Each year Canada takes in about 1/4 million immigrants and refugees. Each year, births over deaths, the impoverished Third World adds another 80 million people to an already over-crowded, ailing planet where, after 30 years of family-planning and birth control programs, 1/3 of the global population is under 15 years old. (Visit our population clock) In July of 1997, an official of the China Family Planning Commission reported that just 20% of China’s 320 million families obey the one-child rule. The UN Child Fund reports that within the next few years the infant mortality rate in the developing world will match our own – 1 in 100. Thus, populations will continue to spiral out of control. And why not? The sucker states will always manage to make room for one more and that one had better be a doctor or computer genius to satisfy bigotted notions of what ‘kind’ of immigrants we will be willing to ‘accomodate’. What we most certainly do NOT ‘owe’ the Third World is a short-sighted policy where we remove the skilled and educated members of their nations to compete with Canadians for jobs. Those people are (or could be) the agents for real change in their own countries. Without them, the Third World can only sink into ever-greater misery. Indira Gandhi once scolded western nations for precisely these practises. The disasterous 1/4 million we accept each and every year can never make any real difference to the 80 millions born each year or the 99.9% condemned to stay in the Third World, but it does make an enormous difference to our own quality of life.
With OFFICIAL unemployment running as high as it does, the last thing we need is anyone – skilled or unskilled – competing with hard-pressed Canadians for jobs. There is a larger, moral issue at stake too. What kind of country do we want? The skilled people we extract from the Third World could stay home and fight to establish decent health care, democracy and every other perq Canada has on offer. Slowly but surely this nation is being reinvented and repopulated – not by a kind of can-do homesteading pioneer spirit, but with native Canadians who believe it is ‘easier’ to say and do nothing as this invasion continues (with no end in sight), as well as imported Canadians, who believe it is ‘easier’ to reap the fruits of democracy, education or health care someone else fought for. Yet somehow we have been convinced that our first obligation is not to our children or our parents or our neighbours – but to the wretched of the earth (however, not so wretched they cannot scrape together several thousand dollars for air fares, and in some particularly desperate instances, adding another $20,000 to a snake head, ‘jockey’, or other flesh smuggler to ‘lubricate’ a refugee claim.) Over-taxed, over-burdened Canadians would like to know how.