Keller: Mark Carney is already struggling with Justin Trudeau’s immigration legacy

2025/11/12 Leave a comment

Captures the challenge and the resulting disruption well:

…The challenge is that for three years the Trudeau government opened the door to what was effectively an unlimited number of notionally temporary immigrants. They came “temporarily” with the aim of staying permanently. (And who can blame them?) They paid tuition to a fly-by-night college and accepted minimum wage jobs in the hope of parlaying that into citizenship.

In the year 2000, there were 67,000 people holding a temporary work permit. By the end of 2024, there were 1,499,000. 

In 2000, there were 123,000 student visa holders. By the end of 2023, there were more than one million.

Between 2011 and 2015, the number of refugee claims made in Canada averaged about 17,000 a year. Last year, there were 190,000. This year, claims are on pace to hit 110,000.

In 2015, there were 10,000 people in Canada who had applied for refugee status and were awaiting a decision. The figure is now 296,000….

Source: Mark Carney is already struggling with Justin Trudeau’s immigration legacy

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Keller: How Canada got immigration right for so long – and then got it very, very wrong

2025/10/11 1 Comment

Good long analysis that captures the dynamic and history well. Money quote:

It was a deliberate policy, but it was also an absence of mind. It was like one of those aviation disasters where the cabin depressurizes, and the pilots, unaware of their impairment via oxygen-deprivation, start making what post-crash investigators will identify as less-than-rational decisions.

Source: How Canada got immigration right for so long – and then got it very, very wrong

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Keller: Yes, Canada should (mostly) end our temporary foreign worker programs 

2025/09/11 Leave a comment

Nice reminder of previous comments (Trudeau did the same in 2014):

…Prime Minister Mark Carney used to get this. Back in 2013, when he was governor of the Bank of Canada, he told a parliamentary committee that “one doesn’t want an overreliance on temporary foreign workers for lower-skill jobs, which prevent the wage adjustment mechanism from making sure that Canadians are paid higher wages but also that firms improve their productivity.”

He added that temporary foreign workers should be for “those higher-skilled gaps that do exist.” 

In plain English, he said that bringing in highly skilled people to fill high-wage jobs was good for Canada, but allowing business easy access to lots of temporary foreign workers for entry-level jobs was a recipe for suppressing the wages of low-wage Canadians, and discouraging companies from raising productivity through labour-saving technologies. 

That was the right answer. It was also a good foundation for future immigration policy.

But last week, Mr. Carney said the opposite. Pushing back against Conservative criticism, he said that “when I talk to businesses around the country … their number one issue is tariffs, and their number two issue is access to temporary foreign workers.”

Mr. Carney, please rediscover your 2013 answer. Aside from being economically sound, it is immeasurably more politically saleable. Just ask British Columbia Premier David Eby.…

Source: Yes, Canada should (mostly) end our temporary foreign worker programs

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Keller: Trump wants to deport millions. What impact will that have on Canada?

2025/07/22 2 Comments

Legitimate concern:

…Which brings us back to Canada. Over the last two weeks at the main border crossing south of Montreal, more than 1,500 people drove up and asked the Canada Border Services Agency for asylum. Under the STCA, most of those people will likely be quickly returned to the U.S. There are some narrow exemptions, but beyond them, the STCA is clear. It is designed to stop people coming from the U.S. to make an asylum claim. 

The foundation for the STCA is that the U.S. is a “safe” country for refugee claimants. It’s a rule-of-law country, just like Canada, that treats refugee claimants humanely and according to the rule of law, just like Canada. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the STCA on that basis.

But things can change. Look who’s in the White House. Look what he’s doing.

A court challenge arguing that the STCA should be struck down because the U.S. is no longer safe might succeed some day, but not soon. It would take years to work its way through the courts, by which time who knows who will be in the White House, or what U.S. immigration policy will be.

But Mr. Trump has the power to rip up the agreement right now, or ignore it, if he wants to. So far, we’ve seen no evidence of any intent to do that. Nor have we seen signs of wanting to load up buses bound for the Canadian border. The administration is offering people $1,000 to self-deport, but it’s not sending them anywhere in particular.

By 2024, Texas had spent US$148-million busing migrants to blue states. That sounds like a lot of money, until you notice that in the new U.S. budget, there’s US$165-billion for immigration enforcement, including US$75-billion for ICE. 

The Trump administration is putting in place the conditions for a massive forced displacement of people. And we’re the next-door neighbours.

Source: Trump wants to deport millions. What impact will that have on Canada?

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Keller: I’m not crazy about the Trump administration either, but we have to work with them on the border

2024/11/16 Leave a comment

Reality:

…Mr. Trump’s nominated “border czar,” Tom Homan, is originally from upstate New York and wants to resolve this issue. Ottawa should be eager to help.

Canada will always have an immigration policy that is different from the U.S., independent of it and (hopefully) a lot smarter. We will decide how many immigrants to accept, and how they are chosen. But on border integrity, a precondition of national sovereignty, Washington and Ottawa should be aligned, regardless of who’s in the White House.

Both countries want to limit the number of people arriving and staying without invitation or legal justification. And Canada badly wants refugee claims decided in the first country of arrival.

On Wednesday, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said that when it comes to border security, “there is no daylight at all between the goals of our two countries.” Ottawa needs to keep saying that.

Roxham Road is closed because of the expanded Safe Third Country Agreement, under which someone who comes to Canada from the U.S. to make a refugee claim can generally be returned to the U.S., for their claim to be decided there. That’s also what the U.S. wants Mexico to agree to, and Canada should share that goal. It’s profoundly in our national interest for the Trump administration to embrace and honour this principle.

Canada is not ready for a refugee crisis, because we’re already in one. More than 132,000 refugee claims were made in the first nine months of this year. Many are people on tourist visas who filed their claim after they got off the plane; others are visa students. The numbers have been steadily growing. In 2019, there were 62,000 claims. Between 2011 and 2016, the annual average was just 18,250….

Source: I’m not crazy about the Trump administration either, but we have to work with them on the border

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Keller: Donald Trump’s victory is about class, not race. And that’s a good thing

2024/11/13 Leave a comment

I would argue both but more discussion about class and less about identity is positive:

…A multiracial society is a lot more difficult to sustain if politics is fought over immutable characteristics, with skin colour or ethnicity dictating how I vote, and which party courts or targets me. Democrats have long accused the MAGA movement of being white supremacy on steroids, but more and more blue-collar voters of all races, particularly Hispanics, don’t see it that way. They see MAGA as a working-class movement.

It’s not a great thing for a society to have deep class divisions – but it’s a heck of a lot better than a deep racial divide. Class, in the U.S. and Canada, is not a fixed thing. It’s mutable, evolving and debatable. It’s about everything from lifestyle to mindset to culture, all which can and do change – unlike skin colour.

It’s notable that, while Ms. Harris and Democrats ran against the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that ruled against a constitutional right to abortion, they never mentioned the monumental 2023 Supreme Court decision that declared affirmative action in college admission unconstitutional. Race-blind admission is a popular policy, even in Democratic-controlled California, where whites are a minority.

In the years to come, Democrats and Republicans alike will continue to appeal to voters on the basis of tribal identities – small town versus city, college versus blue collar, conservative versus progressive. But electoral appeals based on race have become a lot less salient in American politics. That’s progress.

Source: Donald Trump’s victory is about class, not race. And that’s a good thing

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Keller: What will be the economic consequences of Donald Trump?

2024/11/11 Leave a comment

Good series of questions:

..The challenge for Canada is that if the Trump administration decides on an aggressive policy of alien removal, or if non-citizens in the U.S. fear that such a policy is coming, many of them may choose to simply walk across the border into Canada. It could be a repeat of Roxham Road, on a potentially far larger scale.

Since 2023, Canada has an expanded Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S., under which a foreigner in the U.S. who comes to Canada to make an asylum claim is supposed to be quickly returned to the U.S. But if hundreds of thousands of people that the Trump administration wants to deport decide to self-deport themselves to Canada, will the Trump administration follow the letter of the agreement and take them back?

The MAGA movement gets a lot of mileage out of “owning the Libs,” and Mr. Trump could make great sport out this situation. He could say that, while the Biden administration was marked by scenes of migrants flooding across the southern border on the nightly news, the Trump administration is delivering the opposite, namely scenes of illegal immigrants flooding out of the U.S. and across the northern border. Could a border crisis for Canada be played as a deportation triumph for Mr. Trump?

It might be a variation on Republican border-state governors busing migrants to Democratic strongholds such as New York – a move that not only owned the libs but upended U.S. politics, spurring some blue state voters to become more conservative and helping elect Mr. Trump.

Canada’s refugee-claims system is already massively overloaded and backlogged, as is the system for removing failed claimants. Anyone making a refugee claim can expect to live in Canada for many years pending a decision, and possibly many more years, even indefinitely, after that.

To avoid an influx of people from the U.S., Canada is counting on a couple of conditions that may not hold for much longer. First, that if someone comes from the U.S. to make a refugee claim, we can send them back. And second, that there aren’t very many people in the U.S. who would want to bypass the refugee process, sneak into Canada and become an illegal immigrant – even though it’s relatively easy to walk into Canada at thousands of quiet spots from coast to coast.

What does Mr. Trump have in store for us? We are about to find out.

Source: What will be the economic consequences of Donald Trump?

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Keller: It’s time to Moneyball the immigration system

2024/10/23 Leave a comment

Keller continues to offer provocative suggestions. Overly market-based IMO but worth examining given that provincial funding increases unlikely:

…Given that the number of student visas is not infinite, priority should go to programs charging the highest tuition. By happy coincidence, many of the highest-value programs, producing graduates who may become high-wage immigrants, are also the highest-tuition programs.

For example, annual tuition and fees for international students at Waterloo ranges from $50,000 to $73,000. That’s roughly four times Conestoga’s international tuition.

It means that each international student at Waterloo is paying as much as four students at the crosstown college. The government of Ontario, which long prioritized visas for colleges as an easy cash grab, needs to do some basic math. It needs to cash grab more efficiently.

Moneyballing the system means fewer student visas, but going to programs educating the most economically productive future immigrants, and programs charging the highest tuition. The two aren’t exactly the same, but there is huge overlap.

The path forward is clear.

Source: It’s time to Moneyball the immigration system

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Keller: The temporary foreign worker program is a scam, and almost everyone is in on it

2024/08/17 Leave a comment

More from Keller:

…The Trudeau government appears to have finally grasped that handing out an unlimited number of temporary visas, leading to 2.8 million temporary residents, far outstrips the capacity of the permanent immigration system, even after doubling the immigration quota to 500,000 a year. That quota includes refugees, economic immigrants and family reunifications from overseas, leaving just half a million spots or so each year to accommodate the 2.8 million temporary residents already in Canada.

The only way out, as I wrote last week, is to press rewind.

The Trudeau government turned student visas into an alternative low-wage job scheme by allowing students to work an unlimited number of hours while in school. It’s time to go back to the way things used to be: foreign students should not be allowed to work off campus. Postgraduate work visas should be restricted to high-quality graduates in high-wage fields.

And with the exception of seasonal farm work, only jobs paying at least 150 per cent of the median wage, or more than $110,000 a year, should be eligible for temporary visas

Business lobbyists will scream, but voters will cheer.

Source: The temporary foreign worker program is a scam, and almost everyone is in on it

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Keller: How can the Trudeau government fix its immigration mess? Press ‘Rewind’

2024/08/10 Leave a comment

More from Keller on selectivity (Permanent Residents are selective unlike the demand-driven worker programs and international students):

…Over the last few years, work visas have been issued in unlimited numbers, with effectively no questions asked. That’s not how things used to be.

It should be quick and easy for a Canadian business to get a temporary work visa to fill a specialized, high-wage position. If an aeronautical engineering firm needs to recruit a senior production manager at $250,000 a year, they should get that visa yesterday.

But visas for $15-an-hour sandwich artists? Particularly when Statistics Canada says the summer jobless rate among students is at its highest level in decades? Forget it.

The temporary foreign worker streams must become smaller and more selective. Jobs paying, say, at least 150 per cent of the average Canadian full-time wage – that’s roughly $110,000 a year – should be possible to fill from overseas. Lower-wage applications should be auto-stamped “Denied.”

Yes, exception will have to be made for the long-standing program of seasonal agricultural workers. But other industries have to be weaned from their addiction to low-wage, low-rights labour. Going cold turkey will leave businesses with no choice but to raise wages and invest in productivity.

Selectivity should also be the rule when it comes to student visas. Immigration Minister Marc Miller is finally putting a cap on numbers, which were long unlimited. Infinite supply spawned an ecosystem of what Mr. Miller correctly dubbed “puppy mill” colleges, selling entry to Canada in exchange for minimal tuition. It’s a racket that Mr. Miller says he’s scaling back, but which he has hardly ended.

Canada should give student visa priority to programs with the best labour market outcomes, and the highest tuition. Some provinces, led by Ontario, appear to be doing the opposite. Foreign students at Ontario’s public universities pay tuitions that are generally several times those at public colleges, yet the lion’s share of Ontario’s student visas are allocated to colleges, not universities.

It’s not anti-immigration or anti-immigrant for Canada to be selective. It’s how we used to do things. It’s also how, from the 1980s until recently, through governments Progressive Conservative, Conservative and Liberal, Canada had higher levels of immigration than the rest of the developed world – and higher public support for immigration.

Source: How can the Trudeau government fix its immigration mess? Press ‘Rewind’

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