Canada was once lauded all over the world for having a merit-based immigration system. Though strict, this country was widely perceived as welcoming. The same cannot be said for Donald Trump, who, despite angling for a similar approach, is being cast as though he’s bringing an immigration apocalypse upon the United States.
For months, Trump’s keystone promise on the file has been “mass deportations of undocumented immigrants,” of whom there are roughly 11 million (or 17 million, by the count of anti-immigration advocates). It’s a perfectly acceptable thing to do: entry requirements are there to ensure newcomers aren’t criminals or otherwise unable to support themselves in the new country. They’re also a cost to the rest of the population, with generous taxpayer-supported benefits packages available in states like California and New York.
Trump has also proposed to end birthright citizenship — which, if passed, would contrast starkly with Canada, where birthright citizenship was recently given a generational expansion — and to end President Joe Biden’s “parole program” which authorizes entry for migrants who would have been otherwise illegal.
As far as values-based immigration proposals go, Trump says he’ll deport pro-Palestinian student protesters from abroad by revoking their study visas. He’s promised ideological screening as well, primarily to filter out “jihadists, Hamas or Hamas ideology.”
It’s not all about exclusion, either. Trump is looking to grant permanent residency to “thoroughly vetted” post-secondary grads, drifting in the direction of Canada. In the last election, he even called for a “merit-based” immigration program that, similar to our point system, prioritized younger, educated workers. Actually, a lot of his immigration plan is premised on the Canadian system’s former philosophy of welcoming mostly the worthy.
In terms of tactics, Trump seems to have a lot in common with Europe. There, border checks have tightened. The European Union has spoken approvingly of detention centres for migrants in non-EU countries, echoing the previous Trump presidency’s practice of using holding facilities in Mexico.
The critics certainly don’t see it that way. Part of this is a function of Trump’s own words: what makes his proposals particularly notable isn’t their content, but the rhetoric used to sell them. Trump refers to the deportable population as “Illegal Alien Criminals” and says he’ll “STOP THE INVASION” — base-rallying words that agitate the opposition and risk alienating an unconvinced audience.
Great efforts have gone into debunking Trump’s drastic descriptions of the situation in the United States, but they only go so far. The language of “invasion” may exaggerate, but a record number of illegal migrants did cross into the U.S. via Mexico in December; and footage of long lines of border crossers sure doesn’t placate those concerned. Trump’s claims of migrant crime waves, meanwhile, have been supported and debunked with conflicting selections of statistics; high-profile cases of migrant violence on camera fill the data gaps.
Trump doesn’t help his case by citing unsubstantiated anecdotes to back his points. Take the second presidential debate: Trump, in reference to the 15,000 or so Haitians who have settled in the town of Springfield, Ohio (pop. 58,000), exclaimed that “They’re eating the dogs!” Well, no. No Haitian has actually been found to have eaten cats and dogs in Springfield. He slipped, and the fact-checkers naturally pounced.
But the post-debate coverage of this outburst provides a hint as to why Americans might be looking for an immigration change of course. Haiti is a place where animal sacrifice is practiced as part of Voodoo, an official religion of the country since 2003 that blends African animism with Catholicism. Having first developed in the 1600s, it’s sometimes described as ubiquitous, though scholarly estimates suggest it may cover 50 to 95 per cent of the population (often, it’s practiced in conjunction with Christianity). Anthropological scholarship has established that dogs are among the animals used in potion-making and sacrifice.
It’s perfectly natural for Americans to want reassurance that those practices aren’t being brought into their communities, especially if towns are seeing the equivalent of a quarter of their population brought in.
Reporting on the matter often ignores, dismisses or even ridicules these concerns; no wonder some are voting for the side that promises security rather than unquestionable generosity.
Instead of gauging the predictable concerns of the people, much of the American media is spending the final stretch of the election using what appeals they can to convince the population to reject the Republican immigration plan. The emotional: Newsweek reports that 20 million people might be affected by the policy of mass deportation, namely by having their families “ripped apart.” The economic: suddenly concerned about the cost of things, CBS, CNN, the LA Times have all jumped on an immigration advocacy group’s $88 billion cost estimate for the deportation scheme, built on the assumption that the state will eventually detain one million people at a time.
The old lines of what feels like crisis communication aren’t resonating like they might have in the past, however. A slim majority of the public — 51 per cent — supported “mass deportations of undocumented immigrants” back in April, according to Axios. Republicans feel it most, with 68 per cent feeling this way, but Democrats are surprisingly not too far behind, at 42 per cent.
These results were so alarming to Vox that it cobbled together a tone-corrected explainer last week.
“Support for a policy of mass deportation, while superficially high, rests on two related complications: substantial confusion among voters about what it might actually entail, as well as a generalized desire to do something — anything — on immigration, which polls frequently report to be among Americans’ top issues,” Vox chided.
Sound familiar? Misperception is also Canadian Justice Minister Arif Virani’s diagnosis of the concern over crime in Canada.
There was a time when welcoming a reasonable number of legal, capable immigrants while keeping illegal migrants out was a regular function of a healthy country. Now, we’re to believe it’s controversial. If Trump emerges victorious on Nov. 5, let it be a lesson to the fourth estate.
National Post