Canada – Immigration Intake, 1860 to 2013

 

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Immigration Watch Canada is an organization of Canadians who believe that immigration has to serve the interests of its own citizens. It cannot be turned into a social assistance / job-finding program for people from  other countries. It should not be a method to suppress wages and provide employers with an unending supply of low-wage labour. It should never be a social engineering experiment that is conducted on Canada’s mainstream population in order to make it a minority. **

But immigration has become those three things.

Why? In particular, why has Canada’s average 250,000 per year  immigration intake remained in place for over 23 years?

The answer is that for many decades, Canada’s major political parties have assumed that, on the immigration issue in particular,  they know better than average Canadians. This  attitude and the promotion of political party  self-interest manifested itself particularly in 1990 when one political party (the Progressive Conservatives) increased immigration levels to 250,000 per year.

At the time they did this, they actually announced they were doing so in order to capture more of the immigrant vote. This may sound hard to believe because it is so brazen, but it is a fact. Since then, all other parties have adopted the same policy. All pretend that their actions are helping people in the rest of the world and that this immigration flood is  also literally and figuratively enriching Canadian society.

The reality is that Canada’s average 250,000 per year  immigration intake since 1990 has been far too high. In fact, Canada’s intake is the highest per capita in the world. And it has obviously been destructive and senseless.

What are some examples of the destruction and senselessness?

Our high intake has had major negative economic consequences for Canadians who are looking for work. In fact, it has forced many of Canada’s own unemployed to compete with immigrants for a limited number of jobs and it has impoverished many Canadians .

The destruction and senselessness  that naive Canadians (as well as those with sinister intentions) have created has caused many Canadians (especially those in Canada’s larger centres) to become very angry. These Canadians feel that this social engineering project has raised “Diversity” to the level of a national goal. They feel this amounts to the country being ethnically cleansed and re-colonized.

Finally, many Canadians see with their own eyes that Canada’s high intake has also turned many areas of the country into crowded, grid-locked, environmental disasters-in-progress—duplicates of the environmental catastrophes many recent immigrants come from.

We repeat one basic question :

Why Is Canada bringing in 250,000+ immigrants per year? Ottawa has never provided a logical answer to that question. In fact, it has pretended that current immigration is no different from past immigration. It has also  withheld vital information or tried to deceive Canadians by making false claims about the benefits of immigration.

We believe Canada should have some immigration, but that immigration levels should be reduced to about 25,000, that is, to about 10% of the current annual 250,000 intake. We advocate that  the 25,000 intake level should be kept in place indefinitely to compensate for the immigration disaster that has occurred in the past 23 years.

We also advocate a significant reduction to Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program which in 2012 allowed  a record 491,547  non-Canadians to work in Canada. The 491,547 consists of 213,573 new workers who entered Canada in 2012 plus another 277,974 who were already here. This program is being widely abused by employers and should probably be reduced to nearly zero. In any recession (this past one and others), it is madness  for a country to be importing large numbers of immigrants as well as large numbers of Temporary Foreign Workers.

In addition to a reduction of Canada’s immigration intake to 25,000 per year and a dramatic cut to Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program, we also call for major reform to many of Canada’s other immigration policies.  (See our Basics section for details.)

** For background on major immigration policy changes made in the 1960’s and 70’s, click on the following summaries of excellent research done by reporter Doug Collins in his book  “Immigration : The Destruction Of English Canada”