Anti-Immigration Movements Gain Ground in Canada, Ireland and Beyond
From Canada to Europe, citizens are pushing back against migration because of concerns over crime, welfare dependency, and the broader fiscal burden. Photo courtesy of CBC.
A Canadian group is being called racist for pushing back against immigration, but they have legitimate grounds to believe the country would benefit from mass deportations.
Statistics Canada’s “immigrant generation” measure shows 44% of Canadians are first- or second-generation, either immigrants themselves or Canadian-born children of at least one immigrant parent. This includes 26.4% first generation and 17.6% second generation, with the combined share projected to reach 49.8% to 54.3% by 2041. Canada was home to 755 mosques as of December 2024; no reliably sourced count exists for 30 years earlier for comparison.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) reports the incidence of social assistance among immigrants is stable at 6%, below the national average of 8%. On crime, no Canadian government or think-tank source, left or right, publishes data broken down by immigrant origin the way Denmark and Sweden do.
That 6% figure comes from Statistics Canada’s “immigrant” category, which does not include non-permanent residents, a separate classification covering work and study permit holders and asylum claimants. Once granted status, Protected Persons claimed social assistance at 39% in their first year in Canada, declining to 20% after ten years. These rates are several times higher than the general immigrant figure but are reported under a separate legal category rather than folded into it.
Labor force data shows similar variation by origin. Most immigrant groups in Canada have female participation rates between 60% and 80%, but Statistics Canada research found that women from Pakistan fall below 50%. A peer-reviewed study using linked Statistics Canada survey data found that women from the Middle East and North Africa have the lowest labor force participation of any immigrant group, an effect the researchers attributed to source-country gender norms rather than religion specifically.
More broadly, racialized immigrant women had a 77% labor force participation rate and a 12% unemployment rate in 2021, the lowest and highest rates, respectively, among all immigrant groups measured.
The Fraser Institute estimated Canada’s net fiscal burden from immigration at over $6,000 per capita in 2005/06, totaling $16.3 to $23.6 billion that year.
This is where the Dominion Society of Canada comes in. The nationalist group is drawing national attention for a plan to deport millions of people. Its rise is part of a wider anti-immigration pattern of mobilization spreading across Western democracies, including a loosely organized protest movement against asylum accommodation in Ireland that has grown steadily since 2022.
The Dominion Society has scheduled a national conference, “DomCon 2026,” for August 29 in the Hamilton, Ontario, area. The group was founded on July 1, 2025, by Daniel Tyrie, a former executive director of the People’s Party of Canada, along with Greg Wycliffe and Ken Jones. It is registered as a non-profit corporation with an office in Ottawa. Members can join for a $25 fee.
The group advocates what it calls “remigration” of an estimated five million to nine million people, a category that includes temporary foreign workers, permanent residents, and people born in Canada to non-Canadian citizen parents.
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network reported that Dominion Society had roughly 1,600 registered members in October 2025, and by summer 2026, Dominion Society itself claimed roughly 3,000 members while raising hundreds of thousands of dollars. Evan Balgord, who directs the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, told CBC that Dominion Society likely has thousands of members, mostly young white men and boys.