Canada’s immigration rowback is a warning for America

Canada’s immigration rowback is a warning for America

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS – It’s been hard to find someone who has been more critical of Trumpist immigration policy than Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the establishment for which he fronts. Until now.

“Canadians understand that diversity is our strength. We know that Canada has succeeded – culturally, politically, economically – because of our diversity, not in spite of it,” said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a speech shortly after his election. Fast- forward almost a decade and all that diversity is on the verge of uniting to turf him out of office, if current Angus Reid polling noting his nearly 70 percent disapproval rating is any indication.

After former US President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, one of his first moves was an executive order to enact a travel ban from Muslim-majority nations and later ended protections for temporary residents from others.

Always quick off the mark to beam a virtue signal around the world at the first opportunity, like some kind of woke Batman, Trudeau reacted with a Tweet. “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength,” he wrote. And in 2019, Trudeau apparently couldn’t help it when he found himself on the world stage alongside NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and was asked about Trump’s immigration posture. “The diversity of our country is actually one of our greatest strengths and a source of tremendous resilience and pride for Canadians and we will continue to defend that,” Trudeau said.

What made much less noise was the fact that Canadian government desk jockeys and ministers were busy dealing with the mop-up from Trudeau’s rhetorical dysentery, having to explain to foreign governments and to the immigration consultants in the U.S. helping asylum seekers cross into Canada, that the country isn’t really the flop house that its prime minister had suggested through his clarion calls.

When Covid mandates forced many businesses online and others to close or halt activity, Trump suspended entry to foreigners with work visas under the pretext of trying to figure out what to do with all the unemployed Americans first.

Trudeau, by contrast, rolled up his sleeves and mucked about with the Canadian economy, offering cash handouts so generous that many students and low-wage workers decided that it was more lucrative to take the free cash and quit their job. Meanwhile, Canadian immigration skyrocketed from 2021 to 2023 to levels not seen since at least as far back as 2000, according to government data.

Now, no one is happy — not even the supposed beneficiaries of Canada’s openness who struggle to find work at a newcomer unemployment rate of nearly 12 percent (double the national average).

They can’t secure available and affordable housing given their relatively low wages and tight market, particularly amid an ongoing inflation and cost of living crisis. Trudeau’s knee-jerk solution to that was to promise that the government would build 3.87 million homes by 2031. According to the usual leftist magic math, that would be about 1,096 houses per minute.

In the meantime, everyone in the country is stuck in the same sinking boat, and they’re angry at its captain. Which would explain why he has now decided that it’s time to chart a different course in an attempt to undo the damage for which he and his leftist policies are solely responsible.

So Trudeau has just announced a reduction in the overall number of temporary foreign workers, for whom his team helped to create a fake need by paying teenagers and workers already in Canada to stay home and hide from Covid. Employers in areas where the unemployment rate is above the national average won’t be able to use temporary foreign labor, starting later this month. And Team Trudeau has placed a limit on how many low-pay foreign hires can work at any given company, capping the number at 10 percent of the workforce. About the only ones who will be upset by all this are the influential establishment interests that routinely manipulate government policy to benefit from corporate welfare handouts and maximized shareholder dividends.

None of this should ever have happened in the first place. Canada used to be a model that every other Western country cited as the gold standard for merit-based immigration. The points system had long favored educated, skilled workers, fluent in either official language of English or French, whose contributions had to match the economic needs and interests of the country. What has proliferated instead under Trudeau is a shortsighted, shallow, leftist worldview in which diversity, egged on by influential profiteers, is defined as him being able to look out across the national landscape and see as many colors as possible all choosing their own pronouns.

It’s only now that his policies have become a direct threat to his enabling establishment cronies, with his own party that champions their interests now at risk of being drop-kicked from office if things don’t change, that he’s changed his tune. Here’s hoping that Trump, who has recently riffed on the need for more foreign workers in certain sectors, to the obvious benefit of his tech bro backers, doesn’t end up endorsing this failed trend on which his instincts were initially spot-on.