Canada has always been an outlier when it comes to immigration, and it was that way long before Trudeau. Compared to other rich countries, Canada's doors were relatively wide open, but there were walls around those doors, and those walls were higher than in Europe or the United States.
Canadians have always been very concerned with border control, yet very welcoming of immigrants. That sounds like a contradiction, but it's not. Walls don't block doors, they support doors. No walls, no doors.
That was Canada's secret: immigration was relatively high, and we were relatively popular. We were an exclusive club, and we also accepted many new members — economic migrants, family reunifications, refugees — but the new members were chosen by us. Controlling who got the door and who got the walls was the key.
This is a big reason why there has been no major anti-immigration movement calling for Canada to “take back control” of its borders. We had control. We had law and order, and immigration was free. The former bred the acceptance of the latter. It was a prerequisite, not a contradiction.
All of this has largely fallen apart under the Trudeau government, which has bulldozed the wall with little regard for the long-term consequences.
“They were careless people,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said of Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby. “They were very careless, very destructive people.”
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One of the biggest consequences of this oversight is due to be presented to cabinet this week: The government is considering a plan to regularize the status of people who cannot stay in Canada legally, but the details have not yet been made public.
This is an issue that has long roiled American politics, and its role in Donald Trump's election and, unfortunately, reelection cannot be underestimated. In Canada, this phenomenon was rarer, so it was not a political issue. Why rare? Because it was hard to come to the country without permission. Why hard? Because of bureaucratic walls. It's the bureaucrats who close the doors.
But Canada now has a serious problem with illegal immigration. Depending on your ideological leanings, you might prefer to call this “illegal immigration,” but I don't like this term because it brings more confusion than clarity. The people involved have passports and other documents from their countries of origin. They also have legal but expired Canadian visas.
They entered Canada legally but agreed to leave within a few months or years, or under certain conditions, in order to enter the country. In some cases, they were issued departure orders by courts or tribunals.
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It's unclear how many there are; estimates put it in the hundreds of thousands. Last year, Benjamin Tull, an economist at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, estimated that Statistics Canada undercounts the country's population by 1 million because it assumes that visa holders leave the country when their visas expire.
The number of illegal immigrants has probably increased significantly under the Liberal government, and will probably continue to increase because of the expected explosion in the number of people in Canada on overdue visas.
How can we be sure about the second part? It's math. Much of what the Trudeau government has done has been a case of failure to do the math. Unfinished math homework seems to have led us to 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 call the Tim Hortons immigration stream (allowing employers to hire an unlimited number of “temporary” workers to fill full-time positions) or the residency subsidy stream (paying $10,000 for a certificate from the College of Strip Mall Management to earn the right to cross the border), the system has built a new highway into Canada.
The number of visas on offer was virtually unlimited. The idea that Canada was vetting anyone disappeared. Goodbye, walls.
Successive administrations went to great lengths to build a wall because they understood that they had limited resources to forcibly remove people once they crossed the border: international students and temporary workers who were no longer allowed to live and work here, asylum seekers who were determined not to be true refugees, and tourists who decided never to return home.
The Liberal Party is under pressure from left-wing groups to grant citizenship to many of them, but doing so would set a precedent and open a Pandora's box of consequences.
The bill would encourage would-be immigrants who don't qualify for a limited number of green cards to ignore expired work or student visas and stay in the country until an amnesty is granted, as would people whose asylum applications have been rejected or who have overstayed their tourist visas.
That would reinforce the impression sold by student and labor recruiters around the world that crossing the Canadian border, by any means, is a smooth path to Canadian citizenship.
But the most compelling reason for the Trudeau government to tread carefully in this area may be political: Gaining Canadian citizenship as a reward for ignoring immigration law will anger many Canadians. I suspect the most ruthless and unashamed will be those who stood in line, followed the rules, and entered the country in daylight: the immigrants.
