Rising numbers of new immigrants hate it here, want to go home

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rising-numbers-of-new-immigrants-hate-it-in-canada-want-to-go-home

Media in India is now broadcasting segments about how the 'Canadian dream' is nightmare.

As Canada maintains immigration at rates unseen in its history, an increasingly large share of those newcomers are finding that they hate it here, feel hoodwinked by the Canadian government and want to go home.

Amid statistics showing higher rates of outmigration and newcomer dissatisfaction, social media and immigrant forums are increasingly filled with warnings for foreigners to stay away.

This week, the website BlogTO published a series of interviews with recent immigrants who are desperate to leave.

“There is no living in this country; it’s just surviving,” said 39-year-old Raghunath Poshala. A Mexican immigrant told them he no longer sees Canada as a developed country. “I realized that Canada is a very poor country, too; it’s just that everyone is in debt,” he said.

Late last year, Bloomberg News interviewed a Ukrainian refugee who fled Russian shelling and missile attacks — only to find a Canada that was practically unliveable. “I’m tired all the time now,” said Oleksii Martynenko, 44.

Around the same time, CTV interviewed Indian immigrant Emilson Jose. “No matter how much you make, your take home pay is not even keeping up the expense. Families barely keep their head above water,” said Jose. “After 10 years of hardship, I am now a proud Canadian citizen who doesn’t want to live in Canada anymore.”

Last year, the Conference Board of Canada published The Leaky Bucket, a report finding that the rates of recent immigrants deciding to leave Canada were on the rise. It “suggests immigrants may not be seeing the benefits of moving to Canada,” the report says.

The reason for the dissatisfaction is simple: Amid spiking prices and shortages in everything from housing to health care, it’s immigrants that are being hit hardest.

Average rents in Canada have hit an all-time high, with a two-bedroom purpose-built rental now going for $1,359 per month.

But asking rents — the advertised rents that would be faced by a newcomer looking for shelter — are significantly higher. According to the latest survey of asking rents by Rentals.ca, the average two-bedroom now costs more than $2,300 per month — with that figure rising above $3,000 in markets like Vancouver or Toronto.

And while much of the recent immigration influx was driven by stated fears of a labour shortage, newcomers are often encountering a job market that is utterly overwhelmed by applicants.

It’s now a semi-regular phenomenon across Southern Ontario that a routine job fair for entry-level positions will attract blocks-long lines of prospective applicants. In December, a job fair at the Save Max Sports Centre in Brampton drew so many job-seekers that videos posted to Instagram showed the entire plaza in front of the building filled with queues.

There exists an entire online ecosystem of bloggers, TikTokers and YouTubers providing advice for new Canadians or prospective immigrants. Of late, many of them are telling their audience not to come — or at least warning that it’s not what it seems.

Febby Lyan, a Singaporean immigrant to Canada, garnered nearly 400,000 views on a recent video about “why people are leaving Canada.” Over 20 minutes, she detailed rising homelessness, rising crime, limited job opportunities, worsening affordability and even a few qualms with the political situation. Lyan noted that the recently passed Online News Act meant that Canadians couldn’t access news through Facebook.

The YouTuber “Angry Canadian Immigrant” wrote an entire e-book accusing Canada of running an immigration system designed to “scam” newcomers.

“After three years in Canada I see it as one of the most overrated countries in the world; very high taxes, enormous cost of life, very few well-paying jobs with insane competition for them … no access to health care whatsoever,” he says in one of his most popular videos, Top 5 reasons not to move to Canada.

The notion of Canada as an “immigrant trap” has even started to make the foreign press.

The Indian news channel WION broadcast a segment in mid-February titled Canada: The Dream that Became a Nightmare.

“Today, youngsters that immigrate to Canada are struggling to find jobs that match their skill sets and also pay them well,” said host Molly Gambhir.

The comments below a video of the segment are replete with viewers expressing their desire to leave. “As an immigrant who came here in 2019 to fulfil my Canadian dream, I am moving back to India next month. The situation is getting worse every passing day,” reads the top comment.

All of this has actually happened before. The last time Canada dialled up immigration to record-breaking levels, it was similarly accompanied by an undercurrent of disappointment and outmigration.

In the years before the First World War, Canada took in as many as 400,000 immigrants annually in a frantic bid to homestead the prairies. Often, these newcomers had been lured by rosy advertised images of Canada as a temperate land of plenty.

At the peak of the boom, outmigration was often as high as immigration. And even a cursory look at immigrant diaries from that era reveal accounts of despair and horror.

“The women and children raised such lamentations as defies description,” reads the 1899 account of Ukrainian immigrant Maria Adamowska, who said panic began to rise among her fellow immigrants as their train ride west revealed the harshness of the Canadian landscape.

In 1913, a Montreal-based German consul even penned a report home urging his countrymen to avoid immigration to Canada. “The Canadian prairie with its long winters and impermanent rectangular houses conveys something indescribably sad and depressing,” he wrote.