مهدی مهدویان صدر
29 یادداشت منتشر شدهکانادا میان گاز و ترمز
چکیده فارسی:
عنوان: کانادا میان گاز و ترمز
سیاست گذاری رفت وبرگشتی مهاجرت چگونه استعدادها را راند، مهاجران را به مسیر پناهندگی کشاند و برنامه ریزی را در تاریکی رها کرد؟
چکیده: کانادا دو دهه الگوی مدیریت سنجیده مهاجرت شناخته می شد، اما در فاصله ۲۰۲۲ تا ۲۰۲۶ سیاست مهاجرتی این کشور میان گشایشی بی سابقه و ترمزهای ناگهانی در نوسان بود. این مقاله مروری با تکیه بر اسناد رسمی دولت کانادا، گزارش های نهادهای پژوهشی و آمار رسمی، این نوسان را با مفهوم «سیاست گذاری توقف و حرکت» تحلیل می کند. جمعیت کانادا در ۲۰۲۳ با نرخ ۳٫۲ درصد، بالاترین نرخ از ۱۹۵۷، رشد کرد و سپس سهمیه های اقامت دائم و مجوز تحصیل به شدت کاهش یافت. برنامه ویزای استارتاپ پس از انباشت بیش از ۴۵ هزار پرونده و زمان انتظار بیش از ده سال متوقف شد. داده های پناهندگی نشان می دهد در ۲۰۲۴ بیشتر درخواست ها از سوی کسانی بوده که اقامت موقت یا ویزای ورود داشتند و در ۲۰۲۵، با وجود کاهش کل درخواست ها، درخواست کارگران موقت بیش از ۶۰ درصد افزایش یافت؛ پدیده ای که ادبیات مهاجرت آن را «جایگزینی مسیر» می نامد. در حوزه مسکن، هشدارهای داخلی سال ۲۰۲۲ نادیده ماند و در حوزه جمعیت، بازنگری آماری ۲۴۰ هزار نفری نشان داد دولت بدون داده دقیق هدف گذاری می کرد. مقاله چهار ویژگی این الگوی حکمرانی را برمی شمارد: واکنشی بودن، ابزارهای صفر و صدی، کمبود اطلاعات و پراکندگی مسئولیت، و پنج راهکار برای ثبات و پیش بینی پذیری پیشنهاد می کند.
کلیدواژه ها: سیاست مهاجرتی کانادا، حکمرانی، سیاست گذاری توقف و حرکت، جایگزینی مسیر، پناهندگی، مسکن، ویزای استارتاپ
Boom, Bust and Backlog
How stop-go policymaking pushed talent away, rerouted migrants into asylum and left Canada planning in the dark?
Dr. Mehdi Mahdavian Sadr
For two decades Canada was the textbook case of well-managed immigration: points-based selection, broad public support and a reputation as the country that chose its newcomers with care. Governments elsewhere, including in Europe, sent delegations to Ottawa to learn how it was done.
Between 2022 and 2026 that reputation took a heavy blow. Canada first let temporary migration expand faster than at any time in its modern history, then slammed on the brakes. My argument here is not that Canada admitted too many people, or too few. It is that the way it made decisions, in sharp swings rather than steady adjustments, produced outcomes nobody intended: a narrowing door for entrepreneurs, migrants rerouted into the asylum system, and a housing and planning crisis that officials had been warned about in advance. Public administration has a vocabulary for this pattern, and it is more useful than the angry labels the debate usually attracts.
From open door to hard brake
The acceleration was extraordinary. In 2023 Canada’s population grew by 1,271,872 people, or 3.2 per cent, the fastest rate since 1957, and almost all of that growth came from international migration, most of it temporary (Immigration.ca, 2024). Study permits and work permits were effectively demand-driven: colleges recruited, employers applied, and the federal government processed.
The reversal was just as abrupt. The permanent resident target, planned at 500,000 a year for 2025, was cut to 395,000, with 365,000 pencilled in for 2027 (Banerjee et al., 2025). The 2026–2028 plan then fixed it at 380,000 a year and set a goal of bringing temporary residents below 5 per cent of the population by the end of 2027, down from 7 per cent in mid-2025 (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada [IRCC], 2025a). The study permit target for 2026 was set at 155,000, 49 per cent below the 305,900 set for 2025 (University Affairs, 2025).
Public opinion moved at the same speed. In the autumn of 2024, 58 per cent of Canadians said there was too much immigration, a jump of 31 points in two years and the fastest shift recorded since the Environics Institute began asking the question in 1977 (Environics Institute, 2024). Housing was the main reason people gave. In barely two years the country went from treating immigration as an unquestioned asset to treating it as a problem to be contained.
The talent channel: open in principle, jammed in practice
The Start-up Visa shows the pattern at its clearest. Launched as a pilot in 2013 and made permanent in 2018, it asked foreign founders to secure backing from a designated venture fund, angel group or incubator. According to a Macdonald-Laurier Institute analysis, the application inventory grew from about 19,000 in 2022 to 36,572 by October 2024 and more than 45,000 by 2026, while processing times stretched from 31 months to well beyond ten years. At the same time, the planned number of business-immigration admissions for 2026 fell from about 6,000 in the 2023 levels plan to 1,000 and then to 500. At that rate, the authors calculate, clearing the backlog would take roughly ninety years (Melikidze & Paolasini, 2026).
The government’s responses came in lurches. In April 2024 it limited each designated organisation to ten new start-ups a year. From 1 January 2026 it set intake for both the Start-up Visa and the Self-Employed Persons programme to zero, promising a new, more targeted entrepreneur pilot with details to come later in the year (Fragomen, 2025). The Macdonald-Laurier authors point out that there were real integrity problems, including some designated organisations charging applicants large fees and submitting fabricated business plans, but they also note that internal warnings about unsustainable growth had been raised years earlier and were not acted on in time.
It would be unfair to say Canada has shut its doors to talent. Graduate students were exempted from the 2026 study permit cap, and Budget 2025 set aside about C$1.7 billion to recruit roughly 1,000 international researchers, alongside a planned accelerated pathway for holders of American H-1B visas (University Affairs, 2025; IRCC, 2025b). The problem is less a closed door than an unpredictable one. For a founder deciding where to build a company, a programme that runs for a decade, jams, is capped and then closes pending a pilot yet to be designed is, in practical terms, not available.
Channel substitution: when legal routes narrow, asylum grows
Migration research has a name for what happened next. In a widely cited study, Mathias Czaika and Hein de Haas showed that restricting one entry route rarely stops movement; more often it shifts people into other routes, other destinations or other timing. One of the effects they identify is categorical substitution, in which migrants move from one legal category into another when the first becomes harder to use (Czaika & de Haas, 2017).
Canada’s asylum data read like a case study. Of the roughly 173,000 asylum claims made in 2024, 151,220 came from people who were already in Canada on some form of temporary status, and 99,170 from people who had entered on a temporary resident visa, the entry visa issued to visitors from visa-required countries (IRCC, 2026). In 2025 total claims fell by 34 per cent, to 114,515. Yet claims by temporary workers rose from 8,760 to about 14,285, an increase of more than 60 per cent, in the year when many permits issued during the boom were reaching expiry and routes to permanent residence were being narrowed. International students made about 19,685 claims (IRCC, 2026). Yvonne Su, director of York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies, has argued that for students caught between debt, lost permits and closing pathways, asylum became one of the only ways to remain, and that the federal government had itself recruited them heavily during the pandemic before reversing course (Su, 2024).
The visitor route tells a similar story. Canada lifted its visa requirement for Mexican citizens in 2016, when Mexicans made 260 asylum claims. By 2023 they made 23,995, or 17 per cent of all claims, most of which were refused, withdrawn or abandoned. Ottawa reimposed the visa on 29 February 2024, and in the following seven months airport asylum claims fell by more than 97 per cent (IRCC, 2024). A liberalisation without safeguards, followed by a blanket reversal: that is a stop-go cycle in miniature.
The latest response follows the same logic. New rules described to Parliament in 2026 make people ineligible to claim asylum if they do so more than a year after their first entry, applying to anyone who arrived after 24 June 2020 (IRCC, 2026). Meanwhile the Immigration and Refugee Board holds about 298,000 pending claims, and a claim filed today could wait roughly three years for a first decision. Some of these claims are well founded and some are not. Either way, an asylum system turned into the waiting room for people whose other doors closed suddenly is a symptom of how policy was made, not only of who applied.
Housing: a warning on file
Canada’s housing shortage is often described with a note of disbelief: how can the second-largest country on earth run out of homes? The answer is that land has never been the constraint. Housing is built where jobs, transit and services are, under municipal zoning, provincial rules and the capacity of a construction industry that cannot double its output in a year. Immigration, by contrast, is set in Ottawa. The two systems were never planned together.
The risk was known. Internal documents obtained by The Canadian Press show that in 2022 IRCC officials warned that housing construction had not kept up with population growth and that rapid increases were putting pressure on health care and affordable housing. The permanent resident target was raised towards 500,000 a year regardless (Global News, 2024).
The bill is now arriving. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates that the country needs 430,000 to 480,000 new homes a year until 2035 to restore the affordability of 2019, roughly double the current pace of construction (Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation [CMHC], 2025). The Parliamentary Budget Officer finds that lower immigration will sharply reduce household formation in 2025 and 2026, but that closing the gap fully would still require about 290,000 completions a year to 2035, above the 2024 record, every year for more than a decade (Parliamentary Budget Officer [PBO], 2025). In the language of public administration, Canada ignored its absorptive capacity on the way up and is now paying for it with abrupt cuts on the way down.
Population: planning in the dark
In late 2025 and early 2026, Statistics Canada’s quarterly estimates showed something the country had never recorded: a falling population, with a cumulative drop of 234,597 people between July 2025 and March 2026 (Canadian Mortgage Trends, 2026). Then, in September 2026, revised data raised the estimate of non-permanent residents on 1 April 2026 by 240,087 people. The apparent decline largely disappeared, and the population on 1 July 2026 stood at a record 41.8 million, up 0.46 per cent over the year (Immigration.ca, 2026).
The revision is good news for the headline, but it is bad news for governance. For months, a government pursuing a precise target for temporary residents did not know, within roughly a quarter of a million people, how many were in the country. Parisa Mahboubi, who chairs the C.D. Howe Institute’s council on immigration targets, has noted that Canada still lacks reliable data on how many people with expired study or work permits actually leave (CFJC Today, 2026).
The longer-term demographic arithmetic is not in doubt. Canada’s total fertility rate fell to a record 1.25 children per woman in 2024, placing the country among the “ultra-low fertility” societies (Statistics Canada, 2025). With so few births, virtually all future growth depends on immigration. A country in that position cannot afford to treat immigration as a tap to be opened and shut on political impulse, because every swing now shows up directly in the size and age of its workforce.
A governance diagnosis: stop-go policy
Economists coined the phrase “stop-go” for British macroeconomic policy in the 1950s and 1960s, when governments alternately stimulated and slammed the brakes on demand in response to the latest crisis, producing more instability than they cured. Canada’s recent immigration policy fits the description closely, and the pattern has four identifiable features.
The first is reaction rather than anticipation. Warnings about housing in 2022 and about the Start-up Visa backlog were on file long before action came, and action arrived only once public opinion had turned. Leading Canadian migration scholars writing for the Migration Policy Institute describe the shift as fundamentally reactive, driven by housing pressure, strained services and public backlash (Banerjee et al., 2025).
The second is a preference for binary instruments. Caps, intake set to zero, visa reimpositions and a retroactive bar on asylum claims are switches, not dials. They are easy to announce and hard to fine-tune, and they fall on people who had made plans under the previous rules.
The third is an information deficit. Targets were set for a temporary population the statistical system could not count accurately, and there is still no reliable record of who leaves.
The fourth is fragmented responsibility. Ottawa sets immigration levels, provinces run colleges and housing policy, municipalities control zoning, and some colleges earned international tuition from a system whose failures they did not have to pay for. Su’s analysis found that 80 of roughly 650 designated institutions accounted for 77 per cent of student asylum claims (Su, 2024). When costs and benefits sit with different actors, no one is responsible for the whole.
None of this requires attributing irrationality to anyone. Each decision can be defended on its own terms. The failure lies in the system: short political horizons, weak foresight capacity and poor coordination, which together turn reasonable individual choices into an erratic overall course.
What steadier governance would look like
The remedies are less dramatic than the problems, which is partly why they get less attention.
The first is to plan within a corridor rather than to a point. Multi-year levels could move within a published range tied to indicators of absorptive capacity, such as housing completions, school places and health-care capacity, so that adjustments are gradual and predictable instead of sudden.
The second is to protect people already in the system. Rules in force when someone was admitted should continue to apply to them for a reasonable period. That single principle would remove much of the pressure that pushes students and workers towards asylum when policy shifts.
The third is to ring-fence the talent channel. Entrepreneur and researcher streams are small in number and large in economic value. They need strong integrity controls, not periodic shutdowns, so that founders and scientists can plan years ahead.
The fourth is to fix the data. Exit tracking and timely counts of temporary residents are the basic infrastructure of any serious target. Without them, targets are aspirations.
The fifth is to depoliticise the numbers. The United Kingdom’s Migration Advisory Committee offers one model: an independent expert body that publishes evidence on labour needs and capacity before ministers decide. It would not end political debate, but it would give that debate a common factual floor.
A lesson beyond Canada
Canada did not lose its way because it welcomed too many people or because it later decided to welcome fewer. It lost its way because it moved between those positions in lurches, without the data, the coordination or the foresight to manage either. The results were predictable in hindsight: entrepreneurs left waiting for years before the door closed, workers and students redirected into an overloaded asylum system, and a housing shortage that officials had flagged before it became a national crisis.
For other countries, including those in Europe now debating their own caps and thresholds, the lesson is uncomfortable but useful. Immigration policy is less like a switch than like a long-term investment. Its value depends on predictability, and every sudden swing, in either direction, charges interest that is paid later, usually by people who had no say in the decision.
References
Banerjee, R., Alboim, N., Triandafyllidou, A., & Mathurin, G. (2025, June). Canada’s long-standing openness to immigration comes under pressure. Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/canada-immigration-policy-inflection-point
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. (2025). CMHC releases latest housing supply gaps report. https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/media-newsroom/news-releases/2025/cmhc-releases-latest-housing-supply-gaps-report
Canadian Mortgage Trends. (2026, July 28). Canada’s population decline could disappear after StatCan revisions: CIBC. https://www.canadianmortgagetrends.com/2026/07/canadas-population-decline-could-disappear-after-statcan-revisions-cibc/
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Melikidze, N., & Paolasini, S. J. (2026). Closed for business: The unravelling of Canada’s Start-Up Visa program.Macdonald-Laurier Institute. https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/closed-for-business-the-unravelling-of-canadas-start-up-visa-program-nino-melikidze-and-steven-j-paolasini/
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