When Immigrants Oppose Immigration

At just twenty-three, second-generation immigrant Jessie was working in the federal government to save for law school—even though he felt deep “disdain” for “big government.” Jessie’s supervisor suggested that his current role could help him secure a job at the Department of Justice and receive law school funding. But he resisted. He didn’t want to become a lifelong bureaucrat.

The young federal employee shared this story in an interview with Emine Fidan Elcioglu, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, who ran a study on why some racialized communities are turning to the right. (Jessie is a pseudonym Elcioglu used to protect her interviewees.) Jessie said his contempt for the state came from watching his family be failed by the system.

Jessie’s mother, who had immigrated from Guyana at seventeen, and his father, who fled Haiti in the early ’90s, met while working in fast-food jobs. When Jessie was born, in 2001, his father died suddenly, leaving his mother to raise two young children alone. Around this time, the federal government downloaded social assistance to the provinces, and Ontario—where Jessie’s family lived—instituted a restrictive model. Payments were cut by 21.6 percent, and recipients were no longer eligible to receive social assistance if they were working, even if the earnings from those jobs put them below the government’s own low-income cut-off. Jessie’s mom refused to participate in the program precisely because the new model felt inadequate, but that meant begging outside grocery stores for food and diapers.

Jessie acknowledged this systemic failure but went on to embrace the conservative policies that had helped create it. “You have to look out for yourself because no one else will,” Jessie told Elcioglu. In his conversation with the sociologist, he argued that immigrants—once settled—ought to vote in their self-interest. Though his mother had arrived in Canada through a family sponsorship program, and despite having directly benefited from the policy, Jessie now opposed previous Liberal governments’ efforts to strengthen such schemes. “You’re no longer someone trying to get into Canada,” he told Elcioglu. “You’ve arrived. You’re a Canadian. So start voting like one.”

For Jessie, political affiliation wasn’t about ideals—it was first about survival and then about climbing up the socio-economic ladder. That climb often involves racial strategies—subtle efforts to align with whiteness by distancing oneself from other racialized or immigrant groups and adopting the political preferences of wealthy white Canadians, who tend to vote conservative.

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Like Jessie, many established immigrants in Canada are now favouring restrictive immigration policies, dismantling multiculturalism narratives, and drawing boundaries between “past” and “present,” “good” and “bad” immigrants. According to a recent survey commissioned by OMNI Television to research firm Léger, two-thirds (67 percent) of immigrants—especially those who have lived in Canada for more than six years—support tougher regulations for international students. This marks a notable shift from previous decades: as recently as the early 2000s, immigrants in the Greater Toronto Area were far more likely to vote Liberal or New Democratic Party and to support pro-immigration policies. But according to an April study by the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, immigrant voters in the GTA are now increasingly aligning with right-leaning positions.

Support is even higher among South Asian immigrants, rising to 77 percent, according to the results of the OMNI/Léger survey. Another 2024 Léger poll found high anti-immigrant sentiment in that community: 50 percent of surveyed South Asian immigrants believe that the government plan at the time would “admit too many immigrants to Canada.” (That plan aimed to welcome 465,000 immigrants in 2023, scaling up to 500,000 in 2025.) The same poll suggested that the longer a South Asian immigrant lives in Canada, the more likely they are to support the Conservative Party, which typically tends to favour stricter immigration policies. A fall 2024 study by Environics Institute also reports that, over the past year, an increasing proportion of racialized Canadians agree that too many immigrants are “not adopting Canadian values.”

Social media platforms like Reddit often surface similar rhetoric around lack of assimilation—though it’s not entirely clear what commenters mean by this. “I can’t be more vocal against banning these exploiters,” wrote one racialized immigrant on a forum. “We uproot so much to move to a better promise. . . . The social fabric here has been ruined to below the standard of society and culture I left behind.”

Elcioglu believes that voting conservative becomes a way for some second-generation immigrants to reject the perception that they are still outsiders. “By distancing themselves from newer, poorer, or more stigmatized immigrants, they are attempting to claim a fuller version of Canadian belonging,” she says. In a 2025 paper published in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies, Elcioglu argues that electoral behaviour is a mechanism for this faction to “edge closer to privilege.” She writes, “These efforts can be characterized as ‘racial strategies’ or how white-adjacent groups try to ‘achieve’ whiteness in a society that deems them tolerated citizens at best and failed or non-citizens at worst.”

In Canada, Hindu nationalist groups’ increasing affinity with right-wing political parties can be seen as an extension of the same dynamic, according to Elcioglu. While a growing faction of Hindu immigrants is using Conservative votership as a means of aligning with the “community of value”—or white, wealthy native citizens—right-wing leaders like Pierre Poilievre and Maxime Bernier have in turn courted the same demographic to clutch on to power.

In a late 2024 post, Bernier lauded one such Hindu nationalist group for its beliefs around ending “mass immigration” and that “immigrants should integrate into Canadian society rather than live in ethnic ghettos.” Poilievre, too, has pandered to Hindu nationalists—even as nationalist sentiment in India caused an increase in brazen attacks against minorities, particularly Muslims. In a 2024 statement, he said: “May the Maple Leaf and the Tiranga [India’s tricolour flag] forever fly united in celebration of our freedom and our democracies.” The dynamic has resulted in a mutual friendship of convenience—or what some scholars call the “populist paradox.”

A 2024 poll by Angus Reid shows that the Conservative Party now holds the support of 53 percent of Hindus in Canada. In April 2023, Poilievre also became the first federal party leader to speak out against so-called Hinduphobia. In an interview with diaspora channel Prime Asia, he said, “We have to stop Hinduphobia and nasty comments that are made about Hindus and the vandalism and other violence targeting Hindu Canadians.”

But as South Asian journalists Saima Desai and Aniket Kali note in an in-depth investigation for The Breach, the ongoing rhetoric around “Hinduphobia” is often an attempt by far-right Hindu groups to stifle allegations of caste-based discrimination. Caste-based prejudice persists in Canada, particularly within South Asian communities. The Caste in Canada project, an initiative run by researchers Suraj Yengde and Anne Murphy, documents how many Dalit Canadians feel compelled to hide their caste identity to avoid stigma, even in the diaspora. First-hand accounts from students in Ontario further expose how caste bias manifests through social exclusion, slurs, and workplace discrimination—often at the hands of fellow South Asians. These experiences underscore that caste is not just an issue “back home” but a lived reality for many in Canada.

In March 2023, the Toronto District School Board voted to request a framework from the Ontario Human Rights Commission to tackle caste-based discrimination in Canada’s Hindu community. The Hindu right-wing group Canadian Organization for Hindu Heritage Education pushed back. The organization initiated a change.org petition calling caste-based discrimination in Canada “non-existent” and warning that such measures could fuel bias against South Asian Hindus in Canada.

“Denial of casteism and alignment with Hindu nationalist narratives can be used to claim moral authority and legitimacy—a way of asserting, ‘We are good, orderly, respectable immigrants,’ in contrast to what they may frame as ‘backward’ or ‘disruptive’ others,” says Elcioglu. “This mirrors how some respondents in my study distanced themselves from other racialized groups to gain proximity to whiteness and power.” For upper-caste Hindus, publicly recognizing caste as a form of discrimination might challenge the “model minority” narrative or attract unwanted attention and stigma. As a result, this denial can function as a strategic move to preserve a seamless, socially acceptable identity.

Satwinder Bains, director of the South Asian Studies Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley, believes that the Conservative Party’s active outreach strategy directed at racialized immigrants may have proven to be successful. “The only way forward [for some immigrants] is through not looking back,” she says. “It is seen as a way to get closer to power and privilege, which would normally take whole generations to achieve—with the false promise of equal power sharing by immigrants and racialized groups.”