As Canadian governments pursue early efforts to bring down the country’s unprecedentedly high rate of temporary migrants, it’s not being taken well by the thousands of students and foreign workers who are effectively being told to leave. Foreign laborers have been staging daily protests in the capital of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, after the Maritime Province announced drastic immigration policy cuts in an apparent attempt to control growing housing costs and an overburdened health care system.
A popular route for temporary workers to seek permanent residency, the Provincial Nominee Program, was to be immediately curtailed by 25%, the government said in February. In light of “challenges” related to housing costs and hospital wait times, Premier Dennis King stated at the time that “we need to do the best we can to manage the people that come into our province.” As many as 300 temporary visa holders, primarily from India, have been participating in a demonstration since last month, accusing the P.E.I. administration of dumping workers who they were told were headed for permanent residency.
“We came here with high hopes and a strong desire to see the province flourish as a unit. Rupinder Pal Singh, a protestor, stated in early May that “they changed the rules and they eliminated us all, like we were never here.” Similar demonstrations have started in Brampton, Ontario, where 70,000 people are thought to be facing deportation when their temporary work permits expire. At a “good enough to work, good enough to stay” demonstration held in the city last week, protesters called for an extension of their visas and accused Ottawa of lying about their ability to apply for permanent residency.
“Employers and colleges are allowed by the Canadian government to take advantage of hundreds of thousands of international students for financial gain.” “They throw us away after utilizing us as cheap labor, especially during COVID.” In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, all of Canada’s immigration streams have reached all-time highs; however, the rise in temporary migrants—a group that mainly consists of foreign workers and students—has been particularly spectacular.
As of March, Canada was home to 2.7 million temporary residents — a number larger than the combined populations of both Saskatchewan and Manitoba. What’s more, this figure has more than doubled in just two years; in 2021 Canada counted just 1.3 million non-permanent residents.
In April, Trudeau declared that temporary immigration needed to be brought “under control” since it was growing “at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb.” “Hold the line a little more on the temporary immigration that has caused so much pressure in our communities,” he stated. The Trudeau administration announced a reduction of 35 percent in student visas earlier this year, claiming that an uncontrolled rise in international enrollment has placed “pressure on housing, health care, and other services.”
Premier of Quebec François Legault is meeting with Trudeau to specifically request a “rapid” cutback of temporary workers just this week. There are currently 560,000 temporary workers in the province, which Legault argues has led to an “emergency” in public services. The belief among immigrants that a work or study visa was a guaranteed route to permanent residence was one of the factors that contributed to Canada’s rise in temporary migration. In the past, obtaining a temporary work visa was a very reliable way to eventually become a permanent resident. More than a third of immigrants who arrived in Canada as temporary foreign workers prior to 2014 subsequently secured status as permanent residents, per a research conducted by Statistics Canada.
By their fifth year of employment in Canada, 39% of workers in “lower-skill occupations” (like working as a Tim Horton’s clerk) and 48% of those in “higher-skill occupations” had earned PR status. However, the Stats Canada study only looked at temporary migration from 2010 to 2014, which is a far smaller period of time than it is now. 83,740 foreign nationals arrived in Canada as temporary laborers in 2013. In contrast, Canada welcomed 622,000 overseas students and 777,000 temporary workers with work visas in 2021 alone.
