The invisible housing crisis affecting immigrants in rural Canada
Bronwyn Bragg, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Environment, University of Lethbridge, Alberta.
Keywords: Immigration, housing, Canada, precarious work
Canada is viewed internationally as a leader on issues related to immigration. This is in part due to high levels of public support for immigration. In the years since 2020, however, a public consensus around immigration appears to be fracturing: A recent poll found that 58% of Canadians now believe the country accepts too many immigrants. Much of this hostility toward immigrants appears to be related to rising cost of housing and the perception, held by many that immigrants are the cause of Canada’s so-called housing crisis.
The narrative around housing and immigration is mostly an urban one: Cities (and urban residents) are positioned as experiencing the housing crisis, with scant attention paid to the housing situation in smaller centers and rural communities. Immigration in Canada is also largely an urban phenomenon, with 80% of immigrants to Canada living in just eleven cities.
In turn, dispersing immigration to these rural communities and smaller centers is positioned as a “solution” to the “problem” of immigration and housing.
To be clear, Canada’s housing crisis has roots that extend while beyond the current conjuncture. While population growth, driven primarily by immigration, does add to demand issues related to housing, the far greater issue relates to a fundamental lack of housing supply. Decades of under-building, the commodification and financialization of the Canadian housing market, and the rollback of investments in affordable housing have led to Canada being one of the most unaffordable housing markets among OECD member nations.
At issue here is the idea in the minds of policymakers and many pro-immigration advocates that issues around immigration can be resolved by geography. In particular, it can be done by redistributing immigrants to smaller communities in Canada. Or in the words of Canada’s Prime Minister: “Ensure that immigration better supports small‐ and medium‐sized communities that require additional immigrants to enhance their economic growth and social vibrancy.”
Rural and smaller centers are positioned here as ideal settings for new residents to Canada: These places are experiencing labor shortages, and ‘housing is more affordable.’ Setting aside the normative (and problematic) assumptions that immigrants should be treated like chess pieces – moved where necessary to fill labor market gaps and alleviate housing pressures (a particularly problematic assumption given immigrants are people with agency and autonomy and, in Canada, mobility rights guaranteed under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms). These assumptions about rural communities are also inaccurate.
In this framing, rural communities are treated as largely declining places in need of workers and where affordable housing abounds. This is perhaps not surprising given Canada’s settler-colonial history and present. The colonization and theft of Indigenous lands have reinforced forms of what Aileen Moreton-Robinson describes as the “white possessive” in relation to the land and a belief that these are places that can and should be shaped by Canadian state policy and regulation (including immigrant settlement and dispersal).
Yet as other writers in Just Rural Futures have addressed, rural places are much more complex and contested than is often acknowledged or understood by outsiders.
My own research examines the conditions of life and work for immigrants, ‘temporary’ labor migrants, and resettled refugees who live in small centers in rural areas on the Canadian prairie. I focus on those who work in Canada’s beef processing sector, an industry where the Canadian census classifies 70 percent of workers as immigrants to Canada. This work is 3D: dirty, difficult, and dangerous.
As in the US, the beef packing industry is heavily consolidated around a few highly profitable transnational corporations. 70 percent of beef sold in Canada is produced at just two plants in Southern Alberta: Cargill in High River and JBS Foods in Brooks. These massive processing operations run 24 hours/day, 7 days a week, each slaughtering around 4000 head of cattle per day. The presence of transnational firms has radically changed the composition of these previously white-settler majority towns. For example, in Brooks, between 2001 and 2021, the population of Brook grew by 28 percent. Most of this growth has been driven by international immigration: The immigrant population grew from 8 percent (2001) to 36 percent (2021), and the visible minority population grew from 6 percent to 48 percent (visible minority is a term used in the Canadian census to denote people of color who are not Indigenous).
From the perspective of policymakers, Brooks is viewed as a kind of unicorn success story. The town celebrates its multiculturalism in films like “Brooks – The City of 100 Hellos” and hosts cultural events like ‘Taste of Nations.’ Jobs for newcomers are available at the JBS plant, and Brooks is growing in a broader context of declining rural populations. Yet for those who live and work in Brooks as ‘newcomers, ’ the story is not as neat.
Among many challenges identified in my research, including the absence of public transportation and experiences of racial profiling, housing poses a particular difficulty. Immigrant and migrant meatpackers and their families struggle to meet their basic needs. Wages for workers are well below Alberta’s median wage, yet rent is comparable with Alberta’s large cities. Interviews with housing providers and other social service workers describe a series of sub-optimal living conditions for immigrant workers in Brooks – including bed bug infestations, predatory landlords, arbitrary rent increases, overcrowding, and workers living in unsuitable accommodations such as garages and unheated trailers.
I argue that this points to the need to deeply understand the uneven impacts of Canada’s housing crisis. It is a crisis impacting both urban and non-urban places, and it is disproportionately impacting the same people – international immigrants, migrants, and refugees - who are being blamed for its origins. Yet the stories of rural housing scarcity, especially for racialized ‘newcomers,’ are largely overlooked and ignored by processes of erasure that rural places are the solution to the urban housing crisis and ignore the realities on the ground for immigrants already living in rural communities.
— Bronwyn Bragg
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