Ron Peters's Reviews > Immigration Canada: Evolving Realities and Emerging Challenges in a Postnational World

I find myself involved in plenty of dinner conversations about immigration with friends and relatives where no one knows enough to make their case. Fleras provides a somewhat long, academic read, but overall, it is worth the effort to get Canadians thinking about immigration issues in a better-informed manner.

Worldwide, the 215 million people now living outside their homeland make them equivalent to the world’s fifth-most populous country. It’s estimated that more than one billion people would leave their country if they could.

Canada was created by immigrants and settlers, and with our low birth rate and aging population, we must stay committed to migration to fill our jobs, secure our tax base, and maintain international competitiveness. Our population now is more than 20 percent foreign-born. For all its flaws, Canadian immigration still has a good reputation and provides an international model because of the clarity and objectivity of its point system.

But the world has changed since Canada began. The major impact has been from globalization, with its hunt for ‘flexible’ (i.e., disposable) labor, the ease of instant global communication, and fast and relatively affordable international travel. This brought a different mix of migrants, motivations, and ideologies together quickly for the first time. 9/11 also set off an ongoing war on terror and the coincident securitization and militarization of borders. Climate change will be a growing influence as time goes by.

We continue to emphasize cherry-picking migrants with high-level technological skills. However, so does every other major immigrant-receiving nation, so we are at the point where we need these workers more than they need us, and hard competition has ensued between receiving nations.

Immigration controversies tend to centre on family reunification, unauthorized migrants, temporary foreign workers, underfunded and inept bureaucracies, and the process for determining the status of refugee claims.

Yet there has been little or no open or sustained public debate on how to rationalize the system and fix its major flaws. This has been due to a mix of political correctness issues, pressures from the lucrative immigration industry (lawyers and consultants), crass short-term political moves aimed at garnering votes, obfuscatory political language consisting of mealy-mouthed platitudes, and fears of poking a political hornet’s nest.

Somehow, we must start and sustain these conversations, and Fleras’ discussion lays out a good set of ideas and information for doing so. We need to understand that the constant wandering of global capital created global migration as well as new types of migrants with permanent ties to multiple nations. Fleras also makes the excellent suggestion that we create an international body to regulate global migration in the same way we have created institutions that shape and regulate global trade and finance.