A late-night Uber ride from Toronto’s Pearson Airport into the city usually guarantees a good fare for the driver.

But not for Sachindeep Singh on the evening of September 19.

A few kilometres into the ride, his Uber app stopped working.

Singh’s work permit had expired at midnight and, like Canada, Uber was putting him on notice.

Singh, 23, arrived in Canada as an international student in 2019. His immigration status permitted him to work and offered a path to permanent residence, an approach labelled “study-work-stay” on the Canadian government’s immigration website.

But after inviting millions of newcomers to Canada in recent years to help lift the economy, the government has reversed course amid growing concerns that immigrants are contributing to the country’s deepening challenges around housing, healthcare and other issues.

A series of measures unveiled this year, focused on Canada’s vast temporary residence programme, has imposed barriers that have left hundreds of thousands of migrants like Singh in legal limbo.

Shifting sands

The international student programme that Singh followed has made one route to the Canadian dream of permanent residency, through education, appealing for hundreds of thousands of young people — many of them from India.

International students, who after graduating are eligible for work permits to continue living legally in Canada, represent one major category of temporary residents. Another group is made up of workers who come at the invitation of specific employers, while the smallest cohort are migrants seeking asylum.

The temporary residence programme was ramped up after the coronavirus pandemic, as Canada’s economy struggled to fill a labour shortage.

As a result, nearly three million people living in Canada have some type of temporary immigration status, with 2.2 million arriving in just the past two years, according to government statistics. Temporary residents represent 6.8 per cent of the country’s total population of 41.3 million, up from 3.5 per cent in 2022.

Changes to Canadian immigration law will make it more difficult for international students to gain permanent residency. But Canada’s economy is now creating fewer jobs, and unemployment, at over 6 per cent, remains stubbornly high. It is even higher for temporary residents, at 14 per cent.

Many Canadian cities face a housing affordability crisis, and several provinces have overstretched healthcare systems.

Critics say the large number of temporary residents make these problems worse, and the public mood towards immigrants has soured.

In response, Marc Miller, the country’s immigration minister, has announced a series of cuts to immigration quotas since the start of this year, including lowering the number of student visas issued and capping the number of temporary foreign workers that a company can employ.

As part of the government’s efforts to rein in the temporary residence programme, expiring or expired work permits for many immigrants — like Singh — may not be renewed.

“Immigration, writ large, has been, in part, responsible for preventing us from going into a recession,” Miller told the news media last month. “But I think it’s safe to admit that we have allowed certain aspects of this to get overheated, and probably for too long.”

The government is expected to impose further restrictions next month.

With one in five Canadians born overseas, the country has long been open to immigrants. Conservative and Liberal governments have historically promoted immigration policies meant to bolster the ranks of workers and increase the population.

But that is now shifting. Most Canadians, polls show, believe the country has taken in too many newcomers in too short a period. An August poll, for example, showed that two-thirds of Canadians feel the current immigration policy is letting too many people in.

Many immigrants, however, argue they are unfairly being targeted, saying they were invited to Canada only to face the prospect of having to leave if their work permits are not renewed.

The debate over Canada’s immigration policy has echoes of far more polarised arguments in the US and Europe.

The overwhelming majority of Canada’s immigrants arrived legally, and, despite the recent change of sentiment, political discourse remains broadly civil.

Some experts argue that stresses on the housing market or healthcare reflect chronic underinvestment by the government, rather than the consequences of high immigration rates.

Still, the tension between the influx of immigrants and the economic problems can be seen playing out in places like Brampton, a city near Toronto where many Indian students and temporary workers have settled.

Gurpartap Singh Toor, a local councillor for Brampton and the broader region of Peel, arrived in Canada in 2011 as a migrant. He said the large numbers of newcomers had stretched resources.

The health infrastructure in Brampton — one hospital and a smaller medical centre — is insufficient for the population of around 700,000, Toor said.

Housing availability and costs, he said, have been worsening, partly because unscrupulous landlords rent out small properties to multiple students, charging them hundreds of dollars each and pricing out local families.

The Bank of Canada has said that in parts of Canada popular with temporary residents there is less rental housing and it is more expensive than in regions with a small number of such residents.

But the bank has blamed onerous government regulations, as well as a lack of construction labour, for the low availability of housing.

Study, work, limbo

Canada says it will take a more flexible approach to immigration, allowing people in when they are needed and closing the door when they’re not.

“I’ve said it before and I’m going to state it again: The temporary foreign worker programme is an accordion,” the employment minister, Randy Boissonnault, said at a recent news conference.

“It’s meant to flex with the economy,” he added. “When we have a high number of vacancies we can bring in more people and, as the economy tightens, we close the accordion and we make it harder for people to come in.”

Singh, like others whose work permits have expired, faces dwindling options.

Singh and his family in India spent 40,000 Canadian dollars, or $30,000, on office management and hospitality degrees at a Canadian college, believing it would secure him a stable footing in his adopted country.

He could go back to a Canadian college and pay the higher tuition fees for international students in exchange for being allowed to work and keep seeking permanent residency.

Or he could apply for a visitor’s visa, though it would not give him the legal right to work. He could go back to India, his least appealing possibility, given the years and the money he has invested in Canada.

The limbo facing many temporary residents whose permits have expired, or soon will, is pushing some into harmful or illegal paths, said Gurpreet Malhotra, the chief executive at Indus Community Services.

Some, he said, end up staying illegally and working as cleaners, in warehouses or restaurant kitchens, for a fraction of the minimum wage. A desperate need for money also makes them vulnerable to being recruited by criminal groups, he said.

New York Times News Service