In the 1930’s Adolph Hitler established immigration policy that was clearly and unequivocally racist. Eastern Jews immigrating into Germany were a threat to racial purity. We all know where that led.

In Russia, there is a demographic crisis developing, as there is in most developed nations. That crisis is the fact that birth rates have fallen far below replacement levels and as a result populations are growing older and in some countries are starting to decline. Despite the need for young people in his economy, Vladimir Putin has reversed Russia’s immigration policy. Immigrants are no longer encouraged as a solution to demographic decline; they are instead a source of “destabilization and ethnic enclaves”.

In Hungary, the recently deposed Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, was very blatant and explicit in his opposition to immigrants. Asylum seekers, he said, were a Muslim invasion that would destroy the Christian identity of Europe. Migration was not a solution to the population decline problem, but a poison pill that he was determined not to swallow.

In Japan and South Korea, immigration policy is based on a “homogeneous nation” ideology. In other words they don’t want people of non-oriental lineage entering their society and befouling the ancestral bloodlines of their nations by impregnating their daughters.

In the more liberal democracies, any admission of “anti-other” racism is political suicide. However, somewhat paradoxically, anti-other immigration policy is a great populist tool for collecting votes. If you’re a politician, you cannot admit to racism, but you must play to it to collect votes.

The strategy of the populist is to identify irritants, blame the establishment for those irritants, and then paint themselves as the white knight who will make that irritant go away. Since surveys say that people find other-language, other-race, other-dress, immigrants irritating, the populist must find a way to attack immigration without citing “anti-other racism”. And so, we hear that immigrants are rapists and murderers, according to the Orange Idiot. In other, less volatile and more sane environments, immigrants are blamed for taking jobs and lowering wages, for monopolizing government services like health care, for making housing unaffordable for non-immigrants, for not adopting nativist values, and for undermining sovereignty by sneaking in as illegals.

In the United States, where you’re not allowed to admit to racism, the speeches are less direct than Putin’s or Orban’s. In 2025 JD Vance, and in 2026 Marco Rubio, kindly informed Europe that their immigration policies were a threat to European civilization. A vehicle attack on a crowd in Munich by an Afghan immigrant was used by Mr Vance as evidence that European policies are focused on the wrong issues. Mr Rubio argued that open borders and freedom of movement were a threat to the survival of Europe as a civilization. The message was clearly racist. The wording was veiled.

But in the United States, their populist policy has led to the violence and savagery of ICE. Under the Trump 47 Administration, approximately 550,000 people have been deported in the last 15 months. About 95% of those people were either Latino or Black. Asian deportees are also ramping up. White people are less than 2% of the deportee population. At least 48 people have died while in ICE detention facilities. You have only to look at the excuses offered for the deaths of two demonstrators murdered in Minneapolis to understand that this organization is out of control. And very thinly disguised racism is at the bottom of it all.

Our job, as citizens of Canada, is to critically examine the populist positions to help us make rational decisions about immigration policy. We do not want to see the hate, anger, and violence of the ICE team make its way into Canada.

I will tell you, as I have told you before, that Canada really needs immigrants. Like most other modern industrialized nations, the Canadian birth rate is well below replacement rate, which will lead to us being an older and less productive economy. Immigrants, and especially youthful immigrants, can help offset that demographic decline.

Our capitalists are not aggressively investing in Canada. Young aggressive immigrant entrepreneurs can help with that.

Canada is a physically huge country with a widely dispersed population, so the per capita cost of delivering goods across the country is very high. Increasing our population will help bring the transportation cost of products down. Immigration can help with that.

There’s another reason why we should welcome immigrants. It’s not very scientific. It’s simply this – many of them are really nice people. Immigrants are not rapists and murderers and thieves. They are the lovely woman who runs the best Chinese restaurant in my town, and the “awesome” Indian school teacher who lives on my street. I’m willing to bet that each and every one of you could point to an immigrant who you know and really like.

Andrew Coyne wrote an article on immigration in the Globe and Mail back around February as I recall. You should look it up – it was a terrific article and he does a better job than I’m sure I will. So with his ample assistance, and with some research of my own, let’s take a look at the reasons being offered in Canada for being hostile to immigrants.

Mr. Coyne starts off by identifying two politicians who are taking the populist approach of blaming immigrants for ill-defined problems as a distraction. Danielle Smith in Alberta, was heading for a much deeper spending deficit than predicted. (Remember this was before the Orange Idiot upended the oil industry to Alberta’s advantage). Pierre Poilievre was falling far behind in the polls, with MP’s crossing the floor to the Liberals. Both leaders, Coyne says, could use a polarizing issue to bring people to their sides. “By a miraculous coincidence, both leaders have lately hit upon a solution to their respective problems. And would you believe it, the solution is in each case exactly the same: blame immigrants.”

Danielle Smith went on TV and blamed “out of control immigration for the deficit issues, and proposed to assess a fee for immigrants to use social services.” Coyne pointed out that if you expelled every immigrant from Alberta, you would reduce the Social Service bill by less than 5%, and to achieve that minimal reduction, you would forego all of the taxes paid by the 280,000 immigrants in Alberta.

Poilievre painted with a broader brush, delivering a Trumpian blast of anti-immigrant sentiment. Conservatives, he said, would “cut back deluxe benefits for fake refugees and deport non-citizens and foreign nationals who do crime…. “While you can’t get health care, Liberals force you to pay higher taxes to fund deluxe supplementary health care benefits for asylum claimants who’ve been rejected.”…. “Radical Liberal open-border policies have overloaded our housing, health care and job market.”…. They are “at their breaking point.”….It’s time to “secure our border and put Canadians first,….” “send non-citizen criminals home,”.

Check those quotes. He hit every populist anti-imigrant trigger. Crime, health care, housing, job markets, border security – he got them all. Those friggin’ imigrants are destroying this country, aren’t they? Let’s take a closer look.

We’ll take crime first. Analysis based on Statistics Canada data shows us that about 26% of our population is made up of immigrants. Those immigrants are charged in only about 15% of crimes where charges are laid. In other words, good old Canadian born citizens are much more criminally active than immigrants are.

Housing is a bigger issue. Every immigrant needs housing and it’s hard to argue that an increased immigration rate doesn’t put pressure on the system. It does. But, an historical perspective offered by a real estate industry blog says that the problems started long before Trudeau opened the immigration floodgates.

Following the pandemic, the Trudeau government greatly increased our immigration targets in response to record high labour shortages (nearly a million job vacancies) coupled with the predicted demographic pressure of retirements from the boomer generation. As a result, population growth from 2021 to 2024 was more than double the population growth in the entire decade that preceded that three year period. You can date the sustained immigration boom from 2021 on.

The growth in housing costs came long before that. The blog article says, “Canadian housing prices from 1980 to 2001 stayed within a steady and narrow range of 3 to 4 times provincial annual median income……by 2010, Canada began experiencing, for the first time, sustained home price growth that significantly outpaced income growth across most major markets….from 1981 to 2024, median real hourly wages grew by 20%, with most of this growth occurring after 2003. That sounds decent until you realize house prices more than tripled in many markets during the same period……Canada’s home price-to-income ratio remained between six and nine until 2007, but since then has consistently exceeded nine, reaching 10 in 2015, 12 in 2016, and climbing as high as 16 in 2022..” Conclusion? The immigration boom may have exacerbated an existing problem, but it surely didn’t cause it. We don’t have to fix immigration. We need to fix the cost of housing.

In 1970, when the cost of a new house was 3 or 4 times the median annual income, a starter home was 1000 to 1200 sq. ft., not necessarily with an attached garage, and not necessarily with any finished space in the basement. That’s not what the housing industry is building these days.

Urbanization – increasingly population-dense cities – has sharply boosted the land cost component of a new home. The detached 1000 sq ft starter home with formica counters has disappeared. The starter home is now at least a 1650 sq. ft. townhouse with attached double garage and premium finishes like quartz or granite counter tops. The cost-to-income comparison is not an apples to apples comparison. Housing suppliers are building what they can sell, and regulations, population density, land values, and customer expectations have resulted in a totally different starter home market. To the extent that immigration contributes to the continued urbanization of Canada, immigration is also a factor. But all of those other factors, the basic commercial factors of the real estate market, became significant contributors to the problem long before the immigration boom of the post-pandemic era.

And that brings me to health care. Our health care system is a mess. Having to look after immigrant health isn’t helping, for sure. In a system that is stressed by a shortage of medical professionals, increased volume of patients means a dilution of the care available. But the accusations I’m hearing go beyond the straight up numbers issue. I am often hearing arguments that immigrants get preferential treatment. I’ve heard that sort of statement from people close to me both here and in my PEI connections. So I set out to find out about what Poilievre has called the “deluxe supplementary health care benefits for asylum claimants.”

Andrew Coyne’s article dismisses it as an immaterial complaint. There is indeed a Federal program called the Interim Federal Health Program, (IFHP) which provides “limited and temporary health care coverage” to foreign nationals “who are not eligible for health insurance from provinces or territories.” That program cost is “less than one third of one per cent of all spending, federal or provincial, on health care. That’s not only for asylum claimants but resettled refugees as well; and not only for supplemental health care benefits but for basic care….All told, it costs about $1,645 a year to provide each asylum claimant with health care – a fraction of the overall national average.” Let me build on that, just in case you missed the point. Immigrants, on a per capita basis, are taking less from the health care system than the native born Canadians are, and that is true across the full gamut of immigrants, not just the asylum claimants sub-set.

There is no program by which immigrants get preferential treatment. Treatment protocols in all provinces are governed by clinical triage, not by citizenship. So yes, an immigrant might be seen faster in an ER, or might get faster access to a MRI imaging if their medical circumstances dictate that. But they have no program advantage. Similarly, here in Ontario the resident immigrant can sign into the Health Connect process and try to get access to a family doctor (good luck) but their position in that line-up is dictated by the date of their registration, not by their accent, the colour of their skin or their country of origin. As with housing, we don’t need to fix immigration. We need to fix Health care, which Coyne called “an ossified, centrally planned monopoly.”

I am not saying that you have to agree with me that immigration is good for Canada and that we should continue to encourage immigrants with skills and abilities to help us build for the future. (You’re allowed to be wrong.) But if you’re going to have an anti-immigrant stance, make sure that you have facts on your side and that you understand the basis for your own opposition. Most of the rationale being advanced for opposing immigration is very weakly supported by the facts. Immigration realistically plays a small part in most of the problems that are being identified as immigration issues.

It may be that your opposition, deep-down, is based on racism. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is, I think, normal enough to be uncomfortable with people who are “other”. Other colour skin, other language, other customs, other foods – we’re not sure exactly how to deal with “those people” in our society. If that’s what really lies at the basis of your opposition to immigration, go ahead and embrace that racism!

Because, if you throw all those other weak excuses away and understand and accept that you’re simply feeling a little uncomfortable with the “other” people? That’s the first step towards opening yourself up to first tolerating, and then accepting, and then embracing a diverse and wonderful Canadian cultural tapestry.