Myth # 5 "But we 'owe' it to the third world"
Each year Canada takes in about 1/4 million immigrants and refugees.
Each year, births over deaths, the impoverished Third World adds another
80 million people to an already over-crowded, ailing planet where, after
30 years of family-planning and birth control programs, 1/3 of the global
population is under 15 years old. (Visit our population
clock)
In July of 1997, an official of the China Family Planning Commission
reported that just 20% of China's 320 million families obey the one-child
rule. The UN Child Fund reports that within the next few years the infant
mortality rate in the developing world will match our own - 1 in 100. Thus,
populations will continue to spiral out of control. And why not?
The sucker states will always manage to make room for one more and
that one had better be a doctor or computer genius to satisfy bigotted
notions of what 'kind' of immigrants we will be willing to 'accomodate'.
What we most certainly do NOT 'owe' the Third World is a short-sighted
policy where we remove the skilled and educated members of their nations
to compete with Canadians for jobs. Those people are (or could be) the
agents for real change in their own countries. Without them, the Third
World can only sink into ever-greater misery.
Indira Gandhi
once scolded western nations for precisely these practises. The disasterous
1/4 million we accept each and every year can never make any real difference
to the 80 millions born each year or the 99.9% condemned to stay in the
Third World, but it does make an enormous difference to our own quality
of life. With OFFICIAL unemployment running as high as it does, the last
thing we need is anyone - skilled or unskilled - competing with hard-pressed
Canadians for jobs.
There is a larger, moral issue at stake too. What kind of country do
we want? The skilled people we extract from the Third World could stay
home and fight to establish decent health care, democracy and every other
perq Canada has on offer. Slowly but surely this nation is being reinvented
and repopulated - not by a kind of can-do homesteading pioneer spirit,
but with native Canadians who believe it is 'easier' to say and do nothing
as this invasion continues (with no end in sight), as well as imported
Canadians, who believe it is 'easier' to reap the fruits of democracy,
education or health care someone else fought for.
Yet somehow we have been convinced that our first obligation is not
to our children or our parents or our neighbours - but to the wretched
of the earth (however, not so wretched they cannot scrape together several
thousand dollars for air fares, and in some particularly desperate instances,
adding another $20,000 to a snake head, 'jockey', or other flesh smuggler
to 'lubricate' a refugee claim.) Over-taxed, over-burdened Canadians would
like to know how.