“Pick a name,” says one of the two London activists I’m walking down Grosvenor Road with. “We don’t use our real names for safety purposes.” I barely think about it. “Canada?” I propose. They burst into laughter. Apparently, choosing a colonizer-sounding code name is funny. In the end, I go by “Morocco.” Not subtle, but I’m not an activist, and the scene is pretty new to me. It’s early August, and I’m in town during the anti-immigrant riots in the UK, visiting a Londoner who also happens to be an activist—one of the two I’m walking with. They’ve invited me to join what’s known as “patrolling” in the predominantly racialized community of Forest Gate, in the London borough of Newham. We check in to make sure residents and business owners are safe.
While it’s warm and humid, the sky is still typically overcast. Everyone we talk to is on edge, prepared. The day before, a message that had been spreading on underground social media groups leaked to the media; it revealed a “hit list” of thirty-eight planned targets for that evening. It had been put together by far-right activists and captioned: “THEY WON’T STOP COMING UNTIL YOU TELL THEM . . . NO MORE IMMIGRATION. 8PM. MASK UP.” The targets included immigration centres, immigration lawyers’ homes, and asylum support charities in London and nearby towns. The police and the media are treating the information as a “credible threat.”
I’ve been in London for only twenty-four hours at this point, and I’m still catching up on the news. My shock is compounded by the fact that, as an immigrant, I’ve never felt truly unsafe in Canada. I never imagined I’d feel unsafe in the UK either.
A week prior, in Southport, a seaside town in Northern England brimming with tourists and entertainment, a teenager had gone on a mass stabbing spree at a children’s Taylor Swift–themed dance and yoga workshop. He killed three girls between the ages of six and nine and injured eight other children and two adults. The suspect, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, a then seventeen-year-old British citizen born in Cardiff to Christian Rwandan parents, was arrested soon afterward and eventually charged. But after individuals online claimed he was a Muslim and a refugee who snuck into the country illegally, enraged protesters took to the streets, vandalized a local mosque with bricks, bottles, and rocks, and clashed with the police. Over the next few days, far-right anti-immigrant riots targeting the Muslim community and asylum seekers, including at venues such as mosques and hotels housing refugees, spread nationwide. Sky News reported that a growing number of countries, including Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia, warned their citizens to stay away from the UK.
“What you witnessed, that’s not normal for London,” says Tupac Katari (a code name) over a phone call a few weeks later, when I’m back in Quebec. A self-described anti-fascism activist whom I’ve been introduced to by my activist friend, Katari says she’s supported various causes, starting with anti-war protests against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. “For the first time in twenty-four years [of living in London], I was scared to leave my house,” she tells me. Katari, who’s British and Indian, is visibly identifiable as a racialized person.
The “thugs,” as they are frequently described in media, owe their existence to the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been increasing in the UK over the past few years. In the mid-2000s, this was led by groups like the far-right English Defence League, an influential group which had declined in popularity by 2017 but left a legacy of Islamophobia and racism. Their rhetoric has continued to thrive, fuelling new generations of extremists and perpetuating anti-immigrant violence. EDL founder Tommy Robinson, for example, tends to post provocative video messages for his 1 million followers on X, where he attacks Muslims and immigrants.
I had two persistent thoughts while we patrolled that night in London: First, how can a far-right movement, in a place as progressive and multicultural as London, be so emboldened as to hunt down refugees and Muslims and succeed in terrorizing a large swath of the country? And second: that this could never happen in Canada. Except that it could.
“There’s lots of gasoline in Canada for a far-right movement,” says Christopher Cochrane, author of Left and Right: The Small World of Political Ideas and associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. “But what we don’t have, as some European countries have had, seems to be somebody really, effectively, running around with a torch.” We haven’t had a single far-right agitator who points a finger directly at immigrants as the cause of our economic or systemic problems. Somebody like Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, or Donald Trump, who won the US election after calling immigrants rapists and animals and accusing them of “poisoning the blood of our country,” among other things. For now, that is.
Cochrane draws an important distinction between anti-immigration and anti-immigrant stances in daily discourse. In his view, being anti-immigration refers to questioning or opposing policies that allow immigration, typically focusing on limiting or stopping the flow of new immigrants into a country for reasons like protecting jobs. Being anti-immigrant, on the other hand, reflects hostility and prejudice toward immigrants themselves. The latter is rooted in xenophobia and involves targeting communities who are already immigrants, rather than just criticizing policies. “There’ll be people on the right who are saying: Yes, immigrants are ruining this country. Look at what’s happening with this system. You know that’s going to happen. But then there will also be people, I think, [who] are sort of left leaning, who are going to [argue] that any criticism of immigration is a criticism of immigrants and a criticism of multiculturalism,” says Cochrane. The best place to be, I’m learning, is somewhere in the middle.
According to Cochrane, whose research focuses on Canadian politics, ideology, and political disagreement, no one can pinpoint exactly how racist movements built on the ideologies of nativism and xenophobia truly start. But there are common elements that contribute to the rise of far-right thinking. Factors that are starting to sound unsettlingly familiar and real in Canada, and particularly in Quebec, where I live. One of them is a general decline in quality of life. “And if people are getting poor, and their prospects are getting poorer over time, there’s a literature, and I think a good body of evidence, to suggest that people can become a bit more competitive and parochial, and they’re also less convinced by arguments that, for example, immigration increases the economic success of the country, even if it’s true at a time when their economic prospects are declining,” says Cochrane.
To the aggrieved, it starts to matter less that, in large part due to immigration, Canada has matched the US over the past decade in maintaining an average GDP growth rate of slightly above 2 percent, outperforming the G7 average of 1.4 percent, according to TD Economics data. Or that the 2021 census showed that a quarter of all health care workers in Canada are immigrants.
Historically, Canadians didn’t see newcomers as competing for their jobs, the way that some workers in parts of the UK and the US do, because Canada’s points-based immigration system favoured specialized and skilled workers—including me—with high language proficiency, education levels, or extensive work experience. That policy, says Cochrane, has “radically changed in the last three or four years.” Now, Canada’s immigration process seems built to recruit temporary foreign workers, who typically compete for unskilled labour. “We now have, in Canada . . . very direct competition for wages,” says Cochrane, “which is often associated in many other countries with the rise of far-right movements.”
It takes a specific intersection of factors to trigger an anti-immigrant movement, Cochrane learned through his research. People can experience economic misery, and it doesn’t make them xenophobic or anti-immigrant; people can also be exposed to anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric, and that still doesn’t make them anti-immigrant or xenophobic. “But when they’re economically miserable, their conditions are poor, and they’re exposed to messaging that says, ‘Immigrants are to blame for your misery,’ that’s when people are really susceptible,” he says.
In Quebec, in particular, policy shifts have been slowly creating tension. While politicians aren’t openly anti-immigrant like Trump, ever since the Coalition Avenir Québec rose to power in 2018, they’ve been passing legislation that targets immigrants. Bill 21, which bans certain public servants, like teachers and police officers, from wearing religious symbols, has been criticized for its discriminatory effect on religious minorities, especially those from Muslim and Sikh communities, many of whom are immigrants. Bill 9 reformed Quebec’s immigration system by giving the government more control over who is selected for permanent residency and has led to the cancellation of roughly 16,000 applications. Such decisions, naturally, make immigrants feel marginalized or unwelcome. And, more critically, they encourage a false sense of who Quebecers are. The province has a long history of nationalist movements, like the Parti Québécois, focusing on preserving Quebec’s French language and culture. That’s not inherently far right, but it does intersect with concerns over immigration and cultural preservation, fuelling more xenophobic or exclusionary narratives, especially when framed as a threat to Quebec’s unique identity.
But who does the province really need to be protected from? Though Quebec has, over the years, maintained a strong social democratic tradition, we can’t discount the fact that there are sticky elements in la belle province’s political and social landscape—ultra nationalism, heated debates over secularism, and rising concerns about immigration—that could be easily exploited by far-right bad actors.
One way to shield Quebec, or Canada as a whole, from xenophobia is to understand who Canadians actually are. “What does it mean to be a Canadian when we say ‘we Canadians’? It includes people who weren’t born here. It includes people who have different religions,” Cochrane says. Maybe being anti-immigration is different from being anti-immigrant, but it feels like a slippery slope. It’s hard for me not to bristle whenever anyone says anything critical about immigration. Policy moves like cutting down on immigration may seem like a mechanical process meant to rectify economic issues—a numbers thing. But for immigrants, it is deeply personal.
To be a racialized person in one’s own country and to be seen as a problem—a target to be eliminated—“feels really, really shit, and terrifying and saddening,” says Katari. In the wake of the UK’s anti-immigrant riots, “people were looking over their shoulder and at the person across on the tube going, ‘Are they dodgy?’” She recalls that her neighbour, “who is fully [veiled], saying she still feels scared to go to Tesco.”
Katari says, in the past few months, the national mood has been contemplative. The conversations she’s been part of have been about understanding what happened and how to move forward. People are coming to understand that agitators took advantage of long-standing tensions surrounding immigration, particularly heightened by the recent increase of migrants entering the country illegally by crossing the English Channel in inflatable boats. Frustrations were also intensified by the previous government’s decision to house asylum seekers in facilities like hotels—which cost £2.5 billion between 2022 and 2024—amidst deteriorating public services and economic inequality exacerbated by the government’s policies. There’s been a growing “left behind” feeling among the working class and in rural areas. “I’m sure these communities feel like there’s nothing for them,” Katari says. “[The riots] came out of political rhetoric and Islamophobia that’s been building, but [they] also came from lack.”
The violence this past summer, which was some of Britain’s worst in years, led to hundreds of arrests after the government threatened to use the “full force of the law.” And the evening I spent patrolling with activists felt reassuring. That night and for days afterward, thousands of people of all backgrounds and races showed up in favour of immigrants and refugees.
Be that as it may, the events left a real mark. “It’s not because we’re here . . . or we’ve got a British passport [that we’re safe],” says Katari. “And although it’s heartening that they came out in defence of us, [the rioting] never should have happened.”
