When it comes to taking
in refugees, it is easy for Canadians to feel just a little bit better, a little
bit more noble than other countries. After all we did take in 25,000 Syrian
refugees in a few months. There is no doubt that we have the right to feel as
if we did the right thing, (once we decided to do something after four years of
doing basically nothing). While there have been numerous glitches in the system
and quite clearly the bureaucracy was, at times, inadequate to the task, those
that came are well on their way to being settled in their new homes. It may be
three or four years before anyone can determine how successful the relocation
was but I think we can take some satisfaction for a job at least well started. It is easy for us to feel smug. It is easy for
us to feel that we have done it better than other country. But those who propagate such stories are
being disingenuous. We have been reasonable successful because unlike the
majority of developed countries, we have an almost absolute control over our
borders. Canada has never faced the level of illegal immigrants that the US or
Europe has dealt with for the past few decades.
The US, for example has
been rightly criticized for its policies or lack thereof on illegal immigrants
from Mexico, South and Central America. According to
Pew Research there were 11.3 million illegal (or 3.5% of the total
population) immigrants/refugees in the US. As they are illegal, those numbers
could be much higher as illegal immigrants are for obvious reasons, notoriously
difficult to count. The US has almost no control over who sneaks in. Their
southern border is just too long. In spite of fences and armed patrols, people
cross the border daily. The US authorities may, in many people’s minds, behave
badly as it attempts to manage the influx of uninvited people. They may be
treating those individuals as second class citizens, denying them and their
children the right to education or health care; they may be creating a
political environment that can only lead to violence, but US government is
dealing with a problem that they did not, at least initially, create. A problem
for which there is little political will on the part of tax payers to resolve.
The situation in Europe
is even worse. The BBC
estimates that in 2015 over a million refugees crossed over into Europe without
permission. In 2016, according the UN, 189,000 people
have already travelled by boat to land on the shores of Europe. It may be
impossible to even estimate the number of people who have crossed over by land.
Britain, theoretically protected by the English Channel from undocumented refugees
(the political correct way of saying illegal immigrants), reports that there
are thousands of such individuals.(The
Telegraph) living in Britain. Some tax payers, even those who have a strong
belief in social justice, are debating on how many people can developed
countries accept before their infrastructure breaks down.
In spite of some
searching on the internet, I could not find any reliable information suggesting
that Canada had a significant number of undocumented immigrants. There are
certainly a number of individuals who just stayed once their visas expired,
there are some who snuck into the country from the US and I am sure there are a
handful who arrived under false pretenses and have evaporated into the Canadian
landscape. But there are very few illegal immigrants and they have never come
across our borders in such huge numbers that our infrastructure was overwhelmed.
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