Canada and Illegal Immigration

I am continually amazed at the number of Canadians who rail against anyone in the US who wants illegal immigration stopped. Don’t get me wrong – I have several dear friends who are Canadian, but they just don’t GET the scope of the problem we face.

Let’s take a quick look at Canadian immigration law.

Canada is actually very picky about who they let immigrate to their country. In most cases, an applicant must be a skilled worker with a job offer on the table, an entrepreneur or business person with $800,000 to invest, or to have been already nominated by a province that wants them to move there (usually because there is a job waiting for them already that they are particularly qualified for).

Applicants are considered for residency based on their ability to support themselves (and their families, if applicable) financially without assistance from the government. They also have to pass a language proficiency test. Someone who is a permanent resident can sponsor family members, but they have to support those family members. If not, and the government ends up supporting anyone who was being sponsored, the resident will be blocked from sponsoring any more family members until they pay the government back.

Canadians will often point to the fact that their government encourages immigration. That’s easy to do when the people you are welcoming are expected to support themselves and cause no burden to the taxpayers.

While there are no concrete figures available for illegal immigration to Canada, estimates range from 35,000 to 120,000. Many of these are persons whose ‘refugee claim’ was rejected. In response to the number of people trying to immigrate on false claims of being refugees, including large numbers from India, the Czech Republic, and more recently Mexico, Canada has put strict visa requirements in place to stem the tide. Polls of the Canadian public show an overwhelming support for the idea of finding and deporting these illegal aliens. However, the Canadian government is slow to take action, perhaps because even 120,000 is a drop in the bucket spread out over the nation.

To put this in perspective, Fulton County in Georgia (part of the greater Atlanta area) has an estimated 125,000 illegal aliens. That’s more illegals in ONE COUNTY than in the entire country of Canada. The entire state of Georgia (considered one of the fastest growing centers for illegal aliens after Texas) holds an estimated 490,000 illegals.

In Canada, the estimated cost of supporting a refugee who is in the process of qualifying for legal immigration status is between $10,000 and $12,000 for a whole year. In the US, the cost of the birth of one ‘anchor baby’ is between $8,000 and $16,000. That’s just in the first week of life, and the child gets automatic citizenship.To keep an illegal alien in a detention facility for one year costs at least $32,000.

At Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas, 70% of the babies born are the product of illegal parents – and the average patient is a 25 year old illegal alien having her second anchor baby. The US will normally not deport the mother of a US citizen, so she can generally stay and receive benefits such as housing and food assistance, medical care and other benefits at the government/tax-payers’ expense.

Overall, the US currently holds an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. This is a figure obtained by counting methods that primarily depend on illegals admitting to be illegal to census takers and on numbers obtained from law enforcement organizations at border points. The real number is likely to be closer to 20 million at least.

In Canada, the entire country receives government supplied healthcare for just $183 billion per year, public schooling tips the scale at around $40 billion for pre-college education and welfare costs are a scant $8 billion (excluding disability cases).(Some figures are a few years old.)

In the United States, the government spends a conservative estimate of $113 billion a year just on illegal immigrants alone for healthcare, pre-K through 12th grade education and welfare – and that doesn’t count the costs absorbed by state governments, hospitals along the border, and incarceration costs for criminals we are not allowed to deport because they might be killed by the drug cartels they worked for. (Figures again are a few years old.)

So the US spends on illegal immigrants yearly almost half of what Canada spends on their entire population for ‘basic services’.

What would happen if Canada had an influx of foreign persons they were suddenly forced to feed, house, medicate and educate? You guessed it. Their education system would collapse. Their health care system would collapse. Their prison system would collapse.

My Canadian friends, I love you – but seriously. Your understanding of immigration in the US is miniscule, and you always make the mistake of comparing it to immigration in Canada. If the United States magically disappeared today, and you suddenly shared a border with Mexico, your government and citizens would have a rude awakening.

You would scramble to put in place measures to prevent illegal immigration. You would insist on a stringent identification requirements. You would require aliens to meet certain qualifications before making them citizens.

What you would NOT do is welcome them with open arms, refuse to deport them and freely hand them everything they wanted. You couldn’t afford to. Your country would go broke inside three months.

I’ve listened politely as Canadians I know deride the US for our debt, our failure to provide health care to our citizens, and our growing insistence that only US citizens should have US citizen rights and benefits. When the issue of illegal immigration comes up, it invariably degenerates into accusations that the US is full of hateful racist bigots who want to keep minorities in their place and deny them ‘rights’.

Let me be clear. I am not against immigration. In fact, I’d love to see immigration the way the Canadians do it – mandating that an immigrant must follow proper channels, pass a language proficiency test, provide a needed skill for the job sector, have employment lined up, and be able to support themselves and their families financially. However, when the US tries to enforce such mandates, we are vilified.

My Canadian friends, again, I love you – but seriously. You don’t have a clue. Being against illegal immigration isn’t racist. Being against illegal immigration isn’t discrimination against minorities. Being against illegal immigration is being against something illegal, that hurts our entire country more every single day that we allow it.

In my next post, we’ll look at how stopping illegal immigration could potentially fix the US economy. Until then, Grace out.