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Canada has often been seen as immune from the powerful backlash against globalization and immigration that has driven political shifts elsewhere. This article challenges this belief, at least in part, by tracing the evolution of public attitudes toward immigration and analyzing the factors that have shaped the trajectory for over three decades. Drawing on nearly forty years of Environics Focus Canada surveys, combined with annual data on macro-economics and immigration flows, findings here suggest that Canadians' tolerance toward immigration responds to immigration flows and is heavily influenced by macro-economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is international migration a threat to the redistributive programmes of destination countries? Existing work is divided. This paper examines the manner and extent to which increases in immigration are related to welfare state retrenchment, drawing on data from 1970 to 2007. The paper makes three contributions: (1) it explores the impact of changes in immigration on social welfare policy over both the short and medium term; (2) it examines the possibility that immigration matters for spending not just directly, but indirectly, through changes in demographics and/or the labour force; and (3) by disaggregating data on social expenditure into subdomains (including unemployment, pensions, and the like), it tests the impact of immigration on different elements of the welfare state. Results suggest that increased immigration is indeed associated with smaller increases in spending. The major pathway is through impact on female labour force participation. The policy domains most affected are ones subject to moral hazard, or at least to rhetoric about moral hazard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At first glance, Canada and Europe seem to be diverging dramatically in their approach to immigrant integration. While support for a multicultural approach seems to remain strong in Canada, a potent backlash pervades European debates. This paper argues that beneath the image of transatlantic divergence, there are important elements of convergence. First, the retreat from multiculturalism in Europe is more complete at the level of discourse than policy. With a few notable exceptions, multicultural policies have remained stable or even grown stronger since 2000. In many countries, new integration programs are being layered over multicultural initiatives introduced in earlier decades. Second, many of the new integration policies celebrated as evidence of a U-turn away from multiculturalism resemble programs that have long been part of immigrant integration in Canada. As a result, transatlantic convergence is indeed part of the contemporary story. However, there are also limits to this convergence. While some European countries are opting for liberal, voluntary approaches to integration, which can be combined with a multicultural approach to diversity, others are adopting more obligatory, illiberal versions of civic integration that seem inconsistent with the support for diversity central to a multicultural approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, many Western countries have implemented restrictions on immigrants' access to welfare programs, thereby creating new lines of exclusion between immigrants and the native-born. Canada is commonly seen to have resisted this trend. This view overlooks, however, that exclusion can come in different forms. In addition to direct formal exclusion from welfare programs, immigrants can also have more limited access because of indirect or informal mechanisms of differentiation. Reviewing five core welfare programs, this paper shows that direct, indirect, and informal types of exclusion exist in the Canadian welfare state, albeit with different consequences for different categories of newcomers. While this conclusion is not meant to suggest that immigrants face as much exclusion as they do in some other Western countries, it does demonstrate the need to avoid the complacency regarding immigrants' social rights in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]