For most of my life I shared the belief common in Canada that immigration is unambiguously a good thing. Before you stop reading, I haven’t turned into some kind of anti-immigration crusader, or even anti-immigration in general. But, as Trudeau’s Liberals and provincial governments have succeeded in more or less destroying the long-standing pro-immigration consensus in Canada by jacking the numbers of immigrants, temporary foreign workers, and foreign students up enormously over the past few years, I’ve begun to think more about this issue from a leftist perspective.
I’ll begin by saying that any attitude toward immigration that is directed primarily at immigrants themselves is cretinous and should be immediately dismissed. That goes even more for anti-immigrant sentiment based primarily in hysteria about their ‘race’ or ethnicity being ‘incompatible’ or ‘alien’. These are the talking points of right-to-far-right populism, have a long and ugly history, and are irrelevant to a left-wing discussion on immigration. I’ll also note that although immigration levels are currently very, very high, Canada has always been, from its inception, a capitalist project whereby a powerful elite imports enormous numbers of workers from elsewhere in the world in order to staff what is basically three mining companies and a logging company in a trenchcoat (these days the trenchcoat also includes UberEats and Tim Hortons). Canada’s population has grown enormously since its colonization, pretty much doubling every fifty years, and a large proportion of that growth has always been through immigration. So in that sense there is nothing totally unprecedented about an immigration boom.
However, that last fact should probably give us pause as socialists. While liberal institutions have very successfully convinced us all that openness to immigration is a fair stand-in for anti-racism, we need to be clear that immigrants are not admitted to Canada because of anti-racism. Immigrants are admitted to Canada because of economic policy overseen by the aforesaid powerful elites, who have long held that growing the population quickly and ensuring a ready supply of labour is the way to go. In other words it is very good for business. If it wasn’t, immigration would be marginal. Although it’s not always a zero-sum game, it’s true that what’s good for business is rarely particularly good for workers, and when the corporate world gets its way, the working class tends to get fucked. So when we keep that in mind, what observations can we make about immigration policy?