You are in Texas or anywhere along the U.S. border with Mexico. Sooner or later, you’ll hear the favourite local gripe — Latinos. Indulge the complainants and some will let it slip that they hire the same illegals to work at their homes or businesses, dirt cheap, under a tacit “don’t ask, don’t tell” deal.

Pay attention to the politics of the topic and you will notice that the politicians who sound the toughest on the topic — seal the border, jail the fence jumpers, cheer the American vigilante posses — are mum on the idea of making it illegal for Americans to employ illegal Mexicans. Fine them. Send them to jail. But no, it’s easier to keep the hypocrisy going.

In Canada, you don’t need to hire illegals. You can get cheap labour courtesy of the Government of Canada, via the temporary foreign workers program.

You can bring the temps quickly from overseas. You can legally pay them between 15 and 5 per cent less than the going wage.

Under Stephen Harper’s watch, temporary foreign workers have tripled, from 140,000 to 338,000. The total may be more like 500,000, if you add those who may have gone underground at the end of their temporary visas, plus the refugee claimants and foreign students who have work permits.

This at a time when there are 1.3 million unemployed, a high percentage of them educated young Canadians who are having trouble landing their first job. Also, too many of the 250,000 immigrants that Harper is bringing every year by the normal route cannot find jobs commensurate with the education and skills for which they were selected.

This makes sense only as a policy to depress wages across the board, weaken worker rights and make it easy for businesses that barely look for Canadians to fill vacancies, let alone train new hires. Between 2007 and 2011, nearly a third of all net new jobs were filled with temporary workers.

The biggest category of foreign workers are the low-skilled, toiling in the service sector.

That suggests Canadians won’t do those menial jobs, at least for the wages offered. Hence Harper has tightened employment insurance benefits in tandem with opening the floodgates for foreign temps — and allowing more of them to stay for longer periods, on four-year visas rather than two years. Even farmers and agribusinesses are switching their seasonal foreign workers to the new program because it has less oversight.

Why not bring in immigrants willing to do low-end jobs, rather than PhDs and other degree-holders who can’t find suitable jobs?

The argument against that is that we need highly educated people to fill the labour/skills shortages being created as the baby boomers (those born between 1947 and 1966) are beginning to retire and the American economy begins to pick up.

That’s fine as a broad principle, says immigration expert Naomi Alboim of Queen’s University. Employers also need low-end skills. Why not a mix of high-end and low-end skills among immigrants, rather than rely increasingly on temporary workers?

Most temporary foreign workers are not allowed to bring families or apply for permanent immigration status. Many are abused at work. “There are countless harrowing stories from thousands of people facing threats from employers and labour brokers, toiling on poverty wages in unsafe work places and living in horrendous conditions,” says Karl Flecker of Canadian Labour Congress. Given that, most have little commitment to Canada.

Permanent immigrants do. More than 80 per cent become citizens. Even if they don’t do well, their children do and become productive citizens. That’s why our immigration policy has been a successful citizenship policy.

But Jason Kenney, minister of immigration and citizenship, has reduced himself to the role of chief headhunter for businesses.

“Immigration should not be a job recruitment exercise,” says Alboim. “It’s a long-term nation-building exercise.”

Busy with headhunting, Kenney wrecked the regular immigrant stream. He tossed out 98,000 applicants (representing 278,391 people) lined up around the world for the federal skilled program. (Curious for a politician who caters to a constituency that routinely attacks refugee claimants as “queue jumpers.”) He has since also placed a moratorium on both investor and entrepreneur visa programs, and reduced the parent/grandparent sponsorship.

Faced with public anger at the temporary foreign worker program, Harper is set to “reform” it. He should get rid of it. Consider instead expanding the immigration to 300,000 or more a year to meet the needs for both high and low skills, says Alboim.

Kenney says he fears a public backlash.

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But he has increased the numbers by stealth, anyway, and in a manner that has serious long-term implications for Canada.

Alboim: “Why doesn’t the minister ask the same Canadians who are opposed to higher immigration, whether they favour flooding the country with more temporary workers?”

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