Legal immigration is as much out of control as illegal immigration, because of the "family unification" policy, which basically means that foreigners who have relatives in America have a sort of civil right to come here, and ultimately it has the same effect.I've been thinking about it all day yesterday, and was given the excellent challenge of explaining my comment.
Brimelow made the connection between "rights" and family reunification policies and legislation clearer for me in that one sentence. And I don't think anyone has, even in passing as Brimelow did, brought that connection unequivocally.
What caught my attention (and imagination) is that we are basing fundamental legislation and policies on whimsical, ever-changing rights: the right to have a job; the right to have health care (free); the right for "no child to be left behind"; the right to own (not just rent) a home; the right to bring your non-Canadian family with you when you decide to "immigrate" to Canada.
Why should family reunification of foreigners be a right? Some will say that people cannot live without their close relatives; that a husband feels lonely if his spouse is not with him in the same place (country, in this instance). In the name of these vacillating rights, whole countries change their laws and policies to accommodate anyone and everyone, including foreigners.
Even skilled workers believe they have a right to immigrate to Canada, even when job availability is reduced.
My short and not sympathetic answer would be: if you wish to come as a "skilled worker" and immigrate to Canada, don’t expect your wife and children to join you. Come as a single person, and start a family here, or make your stay temporary. This is in fact what happened to Chinese workers at the turn of the century.
Why cannot a country's own values and principles come first before rights? Such as:
The right for a foreigner to have his wife and children join him is trumped by a nation wishing to maintain immigration numbers low.Because what happens in the current situation is that even if Jason Kenney, the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, wished to lower next year's immigration numbers, he is still stuck with this right parading as family reunification, which then is like a perennially open door admitting scores of people in addition to the original immigrant, ad infinitum.
If people saw beyond rights, then perhaps part of the immigration debacle might be averted.
Just like, in fact, what Kenney was forced to do when he enforced visas for Mexico and the Czech Republic, whose countrymen were entering Canada and using the "refugee rights" to "appeal" their cases. This quote from a community agency, St. Christopher House, best explains that process:
The Court rule[s] that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the right of refugee claimants in Canada to life, liberty and security of the person, and that claimants are therefore entitled to an oral hearing, in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.Many refugee claimants, as Kenney realized with the Czech and Mexicans, are hardly the victims they claim to be. And usually their stay includes public subsidies, including housing, health care, schooling, welfare and not least, state-paid-for lawyers' fees. All this for non-Canadians who are trying to entering Canada with their best shot as "human rights" victims.
Except that Kenney couldn't (or wouldn't) change this right embedded in the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. He had to stifle it through the more superficial restriction of visas to prevent these potential refugee claimants with all their rights from entering Canada.
I think the immigration (and refugee) system, and its consequent multiculturalism - note the HRCs - has become a system based on rights, of foreigners, as Brimelow wrote.
If people could see this, then many kinds of policies and legislature that keep getting passed may be accorded a more perceptive and discriminating eye.
