Debunking Four Classic Arguments For Mass Immigration

After nearly a decade of continually increasing immigration levels, including two consecutive years of allowing them to reach stratospheric heights (annual population growth topped one million in 2022, and almost hit 1.3 million in 2023) the Trudeau government finally caved to public opposition in October 2024 by reducing the 2025 permanent resident target from 500,000 to 395,000.

The Carney government will be responsible for Canada’s next Immigration Levels Plan – three year projections that are typically announced in October or November. Under the current plan, put in place by the Trudeau government last fall, this year’s target of 395,000 will gently decline to 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027. Given the Carney government’s goal of reducing immigration to what it calls “sustainable” levels, we can probably expect another gentle decline – as well as the announcement of promised reforms to the Temporary Foreign Worker program.

While these expected cuts and reforms are welcome, the Carney government is not questioning the central argument made by the immigration lobby -namely, that Canada needs a continuous and high inflow of newcomers every year. Before the ’90s, Canada had a “tap-on, tap-off” policy based on domestic economic conditions. If, for instance, we were in a recession, levels were kept low. If we had this mentality now, we would probably be hitting the brakes on immigration much harder than we already are, considering the unemployment rate is now above 7%.

Under Brian Mulroney, our traditional “tap-on, tap-off” immigration philosophy was abolished. Under Mulroney’s Immigration Minister Barbara McDougall, a continuous, high inflow became the new norm. I briefly covered this in an article for the Western Standard, and intend to look into it more going forward.

This became the status quo. The immigration lobby formulated arguments to defend this status quo, and Canada’s political, media, cultural, and academic elite repeated them to the Canadian public. These arguments have been recited, mantra-like, for the last 35 years. Over time, even those who remember that the floodgates were not always wide open began to forget. If they voiced any nostalgia for the days when levels were kept relatively low and assimilation was encouraged, they were called racist.

The only problem with all of those arguments for mass immigration? None of them were even remotely accurate.

1) We need immigration because Canada is ageing

In more than twenty years of studies on this claim, nothing has substantiated it.

In a 2003 paper titled Effect of Immigration on the Canadian Population: Replacement Migration?, Canadian sociologist and demographer Roderic Beaujot finds: “It is impossible to use immigration to prevent an increase in the population aged 65 and over as a ratio to the population aged 20-64”.

In a 2006 report by the C.D. Howe Institute aptly titled No Elixir of Youth: Immigration Cannot Keep Canada Young, we read that “no conceivable amount of immigration with an age profile such as Canada currently experiences can significantly affect the coming shift in the ratio of older to working-age Canadians”.

In a 2025 report for the Migration Policy Institute titled Understanding the Impact of Immigration on Demography: A Canadian Case Study, Professor Daniel Hiebert runs a number of different high-immigration and low-immigration scenarios, and concludes that “even under the highest of these immigration rates, the old-age dependency ratio would still rise”. The only way to counter the fact that immigrants “age and eventually retire along with their native-born peers” would be “continuously increasing the scale of immigration on an indefinite basis” – an obviously absurd policy.

There is no data to support the contention that Canada can use an open-door immigration policy to offset our own ageing population. This does not even address a fact that our immigration lobbyists find most inconvenient: an ageing society actually has many benefits.

2) Canada must grow its population

The ageing society argument does have a kind of truthiness (defined by Merriam-Webster as “the quality of seeming to be true but not necessarily or actually true according to known facts”) to it. The argument that Canada needs immigration-driven population growth, on the other hand, is often simply asserted without the burden of providing evidence, often in this simple format: “well, we need more people”.

The Century Initiative has taken this argument to its logical extreme in calling for the country to use immigration to reach a population of 100 million by 2100. To its credit, it has given some reasons for doing so – but these reasons break down upon closer examination. In a piece titled The Century Initiative: A Blueprint For A Bigger, Broken Canada, Madeline Weld delves into the Century Initiative’s justification for growing the population to 100 million, and finds three main reasons: 1) fixing our ageing society, 2) economic growth, and 3) growing our influence on the world stage.

Having already dealt with the ageing society argument, we can move directly to the second two reasons – economic growth and growing our influence on the world stage. Unfortunately, we find that these two reasons are entirely without basis.

The argument that immigration is necessary for economic growth refers to the fact that adding more people to a country raises the gross domestic product (GDP), an idea which Marc Miller put forth as recently as June to defend the high immigration levels of the Trudeau government, in which he served as Immigration Minister.

While immigration does indeed raise the total GDP – essentially by packing in more consumers who increase economic activity – it has been observed to lower GDP per capita, a far more relevant measure. While growing the total economic pie, each person gets a smaller slice. This was confirmed by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO), which found that Canada’s immigration cuts will lower total GDP, but raise GDP per capita.

The second reason put forth by the Century Initiative, that Canada can increase its influence on the world stage by growing its population, can be dismissed on its face. Does India have more global power than the United States because it has vastly more people? Who has more influence: the United Kingdom (pop: 69 million), or Philippines (pop: 116 million)?

3) We need workers to solve “labour shortages”

First off, there is no general labour shortage in Canada. Our unemployment rate is currently 7.1%, and is 16.9% for returning students. This is a vast pool of potential workers from which to draw from.

There may be sector-specific labour shortages, although it is worth pointing out that some of these can be misleading. For instance, we are told that there is a shortage of healthcare staff, including doctors, but this is largely because immigration is straining our healthcare system to such a degree that we need vast numbers of new staff. Similarly, we are told there is a shortage of construction workers, but this largely reflects the ridiculous number of houses we need to build to shelter our swelling population. The same phenomenon is at play with teachers – there would not be such a dire teacher shortage if our schools were not overflowing due to mass immigration.

Let us concede that there is some number of real, sector-specific labour shortages. In these situations, it should be incumbent on employers to use their ingenuity to solve shortages, rather than lobbying for the government to provision them with foreign labour. A variety of incentives can be employed to make jobs attractive to Canadian workers – higher wages, benefits, on-the-job training, and opportunity for advancement.

Genuine sector-specific labour shortages are relatively rare, and can often best be understood as the Canadian job market sending a clear message to employers: the remuneration you are offering is not commensurate with the job you are hiring for. If a business model is so weak that it depends upon the state intervening in the job market to supply a boss with cheap foreign labour, that model should be allowed to fail.

4) Immigration creates a vibrant interchange of cultures

We are frequently told that immigration enriches Canada by enlivening our country with new cultures, perspectives, foods, music, and ways of life. These novel infusions are said to create a synergy whereby a myriad of foreign cultures combine in a perpetual, amiable discourse with one another – a kind of miniature United Nations (in an idealized world where the UN members all get along). Our cultural and media elite have never seen fit to provide the Canadian public with any studies or data to back this idea up, or even a logical argument demonstrating that throwing together hundreds of foreign cultures into one landmass would theoretically create a vibrant interchange.

I would question the entire premise of creating this kind of cultural interchange. Even if we could do so, why would we want to turn Canada into a miniature version of the United Nations, instead of preserving and enhancing the cultures of our three founding peoples – English Canadians, French Canadians, and the Indigenous? Nevertheless, to give the argument its due, we can examine the effects of mass immigration on the country to see whether Canada is indeed in the state of vibrant cultural synergy that our elite promised us.

All available evidence points to the opposite reality, namely that many of this country’s urban centres have been turned into a kind of Tower of Babel as a result of an immigration policy that crowds hundreds of nationalities together without even attempting to instill in them a common identity or sense of collective belonging. Eritrean immigrant riots in Calgary. Outbursts of communal violence between Sikhs and Hindus in Ontario. Palestine protestors marching through a Jewish neighbourhood in Windsor. The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) being forced to ban “caste-based discrimination” in schools, as India’s caste system is imported to Canada.

There is no need to direct blame at immigrants for the failure of our Kumbaya experiment. Our political elite deserves the blame for its refusal to recognize that humans are by nature a group-oriented species, a fact that no amount of social engineering can alter. Our political elite’s denial of human nature is understandable when you consider that, up until very recently, they also denied the equally undeniable law of supply and demand when it comes to the link between immigration and housing.

All available evidence shows that the arguments for mass immigration are entirely without merit. No amount of repetition of these arguments to the Canadian public will change that.