While I agree with most of the comments in this thread so far, in terms of Trump can go fuck himself, the sentiment he’s expressing does have some merit. Using such statements is one way right-wing extremists have found in roads to more moderate people – and blatant rejection of such concerns helps to drive wedges between progressives and moderates.

Our own auditor general released a report stating that we had about 75,000 cases of reported student visa fraud per year for a bit, of which our government was able to investigate about 2,000 per year. And the only reason we were able to do 2000 per year, is that the government gave up on about 1000 of those investigations after the student… didn’t answer the phone call. This was during the post pandemic surge of immigration, which was largely from India. We now have significantly increased presence of groups like the Bishnoi gang in Vancouver, with things like extortion from such groups becoming a fairly common issue.

Trudeau’s immigration surge triggered a backlash from the public, as many of our public institutions came under strain – wait times for things like medical procedures sky rocketed, in part because we were welcoming in huge numbers of people, without considering whether our systems could actually support the extra load. Even mundane things, like in Vancouver, many of the local hiking areas now have much stricter reservation systems for visitors, and are often heavily populated by recent immigrant ethnic groups who are openly antagonistic to others. The feds, to their credit at least, realised that the anger from the public on this front wasn’t just ‘imagined’, so they put in much stricter caps / restrictions on various immigration channels, which are generally still in place today – after they put those caps in, rent prices and housing prices have been coming down every year. It was amazing to see how Marc Miller’s messaging dramatically changed pre and post 2024, as he went from saying “we need as many immigrants as possible, they prop up our economy!” to “we need to limit immigrants, they’re causing too much strain on the system, ruining affordability, and hurting our economy!”.

Glancing at Miller’s wiki page, there’re even notes about folks like

Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi, who was made a citizen of Canada after he had beheaded someone on film when he was part of the terrorist group ISIS in 2018. Eldidi would have gone unnoticed until a tip from police in France notified the RCMP of a conspiracy to terrorize Canadians while the 2024 Paris Olympics were ongoing. Eldidi and his son were apprehended with bombs at a hotel in Toronto on July 28 and charged with terrorism, possession of weapons and conspiracy to commit murder for the Islamic State

Letting in people who behead folks on camera for a religious terrorist state – someone who had planned to murder a bunch more Canadians, and who was only caught due to a tip from a foreign intelligence service… generally lends credibility to a statement like “Canada’s destroying itself” (accepting people who are actively planning to carry out terrorist attacks against Canadians), by welcoming “people unchecked” (we had no idea who he was / what he’d done till someone else explicitly warned us).

Immigrants also generally need time to acclimatize to the local culture / norms, and to integrate into the ‘regular’ job market – Canada’s done a poor job on this front in recent decades. Immigrants working in immigration fields, and/or in cultural areas that are restricted to their own ethnic group, are not fulfilling their potential for general Canadians. Our population growth is almost entirely driven by immigration - in recent years, it’s been 100%, but even for decades before that (generations before that), we’ve had like 90%+ of our population growth be through immigration. The majority of those immigrants, are people who qualify for equity program benefits, and are higher cost to tax payers / locally born Canadians. We’ve seen the visible minority population of Canada go from 5%, in 1981, to about 27-30% in 2026 due to the Governments approach to immigration - that’s a huge shift to occur within the lifespan of the millennial generation. The only locally born demographic that’s growing, are First Nations – who we still view as disadvantaged and needing more help, relative to other demos that are atrophying. We are a country that, without a constant stream of immigrants coming in, would have a declining population – we are not self-sustaining, we are where family trees go to whither and die.

Point being, there are clearly issues on this front. There are data points that can be highlighted to support the general sentiment of Trumps comment. Dismissing the sentiment/concern offhand, just because we don’t like the messenger, doesn’t help.

Is Trumps statement hyperbolic? Yes. Is Trump a shithead? Also yes. Is his comment entirely inaccurate? No.