D’oh, Canada!
It won’t be long before Justin Trudeau turns Trumpian after welcoming our immigrants to his country with open arms
P RETTY soon the US might not be the only North American country clamoring for tighter security on its southern border. Because suddenly, in the age of Trump, Canada has an illegal-immigrant problem.
No, Barbra Streisand, Keegan-Michael Key and Bryan Cranston have not yet made good on their threats to pack up their stuff and slip into Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s immigrant-loving Canada if Trump won. But at an almost-unguarded point just off Roxham Road in upstate Champlain, desperate people, many of them Muslims, are sneaking across the border from the US to Canada. Once arrested in Canuckland, they get a bus ticket to Montreal, a comfy room (the YMCA is a popular spot) and a hearing into their refugee status.
I call that a win-win: Prime Minister Dreamboat gets all the refugees he wants, and America no longer has to worry about the exact same people. Each illegal crossing represents one less headache for us, one more headache for them — sorry, one more beautiful soul to bask in Trudeau’s utopia.
“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada,” Trudeau tweeted last month, trolling Trump.
That isn’t exactly how things work in the non-Twitter world, of course: The March 8 New York Times story about the secret crossing noted that if the same migrants turned up at a legal border checkpoint attempting to gain entry to Canada while asking for asylum, they would be turned away, ordered to remain in the US.
So the migrants figure they must first commit a crime — crossing the border illegally. Once they’re on Canadian soil, they’re part of the Canadian criminal-justice system.
The Times story shows no interest in whether the border-jumpers in question are illegal immigrants to the US, though all of them are illegal immigrants to Canada. But I’m assuming most of the Times’ subjects were here illegally before they went there illegally. (Color me skeptical that a lot of folks in the US legally would rather take their chances as illegal immigrants in Canada.)
The Times story makes it look as though Trump’s dark rhetoric, comments about radical Islam and executive order restricting immigration from six countries with major terrorism problems are creating woe and desperation for nice people the US should find a spot for. Some of the migrants are from places like Yemen and Turkey.
But if, as the Times also seems to think, Canada is a haven for minorities and immigrants, es- pecially Muslims, aren’t these people better off up north? If the Times is really worried about an epidemic of hate crimes and Islamophobia in the US, shouldn’t the tone of its coverage be celebratory rather than mournful? Shouldn’t it be singing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” as these neo-Von Trapps escape the clutches of Trumpofascism?
Mind you, I’m pro-immigrant myself. I’d like to see America welcome millions more immigrants — legal ones. My immigration policy, though, is informed by Jerry Seinfeld’s thoughts on why a preference for the underclass is pretty dumb: “‘Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses . . .’ I mean, why don’t we just say, ‘Give us the unhappy, the sad, the slow, the ugly, people that can’t drive’ . . . in other words any dysfunctional defective slob that you can somehow cattle prod onto a wagon, send them over, we want ’em.”
I say give us your entrepreneurs, your plutocrats, your MBAs, your job creators. We’ll let you know when we’ re running low on desperate, unskilled people.
Inscriptions on statues do not actually carry the force of law. There’s nothing in the American character that says we have to welcome anybody who wants to come here, just as there’s nothing in the American character that says we have to be either hawkish or isolationist.
It’s simply up to us and our elected representatives to decide, at any given moment, what we want our immigration policy to be. At times Americans have decided on a loose immigration policy; at other times we have had different ideas, notably from the time the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed and led to quotas that meant 70 percent of immigrants came from Ireland, the UK and Germany. Throughout the FDR, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the policy largely stayed in place, and as recently as 1970 only 4.7 percent of Americans were foreign-born.
Today (as of 2013), the foreign-born are nearing a record-high 13.1 percent of the population because, starting in 1965, with passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the US became much more open toward Asian and other immigrants, even as illegal immigrants were flowing in.
Canada can pursue an even more open path, if it wants. But do Canadians have as much willingness to take on the Middle East’s problems as advertised? My guess is that pretty soon it’s going to be a lot harder to sneak into Canada from Champlain, NY.