Quebec’s New Politics of Immigration in a Changing Canada

How can we make sense of the ongoing debates surrounding immigration in Quebec? What insights can we glean from these dynamics about emerging trends in Canada's immigration politics? Drawing upon the findings of original studies on attitudes, party strategies, discourses, and media coverage, this presentation illustrated the evolution of immigration politics in Canada since 2018. Specifically, it highlighted how Quebec has been undergoing an unprecedented politicization of immigration, diverging from previous contemporary patterns of controversies related to secularism and diversity issues. This presentation not only delved into the factors driving this politicization but also underscored that Quebec's experience cannot be simplistically attributed to cultural disparities or the unique nature of its citizens' immigration attitudes. Rather, Quebec's post-2018 experience underscores the need to refrain from overestimating the stability of Canada's immigration politics and exposes the fragility of certain assumptions about how the nation engages with international migration.

 

 

Mireille Paquet is the Concordia Research Chair on the Politics of Immigration and Associate Professor of Politics at Concordia University. She is the scientific lead of the Équipe de recherche sur l’immigration dans le Québec Actuel (ÉRIQA), a co-lead of the Canada Research Excellence Fund project, Migrant Integration in the Mid-21st Century: Bridging Divides, and a Scholar of Excellence at the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University (from September to November 2023). She is the author of Province Building and the Federalization of Immigration in Canada (University of Toronto Press) and has co-edited Nouvelles dynamiques de l’immigration au Québec (Presses de l’Université de Montréal) as well as Citizenship as a Regime: Canadian and International Experiences (McGill-Queen’s University Press). Her research on immigration and politics has been published in outlets such as the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Regional Studies, the Canadian Journal of Political Science and Publius. She is currently conducting research on attitudes toward immigration policies in Canada and on the comparative evolution of administrations responsible for immigration.