Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Canada
In a surprising turn, the ruling Liberal Party of Canada has announced changes to the Temporary Foreign Workers program that would limit the number of admissions; regions with an unemployment rate of 6% or more will not see any application processed for low-wage positions, companies will not be allowed to have more than 10% of their workforce be staffed through the program, and the validity of the program is reduced from 2 years to 1 year. The Liberal Party of Canada has also expressed, though without any commitment yet, that they might revise down their 500 000 immigrants a year target. This is on the backdrop of abysmal (and persistent) poll results for the LPC forecasting a severe loss in the election expected in 2025.
Critics have already pointed out many flaws in the changes, such as how it does not affect the foreign student pipeline, which is a large part of the migration influx. How the 6% unemployment rate restriction applies to the initial request but workers could be moved between regions after being approved.
Now as to the commentary... I mostly ignore provincial and national politics as the obliviousness of Québecois and Canadians to their problems was a source of major despair for me. it's quite surprising to me to peek my head out, check what the discourse is now, and see just how much things have changed. The MAIN (!) /r/Canada subreddit is filled, filled with nothing but messages about how the immigration is just too much and how the Liberals have ruined and destroyed the country. That maybe it's not even recoverable from before decades. Particularly shocking to people is how the TFW (and International Students) are used to staff fast food service positions, while youth unemployment is spiking. Most proeminently Tim Hortons, which seems to be all over the country staffed with almost nothing but Indians now. Most surprising to me is how it's now firmly within the Overton window to not just cite economic concerns with the influx of immigrants, but sociocultural ones too. Which is of course the polite way to say people believe we're letting in a lot of immigrants who are not a good fit for our way of life. The people saying such have found a neat little trick to avoid sharing the blame for supporting the LPC all these years; see, it's all big business' fault for corrupting the LPC to bring in all these people to use as quasi slaves to depress wages. They were told they were going to have Change with the Liberals. Of course, the Liberals did precisely what they were promising to do. And none of it is to blame on the narrative-following majority who for all those years treated unchecked immigration as an unalloyed good, something to be celebrated on its own merit and obviously the right thing to do regardless of if it even made sense economically (which they believed it did, despite the fact that only the barest simplest economics education is required to forecast the effect on wages and housing affordability).
On related anecdote, I went to get breakfast and coffee yesterday at the nearest Tim Hortons, and as my order was taking a long time I could observe the staff. As usual, almost the entire staff was south asian, predominantly women, with one middle eastern/northern african looking man acting as a shift manager and one single white teenager/young man. There must have been around 10 people running around behind that counter. The orders for the drive-thru service were coming out but people in the restaurants were piling in and only a trickle would get to give their order and no one was recieving their food. Now the workers all seemed to be working and to be very busy but still nothing was coming out for the clients inside the restaurant. The manager and the teenager appeared to be the only ones with agency in the situation, noticing the customers were starting to get impatient running from worker to worker, telling them what they should be doing so that they could actually complete orders. We're told that service in fast food restaurants is bad now because since COVID they got used to running with skeleton crews, people are underpaid and because the conditions are so bad working in food service now that it's unfair to expect people to work hard in them. But the area behind the counter in that Tim Hortons seemed very well staffed to me. And presumably, if the people there are immigrant workers then the working conditions there would have been appealing enough to move from across the world for. As I waited 20 minutes for a coffee and a breakfast sandwich, I really struggled to see how anyone except employers could have been fooled this was in Canadians interest.
Wow, you weren't kidding. 11/25 of those posts are directly about immigration.
Also, half the sidebar is in French, c'est trop mignon!
And many of those that aren't directly about immigration will be indirectly about immigration: talks of polls, elections, of the NDP (the left wing party) keeping the LPC in power, posts about housing (in)affordability are all indirectly about immigration.
I think something broke in Canadians mind recently and seeing so, so, so many brown faces around them they've stopped feeling guilty. Not hateful, mind you, but not guilty enough to just roll over and give sanction to unrestricted immigration. And especially since it's now within the Overton window to notice that there is a price to pay for immigration. I'm not sure how it happened, but I remember going to Toronto for work about 6-7 years ago and I noticed once that at a busy intersection in the downtown, financial center, I was literally the only white person I could see around me. It was an eerie feeling, maybe not as strong for me as for locals since being Québecois Toronto has never felt to me like "my people's clay". From what I hear, it got much worse since. I imagine a lot of Canadians, especially those in cities, have now had such experiences, of looking around and suddenly feeling like they've become the minority. Maybe that's what did it.
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