Canada: Cutting immigration and anti-immigrant sentiments

Reporting from CIV Wednesday, February 11, 2009

CanWest reports tonight that CIC minister Jason Kenney is considering axing the number of immigrants coming to Canada. CIC later clarified its position on Omni News that only temporary foreign work permits may drop for a short while but overall immigration levels will remain untouched. Well, I can see the consideration does make sense.

Canada is prepared to consider a cut in the number of newcomers allowed into the country if necessary over the short term to respond to a souring domestic job and economic scene, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says. “We don’t want people to be coming to Canada and facing unemployment,” Kenney said Tuesday.
“So, we need to be sensitive to a changing labour market, and if we need to make changes, we will.” Kenney made the comments to reporters after telling an all-party Commons committee that federal, provincial and territorial officials plan to meet at the end of next month to review the economic data to see if modifications to immigration levels are needed.
For now, though, the minority Conservative government plans to maintain its current immigration target of accepting up to 265,000 new permanent residents in 2009, Kenney told the committee on citizenship and immigration. He said the government must be careful about turning off the flow of immigrants into the country because they will be needed post-recession to fill jobs and help fuel Canada’s economic growth.

“We need to be flexible, prudent and ensure that our response to short-term conditions does not counter our long-term goals, in which immigration will play a significant role, ” Kenney said. Kenney added, however, that bad economic news could spur some potential immigrants to abandon plans to move to Canada. “There is no doubt that newcomers, like all Canadians, will have a tougher time this year,” he said. “And I suspect some people will take that into consideration in their decisions about whether or not to actually use the visas that were offered to them to come here as foreign workers.”

Speaking later to reporters, Kenney said that although demand for temporary foreign workers will shrink this year, it will not disappear because there are still some labour gaps Canadian workers are unable to fill. He promised to introduce a set of regulations this spring to protect foreign workers who, according to recent media reports, have been left in a lurch after being laid off from their jobs in Canada.

Since China ranks low on the number of foreign workers anyway, I believe any temporary measures to limit temp work permit wouldn’t affect the Chinese much. Here are the stats:



Even China doesn’t send most foreign workers to Canada, many Canadians see the Chinese are taking away their jobs. When I scrolled down to the article’s comment section, I again read a lot of anti-immigrant (some anti-Chinese) comments. And that scares me.

Sigh… history repeats itself. During the gold mining and railway building eras of the 1860s through 1900s, the Chinese were blamed to rob jobs off the whites. Now 150 years are gone, Chinese Canadians are still being conveniently picked for being the scapegoat — with people disregarding the real numbers!

We all should be alarmed at the growing anti-immigrant/anti-Chinese sentiments when the economy continues to plummet, especially when the unions - and surely NDP will follow - begin to ask the government to go more protectionist by adopting a “Buy Canadian” policy. This line of thinking may incline to become breeding ground for anti-immigrant sentiments.

Examples of comments left under the CanWest article (interesting to note the spelling and grammatical errors displayed in these comments):

“SB”: So why give a Work Permit to Chinese criminal when we have Canadians unemployed ? Even the Chinese Govt is aghast with our decision !! “Stop The Flow”: About Time! Keep the immigrants down to a dull roar even after the rcession ends. I’m so sick of walking into stores, resturaunts, and all sorts of other service related operations in Vancouver that employ people who can speak 20 or 30 whole words of English.

Especially annoying is the thousands and thousands of Chinese who immigrate to this city, and then refuse to adapt to the Canadian way of life. Been to Richmond Lately? The only thing Canadian about it is the Soil that Richmond sits on… “Mike”: Immigrants here who don’t have a job. Welcome to the real world and if you don’t have a job you don’t pay if any taxes. “fed up with immigrants”:

It’s about damn time that you close the country to immigrants.Maybe we can weed out all the people who punk kids are gang mebers and drug dealers and maybe just maybe us original s can start to feel safe again on our own streets that we paid taxes for and out medical that we built up and are over burden by immigrants What is wrong with staying in their opwn countries for christ sake!!! “julz”: Immigrants should have to take a language proficiency test. There must be able read, write and speak either French or English. Any criminal record , absolutely no entry. My parents are immigrants and worked hard to raise us.

To some of the ignorant comments, not every immigrant has a criminal record or is a gangster. Look at the history of Canada and you find that this country was created by racist, murderers, rapist and thieves. WE, including immigrants are still paying for what these people did to create CANADA. The gang and gun problem is a kick in the bucket to what the pioneers of Canada did to the First Nations people. Reducing the number of immigrant due to economy is a good thing. Our first priority now is the people already in our country and what our government will due to get us through the economic crisis.

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