Canada has always been an outlier on immigration. That was true long before the Trudeau government. Compared to other rich countries, we had a relatively wide and open door. But around the door were walls, which were also higher than those in Europe or the United States.
Canadians were always concerned about controlling the border, yet very welcoming of immigrants. That sounds like a contradiction. It isn’t. Walls don’t block a door, they support it. No walls? No door.
That was Canada’s secret sauce. Immigration was relatively high and relatively popular. We were an exclusive club that also admitted a lot of new members – economic immigrants, family reunifications and refugees – but we chose the new members. Control over who got the door, and who got the wall, was key.
That’s a big part of why Canada had no significant anti-immigration movement demanding that we “take back control” of our borders. We had control. We had law-and-order, liberal immigration. The former created acceptance for the latter. It was a precondition, not a paradox.
All of which has largely broken down under the Trudeau government. It drove bulldozers through the walls, with little consideration of the long tail of consequences.
“They were careless people,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald said of Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, people of “vast carelessness” who “smashed up things.”
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One consequence of that vast carelessness is expected to come before cabinet this week. The government is considering a plan, details not yet public, to legalize the status of people who are not legally supposed to be in Canada.
It’s an issue that has long roiled U.S. politics and whose role in the election of Donald Trump – and his unfortunately likely re-election – cannot be understated. In Canada, this was never a political issue, because the phenomenon was more rare. Why was it rare? Because coming to this country without permission was difficult. Why difficult? Because of the bureaucratic walls. The ones holding up the door.
But Canada now has a significant problem of illegal immigration. Depending on your ideological leanings, you may prefer to call this “undocumented migration,” though I dislike the term because it confuses rather than clarifies. The people involved have documents, including passports from their countries of origin. They also have legal – but expired – Canadian visas.
They came to Canada legally, but to get in, they agreed to depart in a few months or years, or under certain conditions. In some cases, a court or tribunal may have even ordered them to leave.
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It’s unclear how many such people there are. Guesstimates start at hundreds of thousands. Last year, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce economist Benjamin Tal estimated that Statistics Canada had undercounted the national population by one million people – owing to the assumption that, when visas expire, their holders leave.
The count of non-legal residents has likely gone much higher under the Liberals. And the count will probably continue to climb, because the number of people in Canada on expired visas is set to explode.
How can I be sure about that second part? Arithmetic. So many things done by the Trudeau government involve a failure to count. The unfinished math homework appears to have put us on track for a very American problem.
Since 2015, the number of temporary foreign residents in Canada has nearly quadrupled, to 2.7 million. Whether through what I’ll call the Tim Hortons Immigration Stream – which allowed employers to hire an unlimited number of “temporary” workers for permanent jobs – or through the Tuition-for-Residence Stream – pay $10,000 for a certificate from the Strip-Mall College of Management and get the right to cross the border – the system built new superhighways into Canada.
The number of visas on offer was effectively unlimited. The notion that Canada was vetting anyone went out the window. Bye-bye walls.
Previous governments devoted so much effort to the walls because they understood that, once someone crosses the border, the tools for compelling their departure are limited. That includes foreign students and temporary workers no longer eligible to live and work here, refugee claimants adjudged to be not genuine refugees, and even tourists who decided to never go home.
The Liberals are under pressure from left-wing groups to offer many of them citizenship. But doing so would set a precedent, and open a Pandora’s Box of consequences.
It would encourage aspiring immigrants who do not qualify for the limited number of permanent residency spots to simply ignore the expiry of their work or student visas and remain in the country, pending amnesty. Ditto failed refugee claimants. Ditto people who overstay a tourist visa.
It would reinforce the growing impression, which student and worker recruiters around the world are selling, that crossing the Canadian border, by whatever means, is a smooth road to Canadian citizenship.
But for the Trudeau government, the most compelling reason to tread carefully in this area may be political. Canadian citizenship as a reward for flouting immigration law is going to tick off a lot of Canadians. I suspect the most hardboiled and unapologetic will be those people who queued up, followed the rules and entered during daylight hours: immigrants.
Tony Keller