When Canadians say ‘no more’

In The Scotch, his memoir of growing up in southwestern Ontario between the wars, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that to his Celtic kinsmen the value of Canada was about $5 a week.

If the wage gap between London, Ont. and Detroit, Mich. got wider than that, people picked up and moved south, some temporarily, some permanently. In those days, the border was that permeable. It wasn’t really until the 1960s that both countries tightened their rules and migrating north-tosouth became harder.

In 1930, wages averaged about $30 a week, so $5 a week was a lot of money. Galbraith didn’t say whether $5 was good or bad, right or wrong. It was just an empirical regularity, something that happened. A tipping point, as we’d call it today.

Watching refugees from the U.S. trek through the snow toward our border, I wonder what our tipping point on openness and generosity is. A hundred migrants a day? A thousand a day? More than that? In Germany, a million entrants in one immigration season seem to have tipped the balance to impatience and, increasingly, intolerance. I don’t doubt we have a tipping point. I just wonder what it will be.

For now the refugees are outnumbered by the reporters and cameramen.

But word is spreading. The New York Times has been reporting regularly on what is still a trickle, not yet an exodus. Other outlets, too.

Refugee communities presumably are even more aware of what’s going on. We’ve now put the clocks forward. Temperatures are rising.

The trip will become less dangerous. The U.S. Homeland Security czar claims not to understand what’s happening, why refugees legally in the U.S. are leaving. But it’s obvious what’s happening. His boss is happening. The U.S. ban on immigrants from six countries is only for 90 days. But Trumpism won’t be gone in 90 days. Millions of people whose legal presence in the U.S. is in any way precarious might well decide we offer a warmer welcome, despite our colder climate.

If at some stage resistance to unchecked immigration tips, does that mean we Canadians are all racists and xenophobes?

Are immigration restrictionists truly asserting a right — the right to decide who lives here and who doesn’t — that is entirely arbitrary, as the National Post’s Andrew Coyne recently argued?

Not to mention a proposition that’s intellectually untenable, namely that our current population is precisely optimal — as, by remarkable coincidence, it always has been, according to restrictionists down through the ages? I don’t think so.

There are many respectable reasons, grounded in good conservative principles, for not taking anyone and everyone who arrives here.

First, there’s the bizarre loophole that if refugees show up at an official port of entry, if they knock on the front door, as it were, we don’t have to let them in.

But if they sneak into the backyard, they have an ironclad right to stay for a hearing. I do understand that a Geneva Convention grants people who set foot in a country rights of due process.

But that’s a case of conventional un-wisdom. It’s hardly racist or xenophobic to want orderly entry, with people waiting their turn according to an official list, a list current residents control.

Conservatives are also instinctually mistrustful of turbulent change. Coyne is obviously right that the idea of an optimal rate of immigration, with all relevant variables appropriately calculated and weighted, is fine for the seminar room but has no counterpart in reality. But just because we can’t even roughly calculate an optimum shouldn’t mean anything goes.

No one knows precisely when public debt or carbon dioxide levels will hit terminal velocity, either, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be careful about letting either career out of control.

On those subjects, I may even have read a Coyne column or two making that very point.

We obviously shouldn’t take every social-media objection to overland migrants as a canary-in-the-coal mine sign that we’ve reached the tipping point. Some social-media canaries keel over hourly.

And the doctrine of “none is too many” has a deservedly disreputable history in this country. Moreover, Trump’s assertion that a country that can’t control its borders isn’t really a country is clearly wrong.

The U.S. has trouble with its borders precisely because it is such a successful country.

The libertarian ideal that anyone who wants to live here is welcome is perfectly respectable.

But it’s not a stain on the people who live in a place to want to regulate entry to it. History is arbitrary in countless ways.

It’s not obvious the world has been ill served by a system of nation-states with well-defined borders.

Those borders shouldn’t become walls. But they shouldn’t be erased, either.

IT’S NOT OBVIOUS THE WORLD IS ILL SERVED BY WELL-DEFINED BORDERS.