Here in Zimbabwe, where I live, you can’t scroll social media or go on Facebook or WhatsApp chats without being bombarded by ads encouraging people to emigrate to Canada.
In one YouTube video that recently popped up on my feed, a grinning young woman looks into the camera.
“Hi! If you’re looking for the easiest and the most accessible way to emigrate to Canada, give me 30 seconds of your time,” she says.
Another ad promises “an extremely limited once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to relocate to Canada this year.
It’s become so widespread there’s even a trending term for it: “Japa.”
In the Nigerian Yoruba language, it means to “run away or escape.”
Across the continent, online “Japa consultants” are drawing tens of thousands of eyeballs every day promising scholarships, visas, work permits, and asylum advice to would-be Canadian emigrants in Africa.
Forget about anywhere else, they tell us, and make sure you choose Canada. It’s the “only place where the American Dream” is still alive, and the “best place to build a family on Earth.”
The pull of the sales pitch is so enticing that many African emigrants already settled in countries like Germany, England, or Spain still strive to relocate to Canada.
The pitch, however, is hollow. Sold by immigration consultants and social media influencers, it preys on soaring poverty and desperation among African youth. It’s presenting a fake image of a welcoming Canada that is a supposedly less racist alternative—and hiding the reality of Black African migration to the country.
With a booming population, Africa is expected to make up more than 40 per cent of the world’s youth by 2030—meaning the Japa industry’s exploitation could only grow.
A chance to make money selling Canada
Like many other Africans, I too have an application underway in the Canada Immigration and Citizenship system, hoping to arrive in Canada as a permanent resident in several months.
The African diaspora in Canada has more than tripled in the last 20 years—growing from 300,000 people in 2000 to 1.3 million in 2021, according to StatsCan.
Unfortunately, with growing numbers also comes growing exploitation. What drives the influencers is money—an opportunity to charge mentorship, consultation and guidance fees for clients hungry for any sort of Canadian visa. For influencers operating on YouTube and Twitter, an added incentive is views, follows, and a chance to monetize their audience.
Last year, on a Facebook page, I even saw a photo of a close friend in Canada used without their consent—and falsely deployed in an ad describing a “happy client, a recent Japa immigrant just arrived in Canada.”
Online Japa scams are willing to go to this extent—stealing people’s photographs for marketing an artificially sanitized image of Canada.
The so-called Canadian dream
But news from Canada increasingly shows that the “Japa” sales pitch seriously misinforms would-be immigrants about the reality in the country.
First, there is a disproportionately high visa refusal rate for Black Africans applying to go to Canada. An inquiry by Canada’s Senate in 2018 revealed that only 26 percent of study visas from Africa were approved, against a global average of 60 percent. In the five years since, approval for Africans has only marginally improved.
While giving oral testimony in parliament in 2022, Etienne Carbonneau, Director of research and support for internationalization at Université du Québec, was scathing: “Let’s put it bluntly, we think there is a certain rate of racism that exists. By this I mean negative prejudices against, particularly, French-speaking African populations.”
This is one of those unsavory realities that consultants conveniently don’t inform their clients whilst selling them the so-called Canadian dream.
The propaganda, however, is tricking some already successful middle-class professionals in Africa into unwisely selling their properties, abandoning successful careers, relocating to Canada, and getting stuck in loops of complex, expensive, anti-Black immigration processes.
We need a reality check
Canada’s own government regularly contradicts the Japa sales pitch. In 2018, three federal Canadian ministers openly discouraged asylum seekers coming from Nigeria using inaccurate statistics—and then dispatched a mission to the country. The coded prejudice was obvious: “too many Africans, Nigerians are coming.”
The right-wing rhetoric and policies about asylum seekers has only escalated since then. Quebec premier Francois Legault claimed that “airports, particularly in Toronto and Montreal, are becoming sieves and it is time to act.” Media headlines in Canada have been dominated by the false notion that immigrants are driving a housing crisis—rather than speculators and investors—followed by a move to slash foreign student numbers.
And none of the digital sweet talkers hyping “Canada at all costs” informs their clients of the scenes of African refugees sleeping in benches and in parks as the Toronto mayor battles to claw support from the federal government. White refugees have always been treated differently than racialized ones in Canada, and that has yet to change.
A message from a friend who relocated to Toronto gave me the strongest first hand impression that immigrants of color are not exactly the source of Canada’s economic woes.
“I was a manager at my job in Zimbabwe and in charge of a team of 50 employees,” he recently texted me. “Here in Toronto I am living in a basement with my wife and two kids and fast depleting the $5,000 savings we brought with us to Canada.”
It’s time for a reality check on emigrating to Canada—no matter what Africa’s influencers and consultants say.
“We need media that enlarges the sense of what’s possible.”
Naomi Klein, journalist and author
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