A wave of South Asian racism is sweeping Canada — and the Liberals’ missteps on immigration helped fuel the problem

Not convinced that much of the concerns about immigration levels are racist or xenophobic. After all, housing, healthcare, infrastructure etc affect immigrants and non-immigrants alike. Agree with Cochrane’s comment that governments, not immigrants, are responsible for the pressures:

…York University Prof. Tania Das Gupta has observed a shift in public discourse, especially after some politicians started making statements about how immigrants are contributing to the affordability crisis, framing migrants, especially international students, as interlopers.

“They are not Canadians. They are outsiders within. And they are using our services. They are using our housing. They’re using our food banks. They’re taking away jobs,” says Das Gupta, who researches on South Asian diaspora, migration and labour issues. “These are old racist tropes that have been surfacing again.

“In the popular psyche, migrants are being now visualized as being South Asians,” especially people from India, the largest source country of migrants in Canada, Das Gupta says.

She noticed a shift in the rhetoric in the wake of last year’s mass deportation of Indian students who claimed they were duped by an unscrupulous education recruiter and used fraudulent admission letters to apply for student permits to Canada, which she says feeds into the stereotypes that the group was taking advantage of Canada.

By association, an entire group is flagged and viewed through a different lens. And that kind of division and hate will spread if normalized, she warns. This can be felt not only by newcomers, but all Canadians of South Asian ancestry.

Reena Kukreja, an associate professor of global development studies at Queen’s University, is researching the linkage between hateful discourse, its normalization and how that manifests in abuse in people’s day-to-day interactions.

Her research is focused on South Asian men working in the gig economy, such as rideshare drivers and food delivery, or what she calls “hyper-visible” jobs. She says her findings show a “sharp rise in hate” — some report they’ve experienced a rise in overt racism, such as slurs, while others say they feel it in more passive-aggressive behaviours from customers.

“One of the guys told me it’s the way they look at you, and then slam the door shut … it’s a continual reinforcement of two things: One is that Canada is a white-dominant country. And you do not belong here.”

She says while such microaggressions can be hard to prove as outright discrimination, it creates a “continual trauma that accumulates over time, where you feel as less worthy.”

“The moment when hate becomes banal, it is highly dangerous,” she says. “It becomes everyday, which is what I’m seeing right now.”…

“There’s a considerable amount of research out there that shows that online hate doesn’t stay in the online space,” says Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, who edited the report.

She points to a study from the University of Warwick in England that showed tweets targeting Muslims and Latinos by then-U.S. President Donald Trump correlated with an increase in hate crimes against those same groups. 

In Canada, police-reported hate crimes against South Asians have increased every year since 2020, with 228 incidents in 2023, compared to 135 in 2020.

But these statistics likely only represent a fraction of what is really happening, as many people don’t report their experiences, and a comment like “Go back to your country” doesn’t typically meet the threshold of a hate crime, unless it precedes an act such as vandalism or assault, which could then be deemed hate-motivated. …

While it’s valid to criticize Canada’s immigration system, it becomes problematic when people start blaming the individuals who are coming here, rather than a deliberate government policy that welcomed them, and seems designed to keep wages low, says Christopher Cochrane, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.

“It’s governments that are responsible for this,” he says. “It’s not the fault of the students that are coming here and paying these massive tuitions that are subsidizing all of the students from Ontario who are going to university.”…

Source: A wave of South Asian racism is sweeping Canada — and the Liberals’ missteps on immigration helped fuel the problem