Front Burner - The newcomers struggling with immigration policy whiplash

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

A group of former international students with soon-to-be expired work permits in Brampton, Ontario are protesting a series of measures by the Canadian government meant to curb the number of temporary residents entering and staying in the country.We hear their stories and also from Syed Hussan, executive director of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, talks about how growing anti-immigrant sentiment could be fuelling the government's actions and why linking migrants and international students to housing and jobs might not give the whole picture.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Allie Janes, in for Jamie Poisson. So last Tuesday, our producer, Joytha Sengupta, and I headed out to Brampton, a Toronto suburb, to meet with a group of protesters who've been camped out on a patch of grass beside a busy intersection for over a week now. We were there in the daytime when most people were working,

so there were only about 15 people there. But we were told the crowds grow to around 150 some evenings, with some people staying overnight. There are a couple tents, an information desk. Supporters are bringing them food and fresh chai every day. And they all sit down on a tarp in the grass to have meals together. Sometimes they gather in prayer. Many are former international students on postgraduate work permits, mostly from India. They're there to protest a series of shifts in Canada's immigration policies

that they say have pulled the rug out from under them as they've been working towards permanent residency. They've been holding protests throughout Brampton for months now. And with thousands of work permits set to expire within the next year, this protest is just one of many being held across the country, including in PEI, Manitoba, and B.C. Students, fight! The group is protesting the changes B.C. government announced

to its much sought-after provincial nominee program for permanent residency. They feel that the PEI government has, without notice, robbed them of a chance at permanent residency in Canada. Protest at the legislature against perceived injustices endured by skilled trade workers and postgraduate permit holders in Manitoba. When talking to them, we kept hearing about this specific slogan that used to be on the Canadian government's website that helped entice them to come here.

On the IRCC website, the government of Canada posted in huge bold letters that come here, study, explore, work, and stay. So that was their slogan. Study, work, explore, and stay. Study, work, stay. So I don't know why they mentioned that, but now they have... Study, explore, work, and stay. Here's a video from 2018 that used the slogan. Wouldn't it be nice to apply all of your Canadian educational credentials and work experience to pursuing a career and building a life in Canada? Express Entry, the Provincial Nominee Program,

or the Atlantic Immigration Pilot can be your path their permanent residency over here in Canada. So that was clearly a pathway over here for the permanent residency. This is Sarabjit Singh. He's 28 years old and he came here in 2019. He already had a mechanical engineering degree back in India, but he told us he's from a border region of Punjab where there aren't a lot of economic opportunities. So he came to Canada and studied business management and supply chain management. Then he began working in a skilled trade, where he took certification courses to be able to practice as a mechanical engineer in Canada. All in the hopes of building enough points in Canada's permanent residency system

to be eligible to stay. Maybe in future if I got to stay over here in this Canada, over here in this country, and I will get a chance to pursue into engineering, and one day I would be a professional engineer. Many people told us they were here studying or working when COVID-19 hit. Some of them worked risky frontline jobs,

like Dharmendra Singh, who worked at a warehouse contracted out to Health Canada and other government agencies that distributed PPE supplies, syringes and test kits. your bodies will be here. So please stay at home. But as like, we feel that the community needs this. If everyone like sitting at home, how Canada will run? So we believe that this is our duty. Or like Manpreet Singh.

First I worked in Amazon, then in warehouse because they need a lot of people. And I was thinking like, if I can help these companies, maybe, like, I will be getting something from out of this country. And they also promoted me there. But now I'm working with, like... But over the past year, they say, the Canadian government has moved the goalposts, making it much, much harder for people like them,

who've been working here and pursuing a path to permanent residency, to be eligible for it. Despite the time and money, in most cases tens of thousands of dollars that they've put in. And for some of them, the prospect of going home after years away and after spending so much of their family savings is devastating. Sarabjit's permit expires next month. And if I do get deported or didn't get the extension and I have to leave back to India, I have to start everything from scratch, from zero. And it's hard to focus on the even work for me right now. And my employer, he always asks, like, you are OK because your productivity wasn't that

low ever. But still, I have to stay focused, right? If I will lose hope and everything, I have to fight. So I can't show the weakness. And if I show the weakness to my family, they will broke, right? They will broke into tears back home. I have to give them a positive response every day. So it's tough, but even sometimes they are like, okay, you come back.

But I know if I go back, it will be an economic disaster for us, for me and my family. It will be hard for us to survive. I came here to invest in this economy and be a part here and have a better life. De Harmender and another protester, Akash Tyagi, both told us that for all they gave to their communities and to the country by working during the pandemic, they don't feel like they're getting that back right now.

Like, indirectly say that you are a tissue paper. Use and throw. They use it, like, in a critical situation, but now we need them. They, like, say please go back to home when we was having the covid or if any international student was suffering from covid we was not having the health card we have to pay for the doctor and we had paid a lots of bill to the doctor if we was having a covid or

anything else if we are if we at that time if we were standing with canada and canadian government i wish that they should be standing with us in this time, we were standing with Canada and Canadian government. I wish that they should be standing with us this time when we need them. In the last few months, the federal government has also made a series of major changes to international student and temporary foreign worker programs, aimed at addressing the housing crisis and bringing down unemployment, with more changes still on the way. We are tightening the rules and restricting eligibility to reduce the number of low-wage temporary foreign workers in Canada, with exceptions in certain industries like health care, construction and food security. So to those who would complain about worker shortages, here's my message.

There is no better time to hire and invest in Canadian workers. Today, I am announcing three principal measures. One, a temporary two-year cap on new international student permits. a temporary two-year cap on new international student permits. It is the latest... But the people we spoke to said immigrants are being unfairly blamed for these issues. Akash, we've also been talking about some of the hostility that there's been against immigrants right now. Like there's been sort of this sense that like people are looking at the housing crisis,

they're looking at the lack of jobs and they're saying it's because the government let too many people in. What would you say to people who think that? So if we are getting the jobs, because we are getting the jobs, because we are willing to do the jobs. If the people who are saying that their children are not getting the job because of us, because their children don't want to do their jobs, but we are doing. That's the thing. If they are okay to do the job of a cashier in Tim Hortons, they can do it, but they don't want to do it. They say, we had study business, we don't want to be a cashier,

but we are okay to do it, the cashier. Akash and others also said they're being hit by the affordability crisis just as much as anyone else. So I have seen the changes. I have seen the houses crisis. I have seen that. When I was there, I was living and I was paying like $2,300 rent for a whole house. Right now I'm paying $4,300 for a whole house. Who is, like, who would be taking stand for that? It should

be a government. It should not be us. Another man we spoke to, Amardeep Singh, said that immigrants like them were easy scapegoats for the government to distract from their own policy failures. The root cause is the policies and the system which is exploiting the Canadians. Yeah, the thing is, when a Canadian will be exploited, he will be blaming the soft target, and we are the soft targets. It's all about the Canadian dream, what they showed us, and now they are dividing us between Canadians and migrants.

We are same, just the status is different. At one point, when we were interviewing Manpreet and Dehar Mender, we were interrupted by a woman driving by. If you listen hard, you can hear her under the harmender here. So they are like, forcefully like... Happens every 15 to 20 minutes. So a woman just had the window of her car open and she was yelling, go back to your country, bye bye, bye bye.

This is a protest organizer from Najwan Support Network, Arun Ghoshami. We were thinking of actually setting up GoPros to try and figure out if we can get that on camera. To record them? So we're going to come back to that scene. But first, we want to zoom out here. Because postgraduate work permit holders are just one of the groups of newcomers that say they're feeling the effects of these changes at a time of heightened political pressure, right before an election year.

First of all, we have to acknowledge that Justin Trudeau has destroyed our immigration system. We had a multi-generational consensus in immigration for literally decades before Trudeau came along. I'm going to talk now to Syed Hassan, the executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change. He works with and advocates for newcomers of all stripes. And he joined me to talk about what many are calling

a whiplash of Canadian immigration policy and why he thinks that people blaming immigration for the housing crisis and the weak job market could be missing the full picture. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income.

That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Hi, Hasan. Thank you so much for coming on FrontBurner. Thank you for having me. So until fairly recently, the federal government had been steadily increasing immigration targets. And so I just want to back up a little. When did the Trudeau government set out to increase immigration? And what are some of the ways that they've done

that? So permanent residence status hasn't actually increased the way most people think it did. So in 2020, Canada closed its borders and had a shortfall of about 150,000 permanent residents. So the 2021, 2022 and 2023 permanent residency was increased by 50,000 per year for those three years. And now it's being frozen again in 2025, 2026. So there's been an increase in the temporary side of the immigration system, of which the temporary foreign worker program is the smallest. But again, because we saw that downturn in 2020, 2021, if you look at the number over just the last few years, it looks like it's a big leap. You know, we're seeing in the past few months, a number of policy changes on immigration from the federal government, most recently, you know,

among others, a reduction to the number of temporary foreign workers that Canada will allow into the country. And can you just take me through some of the other recent changes the government has been making to immigration policy? Sure. So this has meant a cap on study permits, even worse, a cap on family members of study permits. So most study permit holders will now not be allowed to bring in their families with them. Visas were imposed on Mexico. Permanent residency has now been capped for the next two years. It will go up and then will not go up for the next two years. Temporary foreign worker program cuts were actually announced in May and were pre-announced a few weeks ago. Visas are being rejected at a greater rate than ever before. We're seeing other work permits, for example, the postgraduate work permits not being

renewed. So all in all, we are seeing a massive contraction of the immigration system, but it's being framed as a reduction in numbers, which is part of what's happening. But the other is it's actually shutting out the possibility of most temporary migrants to be able to access permanent residency, which is the only mechanism you have to access rights. On the note of permanent residence, our producer Joyta and I went to this protest in Brampton where we were mainly speaking to people who had been on, you know, they were former international students and they were on work visas and they're saying that tens of thousands of international student graduates

could be forced to leave the country. And they feel like they were told that there was a path to potentially staying here permanently, as long as they follow the rules, and that now the goalposts keep changing on them. And so can you help me understand what's happening there exactly? Like, you know, specifically why it's harder for people to get permanent residence right now and what those goalposts are that are changing? These are international students who graduated and they're on something called the postgraduate work permit. The postgraduate work permit is depending, it's one to three years long, during which time you must amass a minimum of 12 months

of Canadian high waged work experience, following which you put your name into a draw basically, following which you put your name into a draw basically and then there are draws every few months and permanent residency is granted to people on the basis of those draws. So for most of last year and most of this year there were no draws for people in that particular subclass of Canadian experience class of former international students. So there was this shift where there were no draws happening. The other thing that's been happening is because so many people are coming in on study permits and on work permits, but the permanent residency portion is not expanding, then the points that are required to become a permanent resident keep going up. Because there are approximately one and a half plus million people

entering the country each year on temporary permits. And if there's only 500,000 spots, which doesn't just include transition from inside the country, but also outside the country, then there's no, there's just three to one ratio minimum of people who are trying to get in on the same spot. And actually, it's probably much higher. It's five to one. So the government of Canada has framed the international study permit experience and the Canadian immigration policy as having a pathway to permanent residence, but there was not one. During COVID-19, international students, as part of our work, were able to campaign and get these postgraduate work permits to become renewable. That happened three times.

But now, in this moment where there is so much anti-immigrant racism, the federal government is choosing not to allow those workers to renew their permits, which would be the easiest solution. So they just aren't making the very basic change. solution so they just aren't making the very basic change and because they're not enough permanent residency spots because they're not enough draws about 70,000 former international students who have worked here many of them who have lived here for many years are going to be forced to leave or become undocumented these are people who are working of course so businesses will lose workers it's it's a it's just this kind of knee jerk across the board shutting down of the system that's taking place. I mean, some people that we've spoken to kind of describe this as like a

whiplash between, you know, what they were sold, what they were kind of working towards, like working towards permanent residency and thinking that they were on a path that could lead them there. And then this big shift in a whole bunch of immigration policies in the past year. Do you think that's a fair characterization as a sort of whiplash? It's been very quick, but I think the writing was on the wall for a long time because Canada was allowing in more and more temporary residents, but was not increasing permanent residents at the same level. In January, Sean Fraser, the housing minister and immigration minister, Mark Miller,

said that they put out this statement that said that while they stand behind the numbers of newcomers let in during the pandemic, that housing pressures were pushing the government to adjust their immigration targets and how many temporary residents they were letting in. And so tell me more about, you know, what you make of connecting immigration to the lack of housing in that way. Well, there's so many things to look at, right? So the first thing to look at is it's very rare to be able to control a social factor like immigration and see its effect on other policies and other institutions, such as housing or healthcare. But in 2020, Canada actually shuttered its borders during the pandemic. There were no flights, no immigrants coming in,

and we saw a historic rise in housing prices. So we know that immigration does not have this immediate effect on housing prices. We know that the housing price is being set by developers who are choosing to build or not build, and speculators based on the interest rate, based on the profits they want. We know that rent is a result of the lack of rent controls. So we've seen this shift in which interest rates have ballooned. Developers and speculators have entered the market at unheard of levels. There's been a privatization. But it's been three decades of the federal government

actually stepping away from housing construction, to which they are now returning. of the federal government actually stepping away from housing construction, to which they are now returning. So we have seen a housing crisis building for a long time. Now, it's being linked just to migration. In the GTHA, there are condos, but people are not buying them. It's not just a supply issue. It's an income issue. It's a profit issue. It's a rent guideline issue. I mean, just to clarify on one point, I mean, you've been touching on this, but It's not just a supply issue. It's an income issue. It's a profit issue. It's a rent guideline issue. than 1.2 million people a year, but Canada was only building around 250,000 new homes. Conservative leader Polyev has suggested, you know, looking at how many new homes are built should be a factor before deciding how many immigrants to let in. And again, I know you've touched on this already, but if you could just expand a little on this specific point,

like what's your response to this idea that this math just doesn't add up? this idea that this math just doesn't add up? So we're not seeing this huge increase in people coming as we're seeing new work and study permits that are being issued each year, right? But those people are on time-limited work and study permits that expire, and then they're forced to leave the country, and then new people arrive with work and study permits, right? So we have a cyclical revolving door immigration system. So it's not that there are these huge numbers of migrants who are coming in. They're actually revolving door. Only about half a million of them as of next year, and that will stay stationary, will actually be able to live here permanently.

Everybody else will live here for a few years and leave. The thing we need to ask is whose interest does it serve to take these two issues and link them? When did it start? So if you look at the year 2020 and, you know, all across the country, we were seeing encampments. We were having a national conversation about homelessness. That's disappeared. You look at 2020, 2021, people were on our porches clapping for essential workers, including essential migrant workers. That conversation has disappeared. Now we are blaming those same migrant essential workers for the housing crisis. This is propaganda that has been put out and it's an oversimplification of these issues, it hurts migrants, it hurts, and it hurts our ability

to actually build homes, increase healthcare, and ensure that people have basic rights and services. The other part of this conversation is about employment. And, you know, a thing you hear a lot right now is how the increase in newcomers could be contributing to youth unemployment in Canada in particular, which right now is at 14%. I mean, there's kind of two parts of this conversation. There's obviously, you know, the broader discourse where we're seeing immigrants, you know, immigrants across the board. I mean, people like I was just saying, these guys that we were talking to in Brampton, being blamed for Canadian unemployment, that too many people are coming into the country, there just aren't enough jobs and all that. But then there's another part that I'd love to kind of zero in on with you, which is about temporary

foreign workers specifically. And, you know, you're hearing the argument, including from some researchers right now, that basically employers are filling jobs with workers who they can get away with paying less. And that that is both, you know, contributing to sort of stopping young people from getting into the job market, but also suppressing wages in Canada overall. And can you talk to me a bit more about that?

What do you make of that argument? When we talk about temporary foreign workers in particular, just under half are in agriculture, fisheries. And these are sectors, first of all, that will not be impacted by the changes. And these are not the places that so-called young people are going to work because those industries have had temporary foreign workers coming into them for half a century or more the rest of where we're seeing temporary foreign workers are actually distributed across the country and yes there is you know maybe

a few mcdonald's or tim hortons in places like Ontario, but mostly we're seeing these are not jobs that have been historically youth working in them. So again, particularly reductions to the temporary foreign worker program is not going to result in addressing the issue of the overall economic situation we're in. we're in. These are complex problems for which detailed solutions have been provided by organizations like ours, other worker groups, labor unions and economists for many years and the harm done to the economy through the contraction because of the lack of immigration is going to outweigh the jobs that will open up. Hassan, I just want to put some numbers to some of this anti-immigrant rhetoric that we've been talking about. There was this research co-poll in June that found that 44% of Canadians believe immigration has mostly had a negative effect on the country.

I mean, the workers that we spoke to in Brampton said that people drive by telling them to leave on a regular basis. I mean, you know, given the work that you do, do you worry about Canada becoming an increasingly hostile place for people to come and settle in? Absolutely. We're seeing this increase where everyone is struggling. It's difficult to pay rent. It's difficult to take care of your family. It's difficult to pay groceries. So people are looking for answers. And if you're going to tell them again and again and again on every national news program, the problem is too many immigrants, then of course, some people are going to take it upon themselves to go hurl abuse or hurl violence at those people. Our members are being spat at, our social media is

full of attacks. Discrimination is increasing at the workplaces and by landlords. Now look at what happened to the United Kingdom. This was the conversation pre-Brexit. So Brexit happens, Britain cuts out from the EU, the economy does not improve, and now a few weeks ago we saw racist riots on the street where people believe that immigrants are the problem. This is the road that Canada is walking and it's high time that politicians, economists, the media take responsibility for what has been happening here over the last 12, 15 months. Hassan, thank you so much for this interview. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. So it's clear the debate around immigration in Canada has gotten heated, and even ugly at times. But to end, I just want to go back to that moment when that woman drove by the protest we were at

and yelled out of her car, telling the protesters to go home. And what they said right after. You were saying, you know, you feel like Canada is a good country. It's a good place. Sometimes when people come by and they say things like that, what sort of goes through your head? So like we are mentally mature. So we know like in every country, like every community, every color, like like white black brown So there are like one or two percent people like that, but other ninety or ninety-eight percent people are good So we believe only that people we are ignoring them We never like lose our hope by seeing that kind of people

This is Sikh concept culture dikala What does that mean? So even what happened, so even like the portals or anything happened, so we never demotivate ourselves. We stay high in our mind, that's that main. No matter what happens, we will stay high in our mind. We will not back down in any situation. Just shut the door. So, yeah. We ready ourselves to serve the community. All right, that's all for today. This special episode was produced by

Joythashen Gupta, with sound design by Mackenzie Cameron and Samantha McNulty. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos. I'm Allie Janes. Thanks for listening to Frontburner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.