The Immigrant City

Last fall, when the federal Liberals finally revealed their immigration targets for the next few years, pundits and experts in the field noticed a few telling details. While the annual numbers will edge up to 500,000 newcomers over the next two years, that figure will then level off as of 2026, a hint that Ottawa was taking note of mounting public pressure to curb immigration – as well as the admission of temporary foreign workers and international students –  in the face of skyrocketing housing prices.

Pollster Michael Adams, who has tracked Canadian attitudes toward newcomers for more than three decades, noted that “something significant has changed.” 

“In our latest national survey conducted in September,” he wrote in the Globe and Mail, “more than four in 10 Canadians now agree with the statement ‘there is too much immigration to Canada.’ This remains the minority view, but it has grown by 17 percentage points from 12 months ago.”

What’s more, sensational media reports about private community colleges that have become highly dependent on international student tuitions – as well as over-crowded student housing and sharp jumps in the use of food banks by those same students – pushed Ottawa to hit the brakes by freezing international student visas and restricting new enrolments to public institutions.

Yet scholars who have spent years studying immigration trends and urban policy in Canada say that the current story is far more nuanced than recent shifts in public opinion and public policy suggest. The issues dogging the immigration file relate as well to changes in the way Ottawa and the provinces manage immigration, insistent employer demands for temporary foreign workers, and long-recognized bottlenecks that have proven to be exceptionally stubborn, such as credentials recognition and “Canadian experience” requirements.

Housing, notes Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change Graduate Program Director and Professor Liette Gilbert, had become broadly unaffordable well before the federal government began increasing its annual immigration targets. “Those crises existed long before,” Gilbert says. “But it’s used now to say, ‘Well, we don’t want migrants to take our housing.’”

The housing-immigration nexus has taken on other guises, as well. Although Gilbert and other housing experts point out that the affordability crisis is driven less by inadequate supply than by a shortage of specific types of housing (i.e. rent-geared-to-income, student residences, rental), governments at all levels are pushing for much more construction to increase overall supply. But Valerie Preston, a professor emerita and senior scholar at York’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, points out that the push to build more housing has bumped up against an increasingly stubborn shortage of skilled trades workers.

One of the principal investigators in the Building Migrant Resilience in Cities partnership between York and Peel regions, earlier this year Preston attended meetings with federal officials and sectoral leaders in Ottawa to discuss labour shortages and migration. She noted both the intensity of employer demands as well as potential trapdoors in the race to bring in workers.

Regulations, even well-intentioned ones, don’t go the whole distance
in ensuring that newcomers can gain a toehold in the Canadian workforce

“People are saying what we need to do is just build housing, therefore, we need more workers. They’re looking at shortages in the construction trades, which can still offer decent wages, a lifetime career and opportunities for advancement. But they’re also looking to fill labouring jobs in construction, which are insecure in many cases.”

Although Canada is a heavily urbanized nation of immigrants, the country’s immigration policies have swung back and forth between expedient embrace and outright hostility. Migrant labourers from China were brought in to build railways and other infrastructure in the late 19th century, but were also prohibited in various periods from bringing in their families. Until the latter part of the 20th century, immigrants were overwhelmingly white and English-speaking, although the complexion of Canada’s immigration policy began to change, at first grudgingly, and then as a matter of public policy in the early 1960s, when introduced by John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives.

A formal colour-blind, points-based system replaced the old approach in the late 1960s. But by the 1970s, the federal Liberals, traditionally associated with immigration, imposed restrictions in the face of a public backlash against large inflows of South Asians. Throughout the 1980s, Ottawa tinkered with its formulas, for example, offering fast-track approvals for entrepreneurs as a means of attracting newcomers with significant capital. By the early 1990s, the annual targets had risen to about 250,000 people per year, and, later, one per cent of the population. The latest shifts in immigration targets mark a departure and may indicate growing concern within the federal government about low birth rates among Canadian-born residents, especially considering Statistics Canada’s projection that without immigration, Canada’s population growth could stagnate in the next 20 years, due to aging demographics and fertility rates below replacement levels.

Although Canadians pride themselves on the country’s approach to immigration, labour market needs have long been an important driver, going back to efforts to build railways in B.C. and attract homesteaders to settle in Western Canada. In a contemporary context, the labour force issues are familiar and long-standing: educational or certification obstacles that prevent immigrant professionals from re-establishing themselves in Canada, poor labour protections for temporary foreign workers, and chronic skills shortages in certain sectors, among them construction.

Preston points to some recent policy tweaks that aim to better align Canada’s workforce needs with its immigration policies, including regulations that prevent employers from explicitly seeking candidates who have “Canadian experience.” 

Provinces now have more say in nominating migrants as permanent residents, which, in theory, allows them to attract people with needed skills. However, she cautions, this approach “moves away from the model of selecting economic immigrants, where we base it on your education, qualifications and work experience, to a model where employer-identified labour shortages have more influence.”

Regulations, even well-intentioned ones, don’t go the whole distance in ensuring that newcomers can gain a toehold in the Canadian workforce. 

It now takes newcomers a longer time to adjust to the Canadian job market and reach economic parity with Canadian-born residents

Preston cites a highly influential 2011 study by economist Philip Oreopoulos, a research fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He and his team sent thousands of resumes to randomly sampled Greater Toronto Area employers representing multiple occupations, and then recorded the responses based on the ethnicity of the applicants’ surnames. The result: “substantial discrimination across a variety of occupations towards applicants with foreign experience or those with Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and Greek names compared with English names.” Even English proficiency, experience with multinational firms and degrees from leading universities had little impact on these skewed hiring practices.

But racism in the hiring process doesn’t fully explain why some newcomers fare better than others in labour markets. 

Recently published research by School of Human Resource Management Professor Jelena Zikic and Viktoriya Voloshyna (BHRM ’14, PhD ’21), an associate professor at Thompson Rivers’ Faculty of Human Enterprise and Innovation, found that newcomers tend to fare better at integrating into the labour force when they’ve had positive earlier experiences with their new homes, and are better able to make use of work-oriented information sources – from public libraries to online job boards – in the cities where they settle to find work or even reinvent their careers. 

“There were participants [in the study] who realized, ‘Wow, you know, I will never get back into physics or biology,’ for example, but over time, they may have discovered a bridging program or something else,” says Zikic, who is currently working on a new study examining alternative career paths for newcomers.

Voloshyna believes that there are some clear policy implications for these findings, particularly as they apply to the resettlement agencies funded by the federal government. The non-profits, she says, “have to involve different groups if they want to understand migrants, and they have to ask them what they need: what was successful for them and what was not?”

Given that it now takes newcomers a longer time to adjust to the Canadian job market and reach economic parity with Canadian-born residents, she adds that the federal government should consider extending resettlement services, such as ESL programs, for a longer duration, or develop other programs that allow newcomers who’ve been in Canada for a little while to upgrade. “Even though they have been living in Canada for five years, it doesn’t mean that they’re settled in or integrated,” Voloshyna says. “A lot of people are stuck at the initial stage.”

What’s clear is that time is not on the side of many newcomers who arrive and remain stuck on the fringes of the urban labour force. “We’ve seen this in a study of doctors,” observes Zikic. “The longer you’ve been out of your medical school, the harder it is to go through the hurdles.”

With Canada’s immigration levels now at record highs, the broader cultural risks couldn’t be greater, particularly in expensive cities that rely on the energy and ideas of newcomers, but struggle to build affordable homes for many to live, work and raise families.

“When we are welcoming higher and higher numbers of immigrants from around the world,” Zikic says, “the societal responsibility and the narrative – whether it comes from policy-makers or the government – has to be around understanding what integration means to all of us, and how it can be facilitated so that we are creating a society where newcomers and locals are, in fact, collaborating and working together.” ■