While Jonah Chininga, founder of Calgary-based fintech start-up Woveo, was growing up in Zimbabwe, it was in the midst of a hyper­inflation crisis where banks were printing trillion-dollar bank notes and unemployment rates were at 80 per cent. 

“Seeing how the economy we came from forced a lot of people to become dreamers and entrepreneurs—because jobs weren’t readily available, so you had to create them yourself—had a strong effect on me,” he says. 

That sentiment motivated Chininga to move to Canada in 2014. He completed his business and finance degree at the University of Prince Edward Island and, shortly after, started Woveo, a digital community wallet. The inspiration for it came naturally; Chininga experienced his fair share of financial challenges while attempting to start a business as an immigrant. 

“In Zimbabwe, a majority of the population is made up of Black Africans,” he explains. “In Canada, if you’re Black, you’re suddenly in the minority, and you belong to a group that is underserved, in which a large portion of your community is poor… There’s this sentiment in P.E.I. that, as an international student, the first 10 years of your career are going to be grunt work you didn’t study for—a call centre, taxi driving or other low-income jobs people take just to get their permanent residence status.”

Despite these setbacks, he found ways to build networks and connections to raise capital and create partnerships. By late 2023, Woveo was able to secure $1.3 million in pre-seed funding and $2.3 million in seed financing, making it a bona fide success. 

But Chininga hasn’t forgotten the blood and sweat he invested to build his company. As it turns out, innovating and building something of your own in Canada — a country with a worldwide reputation for being a land of promise — is “an uphill battle if you’re an immigrant.”

With Canada’s population having hit 41 million last April, in large part due to record-breaking immigration, hopeful newcomers might assume initiatives and resources have been established to help them thrive and more easily contribute to the country’s economy. But that’s not quite the case. In fact, according to the Business Development Bank of Canada, immigrant-owned businesses are more financially fragile than businesses run by Canadian-born entrepreneurs, and immigrant entrepreneurs tend to be less optimistic about the future. What’s more, while racialized people are more likely to become entrepreneurs in North America, they are also less likely to secure funding, especially if they are women—last year, a McKinsey and Company report found that “in 2022, Black and Latino founders received only 1 percent and 1.5 percent respectively of total U.S. venture capital funding. Women-founded teams received 1.9 percent of VC funds, and only 0.1 percent of VC funds went to Black and Latino women founders.” And amid an overall decline in start-up funding last year, BIPOC-owned companies are seeing a disproportionately large decline. According to Crunchbase, an online platform that offers insights into companies, funding data and market trends, “while total venture dollars in the U.S. fell 37 per cent last year, funding to Black-founded start-ups dropped a staggering 71 per cent.” 

“It’s immigrants who are more likely to start businesses,” says Chininga. “But our current financial system is not enabling those plans to come to fruition. It’s important to have infrastructure here that enables communities coming from outside Canada to have a ramp into the mainstream economy.”

For Chininga, that included having the business incubator system to help him network so that he could raise venture capital and secure bank partnerships. After all, upon arriving in Canada, starting from scratch also means a whole lot of introductions, shaking hands and swapping business cards—and reassuring some folks he’s here to contribute.

In addition, Canada’s cost of living is high. This means, he adds, that “it’s common to see immigrants forced into a system where they aren’t able to thrive, like with doctors who can’t access credit to pay $10,000 for the certification process they need to get licensed. They end up having to do Uber for 20 years just to make enough to survive.”   

These circumstances are particularly challenging considering a recent spike in anti-immigration sentiment recorded in Canada—a stark reversal of the increasingly positive attitudes that have governed public opinion for the last three decades, making change seem even less likely. 

Back in 2022, polls ranked support for immigration in Canada at an all-time high. By the fall of the following year, though, a handful of data-collection institutes (Nanos, Environics, Leger, Abacus) were reporting that upwards of 40 per cent of Canadians felt the country was accepting too many immigrants. At news outlets like CTV, BBC, Forbes and CIC News, political commentators and analysts have often characterized Canada’s immigration targets as “aggressive,” in part because we rely on economic immigration to fill labour shortages and grow our population. But it’s notable that Canadians seemed to have soured on the subject—and so suddenly. 

The federal government’s plan is to welcome 1.5 million new permanent residents by 2025. And among economists, journalists, policy analysts and researchers, opinion around our swelling immigration levels has been largely polarized. Some, like Lisa Lalande at Century Initiative and Livio Di Matteo at Lakehead University (both writing for The Globe and Mail), have said these influxes could be a boon for our aging population, as five million baby boomers prepare to retire in a country where immigration continues to account for almost 100 per cent of domestic labour force growth. Others, like National Bank economists Stéfane Marion and Alexandra Ducharme, expressed concern that the high volume of newcomers in such a brief time span could shock the country’s “absorptive capacity,” a term used by economists to describe a developing country’s ability to convert capital into productivity. 

“When immigration levels rise rapidly in Western democracies, it tends to correlate with a decline in public support,” says Kareem El-Assal, who has researched the economic impacts of immigration since 2010 and consults on policy advice for the Canadian Senate and Parliament. 

Similarly, studies have found a correlation between economic stress and racist or xenophobic attitudes toward newcomers. “People are blaming immigrants and saying they’re adding to inflationary pressures, despite our challenges not being at all unique to Canada—the whole world has been economically shocked by the pandemic,” El-Assal says. 

Anxiety related to our ongoing housing affordability crisis, and the question of how we can accept more people into our borders when we aren’t adequately housing those we already have, also seems to be playing a role. 

To eliminate the gap between demand and supply, the parliamentary budget officer has said that Canada would need to build an additional 1.3 million homes by 2030, about 181,000 more homes a year than are currently being built. 

“The dream of finishing your education and taking out a mortgage on an affordable home has been shattered in recent decades, and so there’s a lot of people lashing out at the government and calling into question their competency around immigration policy,” says El-Assal. “Unfortunately, the immigrants themselves are being implicated in that.”

Rebekah Young, head of inclusion and resilience economics at Scotiabank, echoes this sentiment. Immigration, she says, has become an “unfair lightning rod for all of Canada’s woes”—from productivity concerns and housing shortfalls to complaints about overcrowded classrooms and hospital wait times. 

Earlier this year, she co-authored a report on Canada’s immigration policy. In it, she argues that the problem is multi-faceted: Canada doesn’t have a planning ceiling on the top-line number of annual arrivals, or a plan around existing infrastructure, and doesn’t direct enough resources to newcomers in a way that would set them up for success once they’ve settled here.

“The challenges can be pretty wide-ranging, from language barriers to the recognition of foreign licences,” Young adds, noting that population growth, in isolation, does not bolster the economy.

It’s one thing to view immigration as a potential strategy for economic growth, but it’s a whole other to plan for and establish a system that can help those immigrants thrive and prove just how much of an asset they can be.

Our political calculus shifted toward the modern understanding that immigration could be used to attain a country’s social, cultural and economic objectives in 1967, when Canada became the first country to introduce a points-based immigration system, which awarded applicants based on age, language proficiency, level of education and work experience. Before 1967, “undesirable” newcomers were often rejected on the basis of race or ethnicity, but these were not included as factors in the points-based immigration system. Eventually, though, policymakers decided to encourage all businesspeople and entrepreneurs to immigrate here, as a means of counteracting declining fertility and the rising cost of health and social programs for aging citizens. 

But we still struggle to integrate new­comers into our economy, which, paradoxically, prevents them from using the specialized skills that earned them entry into the country. Canada does not recognize foreign credentials in many disciplines that desperately need workers, like health care, engineering and technology, and this is one reason why, according to StatsCan, 17.5 per cent of highly skilled immigrants who settle in Canada (many of them investors and entrepreneurs) tend to emigrate within 20 years of landing. 

Nobody is saying there are any easy solutions, but a good start, says Young, is to reset Canada’s immigration policy in the context of a broader productivity agenda, as opposed to administering a forceful immigration plan with no idea of how to support people once they get here. She says, “When we think about immigration, the objective shouldn’t just be to grow our economy. The overarching objective should be enhancing the welfare of Canadians.”

Until then, like so many other entrepreneurs of colour, Chininga is taking things into his own hands. For instance, Woveo operates by a rotating group savings model, so users can pool their savings and borrow from the fund when they need it. 

“It’s a common infrastructure in Africa and the Caribbean,” he explains. “Back home, the finance model is more savings-driven. In Canada, it’s credit-first, but newcomers to this country don’t arrive with any credit history, and so it’s incredibly hard for us to access any financing, because you have a high-risk profile and no credit score.” 

In other words, many newcomers can easily be exploited by high-interest costs when trying to access emergency credit. But with rotating group savings, they’re able to opt for an interest-free credit system. It’s considering details like these that can make all the difference. But if anti-immigration prevails, it could take even longer before widespread changes like these are implemented and at a greater scale. 

“To build wealth as an immigrant, you have to be as resilient as possible, and then just be able to tolerate all the pain that comes with the process, which is difficult for most people to do without a history of family money to leverage,” explains Chininga. “I’m trying to re-imagine the financial system in a way that accommodates us, one that provides credit to those who need it to thrive. Many immigrants are actually trying to enter the workforce as employers, which means creating jobs for other Canadians. We can challenge the status quo to allow more opportunity for this—so that newcomers aren’t left behind.”