OP-ED: It’s time to turn off the immigration tap
Riley Donovan writes, "Canada’s immigration system stopped serving Canadians years ago."
By: Riley Donovan
Riley Donovan is a freelance journalist and the editor of Dominion Review. He writes for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Some policy problems require complex solutions. Canada’s immigration mess is not one of them.
Take the international study program, which is now synonymous with diploma mills, fraud and slumlords renting out crowded basements to desperate foreign students. The program has seen excessive demand, with the international student population rising from just 122,665 in 2000 to 638,280 in 2019 and then soaring again to roughly one million in 2024. Increasingly, study permits became tied to work permits and permanent residency.
The uncontrolled growth strained housing, hospitals and food banks. In response, the federal government capped overall student numbers. But the cap fails to address the incentives driving the program’s dramatic expansion: work and permanent residency.
International students can work 24 hours a week, then obtain a “Post-Graduation Work Permit” of up to three years. According to a survey by the Canadian Bureau of International Education (CBIE), 57 per cent of foreign students ultimately want to become permanent residents.
By prohibiting foreign students from working and removing those pathways to permanent residency, we would be left with a limited number of genuine students who want to study, contribute to a lively cultural exchange in our universities, and then return home.
How about foreign workers? Many Canadians feel cheap foreign labour is displacing Canadian workers, especially youth, from retail and restaurant jobs. The data backs this up. A study by the Fraser Institute found that 437,000 people aged 15 to 24 looked for a job but could not find one last year, up 57 per cent from 2022. Yet Ottawa intends to approve 230,000 new foreign worker permits this year, many in the same low-skill sectors Canadian youth are qualified for.
When the Temporary Foreign Worker Program was introduced in 1973, it was limited to specialized occupations like academics or engineers. Employers have only been able to hire low-skill temporary foreign workers since 2002, with the program expanding into sectors such as food service and hospitality. Ottawa could revoke that privilege tomorrow. Ending the low-skill temporary foreign worker stream would not only open up jobs for Canadians, but it would also incentivize bosses to invest in workers through training, benefits and opportunities for advancement.
Canada allows foreign nationals to claim asylum and affords them a process whereby they can demonstrate that they are a legitimate refugee. Canadians are a kind people who largely support this idea but are wary of their generosity being abused. Between 2016 and 2025, active asylum claims skyrocketed from 17,537 to 295,819. How do we retake control?
We can take inspiration from Denmark’s approach. This progressive Scandinavian country was the first to ratify the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention and is now pioneering asylum reforms in a 21st-century world where global travel has made migration so much easier. Simply put, Denmark has made it very difficult for asylum seekers to attain permanent residency. They can stay until their home country is safe and must return to help rebuild when danger is over.
Britain has moved toward the Danish approach, introducing reforms that make refugee protection temporary and could require many asylum seekers to wait up to 20 years before qualifying for permanent residency. If their home country is deemed safe during that period, the asylum seekers are sent home.
Canada should emulate these fellow Western democracies and balance kindness with fairness in our asylum system.
Every aspect of our immigration policy should be analyzed in terms of whether it benefits the average Canadian rather than special interests or lobbies. Until the 1990s, we had what was known as a “tap on, tap off” immigration policy, where immigration levels rose or fell depending on unemployment and broader economic conditions.
Instead of a high and ever-increasing annual flow, levels were adjusted to match the economy. This meant that some tough decades, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, saw almost no immigration. If we restored this approach now, we might choose to turn the proverbial tap off for the rest of this decade as unemployment rises, trade wars rage and rumours of a global recession swirl.
The policy decisions needed to restore Canada’s immigration system are simple. The hard part is finding politicians willing to admit it and reverse course.
