TOI correspondent from Washington: MAGA supremo Donald Trump looked north on Wednesday morning and discovered that Canada has too many immigrants.Canadians might look south and discover something to contest: Although Canada takes in more immigrants per capita, the US takes in three times as many legal immigrants – and both countries seem particularly fond of Indians, the Asian type, who rank #1 in Canada and #2 in the US in legal immigration inflow.“Canada is destroying itself by allowing millions and millions of people into the Country, essentially unchecked and unvetted,” Trump declared in one of his customary social media outbursts, hours after railing that the United Nations was ceaselessly promoting mass migration that was destroying Western cultural heritage.He warned that immigrants to Canada were “causing problems that will soon be too big to handle,” attributing it to a “Liberal takeover” that would “end very badly.”There is, however, a small problem with the arithmetic, which is not exactly an American strength (Canada ranks substantially above the US in maths scores determined by the OECD’s PISA tests).Ottawa does not admit “millions and millions” and the allegation that they are entering “essentially unchecked and unvetted” is typical Trump bunkum. In fact, Canada’s only land border is with the US!According to official data, Canada admitted about 483,640 permanent residents in 2024, a record. But Ottawa has since been reducing the numbers, and its 2026-28 plan is explicitly designed to bring immigration back toward what the government calls sustainable levels. Meanwhile, the US, granted 1.4 million green cards in fiscal 2024, three times Canada’s permanent-resident intake. In 2023, the US figure was 1.17 million.Of course, Canada simply has far fewer people over a much larger area. So with roughly 42 million residents versus America’s 340 million-plus, Canada’s 483,000 permanent residents represented about 1.16% of its population in 2024 compared to 0.4 per cent for the US.The two countries also differ in why they admit them. The US immigration system remains heavily family-based.Of the roughly 1.4 million people receiving green cards in FY2024, 49% were immediate relatives of US citizens and another 14% entered through family-preference categories. Only about 13% were employer-sponsored or self-petitioned employment-based immigrants.Canada offers a mirror image. In 2024, 58% of its permanent residents entered through economic programs, compared with 22% through family reunification and 20% through refugee, humanitarian and other categories. In other words, Canada is not exactly throwing open the door; its system is explicitly designed to select workers for economic and labour-market needs.For Indians, the distinction is particularly striking. India was Canada’s largest source of new permanent residents, with about 127,000 Indians obtaining permanent residence in 2024. India has also been the leading source country in recent Canadian immigration, accounting for 18.6% of immigrants who arrived during the five years preceding the 2021 census.And Canada’s immigration statistics offer an awkward rebuttal to the idea that immigrants are simply arriving to cause trouble.Statistics Canada found that immigrants played a major role in filling engineering jobs: recent immigrants who landed in 2018-19 were twice as likely as Canadian-born workers to be employed full-time as engineers, while roughly three-quarters of recent immigrant engineers entered through economic programs.Across the border, the Indian contribution is equally conspicuous. Some 3.2 million Indian immigrants live in the US, making Indians the country’s second-largest immigrant group after Mexicans.In FY2024, Indians received 71% of all H-1B visas for highly skilled workers; India was also America’s leading source of international students in 2024-25, most in STEM fields.All this makes the current immigration argument rather more complicated than Trump’s red-blooded rhetoric.The same Indian talent pool can apparently be a demographic menace one day for one section in one country and a skilled workforce another day for another section of employers in another country.Trump’s rhetoric, that uncontrolled migration is destroying Western countries, their heritage and ultimately Western civilization, has become a recurring theme lately.Immigration scholars have characterized the language as racialized and xenophobic, pointing to his repeated association of migration, which is as old as human civilization, with invasion, criminality and national decline, none of which is borne out by hard facts or data.