In case you haven’t heard, Canada has a border crisis on its hands. To all but the willfully blind, the deceitful deniers, and the dangerously delusional, it is blatantly evident that growing numbers of migrants are deliberately and flagrantly in contravention of Canadian border law and international treaties.
It is clear that where Roxham Road in Champlain, New York meets Quebec, our laws are not being enforced, our generosity is being abused, and our border is wide open to anyone who wants to walk in and avail themselves of the friendly assistance of the Royal Canadian Mounted Bellhop Police. It is also obvious that the offending migrants knew the drill coming in. They knew that if they crossed the border in defiance of explicit do-not-enter signs, they would be arrested and detained, but by mere virtue of declaring refugee status on Canadian soil, they would also be given a hearing, something that, under the terms of the Safe Third Country agreement, they wouldn’t get had they chosen an official port of entry. Most, by the way, are Nigerians who entered the United States with the fraudulent intent to acquire visas that would allow them to travel to an unguarded section of the Canadian border. For them, the U.S. was just a transit point, a stepping stone to the hospitable welfare state to the north.
Numbers and facts can tell the story concisely. Consider this:
• More asylum claims (50,000) were made last year than at any time in modern Canadian history.
• The RCMP intercepted 1,890 illegal border crossers in the first three months of 2017. In the same period of 2018, that number soared to 5,052, compared to the 4,475 people who filed claims through conventional legal channels.
• Since the beginning of 2017, more asylum-seekers have crossed the border than the 25,000 Syrian refugees who were accepted in 2016. There were 18,644 refugee claimants at the start of 2017, but as of the end of March this year, there were some 48,974—more than double.
• Understandably, this has placed an unsustainable strain on the refugee system. When Canada rejects an immigrant, the decision is final. For refugee claimants in Canada, however, rejections are subject to lengthy appeals, removal orders, and in some cases, Canada-wide-arrest warrants. Since the Immigration and Refugee Board can only process 1,000 to 2,000 claims per month, they can’t keep pace with the flood. In March, the board was able to complete a record 2,587 claims, but 4,078 new refugee claims came through in the same month. The backlog is out of control.
• As the backlog grows, it is taking longer and longer to process claims. Last October the wait time was 16 months. If border crossings continue at the current rate, the wait time could be 11 years by 2021. Thus, a 19-year-old illegal border crosser could be a 30-year-old father with three kids in Canada by the time his case was heard: time enough to put down roots that would be very hard to pull up. These delays will amount to de facto amnesty, and serve as incentive for more potential claimants to make an illegal crossing. Not to worry. The Trudeau government has injected an extra $173 million into processing illegal immigration. But speeding up “processing” does not add up to border security.
• 96 percent of asylum seekers have come via Quebec, which operates only four shelters for asylum seekers, 1,850 spots in total. In Toronto in 2016, 11.2 percent of them were using shelters. Today that number stands at 37 percent. The Mayor estimates that at current arrival rates the city will be housing 4,485 asylum seekers by November, occupying 53 percent of shelter beds when the system is already in an emergency state. Quebec and the City of Toronto are crying “uncle.” Quebec is demanding that the federal government fork over $146 million, while Toronto is calling for $64.5 million.
• Each asylum seeker costs federal taxpayers $10,000-$20,000 per year in entitlements. Asylum seekers receive access to housing, social welfare, education, and health care and dental and pharmaceutical care above what Canadians receive, thanks to the Interim Federal Health Program. Ontario’s debt load, by the way, stands at $325 billion, more than $22,000 per citizen.
• Both RCMP and Canadian Border Security Agents have been muzzled by the Trudeau government, and explicitly told not to talk to the media about the shocking surge in illegal migration. Oddly, Trudeau supporters who reacted with righteous rage against Conservative. Prime Minister Harper’s muzzling of scientists are strangely silent about this gag order.
These facts and stats are by no means exhaustive, but I think you get the picture. We have a massive problem, and the Trudeau government shows no signs of solving it. Some cynics would argue that they have no intention of doing so. But that is not the case. Liberals are getting nervous, and even Trudeau has been moved to backpedal. There is now an understanding that the government risks alienating Liberal voters who couple their naivety about welcoming migrants with a sincere belief that there have to be rules and these rules must be preserved and respected. It’s all about optics and partisan positioning. Liberal strategists are playing catch-up, as they try to shift to the right to adjust to the changing public mood and thwart the Conservative surge.
The outrageous spectacle of brazen law-breaking at the border is highly combustible fuel for a popular rebellion, which so far only manifests itself in relatively modest demonstrations at Roxham Road and the angry, bitter comments that follow pro-immigration online newspaper articles. One senses that there is a subterranean rage out there in search of a leader. Therein lies the danger for nationalists. So desperate is our need for a parliamentary voice that we are prone to vest unwarranted hope in the proven liars and opportunists of establishment parties, determined to ignore their past betrayals and globalist inclinations.
We don’t seem to understand that astute Conservative politicians like Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull or John Howard before him, or our very own (immigration critic) Michelle Rempel—take a hard-line position against lax border control precisely because they are rabidly pro-immigration. They rightly fear that the violation of borders undermines public support for their sky-high immigration agenda. They realize that angry people often conflate refugees with immigrants.
They notice that for some reason, voters are more exercised by a few hundred migrants who arrive by boat than the tens of thousands who arrive from camps. They observe that voters develop an intense hostility to “queue jumpers” (and “border jumpers”) and that this hostility often boils over to include animus toward migrant applicants who jump through all the proper hoops. That is exactly what they want to prevent. They want to appear “tough” on asylum seekers and illegal border crosses to appease public anger and lead it. By manipulating and exploiting popular anti-refugee sentiments, they can not only win elections, but out-flank opponents in their own parties. As noted in the Sydney Morning Herald (April 24, 2018)
Turnbull understands the necessity of tough border protection….a firm and controlled process of entry selection acts as a declaration that the nation state is in charge of its destiny. Tough border protection boosts public confidence in a non-discriminatory migration program, which includes an orderly, humanitarian refugee intake. It benefits immigrants and asylum seekers who go to a nation fairly and legally. It helps avoid the kind of chaos that lax border controls deliver. And it helps dampen down anti-immigrant prejudice.
Smart Conservatives like Howard, Turnbull, and Rempel make a clever calculation. If they fan the flames of public outrage against asylum seekers—whose numbers are but a fraction of our total migrant intake—they can turn the illegal border crossings into a lightning rod, and thereby decoy the angry mob away from what is most important: continual hyper-immigration. Refugee-bashing is a small price to pay to ensure that the real invasion continues on an epic scale. Burka bans and references to “barbaric practices” and unwillingness to “integrate” serve the same purpose: Make mass immigration palatable by pretending that everything will be hunky-dory if only migrants check their tribal values at the door and embrace ours. Population overshoot is fine if everyone is “assimilated” and English signage can co-exist with Chinese.
As is the case with Australia, the number of refugee claimants who enter Canada is peanuts compared to our annual immigration intake. So far, in 2018, the number of asylum seekers who walk across our southern borders each day is but 10 percent of the number who stream through our airports. If, as informed sources fear, 400 illegals will be coming across the border every day during the summer, this would still constitute less than half the number of migrants that come through legally at official ports of entry. If reporter Faith Goldy’s worst case scenario of 219,000 illegal border crossers came to pass, it would still constitute only half of the 450,000 immigrants and “temporary” visa holders who arrive here legally. Perspective people: put things in perspective.
We are running out of time. Our window of opportunity is closing. Changing demographics promise to erode our cultural and natural heritage beyond recovery if we don’t soon mount strong political opposition. Unabated mass immigration will bury us.
If we are to see an abrupt uprising against the government’s bipartisan immigration agenda, we should hope that Canadians see the images of not 400 but 4,000 Nigerians and Somalis streaming through Roxham Road each day. We should hope that TV viewers will be seized by panic, not by relative complacency—as is the case now—notwithstanding the still token number of brave, patriotic demonstrators that make their way to the border.
The very worst thing that could happen, at this point, would be for the Liberal government to yield to Rempel’s crusade and do as she demands: declare the entire border as an official port of entry. We shouldn’t want the Liberal government to get a handle on things. We should pray that they completely loose the handle, as they show signs of doing.
According to Rempel, our refugee/immigration system is “broken,” and that she wants to “fix it.” We don’t want to “fix” it, we want to demolish it. Notice as well that Rempel is positioning herself as a “Compassionate Conservative,” so as to undercut the Trudeau Liberals self-depiction as “caring,” “welcoming” governors. As she has clearly stated, it is not about volume but “processing.” She does not want to cut back in-migration. On the contrary: she just wants to properly “manage” it. Managed national suicide. That pretty well sums up the Conservative project, a project fully embraced by Rempel, as evidenced by this bold confession:
Most Canadians are like me. We want immigration. I want high levels of immigration. Our previous Conservative government had high levels of immigration. What we are seeing today is just a complete breakdown of immigration such that legal immigration is… seven and a half years to come to Canada as a privately sponsored refugee from Djiboute. That’s unconscionable. I want to go back to having a debate about how we process people. How we support them when they come to Canada. Plans for that. We shouldn’t be talking about whether we have a border along the Quebec-US side.
Michelle Rempel, CTV News, May 24, 2018.
In our desperation to look for champions, I fear that many of us are following her banner with the same enthusiasm that we rallied behind Conservative Party leadership candidate Kellie Leitch. We don’t want to face the fact that these people have a different end game than ours. They want to re-capture office. That’s it. And to do that, they will even throw some of their own under the bus, just to get the liberal media hounds off their tail. Lynn Belak is a case in point.
To Canadian nationalists I say this: beware of the Pied Pipers of Fake Populism. Beware of tough-talking Conservatives who mask their globalist goals with the rhetoric of patriotism. Take in the big picture. And make them understand that we don’t really have a border crisis as much as we have an immigration crisis. Tell them that “fixing” illegal immigration doesn’t cut it. Tell them that if they won’t commit to substantial immigration reduction, we will not commit to them.
Don’t be played. ■