The ironic and harmful dichotomy of being an immigrant in the North

Imagine you arrive in a new country. You study the language, learn the customs, pay your taxes, and raise your children to belong to this place as much as to where you came from. You contribute to the economy, volunteer in the community, and navigate a labyrinth of permits, deadlines, and requirements that most people born here will never encounter. And then one day, a politician goes on television and describes people like you as “suicidal” for the nation. Another one says there should be “no more hyphens.” A president, surrounded by Latin American leaders, jokes that he refuses to learn “your damn language.” And just like that, the door you have been walking through, carefully, for years, is quietly closed in your face.

This is not a hypothetical. This is the daily reality for millions of immigrants in Canada and across the Global North, a reality shaped not by accident but by a specific, well-resourced political rhetoric that frames human difference as a problem to be handled. The argument of this paper is simple, even if its consequences are not: immigrants in the Global North, specifically in Canada, are caught in a trap. They are criticized for preserving their cultures, then blamed for not integrating fast enough. They are selected for their skills, then denied the resources to use them. They are told they are welcome, then reminded—in policy, in law, and sometimes in violence—that they are conditional guests. Understanding how that trap works, and who benefits from keeping it in place, is the first step toward dismantling it.

Last week, at the Shield of the Americas Summit, in Florida, when referring to the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. President Trump said, “He’s got a language advantage over me, ‘cause I’m not learning your damn language” (Keller, 2026). To some, this was just another “telling it like it is” kind of comment. To many, this was another appalling reminder that no matter how well you speak the local language and how far you have come professionally, you will always be (mis-)treated like “the other.” Adding to that comment, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth then took to the stage and said, “Mr. President, I only speak American.” If someone was unsure about the intention behind the U.S. President’s dismissive comment, this second statement made it clearer: Our differences set us apart, and we aren’t meeting halfway to improve our relationship.

This message is part of a broader political rhetoric that frames people’s differences, such as language, religion, and cultural practices, as problems to be managed[1] rather than assets to be valued[2] [3]. That rhetoric even hides the valuable contributions of people with diverse backgrounds and beliefs. Take, for instance, the immigrant healthcare workers who “make up 25% of registered nurses, 42% of nurse aides and related occupations, 37% of physicians” (Government of Canada, 2025), or the immigrants in the manufacturing sector who account for 30% of all the sector workers (Government of Canada, 2025). And the fact that, far from threatening the local culture, immigrants actively enrich it by volunteering in their communities, engaging in civic life, and contributing socially, while simultaneously working to integrate into it, creating a relationship of mutual exchange rather than replacement (Vatz-Laaroussi, 2024).

The rhetoric is deliberately constructed and disseminated by certain political actors to portray immigrants as limited individuals, reducing their contributions to shallow cultural novelties, and casting some of their practices as threats to national interests. This rhetoric crosses borders more quickly and effectively than immigrants can. The systems that amplify it are better resourced than the immigration policies meant to support newcomers. In Canada, however, the rhetoric takes a more subtle form—maybe—, wrapped in the language of “pro-border security” and “pro-common sense,” but the underlying narrative remains the same: immigrants are the problem.

Recently, conservative leader Pierre Poilievre signaled a tough stance on immigration. He said, “[W]e must cap immigration at numbers we can integrate into our jobs, housing, health care, and Canadian way of life.”[4]  (Abraham, 2026). Like his Conservative predecessors, he emphasized integration and national allegiance, rejecting hyphenated identities and group labels as a way for immigrants to describe their origins, which is a clear, if implicit, rejection of multicultural identity politics. “We want a nation with no more hyphens, no more group labels,” said Poilievre. Integration capacity is a legitimate concern, but the Canadian way of life has never been a fixed destination; it has always been built through encounter, friction, and exchange between those who were already here and those who arrived. That process is, by nature, a negotiation. The question is not whether it happens. It will, peacefully or otherwise. The question is whether we choose to face it honestly and collectively solve the problem, or whether we keep handing people a face to blame instead.

This aligns with how provincial right-wing political leaders also see immigrants. For instance, François Legault, the Premier of Quebec and leader of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), has referred to increasing the number of immigrants as “suicidal for French … suicidal for the Quebec nation that speaks French” (Banerjee, 2022). He has also linked higher immigration levels to extremism and violence (Montpetit, 2022)[5] and uttered other harmful allegations against immigrants. What Legault doesn’t seem to acknowledge is the circularity of his own argument. When people are repeatedly told that they do not belong, that their presence is a threat, that the nation would be better off without them, some will stop politely asking to be included. Exclusion, sustained long enough, does not produce gratitude. It produces exactly the alienation and conflict that he claims to fear.

Similarly, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith blames high immigration for straining public services like schools, hospitals, and social support systems. She called for restricting both the number of newcomers and their access to services. Smith also outlined a plan for a 2026 referendum to ask constituents how to address immigration. For a moment, could you imagine how people will vote if they are immersed in a rhetoric that portrays immigrants as the cause of the current state of public services like schools and hospitals? 

These politicians are not alone in using immigrants as scapegoats for deeper systemic failures. The logic of scapegoating operates on a revealing contradiction: immigrants are pressured to assimilate, learn the dominant language, and contribute economically, yet they are simultaneously blamed for threatening the very culture they are being asked to join. Those who preserve their cultural, linguistic, or religious traditions are judged as refusing to integrate; those who do integrate are accused of diluting local identity or are later reminded that they are not part of the local group anyway, as happened to Senator Rubio. This impossible double bind serves two purposes. First—In the political and economic sphere, it enables policies that treat immigrants not as rights-bearing members of society but as conditional guests. In other words, immigrants are useful when their labour is needed, disposable when it is not. Second—In the social sphere, it licenses certain individuals and groups to act, sometimes violently, against a population that has already been cast as an ungrateful and dehumanized threat rather than “Wilson, Juan, Rawda, Hassan, Anastasiia...” people with families, dreams, skills, and needs.

Let’s discuss some of those policies seen in the political and economic spheres. Since January 2024, the federal government has introduced 13 regulatory changes to immigration and study permit rules, while simultaneously cutting funding to programs like LINC (Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada). Roughly one in eight language education programs has shut down, enrollment has dropped by 18%, and available learning hours have fallen by 21% (Pyne, 2025). Colleges in Vancouver, Lethbridge, and Toronto have been hit with what researchers call “crushing funding cuts,” forcing closures, layoffs, and fewer classes for newcomers trying to build their lives in Canada (Balyasnikova et al, 2024). In Calgary, Bow Valley College eliminated its LINC program, cutting off language learning access for up to 1,300 students (MacGillivray, 2025). Immigrants who are expected to suit up and get ready to “work [their] tail off”, as Premier Doug Ford once put it, can’t do so effectively and quickly enough due to the lack of access to programs on building employment skills, language learning, and higher education preparedness—the programs primarily affected by these cuts (Balyasnikova et al, 2024).

Settlement services, asylum housing, and other basic-level services are being affected by budget cuts resulting from the Comprehensive Expenditure Review (CER). The federal government’s CER is delivering sweeping cuts to Canada’s immigration system that go far deeper than the official “efficiencies” framing suggests. Federal cuts documented by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (2026) are hollowing out the country’s immigration infrastructure. Refugee health care loses $829 million over four years, while the Settlement Program, which helps skilled immigrants get their credentials recognized and access language training, is cut by $686 million, reducing its total budget by a third. This comes at precisely the time the government plans to increase economic immigration by 5%. These are not efficiencies. They are the quiet dismantling of a system. Do these policies evidence a poor design or a clear goal of placing immigrants in specific jobs and living conditions? [6] Is the goal of such policies to help immigrants adjust effectively so they can quickly “return the investment”?

While the Federal government narrows access to resources, some provinces, like Quebec, narrow identity through policies. Law 14, also known as Bill 96, for instance, limits access to educational, business, and health services (Olson, 2025). Under the bill, immigrants can only be served in a language other than French for the first 6 months after arrival (Gouvernement du Québec, 2025). Let’s do a parenthesis here: When it comes to hockey players, the rules and people are much more forgiving, even though professional hockey players have private teachers and access to French environments that many immigrants don’t.[7]  Additionally, Law14/Bill 96 cut off access to English-language education for newcomers, as only students with at least one parent educated in English in Canada have the right to attend English-language public schools.

Under Bills 84 and 21, Quebec aims to position French-language culture as the common foundation of social cohesion[8] , into which immigrants and cultural minorities are expected to integrate, and prohibits certain public sector workers, including teachers, police officers, and judges, from wearing religious symbols while at work. Indeed, these are objectives that many immigrants understand and would be interested in discussing. However, “in the reality of integration and ongoing negotiation—in the context of so much being in flux—what are the stable points that we can always touch back to when we need to find common ground?” (Struck, personal communication, March 16, 2026).

These bills are projected to undermine the very integration they seek to promote. Critics argue that, instead of bringing newcomer and minority communities into the fold, this legislation will erode social unity and create barriers that prevent these groups from fully engaging in Quebec’s civic and social life (Canadian Civil Liberties Association, 2025). It also prevents the Quebec government from working with the immigrants already established in the province to implement effective solutions to growing problems, such as the teacher and nurse shortages. As a matter of fact, it can potentially exacerbate the number of “nous embauchons” signs, particularly in the education and law sectors, since 51% of students and recent graduates in these fields, out of 629 surveyed in a study reported in 2022, indicated they would look outside the province for work as a result of Bill 21 (Elbourne et al, 2022).

In the social sphere, the number of police-reported hate crimes nearly doubled between 2020 and 2024 (RCMP, 2025), disproportionately targeting Indigenous Peoples, Black, racialized, religious minority, and 2SLGBTQI+ communities, women, as well as persons with disabilities (Government of Canada, 2025). Many immigrants are being yelled at and assaulted in the streets, workplaces, and public offices, based solely on what they wear, and how they look and sound. Professor Reena Kukreja, from Queen’s University in Ontario, has conducted a study on online spread of centre-right populism and white supremacist ideology in Canada and Southern Europe since Spring 2024. In an article she published in The Conversation, she recounts incidents where immigrants were attacked in everyday life situations, like the stabbing death of a South Asian cab driver in Winnipeg and the killing of a Pakistani Canadian family who were run over with a truck. She highlights that:

In 2023, 44.5 per cent of hate incidents in Canada were motivated by race or ethnicity with South Asian and Black people facing higher rates of hate threats and assaults. Between 2022 and 2023, there was a significant increase in reported hate crimes against Muslims (Kukreja, 2024, par. 10).

She argues that far-right groups are weaponizing the Great Replacement Theory to fuel racial hatred against male migrants of color. Critically, she notes that when political elites adopt this anti-immigrant rhetoric, it leads to tangible consequences, manifesting as increased harassment and attacks against migrants in the workplace.

This broader climate of hostility is not confined to street-level incidents. The Alberta Association of Immigrant Serving Agencies (AAISA) warns that government communications around immigration policy have inadvertently reinforced the very rhetoric that fuels it. By framing immigration reductions as a response to housing pressures and the need for a “managed” system[9] , the government implicitly validated the idea that immigrants, rather than decades of under-investment in housing and services, were the problem to begin with (AAISA, 2025). A 2024 Environics Institute survey found that 58% of Canadians agreed there is too much immigration, with housing cited as the primary concern; yet experts consistently point out that Canada’s housing crisis predates recent immigration surges and stems from decades of under-investment, not from the presence of newcomers. The hate crime data tells a parallel story: between 2022 and 2023, crimes against Muslim people increased the most of any religious group, while attacks on Sikh, Hindu, and Buddhist communities also rose significantly, and 35% of all race-based hate crimes were directed at Black people (Statistics Canada, 2024). Blaming immigrants for a structural failure does not solve the crisis. It only gives it a face to identify and attack.

Let’s return to where we started. You arrived. You learned. You contributed. You built something here. And still, on any given day, you may be reduced to your accent, your skin color, your religion, or what you choose to wear. Not because you failed to integrate, but because the system was never fully designed to let you succeed. It only extracts what it needs from you and then looks away.

The arc is not accidental. Immigrants are criticized for holding onto their cultures, so they assimilate. They assimilate and are told they are diluting local identity. They work hard and are told they are taking jobs. They struggle and are told they are a burden. The resources that could help them find their footing (i.e., language programs, settlement services, credential recognition, housing support) are cut. And when the housing crisis, the labour shortage, and the strain on public services become impossible to ignore, politicians hand the public a face to blame. That face is never a policy failure. It is always an immigrant. And when the consequences arrive, that is the homelessness, the hate crimes, the closed language programs, the credentials that go unrecognized, they will not come as a surprise to anyone in power. That may be the most troubling part. It is not that these outcomes are being sought. It is that they are being foreseen, accepted, and filed away.

Far-right politicians, through rhetoric that scapegoats immigrants and policies that strip away resources and narrow identity, are producing measurably unfair educational and professional opportunities and unsafe living conditions for the very people Canada claims to welcome. Whether this is deliberate cruelty or comfortable indifference, it hardly matters to the people on the receiving end. It is not a malicious choice to seek those bad outcomes. It is an observation that they probably will happen, followed by a shrug (Struck, personal communication, March 16, 2026). And that shrug, repeated at the level of policy, repeated in legislation, repeated in public discourse, is its own form of violence.

Scapegoating immigrants does not fix Canada’s housing crisis, its labour shortages, or its strained public services. It never has. What it does fix is blame, and that is a far cheaper and far more dangerous solution. The question this paper leaves you with is not whether you agree that this is happening. The question is what you are willing to do now that you know.