“Is Canada’s approach to immigration ‘a beacon to the world’ or is it ‘a disaster in the making’?” Kelley, Reitz and Trebilcock pose this question at the end of their new book, Reshaping the Mosaic: Canadian Immigration Policy in the Twenty-First Century (365), which narrates the past 25 years of policy changes related to admissions, deportation and citizenship. Over the past decade in particular, the Trudeau government overhauled admissions policy: roughly doubling permanent immigration and tripling temporary immigration. Initially viewed by experts and advocates as a welcome liberalization of policy after the introduction of restrictive measures by the Harper government, that perception has quickly shifted. Canadian public opinion has reacted negatively to these rapid changes and their social impacts. This book traces in detail how policy has changed over the past 10–25 years, and what some of the consequences have been.

Reshaping the Mosaic is not only an account of recent changes to Canadian immigration policy; it grounds this narrative within historical context. Two of the authors, Kelley and Trebilcock, are also the co-authors of the widely cited, and still unparalleled book, Making the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy. Reitz, a sociologist, is a leading scholar of Canadian immigration policy and its impacts on employment and inter-group relations. Their collaboration situates contemporary immigration policy changes within a historical perspective that extends back to Confederation. The book is an easy choice for professors looking to assign a straightforward public policy text on Canadian immigration to upper-year undergraduates. It consolidates a vast field of knowledge into accessible prose, organized with easy-to-follow sub-headings and footnotes. It would provide an interesting paired reading with the recent book by Abu-Laban, Tungohan and Gabriel: Containing Diversity: Canada and the Politics of Immigration in the 21 ^st Century (UTP 2022), which adopts a more critical analysis of the same subject and time period.

The organization of the book is in three parts. The first part is “an historical reprise,” condensing much of Making the Mosaic’s 500 pages into 50 pages of history. The second part focuses on recent changes in admissions policy, with chapters devoted to each of the main policy streams: economic, family and humanitarian. The chapter on the economic stream is an especially helpful primer on recent changes to Canada’s human capital-focused points system, which now emphasizes Canadian experience, occupation and employer sponsorship. The third part examines membership and belonging, with chapters on deportation, integration and citizenship. Here there is more legal analysis, and we see the courts as an increasingly influential constraint on immigration policy-making. An appendix includes several helpful tables that illustrate the recent changes presented by the authors.

Reshaping the Mosaic is a public intervention as much as, or perhaps more than, an academic one. While it is rooted in academic literature, it takes a light touch with academic jargon and sources. It cites widely from media sources and government reports, giving it a strong contemporary currency and immediate relevance to policy discussions. The core contention of the book is an appeal for greater public engagement with the immigrant policy-making process. The authors call for more public data to be released, for experts to be more readily consulted, and for policy changes to be debated in parliamentary committees. They assume that such engagement facilitates public support for the government’s policy goals and increases the legitimacy of immigration policy changes.

University of Toronto Press has published the book as part of a series called UTP Insights, which offers “accessible introductions to the ideas that shape our world.” As an introduction to the main contours of contemporary Canadian immigration policy, one could hardly do better. However, it overlooks the excellent work of some of Canada’s best young scholars working on immigration policy, such as Antje Ellermann, Mireille Paquet and Jennifer Elrick, just to name a few. They have shown how the structure of Canadian institutions insulates immigration decision-making processes from public pressures. And while this may limit public input, it also enables policy innovation by bureaucrats who are unconstrained by the fear of inflaming blowback. In addition, the book would benefit from a deeper examination of the role of specific interest groups (including businesses, universities and colleges) in lobbying decision-makers, driving the uncontrolled rise of temporary immigration. Although the authors of the book call for greater public engagement, it is unclear whether more public engagement would necessarily lead to better immigration policy. More expert advice, responsiveness to public opinion or interest group engagement may not, in and of themselves, produce better policy outcomes.

Kelley, Reitz and Trebilcock have done us a service by drawing on their decades of knowledge and practical engagement with policy to author this book. It fills a longstanding gap within the policy literature and provides an essential and up-to-date analysis of the rapid and consequential changes to Canadian immigration policy under the governments of Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper. Only time will answer the question they pose at the end of their book: whether Canadian policy will be a “a beacon to the world” or “a disaster in the making.”