Immigration Watch Canada is an organization of Canadians who believe that immigration has to serve the interests of its own citizens. It cannot be turned into a social assistance program for other countries. It should never be a social engineering experiment that is conducted on Canadians without the consent of Canadians. **
But immigration has become those 2 things.
Why? In particular, why has Canada’s 250,000 per year immigration intake remained in place for 20 years?
The answer is that all of Canada’s major political parties have adopted the attitude that they know what is best for Canadians and that Canadians do not have to be consulted when major decisions are made.
These politicians imply that the primary purpose of immigration is to help people in other countries, whether this help is to protect them from persecution or from unemployment. These politicians claim that this is a superior moral position, and that this is why they support current immigration policies.
They have also pretended that these policies are in the interest of Canada. But, in reality, the policies are intended solely to help each of the political parties get a share of the immigrant vote.
This shameless betrayal of Canada and the promotion of political party self-interest began in 1990 when one political party (the Progressive Conservatives) increased immigration levels to 250,000 per year. At the time they did this, they announced they were doing it in order to capture more of the immigrant vote. This may sound hard to believe because it is so brazen, but it is a fact. Since then, all other parties have adopted the same policy. All pretend that their actions are helping people in the rest of the world and that this immigration flood is literally and figuratively enriching Canadian society.
The reality is that Canada’s 250,000 per year immigration intake since 1990 has been far too high. In fact, Canada’s intake is the highest per capita in the world. And, contrary to the claims of our political parties, it has obviously been destructive and senseless.
What are some examples of the destruction and senselessness? Our high intake has had major negative economic consequences for Canadians who are looking for work. In fact, it has forced many of Canada’s own unemployed to compete with immigrants for a limited number of jobs and it has impoverished many Canadians . Absurd as it may sound, employed Canadians have actually launched “Hire An Immigrant” campaigns to give immigrants a hiring advantage over unemployed Canadian-born.
In addition, it has caused many Canadians (especially those in Canada’s larger centres) to feel that this social engineering project amounts to the country being ethnically cleansed and re-colonized. Finally, it has turned many areas of the country into crowded, grid-locked, environmental disasters-in-progress.
We ask one basic question : Why Is Canada bringing in 250,000+ immigrants per year? Ottawa has never provided a logical answer to that question. In fact, it has withheld vital information or tried to deceive Canadians with false claims about the benefits of immigration.
We believe Canada should have some immigration, but that immigration levels should be reduced to about 50,000, that is, to about 20% of the current annual 250,000 intake. We advocate that the 50,000 intake level should be kept in place indefinitely to compensate for the immigration disaster that has occurred in the past 20 years.
We also advocate a significant reduction to Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program which currently allows another 250,000+ non-Canadians to work in Canada every year. The 250,000 consists of about 180,000 new workers who enter Canada each year + another 70,000+ who are already here. This program is being widely abused by employers and should probably be reduced to nearly zero. In any recession (this past one and others), it is madness for a country to be importing large numbers of immigrants as well as large numbers of Temporary Foreign Workers.
In addition to a reduction of Canada’s immigration intake to 50,000 per year and a dramatic cut to Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program, we also call for major reform to many of Canada’s other immigration policies. (See our Basics section for details.)
(** For background on major immigration policy changes made in the 1960′s and 70′s, click on the following summaries of excellent research done by reporter Doug Collins in his book “The Destruction Of English Canada” :
