In May, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that Britain risked becoming “an island of strangers” due to immigration.
“Migration is part of Britain’s national story … But when people come to our country, they should also commit to integration, to learning our language … I think that’s fair,” he said.
Some Canadians share Starmer’s concerns.
In an October 2024 poll, half of respondents said they view immigration negatively, up from one-third a year earlier. Nearly half cited the detrimental effects of immigration on “community cohesion” as a reason for their views.
Academics say Canadians’ concerns about the effects of high levels of immigration on social cohesion should not be ignored.
“It’s going to be disruptive to a sense of community,” said Canadian Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, about the Liberals’ promise to admit millions of new immigrants in the coming years.
“I think basically the storyline will be a growing loss of social cohesion or disorder,” he said.
Mass immigration
Each year, Canada grants permanent residency to hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Nearly 500,000 individuals received Canadian permanent residency in both 2023 and 2024. The government is targeting 395,000 new permanent residents in 2025, 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027.
Daniel Hiebert, a geographer at the University of British Columbia who specializes in immigration policy, says Canada’s high population growth in 2022 through 2024 has caused “public opinion to sour.”
“We saw in 2024 probably the biggest shift in Canadian public opinion [towards immigration] that we’ve seen in the last generation,” he said.
Herb Grubel, a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute think tank and professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University, says excessively high immigration levels during the Trudeau years have affected community cohesion.
“ Most of us economists, conservative or not, are not against immigration. The issue in the last decade or so has been too much immigration,” said Grubel, who has written extensively on the politics of Canadian immigration.
“Mass immigration [slows] or even prevents the integration of the immigrants with the existing population,” he said.
“It’s quite clear that immigrants prefer to be with people who share their own ethnic backgrounds, language and customs. It makes life much easier than to have to adjust to the Canadian lifestyle.”
Grubel pointed to the example of English no longer being the dominant language in some ethnic communities as one concern.
“You go to Richmond, which is part of Vancouver that is [mostly] Chinese … and there are restaurants and stores that advertise for workers, and they say ‘Chinese language knowledge essential’,” he said.
In a May 12 white paper on immigration reform, the U.K.’s centre-left Labour Party announced plans to introduce more stringent English-language requirements for both principal immigration applicants and their dependents.
“The ability for individuals to communicate is essential to perform civic duties, and for all social connections including, crucially, with the communities in which they live and with state and other agencies,” the paper says.
Grubel says another concern is that Canada is seeing some diaspora communities “transfer” their political disputes to Canada.
“The disputes involve India and … the Sikhs [who] want an independent state … and obviously [Sikhs] have a group of people very much in support of that in Vancouver.”
“And [you see] the same thing now with Muslims, who are very much taking a position on the dispute in Israel,” he said.
A spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada told Canadian Affairs that the agency invested about $1.2 billion last fiscal year to help newcomers settle in Canada.
This included funding for “community connections” programs that bring together newcomers, established immigrants and long-time Canadians to promote inter-cultural exchange and social cohesion, the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Fraying trust
An influential 2007 study by Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam found that increased ethnic diversity reduces social trust.
Putnman found that in highly diverse American cities, such as Los Angeles or San Francisco, just 30 per cent of residents said they trusted their neighbours “a lot.” By contrast, in ethnically homogeneous communities, such as those in North and South Dakota, 70 to 80 per cent of residents reported high levels of trust in their neighbours.
According to Kaufmann, of the University of Buckingham, “The Robert Putnam research and a lot of the studies show fairly clearly … that the more diverse the population, the less people trust each other.”
“It’s not fatal,” he added. “People aren’t going to go out killing each other. But you’re going to see less borrowing from neighbours, less meeting people on your street, less trust that people will return a wallet, and less attachment to community.”
But Hiebert, of UBC, says the long-term implications of Putnam’s findings are contested.
“[Putnam] also believed that in the long term, things would revert to normal,” Hiebert said. “That paper kicked off a kind of industry in people trying to test that relationship across many different countries.
“There were some who agreed with his findings and others who disagreed with his findings. So it’s kind of an open question actually.”
The IRCC spokesperson told Canadian Affairs that it conducts an annual Newcomer Outcomes Survey to understand how well newcomers are integrating into Canadian society. The survey shows strong majorities of newcomers feel they belong and are welcomed to Canada.
Lack of debate
Kaufmann says Canada’s political and media institutions often shy away from discussing the cultural implications of immigration, fearing a public backlash.
One of the reasons Canada is reluctant to have these conversations is because the progressive cultural institutions reward those who affirm multiculturalism uncritically, and ostracize those who raise concerns, says Kaufmann, who grew up in Vancouver and studied at the University of Western Ontario.
“ The [institutions] set the parameters of acceptable debate quite narrowly, so the Overton window is just narrower in Canada,” he said.
Starmer’s recent remarks on social cohesion would likely push the bounds of acceptable political discourse in Canada, he says.
“[Political correctness] is still a force in Britain, but it’s not such an overwhelmingly dominant force as to squeeze out that kind of discourse.
“ To put it crudely, political correctness is just stronger in Canada,” he said.
In Kauffman’s view, Canada’s failure to engage with social cohesion concerns only postpones an inevitable reckoning. He cited the evolution of progressive “woke” policies on campus as a cautionary tale.
“ It’s a bit like the buildup of discontent around political correctness in the universities. It starts off in the ‘80s. It took… three, four decades before the backlash. We’re now seeing it.
“ The taboos are extremely powerful in Canada and until they start to break, there will be a certain amount of pressure,” he said. “It’s like kindling building up in a dry forest.”
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