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§ If you do not have control of your borders, with a meaningful set
of immigration laws and the right to keep people out of your country, then you
do not really have a country.
§ While the public wants their representatives to control their
borders, politicians seem to see only political capital in running the other
way. In part this is because there appears to be some kind of "bonus"
to be achieved by looking welcoming and kindly, in contrast to the unwelcoming
and mean things that borders now appear to represent.
§ By the end of August, it was estimated that almost 12,000 people
had arrived in Canada through this route so far this year. It is a number that
constitutes little more than an averagely busy week in Italy at any time over
recent years. But even this comparatively tiny movement across an entire year
has proven too much for Canada. At the end of last month, Prime Minister
Trudeau told reporters: "For someone to successfully seek asylum it's not
about economic migration. It's about vulnerability, exposure to torture or
death, or being stateless people. If they are seeking asylum we'll evaluate
them on the basis of what it is to be a refugee or asylum seeker."
Bombings and other terrorist attacks are
now a common feature of life in modern Europe. On just one day (September 15,
2017), an improvised explosive device was placed on a London Underground train,
a man wielding a knife and shouting "Allah" attacked a soldier in
Paris, and a man with a hammer shouting "Allahu Akbar" badly wounded
two women in Lyon. As the former Prime Minister of France and the present Mayor
of London have put it, perhaps this is all just a price we have to pay for
living in big cities in Europe in the 21st century: we have traffic
congestion, great restaurants and terrorist attacks.
Of course, the public are all the time
worrying about other things -- not just whether all this is just a taste of
something worse to come, but whether anything might be done to stop it. While
our political leaders continue to view this as a narrow security-related
question, the public can see that it is also a border-security and
mass-immigration issue. Across the continent, poll after poll shows the
European public continuously calling for migration into Europe to be slowed
down. This plea is not due to some atavistic urge or distasteful racist
instinct, but something that the public seems to intuit better than their
politicians -- which is that if you do not have control of your borders, with a
meaningful set of immigration laws and the right to keep people out of your
country then you do not really have a country.
Since the upsurge in Europe's migration
crisis in 2015, when Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel unilaterally decided to
suspend normal border checks and turn an already existing flow of migrants into
a tidal wave, politicians and the public have divided from each other over this
issue. While the public want their representatives to control their borders,
politicians seem to see only political capital in running the other way. In
part this is because there appears to be some kind of "bonus" to be
achieved by looking welcoming and kindly in contrast to the unwelcoming and
mean things that borders now appear to represent.
Politicians such as Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau in Canada have used the opportunity of Europe's migration catastrophe
to grandstand and present themselves as offering a different way. In the wake
of Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric on building a wall along the US-Mexican
border, Trudeau in particular has presented himself as the yin to Donald
Trump's yang. In January, when President Trump was sworn into office, Trudeau sent out a Tweet
reading, "To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will
welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength." To
which he added the hashtag, #WelcomeToCanada. In March of this year, in
another clear response to the US President, Trudeau tweeted, "Regardless of who you
are or where you come from, there's always a place for you in Canada" -- a
tall order, given the existence of 7.5 billion people on this earth, many of
whom are not already Canadian.
The movement which the Canadian Prime
Minister appears to be auditioning to lead is one which seeks (as protestors
often put it) to "build bridges not walls". It is an attractive
slogan, although anyone who utters it cannot have been to London recently where
(after attacks on Westminster and London Bridge within just a few weeks) the
city's bridges are covered in security walls and barricades. Which might
suggest that the "walls and bridges issue" is not, after all, an
either/or business, or even the central issue at all.
Yet, given this considerable
grandstanding in the early part of the year, it would take a heart of stone not
to laugh now at the situation in which Prime Minister Trudeau finds himself. In
recent months, thousands of migrants, most of them from Haiti, have crossed the
border -- illegally -- from the US into Canada. This influx -- tiny by European
standards -- has already started to buckle the Canadian immigration system.
Hundreds of migrants have had to be housed in emergency tent villages
set up by the Canadian army and many have been temporarily housed at the old Olympic stadium
in Montreal.
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Pictured:
Two people, who claimed to be from Turkey, illegally cross the U.S.-Canada
border into Canada, on February 23, 2017, near Hemmingford, Quebec. (Photo by
Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
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Unlike many of the migrants still daily
moving into Europe, the migrants arriving in Canada are not fleeing war,
persecution or poverty. They are simply people who are not keen to end up on
the wrong side of America's immigration laws now that there is a president who
may (though may just as likely not) enforce those laws. As a Washington Post report has put it, "Though they've been
lazily framed as 'fleeing Trump,' most of the Haitians appear motivated by a
desire to dodge American laws they don't care to obey."
By the end of August, it was estimated
that almost 12,000 people had arrived in Canada through this route so far this
year. It is a number that constitutes little more than an averagely busy week
in Italy at any time over recent years. But even this comparatively tiny
movement across an entire year has proven too much for Canada. At the end of
last month Trudeau told reporters:
"For someone to successfully seek
asylum it's not about economic migration. It's about vulnerability, exposure to
torture or death, or being stateless people. If they are seeking asylum we'll
evaluate them on the basis of what it is to be a refugee or asylum seeker. You
will not be at an advantage if you choose to enter Canada irregularly. You must
follow the rules and there are many."
Of course, this is a very different tune
to the one he had been advantageously -- perhaps even opportunistically --
playing to date. When he was trying to present a clear alternative to European
and American leaders at the start of 2017, there was no talk of
"irregular" or "regular" entry, or of the "many"
rules. Before he experienced his own tiny trickle of migration, Trudeau spoke
only of there always being a "place" for everyone in the world who
wanted to come to Canada. How things can change when even the tiniest dose of
reality hits.
Douglas Murray, British author,
commentator and public affairs analyst, is based in London, England. His latest
book, an international best-seller, is "The Strange Death of Europe:
Immigration, Identity, Islam."
