Source: The Conversation – Canada
Canada likes to describe itself as a multicultural success story — a place where people from radically different backgrounds live side by side without much of the social turmoil seen elsewhere.
The usual explanation credits Canada’s points-based immigration system, its official multiculturalism policy or some deeper national tolerance for people’s differences.
To test this multicultural narrative, we conducted a study with two very different groups of recent arrivals in Canada — Ukrainians displaced by Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion and Afghan women who fled Taliban rule. We found something less flattering to that official story.
What seems to smooth the path to multicultural belonging isn’t a celebration of cultural difference. It’s the fact that many newcomers already share a middle-class identity, or the aspiration to reclaim one, regardless of where they came from.
Downwardly mobile
We interviewed 80 people who arrived in Canada in 2023: 45 Ukrainians who came through the federal emergency travel program set up after the invasion, and 35 Afghan women who arrived through Canada’s Afghan resettlement stream.
On paper, these two groups of people have little in common: different regions, religions, migration pathways and reasons for leaving. What united them, again and again in our interviews, was how they described themselves before they left: as middle-class people with steady jobs, homes, education, and a recognizable place in their own society’s professional life.
That self-description didn’t disappear on arrival, but the way Canada received them didn’t always honour it. A lawyer from Kyiv finds her degree unrecognized and ends up in working in retail stores; an Afghan dentist faces the same obstacles. We heard this story over and over: people with the education and work history to back up their middle-class identity being funnelled into working-class jobs while they rebuilt their lives in Canada.
What’s striking is what these downwardly mobile arrivals still had going for them, and it wasn’t tied simply to nationality or culture. Above all, it was the benefits of their middle-class life before coming to Canada: English learned well before migration, prior experience travelling or living outside their home country, and, perhaps most importantly, networks of family, friends or diaspora contacts already established in Canada who could vouch for them to landlords and employers.
These are the practical tools that help newcomers turn a difficult transition into a survivable one, hoping to become middle-class again. They share this middle-class aspiration with many native-born Canadians.
Class, not just culture
We think this self-perception is worth contemplating, because it’s at odds with a comfortable assumption inherent in discussions about multiculturalism: that Canada preserves its social fabric mainly by celebrating difference, and that this celebration is what keeps the social fabric intact.
Our interviews suggest something more mundane and more selective is happening underneath the multicultural branding. People who arrive already resemble a Canadian middle-class template. Like most Canadians, the newcomers we interviewed are credentialed, English-speaking, mobile and networked and have an easier time being “legible,” or easily understood and categorized, by many institutions outside of Québec.
Multiculturalism, therefore, isn’t really about managing radical differences. It’s about smoothing over fairly minor cultural differences, insofar as Canadian immigration and refugee systems filter for people who are already compatible with the Canadian ideal of being and acting middle-class.
Canada’s emergency and resettlement programs, like its immigration system more broadly, don’t admit a random cross-section of Ukrainian or Afghan society. They tend to favour people with education, professional experience, language skills or existing ties to Canada — the very same traits that emerged as the connective tissue in our interviews.
In other words, the “shared values” newcomers are so often expected to possess may have less to do with adopting Canadian culture after arrival and more to do with already holding a class position and mentality that made them compatible with Canadian institutions in the first place.
What about those who aren’t middle class?
None of this means Canada’s approach to refugees and displaced people is a sham, or that these newcomers’ hardships aren’t real.
Many of the people we spoke with had lost careers, homes and social standing, and were doing difficult work to rebuild their lives. But it does suggest a harder question sits beneath Canadian multiculturalism: if a shared middle-class status or identity is really what makes integration feel smooth, what happens to people who don’t arrive with a university degree, fluent English or a cousin already settled in Vancouver or Toronto?
Our findings point to a multiculturalism where diversity is welcomed, but only once it’s been pre-filtered by class, leaving the deeper, more uncomfortable version of diversity still waiting to be tested.
Aryan Karimi receives funding from SSHRC.
Sophie Xiaoyi Liu and Thomas Kemple do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/07/canadas-multicultural-success-story-is-built-on-class-inequalities-not-just-cultural-differences/