Restrictive immigration policies may be cooling foreign interest in Canadian jobs, Indeed says

Canada’s own efforts to tighten immigration is cooling foreign interest in Canadian jobs.

New research from Indeed Inc. said that foreign job seeker interest in Canadian jobs has plummeted by more than half since its recent peak in 2023 and broadly coinciding with Canada’s shift toward a tighter temporary-immigration policy.

Accounting for eight per cent of all clicks on Canadian job postings in 2023, the foreign share dropped to three per cent by September 2026, according to its report based on data from job seekers in 254 countries and overseas territories.

“The decline is a natural and perhaps even intended consequence of policymakers’ direct actions,” wrote Indeed’s Sneha Puri. However, this also has downstream effects, including a tighter labour supply, slowing population growth and potentially diminished spending, she said.

In January 2024, Canadian officials began capping international study permits, aiming for a 35 per cent reduction from 2023 levels. This cap was reduced the following year and subsequently extended through 2026.

The federal government’s explicit targets for temporary residents, like students and workers on temporary visas, resulted in fewer study and work permits issued, which meant fewer prospective migrants with an immediate reason to search for Canadian jobs, the report said.

In 2023, as many as 308,000 non-permanent residents were added in a single quarter. This trend has since reversed. The same group shrank in five of the seven quarters through mid-2026, sometimes by nearly 80,000 people per quarter.

By contrast, permanent immigration stayed relatively steady over the same period.

Temporary residents have supplied a meaningful share of the workforce in recent years, with a higher labour force participation rate. The report said a smaller inflow of this population may ease some localized pressures on housing and public services, but it also reduces the number of people available to enter the workforce.

Industries that have leaned most heavily on temporary workers and international students, such as accommodation and food services, retail and agriculture, are likely to feel the squeeze first.

Indeed said its data on job seeker-clicks has previously been shown to track actual migration patterns across OECD countries. It suggested that the decline in foreign job-search activity may point to further slowdowns in actual arrivals.

The sustained decline is consistent with the country becoming less accessible, and potentially less attractive, to temporary migrants than it was just a few years ago, it said.

The report also said that job seekers from the United States represented only 21 per cent of foreign clicks on Canadian jobs in the third quarter, down from a post-pandemic high of 28 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2024, coinciding with the deterioration in the U.S.-Canada trade relationship.

This shows a shift in who is still looking for jobs in Canada. The declining U.S. share means a comparatively larger share is coming from other parts of the world, it said. As of the third quarter, the largest share of foreign interest came from Asia rather than the U.S., as it has since the first quarter of 2018.

“Canada’s tighter temporary-immigration policy is doing what it was designed to do, but its effects will not stop at its intended targets,” wrote Puri. “Managing these trade-offs, rather than treating lower inflows as a pure win, will be the central challenge for policymakers in the years ahead.”