The Immigration Crisis, and How to Deal With It: Part I

Immigration crisis? In Canada, there isn’t one. Yet.

Truth be told, in most of our developed societies, we have an immigration opportunity. In fact, we have an immigration need.

Canada and many other first world nations are facing down a dearth of talent and of new taxpayers to fill the gaps left by our declining birth rate and collapsing demographics which coincide as the Boomers take their ease and expand their needs. Doctors? Personal care workers? Store clerks? We can’t get enough third world candidates to fill the gaps.

Even our true refugees are cherry-picked and once they land on their feet and get their bearings, quickly transform from recipients to contributors. They bring skills and a work ethic to die for. The story of Peace by Chocolate (https://peacebychocolate.ca/pages/our-story) is a lovely one, perhaps not universal, but certainly not unique. For Canada, bringing in immigrants and refugees is currently a smart and essential investment.

What we don’t have (yet) in Canada is a refugee crisis. We’re blessed by large open spaces and an ability to absorb large numbers of immigrants. Our lucky break is that we’re also at the end of the world. Crossing the Atlantic or the Pacific on a rubber raft is never going to be feasible to the poor and the downtrodden. So we get to pick and choose who we’ll accept, and in what quantities. Even the five or six or dozen tragic cases of refugees freezing to death trying to cross the prairies in midwinter were individuals able to afford plane tickets to get to the United States first. The other 99.99% are too poor for that. We don’t have a refugee problem, not even close. Yet.

But what actually exists in most of the world is not an immigrant crisis, it’s a refugee crisis. We like to call it an immigrant crisis because that lets us focus on ourselves, our concerns, and our comforts– our borders and our border patrols and our angst about handling the hordes who want to crash through the barbed wire. It lets us see the “immigrants” as the problem, an imposition upon our lives and security. It gives us the right to “defend ourselves” and take harsh measures to send these pests away. Calling those at our borders “immigrants”, not “refugees” is a sleight of hand which lets us off the hook and flips the moral issue.

Here’s the difference. In the normal course, when you arrive in our country, you’re called an immigrant. When you leave your country, you’re called an emigrant. Nice and tidy, “Oh, I have a cousin in Toronto and he has a restaurant. I think I’ll move to Canada and work for him. I hear it’s a great life.” Basically, you’re just trading up. That’s what immigrants do. After all, most of us are immigrants or our parents were, and they all arrived to trade up. Start as a waiter, end as a restaurateur.

But refugees aren’t like that. A refugee isn’t trading up, by definition a refugee is seeking refuge. I have a friend who fled a genocide, spending months hiding in the jungle fearing for his life. It was a simple choice: leave his country or die. He wasn’t concerned about trading up, he just wanted to stay alive. That’s the difference between an immigrant and a refugee.

Immigrants apply politely and we choose them as if they were beauty contestants. Refugees risk their very lives to come and plead desperately at our doors, fear on their faces, hoping not for a better life, but for life itself.

Refugees are not a new thing. They fled to the New World because of the Highland Clearances, the Potato Famine, and the Pogroms. Mennonites and Old Order Orthodox, Huguenots and Boat People, coming to the New World by their thousands because the Old World meant extermination.

But what we’ve never seen before is the scale. Our ancestors arrived by the thousands and tens of thousands. Those who now bang on our doors are in the millions and the tens of millions.

And that’s what we’ll look at next week.