Canadians could be forgiven for losing the plot of our highly fluid immigration policies in recent years.
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Canadians → forgive → years
in the second year of the pandemic, Ottawa threw open the borders as employers struggled to hire back staff laid off when businesses had to close.
asserted
businesses → throw → staff
Then the feds closed them tight in response to a mounting chorus of complaints about teenagers who allegedly could no longer find part-time jobs, community colleges feasting off international student tuitions and rules that encouraged large firms to recruit low-wage, low-skill temporary foreign workers.
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that → close → workers
Now we seem to have whipsawed again, with the Carney government announcing last week that 200,000 temporary residents — some with expired work permits who are essentially undocumented — will be allowed to secure permanent status.
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who → seem → status
Given that the Liberals ordered all three of these 180-degree turnarounds, which is the right one?
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which → give → turnarounds
The Liberals’ plan to “regularize” temporary visa holders who want to stay is not just good policy.
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who → regularize → holders
It is also more in line with the best of Canada’s post-war immigration policies than with Ottawa’s campaign in the past two years to throttle the flow of newcomers in response to something that felt like a moral panic.
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that → throttle → panic
A bit of recent context: according to federal data, 10,545 undocumented immigrants working in health care or construction obtained permanent residency between 2020 and 2024.
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immigrants → accord → 2020
Between 2005 and 2024, almost 86,000 permanent residences were admitted through a program allowing “out-of-status spouses and common-law partners of Canadian citizens and permanent residents to apply.”
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spouses → admit → citizens
Compare those figures to what is effectively an amnesty for 200,000 temporary residents already in Canada, and you can see not just the difference in scale, but also in tone.
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you → compare → tone
After all, just two years ago, the feds were press-releasing “estimates [suggestively] suggesting” there were half a million “undocumented migrants.”
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feds → release → estimates
Canadians and our governments have indulged in immigration backlashes before: just look at Danielle Smith’s referendum questions on this topic.
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Canadians → indulge → topic
For example, more than 12,000 Chinese immigrants who came here with forged papers to skirt our racist laws were granted an amnesty between 1960 and 1972, thanks to lobbying from Chinese-Canadian advocacy groups.
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who → come → groups
In 1967, Ottawa passed a law granting immigrants and refugees the right to legally challenge decisions by federal officials who had rejected their applications.
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who → pass → applications
In 1973, another amnesty regularized 39,000 people from 150 countries.
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amnesty → regularize → countries
Advocacy groups for Haitians and Algerians living in Canada regularized thousands of undocumented migrants living in Quebec.
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groups → live → Quebec
More recently, efforts by the immigration and citizenship department to clear backlogs also allowed thousands more to stay here legally.
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thousands → clear → backlogs
None of this caused the sky to fall.
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sky → cause → this
As leading migration scholars Naomi Albiom, Audrey Macklin and Anna Triandafyllidou wrote in a 2023 brief to the federal government entitled “Out of the Shadows,” “Ongoing regularization mechanisms are crucial for addressing endemic situations in immigration systems where applicants may fall through the cracks of the system.”
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applicants → lead → system
Critics, both in the Conservative Party and the media, have assailed this regularization program as a kind of bait-and-switch, accusing the government of promising the tamp down on immigration, only to allow in all these temporary residents and thus hike the actual intake figures well above Ottawa’s target for this year.
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Critics → assail → year
Besides the fact that the regularization program applies to people who are already here, it’s worth remembering that one of the leading criticisms of the Trudeau-era immigration levels had to do with housing prices and rents.
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one → apply → prices
But these have dropped significantly in the past two years — the high costs had as much to do with a speculative bubble and low interest rates as anything else — so one of the policy justifications for restricting immigration has fallen away.
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one → drop → immigration
The unemployment rate is trending down, despite Donald Trump’s assault on Canada’s economy, which would suggest that the immigrants-taking-our-jobs argument doesn’t hold water (it never does).
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it → trend → water
The key take-away with this announcement, in my view, is that the government is enabling people who are here — and, critically, who want to be here but have over-stayed work or education visas — to find a path to permanent residency.
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who → enable → residency
Canada needs immigrants, for all sorts of reasons — economic, demographic, cultural, and so on.
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Canada → need → reasons
There’s nothing to fear in a tried and tested approach — regularization — that simply acknowledges the untidy reality that rigid immigration rules have a way of ensnaring people who came here not expecting to stay, but then discovered they actually wanted to build their lives here, for all sorts of reasons.
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they → ’ → reasons
We need only look to our neighbour to the south to see what happens when the state becomes more fixated on removing quote-unquote illegal or undocumented migrants than with providing them with a path to citizenship.
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state → need → citizenship
More importantly, we can look to the best moments of our own immigration history to see why this alternative approach is a better and more humane solution, and one that ultimately benefits Canada.
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that → look → Canada
The Aporia
