Between 2021 and 2024, the United States had the highest level of immigration in its history.
That was the conclusion of a New York Times analysis published in late 2024. It estimated that over the four years of President Joe Biden’s administration, about eight million people had immigrated. This movement of people, powered by asylum claimants crossing the Mexican border, represented, said the Times, “a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island, when millions of Europeans came to the United States.”
“Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.”
The Times figure, big as it was, may have been a low-ball estimate. In early 2025, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released its own tally. The CBO estimated that in just three years, between 2022 to 2024, the number of net immigrants – those who came to the country, legally or otherwise, minus those who left – was 8.8 million.
To put things in perspective, immigration to the U.S. was around 1 million a year between 2000 and 2019. That abruptly changed during the Biden administration – doubling, according to The New York Times, or tripling, per the CBO. Either way, it helps to explain why immigration, already a heated issue in American politics, became even more so during the 2024 election.
What about Canada? At the same time as the U.S. was experiencing the largest influx of immigrants in its history, Canada was having its own immigration surge.
Ours was three times bigger.
Former President Joe Biden walks along the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Tex., in January, 2023. From 2021 to 2024, during Biden’s administration, about eight million people immigrated to the U.S., the highest level in its history.Andrew Harnik/The Associated Press
For decades, Canada enjoyed all-party, across-the-spectrum support for immigration. The arrival of new people, at a higher pace than in Western Europe or the U.S., had not driven political polarization. This country took in far more immigrants than the U.S. relative to the size of its population, and had been doing so for decades, without signs of a backlash. Instead of a heated American left-right clash, Canada had a boring all-party consensus.
When Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency for the first time, visceral opposition to immigrants and immigration was central to his campaign. By 2016, the share of the American population born outside the country was 13.5 per cent, the highest level in more than a century. Perhaps a backlash was inevitable.
Or perhaps not. In Canada, it has been well over a century since people born outside the country were that low a share of the population. In 2016, immigrants were 22 per cent of Canadians and rising. That was higher than the U.S. at any time since at least the Civil War.
Yet in Canada in the mid-2010s, there wasn’t much evidence of a groundswell of popular opposition to immigration, nor were there signs of a political crack-up over the issue. From the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, there hadn’t been much daylight on immigration–not in the shared positive attitude toward legal immigration, nor in their common concern to limit illegal and irregular immigration, nor in the actual numbers of new residents accepted each year. For a quarter of a century, immigration levels were stable, and immigration policy did not whipsaw when the party in power changed.
Immigration sparked conflict across most of the rich world, but in Canada it barely registered as an area of public concern.
A 2018 Pew poll found that 68 per cent of Canadians said that immigrants “make our country stronger” – the highest level in the developed world. Just 27 per cent said that immigrants “are a burden” – the lowest level in the developed world.
A 2019 Gallup survey found that Canada had the world’s most welcoming and positive attitude toward immigrants. In the U.S., the survey found support for immigration declined with age; in Canada, Gallup found no differences by age group. The most pro-immigration Americans were in their teens and twenties, but even they were not as pro-immigration as Canadian seniors.
A country that likes to humblebrag about modest successes had a not-so modest success. Canadian voters, unlike those in other developed countries, were not preoccupied with immigration. Public disinterest expressed public trust. The subject was usually as newsworthy as functioning plumbing.
Until, that is, everything changed.
Justin Trudeau arrives at a victory rally in Ottawa after he was elected Prime Minister on Oct. 20, 2015. The Trudeau government ramped up immigration after 2015, exceeding its campaign promises.NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP
When the Trudeau government was elected in late 2015, Canada was suffering from sluggish economic growth, a global slump in oil and gas prices that had abruptly sapped the country’s one booming industry, underinvestment by business, and a stubborn productivity gap relative to the U.S. Canada had one of the world’s highest standards of living, but there were real concerns about how this would be sustained in decades to come.
The government came to believe, tentatively at first and then aggressively after 2020, that higher immigration offered an all-in-one solution.
Markedly higher immigration was also advocated by groups like the Century Initiative – founded by Dominic Barton, then leading the global consulting firm McKinsey, and Mark Wiseman, then-president and CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board – which argued that what Canadian business and the Canadian economy needed was a sustained population boost. The organization’s name was its goal: Getting Canada to the century mark – 100 million people – by the end of the century.
The government’s 2016 advisory council on economic growth – which included Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Barton, but almost no economists – similarly called for considerably higher immigration.
To their credit, Century and the advisory council also had immigration recommendations that went beyond simply boosting numbers. But the first, loudest and clearest call was always: more.
Somehow not noticed was that Canada’s immigration rate was considerably higher than the U.S., and had been since 1900. For more than a century, Canada has had consistently faster population growth. In 1900, the U.S. had 14.5 times as many people as Canada. By 2025, the gap had shrunk by almost half, to just 8.5 times. If more immigration and more rapid population growth was the elixir Canada needed, the country was already on the prescription. It had been for generations.
But a policy of higher and easier immigration also bridged a political gap, satisfying both progressives and business. It was a rare issue where Bay Street and the social justice warriors were on the same page. The provinces, too.
In the face of all that, impulses inside and outside government that had maintained a balance in immigration policy were diminished and sidelined. The Trudeau government ramped up immigration after 2015, more than promised and in ways it had never promised. After 2020, it supercharged the approach. When COVID-19 travel restrictions caused a temporary drop in arrivals, Ottawa responded as if this constituted the gravest economic threat.
The government by then appeared to treat immigration the way public companies treat quarterly earnings: the more you overshoot expectations, the more your stock goes up.
Groups of migrants attempt to enter Canada at Roxham Road, an unofficial crossing point from New York State to Quebec. By the early 2020s, most immigrants were arriving to Canada through alternative and temporary migration routes.
Roger Lemoyne/The Globe and Mail; CHRISTINNE MUSCHI/REUTERS
A character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he replied. “Gradually, and then suddenly.”
What happened to Canadian immigration was like that: many small changes over a long period of time, and then the loud crack of something brittle shattering.
A country that prided itself on welcoming newcomers as future citizens discovered that, by the early 2020s, most immigrants were arriving through alternative and temporary – well, notionally temporary – migration routes. The government left these out of its annual immigration targets and never mentioned them when discussing immigration levels. But by 2022, the immigration side-door was busier than the front door. And unlike the front door, there was no limit on the number of people who could use it.
By 2024, Canada had more than 3-million legal temporary residents, with the accent on low-wage and low-skills workers. This new immigration system had something of the flavour of Qatar or the United Arab Emirates. An immigration program previously tilted toward attracting skilled future citizens, and selecting those with the best prospects through the points system, had somehow become refocused on recruiting record numbers of temporary migrants to permanently fill low-wage jobs.
Canada’s temporary immigrants had been told that entry though the side door brought the opportunity to become permanent residents. However, by 2024 the number of people who had come through the side door dwarfed the number of permanent residency places available – even after the Trudeau government nearly doubled permanent immigration levels.
It was like a Taylor Swift concert where the organizers got everything backward. First, they let 3 million people into the stadium. Then, they remembered they had only a fraction of that number of seats. And now they were hoping that those without tickets would quietly leave, so that Canada would not end up with a problem like the millions of people living without status in the U.S. Good luck with that.
A Canadian flag flies on the UBC campus in Vancouver. By 2023 there were more than a million foreign students in Canada, with most of the growth coming from fast-expanding, low-fidelity colleges, rather than major universities with high-skilled programs.Isabella Falsetti/The Globe and Mail
The biggest temporary immigration path was the student visa program. In 2008 there had been fewer than 200,000 foreign students in Canada, but by 2023 there were more than a million – as many as in the U.S.
Most of the growth came from questionable programs at fast-expanding, low-fidelity colleges. For example, the University of Waterloo got fewer than 1,900 new foreign student permits in 2023. But on the other side of town at Conestoga College, the number of visas more than quadrupled in just four years, to nearly 32,000. “Entrepreneurial” institutions filled their boots.
The Trudeau government goosed this by allowing foreign students to work full-time while in school, and made it easy to stay on with post-graduation work permits. That turned the student visa program into an alternative low-wage, temporary foreign worker program that grew far larger than the official Temporary Foreign Worker program. Students paid tuition for short courses of study at no-name colleges in return for the right to flip burgers or stock shelves, in the hope that any work experience, plus a Cracker Jack-box educational credential, would make them eligible for the real prize, Canadian permanent residency. That’s what schools were selling.
It was pitched as a best-and-brightest international education strategy. It was mostly a cash grab.
When Ottawa finally clamped down, in the face of dawning public awareness and dismay, then-Minister of Immigration Marc Miller described the institutions at the centre of the trade as “puppy mills.” That was accurate. But until then, the quantity-over-quality approach had been enabled and celebrated by his government, the provinces (especially Ontario), and the private sector.
It all added up to a watering down of what had made the Canadian immigration system successful, and what had kept it popular.
It also delivered an unprecedented immigration surge that, though it was the inevitable result of deliberate policy choices, was somehow unexpected by Ottawa, and not planned for.
In 2019, Canada welcomed 341,000 new permanent residents – a modest increase of 25 per cent since 2015. But the non-permanent resident population, the part of the immigration system the government never talked about in its annual targets, and that most Canadians knew nothing about, had grown in 2019 by 190,000. That meant the real immigration level in 2019 was 531,000 net new arrivals, not 341,000. That wasn’t 25 per cent higher than 2015. It was double.
The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 put a momentary brake on things. Canada’s border slammed shut. Regular immigration that year was less than half the government’s target, and many temporary foreign workers and students who would have arrived never did.
It should have been an opportunity for the Trudeau government to take stock and consider course corrections. Instead, as soon as the country began to reopen, the government floored the accelerator. It was urged on by a business community that claimed the country was facing unparalleled labour shortages, especially in the least well-paid jobs; higher education institutions with dollar signs in their eyes; immigration advocates; and many provincial governments. There was no opposition.
The result was a significant watering-down of immigration standards, and an increasing focus on quantity over quality.
It was a deliberate policy, but it was also an absence of mind. It was like one of those aviation disasters where the cabin depressurizes, and the pilots, unaware of their impairment via oxygen-deprivation, start making what post-crash investigators will identify as less-than-rational decisions.
Former immigration minister Marc Miller described the education institutions that helped turn the student visa program into an alternative low-wage, temporary foreign worker program as ‘puppy mills.’Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
In 2022, Canada added almost 1 million immigrants. There were 438,000 new permanent residents – the number the government always referred to in its immigration targets and public communications. That was about 60 per cent above the level of the Harper years.
But Canada in 2022 also had net migration of 539,000 non-permanent residents – visa students, temporary foreign workers (many former visa students), and asylum seekers (many of whom were visa students or temporary foreign workers). The previous high for net temporary migration, in 2019, was a third that number.
Then came 2023. Canada added nearly 1.3 million immigrants. That was five times the immigration level of 2015. It was also more than two and a half times the Trudeau government’s own official immigration target.
In one year, Canada took in more immigrants, relative to the size of its population, than the U.S. during the four record-breaking years of the Joe Biden administration.
Of those 1.3 million immigrants, 789,000 were temporary residents. In 2022, the side-door immigration stream had grown larger than the front door; by 2023, side-door traffic was almost double the flow at the main door.
Canadians may have had trouble finding a family doctor – where was the crash program to bring in tens of thousands of them? – but it had never been so easy to order a burrito and have it delivered at all hours of the day or night.
By 2024, Statistics Canada believed that the country had 3 million temporary residents. However, CIBC economist Benjamin Tal and former Industry Canada economist Henry Lotin estimated that the real number was possibly 1 million higher, because of a large number of people whose work or study visas had expired, but who nevertheless had not left Canada.
Last September, international students and community members staged a protest-encampment in Brampton, Ont., calling for longer post-graduate work permits for international students and better pathways to permanent residency after changes to Canadian immigration policy left at least tens of thousands at risk of being forced to return to their home country once their permits expired.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
As 2023 turned to 2024, Ottawa started to backpedal. But knocking down walls is easier than putting them back up. Statistics Canada estimates that more than 880,000 net new people arrived in 2024. That was more than triple the immigration level of 2015.
To put it all in perspective, between 2022 and 2024, the number of non-Americans who took up residence in the United States, minus the number who departed, was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to be 8.8 million. StatsCan’s estimate for Canada over the same period is 3.1 million.
Relative to Canada’s smaller population, that’s equivalent to the U.S. accepting around 26 million immigrants.
That figure does not account for any Statscan overcount of how many ex-visa holders left, or undercount of how many who were supposed to exit instead stayed. Canada’s real net immigration level in those three years, rather than being equivalent to America adding 26 million immigrants, may have been closer to 30 million.
Former prime minister Justin Trudeau and former deputy prime minister and minister of finance Chrystia Freeland deliver the 2023 federal budget in the House of Commons. The budget emphasized the growth of the Canadian economy thanks in part to high immigration.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
The years after the COVID-19 pandemic brought an economic bounceback across the globe, but Canada’s recovery came with a uniquely unhappy wrinkle: the number of forks in the economic pie grew faster than the pie.
It took a while for the federal government to grasp this. At first, it believed that its immigration policy had authored a chart-topping success story.
The 2023 federal budget proudly proclaimed that, thanks in part to high immigration, “Canada’s economy is now 103 per cent the size it was before the pandemic.” The increase in gross domestic product had topped the G7 the previous year, with “strong population growth” cited as a cause. High immigration was touted as “a significant driver of economic growth,” and the budget proudly announced that “Canada continues to post the fastest population growth in the G7, with strong immigration levels pushing population growth to its fastest pace since the 1950s.”
The more people arrived, the more prosperous Canadians became, apparently.
The Trudeau government had added and multiplied, but it had failed to divide. It focused on the growing size of the pie, while ignoring the number of forks and the size of the slices. Canada’s gross domestic product, the measure of the economy’s total output, was rising, and all else equal, that was a good thing. But all else was not equal. Per capita GDP – the pie divided by the number of forks – was shrinking.
Between the summer of 2022 to the fall of 2024, Canada had seven quarters of positive economic growth, and two quarters of negative growth. But per person growth – GDP per capita – was the opposite story: two quarters of expansion, and seven of contraction. Canada’s population was growing faster than the economy.
Between 2015 and 2024, Canada was arguably the rich world’s poorest economic performer. Real GDP per capita – economic growth per person, less inflation – grew by 2 per cent, according to the OECD. Not 2 per cent per year. Two per cent, in total, over a decade. During the same period, U.S. GDP per capita was up almost 20 per cent.
By 2025, real GDP per capita was no higher than it had been in 2019.
It turned out that supercharged population growth via record-high immigration was not a panacea for the country’s economic challenges. It had, if anything, made the challenges more challenging.
RCMP guard the Roxham Road irregular border crossing, which was permanently closed at midnight on March 24, 2023. Beginning that year, polls showed an abrupt change in Canadians’ attitudes on immigration.LARS HAGBERG/Getty Images
Canadian immigration, which for decades had hummed along like functioning plumbing or a quiet HVAC system, generating neither fuss nor bother, became the object of a great deal of both. Polls showed an abrupt flip in attitudes toward immigration beginning in 2023. As Canadians learned how much immigration had risen, they demanded that it be lowered.
And by the fall of 2024, an Angus Reid poll found that more than one in five Canadians said that formerly boring, bland, benign immigration was one of the top issues facing the country. Like so much else, this was unprecedented. Two years earlier, the figure had been just 5 per cent.
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” That was John Maynard Keynes’ response when asked why he had reconsidered an opinion.
It’s possible that Canadians’ attitudes on immigration shifted for irrational reasons, or that an entire nation contracted airborne xenophobia. But the most plausible explanation was that Canadians dramatically changed their opinion about immigration policy because immigration policy had dramatically changed.
A poll asking “Are you cold?” is going to get different results in winter than in summer. A survey asking “Are you hungry?” should generate a different answer before breakfast than right after someone has scarfed down a 5,000 calorie brunch.
Canada conducted a decade-long experiment. The experiment’s principal investigator was the Trudeau government, assisted and enabled by the provinces, the business community and much of the higher education sector. They were opposed by essentially nobody.
The hypothesis was that Canada, already one of the developed world’s highest-immigration countries, could jump start its slow-growth economy through higher immigration, and lower standards.
The experiment was not a success.
The run-up in Canadian immigration after 2015, and especially after 2020, did not prove that immigration is inherently bad, or that however much or little immigration a country receives it would be better off with less. But neither had it shown that immigration, of whatever type and in whatever quantities, is always and everywhere an unqualified economic good for the receiving country – and that however much immigration a country got, it would always be better off with more.
The recipe for higher national living standards was not “stop immigration.” But neither was it “add as many people as possible, stir and enjoy.” What Canada’s lost decade showed was that Canada’s economic challenges cannot be solved by a crash program of sharply rising immigration. Things aren’t that simple.
New Canadians recite the Oath of Citizenship during a citizenship ceremony in Ottawa in March, 2025. In fall of 2024, an Angus Reid poll found that more than one in five Canadians said that immigration was one of the top issues facing the country, up from 5 per cent just two years earlier.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Under the Trudeau government, the previous tilt toward high-skills immigrants, instead of being further emphasized, was watered down. Immigration levels in place for decades – higher than U.S. levels, but stable – were increased, raised some more, and then completely overrun. Border control and careful selection of immigrants, which underpinned the national belief that immigration was a choice of enlightened self-interest rather than an unwelcome imposition, were weakened to the point of near abandonment.
And for a long time, nobody said boo. Nobody dared. Immigration, formerly a matter of practical trade-offs, had been transmogrified into a matter of values.
Canada’s plutocratic lions and progressive lambs had laid down in agreement on immigration, and as their work reached its apotheosis between 2022 and 2024, Canada had something approaching an open-borders policy. The result was more negative than positive, bringing a series of previously unreckoned costs and consequences.
It turned out that 21st century Canada could not bound up the world tables of economic advancement simply by having more population growth than other rich countries. The secret to higher Canadian living standards was not higher immigration rates and lower immigration standards. Sorry.
Adapted from Borderline Chaos: How Canada Got Immigration Right, and Then Wrong. Tony Keller is a Globe and Mail columnist, and the 2025 McGill Max Bell Lecturer, with lectures in Calgary (Oct. 28), Halifax (Nov. 18) and Toronto (Nov. 27).