Apparently some people are considered immigrants and that’s bad, while others are just expats looking for a new home.
I don’t think they’re considered expats if they plan to stay indefinitely. But yeah, there’s vastly different sentiments towards different types of immigrants. Usually the surveys ask for “European immigration”, but I guess a Canadian would fall into that as well, so they might just as well ask about Western immigration (the use European because of EU freedom of movement).
In part sentiments obviously have a lot to do with racism and xenophobia, but it’s unfortunately not just that. The statistics for people who immigrated irregularly (i.e. without a visa) really don’t look good. E.g. here in Germany in 2022 foreign nationals made up some 16% of the population but 32% of crime suspects (excluding crimes around migration which Germans can’t commit). The percentages regarding people who actually get convicted are even worse and “Zugewanderte” (recent immigrants, mainly asylum seekers) used to have even worse numbers as well (before the refugees from Ukraine, largely women and children came).
Obviously there’s demographic and socioeconomic reasons for that discrepancy. The main issue is that there’s a lot of young men among immigrants and you men tend to commit most crimes, but that obviously doesn’t undo any of these crimes. Ukraine’s rather sexist border controls (they don’t allow men aged 18-60 to leave) really did their diaspora a solid here.
I don’t think they’re considered expats if they plan to stay indefinitely. But yeah, there’s vastly different sentiments towards different types of immigrants. Usually the surveys ask for “European immigration”, but I guess a Canadian would fall into that as well, so they might just as well ask about Western immigration (the use European because of EU freedom of movement). In part sentiments obviously have a lot to do with racism and xenophobia, but it’s unfortunately not just that. The statistics for people who immigrated irregularly (i.e. without a visa) really don’t look good. E.g. here in Germany in 2022 foreign nationals made up some 16% of the population but 32% of crime suspects (excluding crimes around migration which Germans can’t commit). The percentages regarding people who actually get convicted are even worse and “Zugewanderte” (recent immigrants, mainly asylum seekers) used to have even worse numbers as well (before the refugees from Ukraine, largely women and children came).
Obviously there’s demographic and socioeconomic reasons for that discrepancy. The main issue is that there’s a lot of young men among immigrants and you men tend to commit most crimes, but that obviously doesn’t undo any of these crimes. Ukraine’s rather sexist border controls (they don’t allow men aged 18-60 to leave) really did their diaspora a solid here.