US Conservative commentator warns mass immigration is straining Canada’s economy

CALGARY — The immigration debate rages on in Canada as the country’s rapidly changing demographics have attracted attention south of the border, with American conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson warning the massive influx of migrants is placing growing pressure on an economy already struggling with housing shortages and strained public services.Hanson claimed in a recent video that immigrants now represent approximately 26% to 27% of Canada’s population — higher than the foreign-born share of the United States, estimated at 16%..“When you add second-generation immigrants [to the Canadian population], about seven million [more], and you add visa holders who are not Canadian citizens, but residents, you're getting close to 45% of the population who were not born in Canada or whose parents were not born in Canada,” Hanson said.“When you combine that with a very sluggish economy and people coming largely from Asia, India, China, and Latin America, you have a lot of very poor people in dire need of social services in a stagnant economy that cannot support them.”Hanson’s comments come as the debate over mass immigration and the scale of Canada’s continued demographic transformation remains a heated talking point within the country.In a 2022 projection, Statistics Canada estimated that immigrants and their Canadian-born children could represent between 49.8% and 54.3% of the population by 2041, when the country’s population was projected to reach roughly 47.7 million.Approximately 25 million — or 52.4% — would be immigrants or the Canadian-born children of immigrants. That population represented 40% of Canadians in 2016.The agency also projected that between 9.9 million and 13.9 million Canadians would have been born in Asia or Africa by 2041.That would represent between 23.1% and 26.9% of the country —approximately one in four Canadians — compared with 13.5% in 2016..Canada’s current population growth has already become almost entirely dependent on immigration, with international migration accounting for 97.6% of population growth in 2023 and 97.3% in 2024. This has fuelled a widening debate over whether immigration has exceeded the country’s ability to build housing and other infrastructure, meet health-care needs, and address ongoing complexities in schools.In its 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plan, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government plans to target 380,000 new permanent residents annually through 2028. Ottawa has also reduced its target for new temporary resident arrivals to 385,000 in 2026 and 370,000 in each of the following two years.However, many critics feel that this is still not enough of a turnaround in immigration policy to address ongoing concerns.The US-based White Papers Policy Institute (WPPI) recently published a Canadian Remigration Policy Platform calling for the removal of millions of non-Western immigrants and temporary residents.Its first proposed step would require approximately 2.3 million non-Western temporary residents to leave when their legal status expires, with deportation proposed for those who refuse..Remigration plan presented at Dominion Society event would reduce Canada’s population by 12 million.The proposal goes considerably further by calling for permanent status and, in some cases, citizenship to be revoked, while offering financial incentives for other immigrants and naturalized citizens to leave voluntarily.WPPI estimates that its policies would reduce Canada’s population from approximately 41.5 million to 29.5 million — a decline of roughly 12 million people. The institute says its objective is to restore a large European-origin majority.The group’s proposal stands in stark contrast to that of the Century Initiative, a Canadian lobby group that aims to increase Canada's population to 100 million by 2100.The Century Initiative was co-founded by Mark Wiseman, the current Canadian ambassador to the US, and Dominic Barton, who led the Advisory Council on Economic Growth under former prime minister Justin Trudeau and was appointed chair of Invest in Canada on Monday by Carney..Barton has argued that Canada could accommodate substantial population growth if it changed how it builds infrastructure.“A hundred million, I’m sorry to say, is not a big number,” Barton said during a 2016 panel at the Canadian Club of Toronto.“Chongqing has the population of Canada today in one city. I'm not gonna move to Chongqing because it's a wonderful place to live. I'm just saying we can actually do both. I really believe we can. We will have to do infrastructure in a fundamentally different way. We do a poor job.”

US conservative commentator warns mass immigration is straining Canada’s economy

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