Migration and Canadian Foreign Policy
Canada has a long and successful history of welcoming immigrants and resettling refugees, assisted by years of forward-looking policy and a unique geography that has significantly shielded it from the type of large-scale undocumented migration seen elsewhere. This history of immigration is a history of nation-building, from colonial times to the present. Today, immigrants are seen to bring prosperity, economic development and the advantages of diversity. The majority of the Canadian public continues to support the immigration program, as well as associated programs of refugee protection and immigrant integration. Multiculturalism, a value enshrined in the Canadian Constitution, remains largely respected and has facilitated the integration of immigrants into Canadian society.
To be sure, some recent polls have shown a modest negative shift in attitudes towards immigration and visible minorities in Canada. However, an ageing population and low-fertility rates will provide strong incentives for Canada to maintain an open immigration policy to make up for slow population (and labour force) growth.1 Indeed, a recent Conference Board of Canada (2019) report makes the case that all of Canada’s net labour force growth will be met by immigrants in the coming decades. Unsurprisingly, the government has already taken notice. In the 2018 annual report to Parliament on immigration tabled by the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), it is projected that Canada will admit more than one million permanent residents from 2019 to 2021 (330,800 in 2019, 341,000 in 2020 and 350,000 in 2021), a significant increase from previous years.
In any case, not all of the news coming out of recent polling data is negative towards immigration. For example, in a recent survey conducted by the Environics Institute in April 2019, 6 in 10 Canadians disagreed that immigration levels were too high and eight in ten said that immigration had a positive economic impact. In another poll (Environics 2019b) conducted in the final weeks of Canada’s 2019 federal election campaign, 24% of respondents indicated that the environment and climate change should be priorities for the government. The economy or unemployment (14%) and the cost of living (8%) were also seen as important problems while only 2 % of respondents chose immigration as a priority.
Thus, the recent backlash against migration in many Western countries, which has seen far-right parties make political gains in several elections, seems odd when contrasted with the Canadian case. Consider that the People’s Party of Canada, led by Maxime Bernier, and which opposes multiculturalism and sought to restrict immigration levels, obtained less than 2% of votes and no seats during the 2019 federal elections. Migration has not been a wedge issue in Canada. Perhaps one of the key differences between Canada and other Western countries is that economic anxiety, rather than the dominant status of one’s group being at risk (see Mutz’s 2018 study on the US Presidential election), is more salient. Canada’s embrace of multiculturalism and its success in integrating newcomers have certainly played a role in preventing the sort of backlash that we have seen against immigration and refugees in other countries.
Despite its inherent international character, immigration policy—in terms of prosperity, economic development, diversity and so on—has primarily been treated as a domestic rather than foreign policy issue. Accordingly, treatments of immigration policy as foreign policy are comparatively rare. Most studies have tended to focus on the domestic effects of immigration, that is, what has happened to Canada as a result of the immigrants having arrived in this country. And yet, there is evidence of international impacts of Canada’s immigration program, to cite just one example, that immigrants increase trade flows. In particular, immigrants tend to consume products from their countries of origin, thus increasing imports, and they also help boost exports due to their contacts and knowledge of markets of their native countries (Head and Ries 1998). By emphasizing how immigration has affected the Canadian economy, social cohesion, demographics, housing markets, social welfare and other domestic matters, the effects of immigration to Canada on foreign affairs have been comparatively neglected. As another example of this neglect, many countries have built relationships with their overseas populations through explicit diaspora strategies, and although engaging the diaspora is often mentioned in the Canadian context, it is not clear what has been accomplished thus far.
The movement of people across borders brings up bilateral relations between nation states and multilateral cooperation through international institutions such as the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Canada’s relations with individual countries in the rest of the world as well as with the “international community” as embodied in the United Nations system and other multilateral fora are touched, sometimes significantly, by our immigration policies and practices. Viewing immigration through both a domestic and international lens is thus paramount to understanding these policies and practices. This book will draw attention to some of these areas in the hope that it will encourage more scholarly and policy activity directed to the impact of immigration on foreign affairs.
Specifically, the book examines various issues related to Canada’s immigration policy: Canadian exceptionalism with regard to migration; the impact of immigration on the Canadian economy; immigration and the global competition for talent; possible linkages between immigration and national security; the role of diasporas and how they contribute to the development of their homelands; the role of Canadian cities in managing migration; and the delicate balance between Federal and Provincial management of immigration through Quebec’s immigration policy. In particular, and where relevant, the book focuses on the linkages between Canada’s immigration policy and its international relations. A massive academic literature on immigration has emerged from Canada over the past 25 years, but much of it has been about domestic concerns. The impact of immigration on Canadian society and its economy has been a mainstay of academic research, and perhaps even more attention has been given to the well-being of those individuals and families who have chosen to reside in this country. This speaks to the highly visible integration agenda of governments at all levels in this country. This academic literature has been an important supplement to research done within government ministries and has had an influence on the making of policy.
Far less attention, however, has been given by academic researchers to the effects of Canada’s immigration program on our relations with other countries and the international community. We believe that this is a rich field to explore and one that will receive much greater attention now with the arrival of the United Nations on the migration scene. The UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration and its Global Compact on Refugees offer considerable scope for academic researchers to look at immigration from an international relations perspective. There are the obvious matters of degrees of compliance by UN member states but more significantly the extent to which member states establish bilateral or multilateral approaches to shared migration-related interests. We hope that this volume of essays stimulates more academic researchers to dive into these deep and plentiful waters.
The Chapters
Following this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 by Triadafilopoulos and Taylor opens the discussion with an examination of claims to Canadian exceptionalism on immigration, claims that have been voiced more loudly recently owing to the growing number of countries that have turned their backs on immigration as rising nationalism and concerns over globalization, over uncontrolled irregular migration, over security, and over losses of national identities have begun to displace previously more open attitudes towards the world beyond national borders. As many countries have tightened their borders and further restricted migration flows including flows of refugees and asylum seekers, Canada has not only remained open to immigration at its previous high levels but has continued to increase these numbers and with the acquiescence of the public (see our earlier discussion in this introduction). Why has Canada become a rare example of continued support for immigration and population diversity when all around the trends are otherwise? Does it have to do with the nature of the Canadian people, a people nearly all of whom are immigrants and descendants of immigrants?
Given that there are many countries that share this immigrant character with Canada, appealing to the exceptionalism of the Canadian people seems an unlikely explanation for its current policy trajectories. Other explanations beckon. Triadafilopoulos and Taylor point to three additional factors: the distribution of immigrants in Canada, Canada’s citizenship policy, and its Single Member Plurality electoral system. They argue that these factors enhance the electoral weight of new Canadian voters and moderate the positions of Canadian political parties, thus providing support for cross-party political consensus on migration. Underlying the question of Canadian exceptionalism is whether Canada’s approach to managing migration can serve as a model for other countries; however, Triadafilopoulos and Taylor also argue that the portability of the Canadian model is limited because of the uniqueness of these aforementioned factors.
Within the international community, Canada is a middle power economically, militarily and politically. It has long enjoyed, however, a strong reputation for managing migration well with regard to both immigrants and refugees. As a result of the recognition of the weakness of the international community to manage the flows of migrants towards Europe, either from its east or from across the Mediterranean Sea, a weakness that was most dismally displayed during the 2015–2016 crisis stemming from the Syrian civil war, the United Nations took the bold step of launching twin processes to establish a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration and a Global Compact on Refugees. These processes were completed towards the end of 2018. Chapter 3 by Milner examines Canada’s role in the development of the UN Global Compact on Refugees. While Canada has been an active member of the global refugee regime since its inception in the aftermath of the Second World War, Milner observes that not much is known about the mechanisms that it employs to influence outcomes in the regime. He argues that Canada was able to do so as a result of its perceived moral and expert authority—resulting from refugee resettlement and financial contributions made to the regime—as well as through political and diplomatic engagement with the functioning of the regime itself. Interestingly, according to Milner, there is still work to be done to understand how actors can influence complex governance processes such as the development of the Global Compact on Refugees that include a mix of domestic politics and international relations.
Disputes over migration policy between the United States and Canada form the core of Chapter 4 by Sands and Jackson. They consider changes to labour mobility in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and examine why both this and NAFTA have not included significant provisions for the easy movement of people across borders. The chapter also looks at related issues concerning the migration of tech professionals, entry-exit issues, including recent changes to work visas and the impact of marijuana legalization in Canada, as well as the growing challenge posed by refugees, asylum seekers, and the safe-third country agreement. As the chapter shows, disputes between Canada and the United States over migratory issues have historically been solved by short-term compromises. Although there are structural reasons for this—especially now through the combination of the Trump administration and a minority government in Canada—the continued importance of migration should incentivise the development of a long-term forward thinking, bilateral, strategy.
Part of the reason for the resistance to the movement of human beings has to do with national security, an historic fundamental of exercising sovereignty over territory. Since the 2001 terrorist attacks (9/11) on the United States, migration management has been intensely linked to national security with many now critically referring to the “securitization of migration”. Many countries have joined forces in preventing further attacks arising from the entry of migrants hostile to their interests, thus coordinating their foreign policies by sharing information, and Canada is among those joining with others in this effort. Chapter 5 by Scoppio and Winter examines immigration in Canada from a security perspective and focuses on Canadian legislation on immigration and Canadian attitudes towards immigrants after 9/11. The authors find that although most Canadians continue to view immigration positively, Canadian immigration legislation after 9/11 became more concerned with immigrants as potential security threats. However, according to the authors, even if the “new” 2001 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that was implemented after 9/11 and came into effect in 2002 is more security-focused, it is also more flexible and accepting of immigrants. Finally, the chapter does not find a significant shift in source countries for immigrants since 9/11 as Asian countries continue to be the top source countries, with the majority of immigrants admitted under the economic category.
Economic prosperity is an important component of any nation-building exercise and Canada’s immigration program has maintained its historical trend of being driven by economic interests. However, as the Canadian economy has evolved, knowledge-based skills have become more important for the selection of migrants. Indeed, almost 60% of those offered permanent residency visas are within the economic category, while the rest are the result of family reunification or refugee protection. The availability of skilled workers in a rapidly changing global economic environment has become restricted because of both supply and demand factors. On the one hand, developed economies such as Canada are facing lower supplies of talent due to low-fertility demographics and ageing populations. This is compounded by an increase in demand for talent in both advanced and developing economies as they all try to achieve economic growth and development.
Chapter 6 by the Century Initiative reflects on how well Canada will fare in attracting and, just as importantly, retaining the talent upon which the country’s future economic prosperity depends. It considers not only skilled immigrants with permanent residency visas but also international students and high-skilled temporary workers whose talents Canada increasingly wants to retain. A stark reminder of the stakes are the 500,000 Canadian citizens who are estimated to reside in China, not to mention the much greater number of Canadians in the United States and elsewhere. The chapter recommends that Canada should capitalize on its ability to attract and integrate immigrants and commit to a more ambitious long-term trajectory of increasing its immigration target from 1 to 1.25% of the Canadian population, and with most of that increase in the economic category. It also recommends a number of concrete steps to integrate immigrants better such as matching immigration programs with longer-term labour market needs, piloting programs that target specific gro...