Roxham Road, non-permanent residents, reception capacity, situation of French: immigration has been at the heart of the news throughout this year. Since the 2018 electoral campaign, the subject has become the “ballot box question”, as the outgoing Prime Minister, Philippe Couillard, said at the time. Since then, by multiplying clumsy (and sometimes erroneous) declarations, the Coalition Avenir Québec has also made it a subject closely linked to its identity concerns. Here are some elements to restore some order to the holiday debates.
Quebec will welcome more than its target of 50,000 new arrivals
“It is important, for us, to stop, to reverse the decline of French, to limit ourselves to 50,000,” said Prime Minister François Legault on 1er last November.
However, even if the official threshold for permanent immigration remains at 50,000 admissions projected for 2024, we must add to this number immigrants from two categories not counted by Quebec, which increase the real number of new arrivals to more than 63,000 There are, on the one hand, approximately 6,500 “off-target” foreign students who will be admitted continuously. And, on the other hand, there is a form of catch-up for people in the business community, aiming to clear up to 6,600 backlogs of requests.
The total number of people who will obtain permanent status in 2024 will therefore exceed the target announced at the press conference by 26%.
Never before have so many immigrants been welcomed (in absolute number, but not proportionally)
You will certainly hear the first part of this statement around turkey or pie. The annual target of 50,000 new arrivals actually represents the quantity of permanent immigrants that Quebec has wished to admit each year since 2009. But, during this time, the total Quebec population has increased: this means that this target of 50,000 represents a smaller annual contribution, all things considered.
In the province, today around 15% of the population was born abroad. Across Canada, it’s more like 23%.
The country has actually just surpassed the proportion of immigrants in its population at the start of the 20th century.e century, or 22% between 1911 and 1931. In 1913, 400,900 immigrants had landed in Canada under the impetus of the colonization of the Prairies, which displaced the indigenous populations. We had to wait more than a century, until 2021, for this record to be broken.
There are now more temporary than permanent immigrants
The conversation will perhaps then turn to the shift in our system towards temporary immigration. The number of non-permanent residents has in fact reached a record this year, with an estimate of 528,034 arrivals in Quebec as of 1er October, according to Statistics Canada. Foreign students, temporary workers, asylum seekers: these people often arrive in the country with the plan of settling there. However, by keeping the permanent immigration thresholds between 50,000 and 60,000, Quebec is creating a bottleneck, according to several associations, both employers and unions.
What has captured the imagination in recent years are also the arrivals of asylum seekers at the border. Here again, records were broken in absolute numbers. But the immigration rate has sometimes been as high in the past, during major humanitarian crises, such as in 1957, when the province welcomed thousands of Hungarians, or at the turn of the 1980s, with the arrival of Vietnamese refugees.
After the expansion of the Safe Third Country Agreement (and therefore the “closure of Roxham Road”), arrivals also increased at airports, including Montreal. The number of asylum seekers has therefore already exceeded last year’s record across Canada, and it is also on track to do so in Quebec.
Support for immigration has declined in Canada
Perhaps it will be a phrase that resonates in someone’s mouth as a prelude to their own opinion. If your guests are left with this impression, it is because a survey had the effect of a small bombshell this fall: 44% of respondents to it said they agreed with the statement that “the Canada welcomes too many immigrants.” This leap in “resistance to immigration” was publicized and debated.
What this headline overshadowed is the fact that Quebec remains the place where the general feeling is the most open towards newcomers. About a third (37%) of Quebecers consider that there are too many immigrants, compared to 50% in Ontario and 46% in the rest of Canada. It must be said that the province also receives fewer newcomers, in proportion.