A local rise in online anti-South Asian hate is part of a larger trend, according to two professors at the University of the Fraser Valley.
Dr. Hassan Javid, a professor of sociology at UFV, said it’s part of a broader anti-migrant sentiment around much of the Western world, concurrent with the rise of right-wing populist politics.
“There’s really been a spike in that kind of rhetoric – that narrative about migration and the allegedly problematic or detrimental effects migrants have in local communities. And what I think is perhaps unique about Canada and B.C. is the way in which it’s concentrated on Indian migrants in particular,” Javid said.
A study from 2025 from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found anti-South Asian hate in Canada has been “skyrocketing” both on and offline.
According to the study, over 2,300 posts containing anti-South Asian rhetoric were shared across various platforms which collectively generated over 1.2 million engagements in the lead-up to Canada’s federal election (between March 1 and April 20).
In Mission last summer, a Kabaddi tournament at the Heritage Park Middle School grounds garnered a large social media backlash, including racially charged comments targeted at the Punjabi community.
In the same week, Mission RCMP responded to xenophobic and racist commentary on its Facebook page.
Javid said social media platforms such as Reddit, X, Facebook and Instagram are bombarded with content that attributes a variety of different social ills and problems to migration from India.
“You’ll hear about how jobs are being taken by Indians [and] housing is being taken by Indians. You’re going to hear about how Indians are scamming Canada, scamming people, scamming businesses in various ways by violating rules around migration, student visas, work permits … and what’s interesting about all of this is that a lot of it is essentially disconnected from the reality of the situation,” he said.
He said he’s been exposed to social media accounts that show large numbers of South Asians queuing outside Tim Hortons saying “can’t see a single white Canadian here” and others discussing open defecation. Javid said these types of accounts take isolated incidents and magnify them.
“It’s not just that there’s misinformation. There’s also a tendency to over-exaggerate and inflate the impact of relatively isolated incidents and to generalize. So you have one Indian [who] commits a crime – all of a sudden, all Indians are suspect. One Indian commits visa fraud, and all Indians are suspect. Without giving the broader context, without understanding that if you were to look at these incidents, or similar kinds of incidents, in other communities, you probably find that’s happening there too,” he said.
He said the media landscape has become increasingly polarized, with an individual’s content consumption tailored to them, as opposed to past times when everyone watched the same five to 10 channels.
“You are only going to be as good as the information you have access to. If all the information you’re accessing reinforces those particular biases or narratives, then it’s difficult to see an alternative perspective,” he said.
He later added: “So when you’re confronted with contrary information, accepting that information doesn’t just mean rejecting any prior biases you may have had and questioning those. It might also mean having to kind of pay a social cost by having to disagree with your friends or people you interact with online and offline.”
Global issues such as cost of living increases and housing affordability help to propel the narratives, Javid said.
“People are looking for answers. They’re looking for some kind of change to the status quo that’s failed them in many ways. And in that context, it’s very easy to stigmatize migrants and others as being the cause of all of these problems because perhaps in some ways, they’re a visible sign of the change that’s happening,” he said.
While there has been a rise in migration, Javid said it’s not the presence of South Asians that creates tensions. In circumstances where people are grappling with uncertainty, he said fault lines can be exploited by political and cultural opportunists to stoke tensions.
“If you can’t buy a home [or] can’t get a job, you’re looking for reasons why. And in those conditions, it’s easy for someone to come and tell you the problem is these other people are taking all that stuff from you. Whereas one could make the argument, there’s other reasons why you can’t buy a home or get a job but those are harder to deal with. It’s easier to scapegoat people than to ask the bigger, more difficult questions about how you can create some kind of new social contract,” Javid said.
Dr. Satwinder Bains, a professor emeritus at UFV and the former director of the university’s South Asian Studies Institute, has worked in the field of anti-racism for over 40 years.
“We’ve done a lot. We’ve walked a lot of miles, but there are times when I see something – it takes my breath away. And it feels like I’ve walked a million miles and then just standing still. It’s very painful,” Bains said.
While times of economic uncertainty lead to the search for scapegoats, Bains said the possibility of racial rhetoric always looms for people of colour.
“The antennas are always out. You’re always aware this can surface at any given time,” she said.
She said when racism shows up, it’s as visceral to the body as if it happened for the first time.
“It never, never makes you feel [like you’ve] experienced this before and can deal with it. Of course, you deal with it. But it hurts. It hits you in a place you can’t even change,” Bains said.
For those unequipped to deal with racism, Bains said it can deepen vulnerability.
“They retreat, they become less open. They contribute less … it weakens our society,” Bains said.
Bains said racism can become internalized for both adults and youth.
“Children go home and tell their parents ‘don’t speak to me in that language’ or ‘mother, drop me off two blocks away from the school’ … you have older people who will give up certain traditions because they think people don’t think they’re valuable. Internalization of race is very harmful to young people, especially because in their formative years if they encounter racism, they think they’re the problem. Because the victim gets victimized twice over,” Bains said.
Both Javid and Bains noted that South Asians are not new to B.C. and have been rooted in the Fraser Valley for over a century.
“They’ve played a valuable role in communities here. The entire backbone of the agricultural industry here in B.C. is comprised of Indians who have been working the land for generations,” Javid said.
Bains said there’s still a sense that South Asians have just arrived, along with others who look different from the dominant white European settler community .
“There’s no sense of permanency for us. There’s no sense of our belonging, our history as being as important as everybody else’s. It’s always the sense of othering. So even our long history doesn’t take away from that idea that these people are different from dominant society. And the difference is actually made larger than reality,” Bains said.
Bains said migration is baked into the history of Canada.
“Other than the First Nations people, everyone has come from somewhere,” she said.
Javid said racism has always been structurally embedded in Canadian society in many ways, but what’s changed is how certain spaces have been amplified.
“I would wager that the average racial minority walking on the street is not going to experience more overt racism than they would have in the past – which is to say it existed before, and it exists now. I don’t think there’s been a quantum change in that, but it’s in the online arena where you’re definitely going to see a huge magnification,” he said.
Bains encouraged white European settler community members to engage in the work of anti-racism.
“You also don’t want to live in a pessimistic world or think all is wrong, either. We hope that society will get better and better, not worse and worse. But this is a global phenomenon. We are a microcosm of the world,” Bains said.