Step aside, multiculturalism… xenophobia is trending in Canada

Everyone is rushing this week to declare 2025 the “year of” something.

Those somethings include words, colours, personalities from entertainment or politics or, even, fashion.

Not to completely dismiss any of those “year of” claims, but for my money, 2025 is the year of the proud and unbridled xenophobe.

In the United States, President Donald Trump has forged ahead with an aggressive militarized campaign to deport illegal immigrants that has been so swift and remorseless, it has turned some of America’s biggest cities into war zones — complete with masked, heavily armed troops — and ensnared completely legal residents.

The United Kingdom is suffering through an anti-immigrant crisis that has seen a relentless parade of violent protests and hate crimes directed at the Jewish community, asylum seekers and legal residents from racialized communities.

Denmark, France, Germany, Australia, Norway and Finland have all seen growing anti-immigration and anti-semitic sentiment that has allowed openly xenophobic parties to surge in popular support.

Canada, once a nation of unabashed support for immigration, is not immune to the same macro forces.

Support for immigration in Canada has gone down, with current polls showing that slightly more than half of Canadians believe we admit too many immigrants. Although it’s not a commanding majority who are concerned about immigration, it’s a statistically significant shift from a time, not so long ago, when we were strongly pro-immigration.

Our diminished support for immigration is reflected in two ways: increasingly stringent laws and policies on the numbers of immigrants admitted to Canada; and the rapid rise in hate-inspired violence against racialized Canadians.

Earlier this month, two Ottawa men were sentenced to between four and five years in prison for a hurling racist slurs and violently attacking a Black man who had only just arrived in Canada from New Guinea.

That kind of incident is no outlier.

Go to your preferred search engine and enter the words “Canada,” and “racial slurs” and you get an endless news feed of incidents from across the country: a man who verbally harassed a South Asian couple in a Peterborough, calling them “f—king immigrants;” a Black woman in Hamilton who was assaulted by men who drove up beside her as she was walking along a city street; two men wielding axes who tried to break down the door of Winnipeg’s Abu Bakr Al-Siddique Community Centre.

Maybe you think those examples are unusal and infrequent. In fact, hate crimes have become, arguably, the fastest-growing category of criminal activity. Statistics Canada data showed total police-reported hate crimes rose 29 per cent in 2023 over 2022; the overall crime rate in Canada went up by only three per cent.

Apart from the violence and hate being directed at immigrants and other racialized groups, including Indigenous peoples, the broader trend of concern is the way normally enlightened, even progressive, political leaders are responding.

After winning the leadership of the Liberal party and then winning a spring election, Prime Minister Mark Carney wasted no time in introducing drastic reductions in the number of temporary foreign workers and foreign students.

Why would a traditionally pro-immigration party perform such an abrupt about-face? Canadians are convinced that immigration is key to our economic woes. Everything from high housing prices, shortage of affordable rental housing, the physician shortage and inflation have been blamed on the historically high immigration when former prime minister Justin Trudeau was running the ship.

The Liberal government still won’t blame all those economic problems on immigrants. However, it is also not willing to let the Conservative party feed our growing cynicism about admitting too many people too quickly.

For the record, immigration has played a very small role in economic problems. A report released just a week ago, and based on research performed by Immigration and Citizenship Canada, found that between 2006 and 2021, new immigrant arrivals were responsible for about 11 per cent of the total increase in housing prices.

The impact was greater in larger cities, but still came in at less than 20 per cent total impact. “Immigration is a factor but far from the dominant driver of rising housing costs,” the report’s authors concluded.

So, we have governments all over the world, including Canada, cutting immigration and making it harder for people to migrate because of the perception — not the reality — that it’s bad for the economy.

David Coletto, CEO of polling firm Abacus Data, recently told the Canadian Press that public opinion has always had a strain of xenophobia to it. But he said that thinking has found a more receptive audience over the past five years as Canada’s immigrant population grew quickly alongside economic pressures.

“The population growth that happened between 2022 and ’24 really did materialize in what people were telling us,” Coletto said.

“They felt that they couldn’t get access to the housing they needed. They couldn’t access a doctor. They saw and felt congestion… all around them, and that has then led to some taking what was an originally rational, in their minds, reaction and becoming irrational and much more anti-immigrant to the person, not to the policy.”

For political leaders, pre-emptive policies to curb immigration may be seen as a pragmatic way of diminishing the appeal of far-right populists. But it’s also clear these policy shifts are serving as dog whistles for maladjusted and aggrieved citizens to act on their growing anger.

So this odious cultural shift wears the crown as Canada’s top trend of 2025. And it seems as if nothing short of a complete economic recovery is going to stop it from repeating next year.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca