Temporary immigrants exceed the half-million mark in Quebec. The latest data from Statistics Canada, released Tuesday, show that the spectacular growth observed in the third quarter continued into the fourth quarter of 2023.
What there is to know
Temporary immigrants have reached a historic peak in Quebec.
Their number jumped by 46% in one year, for all categories, going from 361,000 to 528,000.
In Canada, the number of temporary immigrants reaches 2.5 million.
A year ago, Statistics Canada counted 360,936 temporary immigrants, also called non-permanent residents. This number now reaches 528,034, an increase of 46% in one year.
Who are these newcomers? What are they doing ? These are foreigners who hold a work permit, a study permit or who have requested asylum.
Governments set annual thresholds for permanent immigrants. But in the case of temporary workers, there is no threshold, no limit. Which explains the explosion revealed by Statistics Canada data.
We can even add that this explosion was partly fueled by government policies.
This is not the case for asylum seekers, whose flows result from international tensions. But it is the governments of Quebec and Canada which accept students, or which grant or not permits to foreign workers. It is the government of Canada which allows students to extend their stay by granting them a post-graduation work permit, and it is the government of Quebec which intends to attract more French-speaking foreign students with a promise of a rapid gateway to permanent residence.
The strong growth in non-permanent residents does not surprise Professor Jean-Pierre Corbeil, who was responsible for Statistics Canada’s linguistic statistics program for 15 years. “At the moment, there seems to be a certain opacity regarding information on non-permanent residents at the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration of Quebec,” he laments. It’s becoming very difficult to know where exactly we’re going with all this. »
Have we lost control? Mr. Corbeil is cautious, but “what is clear,” he says, “is that this number continues to increase and that we do not know to what extent this increase is linked to real needs and demands from the community.” business that has positions [pourvoir] “.
More workers
It is foreign workers who form the largest contingent of non-permanent residents in Quebec. There are 225,684 of them, including their family members. This represents 43% of the total temporary workers.
Their number jumped by 85,500 in one year, an increase of 61%.
The second largest group is asylum seekers. There would be 106,000 in 2022, according to the federal agency. There are now more than 160,000. You should know that around 100,000 of them have a work permit.
The smallest group in number is that of foreign students: 72,620. Surprisingly, the number of study permit holders jumped by 8,000 between the third and fourth quarters, while it had been rather stable since the beginning of the year. Is this growth attributable to the threat of an increase in tuition fees from the Coalition Avenir Québec government? “It’s a possibility,” believes Jean-Pierre Corbeil, professor in the sociology department at Laval University. “Because the measure will be imposed on newcomers and not on those who have already started their program of study. »
Explosion in Canada
Across Canada, the number of non-permanent residents is also exploding. Out of an estimated population of 40.5 million, there are more than 2.5 million temporary residents. A year ago, there were 1.7 million.
The largest group of temporary workers is foreign workers. At 1,165,500, these account for 46% of the total.
The second largest group is international students. There are 660,000 of them, which is equivalent to 26% of non-permanent residents in Canada. Their number jumped by 122,000 in one year.
Asylum seekers are proportionally much less numerous in Canada than in Quebec. There are 289,000 in the country, or 12% of temporary residents. In Quebec, they account for 30% of all non-permanent residents.