According to Marie Woolf of The Globe and Mail, shortly before Parliament shut down for the summer, Immigration Minister Marc Miller tried unsuccessfully to convince his Cabinet colleagues to approve a “regularization” program for select Canadian residents who are, for whatever reason, living here without the proper paperwork.
According to The Globe, “under the plan, migrants without documents, including people with Canadian children who have lived here for several years, would be able to apply for permanent residence.”
Miller’s predecessor, Sean Fraser, had been instructed to develop such a program in 2021, so it appears that officials have been working on this proposal for a while.
In the meantime, the best guestimate (it’s really hard to track people who don’t exist on paper) is that the number of “migrants without valid papers” in Canada has reached somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000.
According to Woolf, those in favour of mass regularization make what is largely an economic argument.
Immigrants to Canada without the proper paperwork can’t open bank accounts or get credit cards. No matter their level of education, they are limited in the jobs they can take and the work they can do.
Regularizing them would benefit the Canadian economy and enable better public policy development and analysis. (You can’t figure out how many more houses we need to build if you don’t know how many people are living here.)
Opponents focus on how allowing people who have somehow gamed the system to jump to the head of the permanent residency line would undermine public confidence in Canadian institutions, create significant resentment among migrant families who have waited patiently and followed the rules, and encourage still more to attempt to immigrate illegally in the future.
Both sides make reasonable arguments.
Nobody wins by sending home an international student whose only reason for being here "illegally" is that Ottawa could not process their visa renewal paperwork fast enough.
On the other hand, a country that believes in the rule of law cannot reward asylum seekers who refuse to leave after their claim has been rejected.
But that is not the whole picture, nor does it make clear the urgency of the problem.
We must also consider the implications of an increasing number of undocumented residents on Canadian multiculturalism's long-term prospects.
Among the many reasons that Canada has been more successful at integrating immigrants than many of its like-minded allies is that we have not, until recently, had anything resembling an illegal immigration problem.
Typically, the greater the prevalence – real or perceived – of illegal immigrants in a country, the less accepting its citizens are of immigration writ large.
It follows that if we want Canadians to open their arms to newcomers (and since our economy is unlikely to sustain our aging population without more workers, we need them to), we must keep the number of undocumented immigrants living here to an absolute minimum.
The other factor missing from Woolf’s article is the potential impact of even just the perception of a Canadian immigration problem on American attitudes towards their northern border.
The US election campaign has seen both parties portray immigration in negative terms. The last thing Ottawa needs right now is to be seen as a security liability.
All of this is not to call for indiscriminate regularization, or a heartless crackdown. But it should be clear that punting the problem indefinitely is a mistake.
Far better would be to identify any subsection of the undocumented group that could indeed be regularized immediately – without significant controversy – and doing so, while at the same time moving more quickly against obvious abusers of our processes.
There is too much at stake to wait for the perfect solution. We need action now.
***
On immigrant integration, see the work of Queen’s University’s Will Kymlicka.
***
To be notified of my next post, follow me on X (Twitter) @achapnick or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-chapnick/.
You can subscribe to my newsletter at https://buttondown.email/achapnick.
According to The Globe, “under the plan, migrants without documents, including people with Canadian children who have lived here for several years, would be able to apply for permanent residence.”
Miller’s predecessor, Sean Fraser, had been instructed to develop such a program in 2021, so it appears that officials have been working on this proposal for a while.
In the meantime, the best guestimate (it’s really hard to track people who don’t exist on paper) is that the number of “migrants without valid papers” in Canada has reached somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000.
According to Woolf, those in favour of mass regularization make what is largely an economic argument.
Immigrants to Canada without the proper paperwork can’t open bank accounts or get credit cards. No matter their level of education, they are limited in the jobs they can take and the work they can do.
Regularizing them would benefit the Canadian economy and enable better public policy development and analysis. (You can’t figure out how many more houses we need to build if you don’t know how many people are living here.)
Opponents focus on how allowing people who have somehow gamed the system to jump to the head of the permanent residency line would undermine public confidence in Canadian institutions, create significant resentment among migrant families who have waited patiently and followed the rules, and encourage still more to attempt to immigrate illegally in the future.
Both sides make reasonable arguments.
Nobody wins by sending home an international student whose only reason for being here "illegally" is that Ottawa could not process their visa renewal paperwork fast enough.
On the other hand, a country that believes in the rule of law cannot reward asylum seekers who refuse to leave after their claim has been rejected.
But that is not the whole picture, nor does it make clear the urgency of the problem.
We must also consider the implications of an increasing number of undocumented residents on Canadian multiculturalism's long-term prospects.
Among the many reasons that Canada has been more successful at integrating immigrants than many of its like-minded allies is that we have not, until recently, had anything resembling an illegal immigration problem.
Typically, the greater the prevalence – real or perceived – of illegal immigrants in a country, the less accepting its citizens are of immigration writ large.
It follows that if we want Canadians to open their arms to newcomers (and since our economy is unlikely to sustain our aging population without more workers, we need them to), we must keep the number of undocumented immigrants living here to an absolute minimum.
The other factor missing from Woolf’s article is the potential impact of even just the perception of a Canadian immigration problem on American attitudes towards their northern border.
The US election campaign has seen both parties portray immigration in negative terms. The last thing Ottawa needs right now is to be seen as a security liability.
All of this is not to call for indiscriminate regularization, or a heartless crackdown. But it should be clear that punting the problem indefinitely is a mistake.
Far better would be to identify any subsection of the undocumented group that could indeed be regularized immediately – without significant controversy – and doing so, while at the same time moving more quickly against obvious abusers of our processes.
There is too much at stake to wait for the perfect solution. We need action now.
***
On immigrant integration, see the work of Queen’s University’s Will Kymlicka.
***
To be notified of my next post, follow me on X (Twitter) @achapnick or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-chapnick/.
You can subscribe to my newsletter at https://buttondown.email/achapnick.
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