The Immigrant Problem

No, this is not a screed for or against immigration. It’s a discussion of the real issue, which is ignored because it’s awkward.

In our big, empty, beautiful country there’s actually plenty of room for newcomers. Heck, all Canadians except for First Nations are newcomers, and even their ancestors came from somewhere else, albeit 30,000 years ago. And given our declining birth rate combined with our advancing median age, I’m kind of glad immigrants are coming in to pay the taxes and do the grunt work to keep me in comfort when I get to the stage where I need someone to push me around, literally if not figuratively.

But not everywhere in the world has Canada’s expansive, empty real estate. Immigrants pouring into smaller and crowded countries are not a solution, they’re a problem. Let’s be honest. To their credit, European nations are behaving generally humanely, but they can’t do so forever. In fact, even Canada will eventually hit a saturation point.

Immigrants, particularly refugees, are not on vacation. Leaving family and traditional communities behind is not an adventure, it’s often a matter of no other choice, frequently life or death. And therein is the root of the problem.

The refugees did not choose the wars they are fleeing, or the famine, the desertification of their farmland, or the increasing incursion of the sea. They did not ask for the devastation of their traditional lifestyles, the incursion of warlords, or the open pit mines that gobble up precious gardens and grazing land. Left alone, they would have continued to do what their ancestors have done for millennia. They were, after all, “home”.

First world societies, both the “good guys” and the “bad guys”, have turned the third world upside down as we jostle for political influence, bribe corrupt politicians, sell weapons at a profit, and extract minerals. Leopold’s Ghost is alive and well. Yeah, good old Canada’s in on the game, too. We’re mining experts, remember?

Having enriched ourselves at their expense and having made their world uninhabitable, we now begrudge them refuge in ours.

It ain’t going to get prettier.

Climate change, even if we can slow it down and hold the line, will exacerbate the problem more in the third world than in the first. We can adapt, they can’t.

When ocean storm surges regularly wash across Bangladesh, home to 170,000,000 humans living in an area the size of Michigan most of which is 12m or less above sea level, most of the survivors (however many that will be) will ultimately look to move somewhere else. That’s what humankind do.

And then what do we do? If history is any guide, we look the other way and tell them to fix their own problems.

Immigration and the refugee crisis are neither temporary nor fixable with bandaids. As long as we respond with finger-in-the-dike solutions, the pressure on the other side will only grow. Ultimately, even in our gentle and civilized West, we may need to call on our militaries to use deadly force to repel the desperate masses at our borders. While we look the other way.

Or we can accept that we have royally screwed up their homelands, largely to our benefit and their detriment, and do something about it.

Do I have a simple solution? Not a chance, but maybe if we own up to the greater problem we can begin to fix it.

Life’s like that, isn’t it?