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A long-term tracking has found that many Canadians believe their country has accepted too many immigrants.
They made this revelation in a poll released on Thursday. 58 per cent said there’s too much immigration. In 2023, 44 per cent and in 2022 27 per cent believed Canada had too many immigrants.
The Focus Canada survey by Environics Institute, which has tracked Canadian attitudes toward immigration and refugees since 1977, said, “The latest findings suggest the balance of public opinion about the volume of immigration currently being admitted into the country has effectively flipped from being acceptable (if not valuable) to problematic.”
The annal survey found an increasing minority of Canadians believe the country accepts too many newcomers from racial minority groups and that immigration increases the level of crime. Although, a third of respondents said immigration makes their community better compared to 14 per cent who said the opposite, the balance of opinion is less positive than a year ago.
Canada’s population has increased significantly in the last three years, due to the surge of temporary residents including international students, foreign workers and asylum seekers when the border reopened after the pandemic. Canada has tried to control the growth by cutting the number of study permits and tightening rules on work permits.
Federal political parties have divergent public views on immigration. Conservatives’ supporters are most widely in agreement about having too much immigration. However, there has also been an equivalent increase in this sentiment among those who will vote for the Liberals or NDP.
68 per cent of respondents agreed that immigration has a positive impact on Canadian economy. However, the share of people with that view has declined for the second consecutive year.
Those who said there are too many migrants were most likely to raise concerns over the lack of housing availability and affordability, the state of the economy, overpopulation, and potential strain on public resources. The percentages of people blaming too much immigration on poor management by government has shot up from 10 per cent in 2023 to 21 per cent this year.
A growing number of Canadians are also concerned about who is being admitted and how well they are integrating.
The Canadian public value immigrants with specialized skills and those with a good education who will settle permanently rather than temporary foreign workers, especially those with low-skilled jobs, and international students.
The survey interviewed 2,016 Canadians ages 18 and over in September, with a margin of error of 2.2 percentage points, nineteen times out of twenty.
