Hello, and thank you to the committee for inviting me.
I'm a political scientist whose research and teaching focus on the relationship between public opinion and public policy, primarily in North America and western Europe, although I do occasionally look elsewhere.
As a beneficiary of Canada's generous immigration policy, I am quite grateful to the policy the way it exists, but I'm glad the committee is looking for ways to improve it and to respond to challenges that have arisen or are likely to arise in the future. In my comments today, I'm not going to offer any specific policy recommendations. I'll offer instead my thoughts on three big themes that I think are often underemphasized in debates and discussions around immigration policy in Canada.
The first theme I want to address is the extent to which the Canadian public is unusually tolerant of immigration or unusually enthusiastic about immigration relative to similar countries. In short, Canadians are people, and in any large group of people there will be a decent-sized chunk who are not very tolerant, not very excited about outsiders.
Canada is neither unusually tolerant nor unusually intolerant. Like many other countries, Canada is made up of some people who accept immigration, some people who are enthusiastic about it, and others who are not very enthusiastic. Measuring xenophobia and related attitudes is a notoriously difficult thing to do. We are not very good at it, but we try. I think a fair assessment of the evidence would suggest that Canada is somewhat more tolerant on average than typical wealthy countries, but only somewhat. It is by no means exceptional or an outlier.
One recent survey asked Canadians to evaluate the impact of immigration on the economy. Canadians were more enthusiastic, more positive than 18 European countries that were asked the same question. They were less enthusiastic than three. That same survey asked a question about whether we should accept more immigrants from poor countries. There, Canada was smack in the middle—more enthusiastic than 10 and less enthusiastic than 11. The majority of Canadians are satisfied with current levels of immigration, but a substantial group takes a dimmer view. About a third would be happy to see fewer immigrants arriving each year, and many Canadians, perhaps a quarter, would like to see a more racially or religiously discriminatory policy.
I'll turn now to the second theme I want to raise today: Policy matters for public attitudes, but only to a degree. Policy helps to improve acceptance of immigration, but only somewhat. Geography probably deserves more credit than institutional design for the relatively consensual immigration politics Canada has seen. Consider the attention that has arisen around the comparatively small number of asylum seekers crossing the border from the U.S. Those asylum seekers, plus all the refugees resettled under formal processes, amount to a very small per capita number when set against the large flows seen recently in countries like Germany or Greece, let alone countries like Lebanon or Turkey.
There are three big things that I think we know about how policy can shape public debates around immigration. First, events and particular policy failures matter. The most direct short-term and visible impacts of policy on public perceptions appear when something goes wrong. The public responds to perceived or real policy failures, to events that draw media attention and have clear narratives with villains, heroes and victims.
In the absence of such a key event, most people just don't think about immigration most of the time. Indeed, even major changes don't seem to move immigration attitudes in the aggregate or on average. Most events move some people one way and other people other ways. Neither the great recession of 2009-10 and the euro crisis nor the Syrian refugee crisis seems to have shifted the average immigration opinion in Europe in the places I study.
Instead, both of those big events changed the coalitions supporting immigration, changed which types of people supported immigration and moved political parties to more firmly tie their identity to their position on immigration, which has to some degree polarized or politicized the debate without changing attitudes on average.
A second big piece of the policy literature that I think is relevant here is that immigrant voices matter in Canada more than they do in most places. One form of what we call policy feedback is the long-term relationship between the citizenship or naturalization regime and the politics of immigration in the future. The comparatively generous naturalization policy here means that there are large communities of migrants whose voices and votes end up mattering in politics, and this makes it harder, though by no means impossible, for the ugliest forms of anti-immigrant arguments to rise to the top of the agenda. Since we know that public attitudes are profoundly shaped by the issues and arguments that political and media actors place on the agenda, this is an area where policy has undoubtedly contributed to reducing political conflict.
Finally, we have something that's been discussed already today. The selective nature of Canada's immigration policy targeting economic benefits does seem to matter and does seem to increase public support for immigration, though it does so only within a fairly small group of the public. The limited impact is attributed to the fact that some people don't know about the selective nature of the system. Some people don't trust the system to work as it is designed. Others simply take their position on immigration based on factors other than what they perceive to be the economic benefits. The effect of policy design on the politics of immigration is an open question that many scholars are working on. I am cautiously optimistic that we can continue to find ways of designing policy that will reduce the conflict and increase support for immigration.
The final theme I want to raise steps back a bit from the realm of immigration policy and considers the broader context of the policy arena. Particularly, I think the committee would be well advised to consider many other forms of policy that directly impact policy debates around immigration. As I am sure other witnesses prior to me have emphasized, labour markets, educational systems and social assistance programs all interact with immigration policy in important ways.
To those sectors, I'll add the importance of considering how policies that impact political parties and civil society matter for immigration outcomes. Political parties, religious groups, non-profits and trade unions have all played a role in the past both in promoting immigrant integration and in channelling public anxiety about immigration toward productive engagement rather than destructive resistance. These kinds of organizations have all, to some degree or another, seen their influence on public opinion wane in the last few decades. Policy-makers considering how to regulate, support or restrict the activities of those groups should consider how those actions might influence the ability of such groups to promote successful integration and consensual immigration politics.
Thanks for your time. I'm happy to answer any questions.