There’s a specific worry that sits underneath this one, and it deserves to be said out loud. You watched a job feel less stable than it used to. Maybe you’ve seen a raise that didn’t keep pace with the till, or a posting that drew a hundred applicants where it used to draw ten. When work feels that precarious, the idea that someone new is competing for your spot isn’t paranoia — it’s a reasonable fear in a labour market that has stopped feeling fair. That fear is the honest part, and it’s where this has to start.
So let’s take the claim seriously rather than wave it away. If newcomers were simply taking the jobs Canadians do, you’d expect employment to be collapsing as immigration rose. That’s not what the numbers show — and the real story of where your bargaining power went is more useful, and more on your side, than the one about your new neighbour.
The jobs didn’t disappear
Start with the plainest fact. As of January 2025, about 21.0 million Canadians were employed, and employment had just grown by 76,000 in a single month, with the employment rate ticking up rather than down (Statistics Canada).
That matters because “immigrants are taking our jobs” pictures a fixed pile of jobs that newcomers subtract from. But the number of jobs isn’t fixed. People who arrive also rent apartments, buy groceries, get haircuts, fill cavities, and send their kids to school — and all of that spending creates work for other people. More residents means more customers, not just more workers. Economists call this the difference between substitution (taking your job) and complementarity (filling a different role and supporting yours). In an economy that’s still adding jobs, complementarity is doing most of the work.
Where the genuine shortages are
It’s also true that whole sectors have been begging for workers. In the third quarter of 2025 there were roughly 492,500 job vacancies across Canada, with trades, transport and equipment-operator roles alone accounting for about 87,700 of them (Statistics Canada).
Those aren’t abstract. They’re the framing crews we need to build housing, the long-term-care aides we can’t keep, the rural clinics that can’t staff a shift. Filling roles that are sitting empty isn’t the same as displacing someone who wants them. And newcomers tend to slot into exactly these hard-to-fill spots — often, frustratingly for them, below their training.
Newcomers aren’t undercutting from a position of strength
The “undercutting” fear assumes immigrants arrive and immediately outcompete you. The data tells a more complicated, more human story. Recent immigrants’ labour-market outcomes have actually improved: among core working-age newcomers, the employment-rate gap with Canadian-born workers narrowed from 13.1 to 6.5 percentage points between 2010 and 2023, and wage gaps shrank to their narrowest in two decades (Statistics Canada).
And they pay a real penalty on the way in. Among recent newcomers with a postsecondary education, about 32.6% report being overqualified for their job, versus 19.1% of Canadian-born workers — the engineer driving the cab, the nurse working as an aide while her credentials are reviewed (Statistics Canada). A workforce being held below its skill level isn’t a workforce winning a bidding war against you.
The honest version isn’t “they’re beating you.” It’s “they’re often being underpaid for skills we won’t fully recognize.” That hurts them, and a labour market that lets it happen hurts you too.
The part that’s fair
Let’s not flatten it. A fast surge of workers into one local trade or one region can soften wages there for a while — that’s a real, localized effect, and brushing it off would be dishonest. The point is proportion. It’s a temporary pressure at the margin, not the reason a generation’s pay stopped keeping up. When the supply of workers in a narrow field jumps faster than demand, the people most exposed are usually other low-wage workers, including recent immigrants themselves, who end up competing right alongside you.
What actually softened your paycheque
If you want the real lever, follow your bargaining power. The share of Canadian employees covered by a union fell from about 38% in 1981 to 28.6% by 2022 (Statistics Canada). Fewer unions means weaker leverage at the table, and weaker leverage means raises that lag the cost of living — for everyone on a paycheque.
That erosion wasn’t caused by the person who started at your workplace last month. It was a long string of policy and corporate choices that shifted power away from workers. The fix isn’t aiming your frustration sideways at someone as squeezed as you are. It’s aiming it at the structures that decided your time was worth less — and rebuilding the leverage that used to make a job feel like solid ground.