Anti-immigrant sentiment rises with loss of consensus on immigration policy

That parallels a government survey from November 2024, when 54 per cent of respondents to a phone survey conducted by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said “too many” immigrants were coming to Canada.

Immigration Minister Lena Diab said she believes the Canadian consensus on immigration began to wobble as the country emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Certainly since COVID, I would say, there’s been a shift in thinking, and that is largely due to the fact that Canada is seen as the destination that many people want to come to study, to work, to live, but also as a refuge,” Diab said during a year-end interview with The Canadian Press in Ottawa.

“We Canadians, and this government, want to continue to do that. In order to do that though, we need to ensure that we have a managed immigration system … We need to bring that immigration system back into sustainability, and that’s exactly what this new government is doing.”

The latest federal immigration levels plan looks to welcome 380,000 new permanent residents in 2026, about two-thirds of them economic migrants. Temporary resident admissions are being cut from almost 674,000 in 2025 to 385,000 next year.

This is the second year of decline in Canada’s immigration intake after annual permanent resident admission targets peaked at 485,000 in 2024.

As more people were coming to Canada in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost of living — and of housing in particular — began to rise, creating a sense of precarity that has undermined Canadians’ support for immigration.

As support for immigration has diminished, the number of police-reported hate crimes has spiked alarmingly.

Statistics Canada has tracked a steady increase in racially motivated hate crimes — including a 227 per cent rise in incidents targeting South Asian people between 2019 and 2023. There were 265 police-reported hate crimes targeting South Asian people in 2023, according to Statistics Canada data.

Rupinder Liddar is a political science researcher at McGill University who studies South Asian and Indo-Canadian communities. She said the rise in hate crimes is just a statistical symptom of a broader wave of hatred.

“My family, my extended family, everyone has experienced an increase in racism. Again, whether it’s overt, whether it’s microaggressions, whether it’s in person, whether it’s online — just a drastic change since … before the pandemic and now it’s gotten incredibly worse,” Liddar said.

Government data shows newcomers from India make up the biggest share of immigrants to Canada. Over 127,000 new permanent residents in 2024 were Indian nationals. More than 83,000 Indians became permanent residents in the first three quarters of 2025. About 39,000 Indians became permanent residents in 2015.

Liddar attributes the rise in racist and anti-immigrant statements and acts to the links politicians are drawing between immigration, the high cost of housing and a difficult job market for young people.

“I think every brown person in Canada knows what people are thinking when they see them, when they see the colour of their skin, and it’s generally a scary time right now. Everyone is very hyper-aware of these racist sentiments,” Liddar said.

Both the Liberals and Conservatives have made that link between higher housing costs, challenges in accessing services and high rates of immigration in recent years. Successive immigration ministers have said the system needs to return to more sustainable levels.

Both Diab and her opposition critic, Michelle Rempel Garner, have denounced the rise in hate crimes and have said immigrants are not to blame for the high cost of living.

Rempel Garner blamed the government for the rise in anti-immigrant opinion, saying it allowed too many people to come to Canada in too short a time.

Diab said addressing hate demands a multi-faceted approach that includes education, legislation and law enforcement.

“Hate is not acceptable in any form, and this government will do what it needs to do, whether it’s creating legislation, but it’s also as well working with policing and the justice system to ensure that we do that,” she said.

For now, the polling shows little indication that Canadians’ downbeat views on immigration are turning around. Fifty per cent of respondents to a November 2024 Abacus poll said they had a negative view of immigration, while 49 per cent of respondents said the same thing in this year’s poll.

“I think it hasn’t any come anywhere near to returning to the, I would say, normal place, which is most people thinking that immigration is generally good for the country,” said David Coletto, Abacus Data CEO.

Coletto said Canadian public opinion has always had a strain of xenophobia to it. But he said that thinking has found a more receptive audience over the past five years as Canada’s immigrant population grew quickly alongside economic pressures.

“The population growth that happened between 2022 and ‘24 really did materialize in what people were telling us,” Coletto said.

“They felt that they couldn’t get access to the housing they needed. They couldn’t access a doctor. They saw and felt congestion in all around them, and that has then led to some taking what was an originally rational, in their minds, reaction and becoming irrational and much more anti-immigrant to the person, not to the policy.”

Liddar said it’s not uncommon to see racist and anti-immigrant attitudes spread when people don’t feel secure. She pointed to the rise of Islamophobia after 9-11, outbursts of hate directed toward Chinese Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic and current tensions over anti-Indian discrimination.

“What we do know is … the anti-immigrant sentiment is going to get better when the economy gets better, when people feel less resentment towards other people, it’s because that they feel more secure in their own situations,” Liddar said.

“The online environment is something that still continues to circulate anti-Indian and anti-immigrant posts. And so even if suddenly these attitudes become dormant, we know that it’s not long until they kind of arise again.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 20, 2025.