Give Me Your Huddled Masses

Grosse Ile Celtic Cross.

Canada’s current immigration policy gets a lot of praise in the US and the UK, where politicians now propose it as a model. But I think Canada has it wrong.

Briefly, Canada lets in immigrants on the basis of being well educated and highly skilled, on the premise that they will be net contributors instead of a net drain on the economy.

But this has several unfortunate consequences.

In the first place, it strips poorer countries of their skilled workforce. Presumably this is a net minus for the welfare of mankind.

In the second place, Canada is importing, by and large, the Third World’s upper class. There is one reason, and only one reason, why the underdeveloped world is underdeveloped: a corrupt ruling class. These are the people we are bringing in, and, to the extent that they enter the upper class in Canada, they will bring this corruption with them.

Third, if it is a problem to have low-wage foreign workers taking jobs and opportunities away from native-born citizens, why is it not a bigger problem to have foreign workers taking higher-wage jobs away from native-born citizens? In effect, we are voluntarily turning Canada into a colony with a foreign ruling class.

Fourth, since these people by and large had it pretty good where they came from, they will not appreciate the opportunity to be Canadian, will not prize it, and will not feel committed to making things better here (there). If things do not go well, they can just go home. They have no skin in the game.

Fifth, because they had things pretty good where they came from, they will want to change Canada to make it more like where they came from. And they will complain about everything, and be discontented, and inclined to subversion.

In sum, a lousy policy.

I think we would do far better even in a practical sense with a more purely humanitarian immigration policy. As well as being more moral. In principle, all immigrants should be refugees; all refugees should be potential immigrants.

I know, this is currently an unpopular idea in many quarters. Canada, and Europe, are facing a flood of “Middle Eastern refugees,” and everyone fears demographic death. Everybody worries about ISIS infiltration through Syrian refugees. Fair and proper concern. But hear me out.

To begin with, Canada is a nation of refugees. It is our national identity and the essence of our being. Accordingly, new refugee populations would fit right in. English Canada began with the flood of refugees leaving the US after the American Revolution. Nova Scotia and parts of Ontario were populated with refugees from the Highland Clearances. Throughout the nineteenth century, the largest immigrant group was refugees from the awful situation in Ireland, and they have proved the most committed of Canadians. They have been joined now by refugee populations, notably, from Poland, the Ukraine, Swabian Germans, Sikhs, Russian Jews, Vietnamese boat people, and so forth. Each of these groups, I submit, have shown themselves to be model Canadians. It is these refugee groups that make the best Canadian citizens.

It stands to reason that they would. They have nowhere to go back to. All the bridges are burning; for them, it is do or die. And, by contrast with the situation they have left, they have reason to love and bless Canada. They are all in.

I submit that this is also Canada’s manifest destiny. It is what God put this land here for. Canada is vast and still, in world terms, underpopulated. In the rest of the world, there are always populations of people who are hated and in danger of extermination. By welcoming them here, we can save their lives, defuse the tensions where they came from, and preserve cultures and traditions otherwise in danger of dying.

Consider, for example, how much might have been different had Canada swung its doors wide to Jews seeking to leave Germany in the 1930s. There might have been no Holocaust. And can anyone doubt that Canada itself would have ended up much better off?

So what then about these Syrian and Middle Eastern refugees?

For the most part, I do not think they legitimately qualify. They are not real refugees, not in the sense of the term I am using. Regardless of what the UN, or someone else, says.

If a group is simply fleeing a bad government or a civil war, they do not need refugee status, and will not benefit from it. Soon, that civil war will end, that bad government will fall, and they will want to return to their homes. And they ought to return to their homes. Their home country needs them. Their refugee status is only temporary.

At the same time, if we bring in refugees from both sides of a civil war, we are obviously asking for trouble to be transported with them. An obviously awful idea.

No, real refugees are identifiable as either an oppressed or endangered distinct ethnic minority where they come from, or an ethnic group being ruled by some foreign power and with no realistic prospect of self-government in the foreseeable future.

I don’t think that is a difficult distinction to make.

In the current Middle Eastern turmoil, by this standard, we have warrant to open the doors wide to Syrian Christians, Syrian Jews, Syrian Yazidis, Kurds, Assyrians, Druze. We have no warrant to let in Syrian Shia Arab Muslims—currently in power—or Syrian Sunni Arab Muslims—a majority of the population, and quite likely to hold power soon. Just about the same calculation applies to Iraq. We have no warrant to let in Libyans, Yemenis or Somalis as refugees—these countries are basket cases currently due to civil war, not systemic oppression of a minority by a majority, and it is not clear who will hold power in a few years.

There is again no warrant to accept large numbers of Mexicans, or South or Central Americans, as refugees, if they happen to come knocking on our door. These are economic migrants. Things may be awful in Venezuela right now, but they are likely to get better sometime soon. The same seems generally true of “refugees” from sub-Saharan Africa. That continent is a patchwork of ethnicities, and these bear little or no relation to national boundaries; at the same time, in most cases it is impossible to foresee who will be in power and oppressing whom in a few years time. Which group is oppressed, and which oppressor, seems transitory. This year it is Tutsis; next year it is Hutus. Let in the Tutsis this year, let in the Hutus next year, and in the third year you may have an imported civil war.

There are probably a few exceptions. I think there is good reason to see “white” minorities in Africa as now endangered and unlikely soon again to come to power. The South African parliament has just voted overwhelmingly to confiscate land owned by “whites” without compensation. South Asians living in Uganda certainly qualified under Idi Amin, and perhaps elsewhere.

An interesting case is that of “indigenous people”: do they fit our definition? “Either an oppressed or endangered distinct ethnic minority where they come from, or an ethnic group being ruled by some foreign power and with no realistic prospect of self-government in the foreseeable future.”

So, should we make a special point of letting in Australian aborigines, or Sami from Norway, or Bushmen?

No; these groups more or less by definition would not benefit from refugee status. To be clear, what we are really talking about when we refer to a group as “indigenous” is to a culture that is dramatically technically behind the surrounding culture. In such a case, while their culture is endangered, it is not because they are being oppressed or discriminated against by the surrounding culture. It is because their culture by its nature cannot survive much contact with another culture. In such a case, emigrating to an entirely new milieu would make their problem vastly worse. Moreover, by the nature of the culture, they would be lousy immigrants, doing their best to stay apart and separate.