I just sent this letter to my Member of Parliament:
To Hon. Bill Morneau, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1A 0A6
The events in France make it perfectly clear what kind of thing the Syrian refugees are fleeing from. Your party won the recent election with a mandate to accept more Syrian refugees and increase our participation in this crisis.
As my Member of Parliament, I urge you to stand up in that legislative body and propose that we TRIPLE THE RECENTLY ANNOUNCED NUMBER that we will commit ourselves to accept.
The recent generation of Canadian politicians — especially those in the Conservative Party — have fallen completely out of touch with Canada’s history and traditions. They have grotesquely transformed our immigration policy into a racket where we sell Canadian citizenship to the rich of the world, giving a safe place for them to park their assets. Such people will never see Canada as anything except a convenient pied-à-terre, or a sort of tax-dodge-with-a-passport. Those aren’t the kind of people that built Canada. We are a nation built by offering a home and a second chance to the poor and oppressed of other lands. That should be our pride, our glory.
Bringing in large numbers of refugees from foreign lands, often with languages, customs and religions that we find exotic, many of them traumatized by terror and war, and with the distinct possibility that there will be some bad apples among them (planted agents, criminals, faked identities) is nothing new to Canadians. We have done this over and over and over again in this country. Scots fleeing the brutal highland clearances, the six Iroquois Nations fleeing ethnic cleansing, African-Americans escaping slavery through the Underground Railroad, Irish peasants fleeing the potato famine, Armenians fleeing mass killings, Ukrainians fleeing Stalin’s terror, Jews fleeing the Holocaust, Hungarians fleeing the Communists, African Gujaratis fleeing Idi Amin, Vietnamese boat people, Sri Lankan Tamils fleeing civil war, Rwandans fleeing ethnic slaughter.… peasants and slumdwellers from around the world fleeing poverty and static societies that keep them at the bottom. Yes, there are costs and difficulties involved in taking in strangers in this way. But we know how to do it, probably better than anyone in the world. It’s our specialty. This time is no different. Years ago, I saw my neighbours roll up their sleeves and volunteer to welcome, sponsor, house, and help frightened boat people who arrived after weeks on flimsy rafts, being attacked by pirates, then months in gruesome internment camps. Now those former refugees are fellow Canadians we point to with pride, and they in turn volunteer for the same task. Yesterday, a Toronto couple were married cheaply at City Hall, and turned over the full cost of their planned fancy wedding to sponsor Syrian refugees. They, and others like them, are the spirit of our country. We must never forget this.
As a historian, I seldom read the news without hearing echos from the past. Here a quote from a history of Irish immigrants to Canada, fleeing the potato famine:
Shocked by the numbers flooding Boston, New York and other ports, the United States Congress passed two Passenger Acts. One limited the number of passengers a vessel was permitted to carry. The other increased the price of the cheapest passage to seven pounds, an amount that was well beyond what most poor Irish could afford. Starting in May of 1846, this resulted in increased traffic to Canadian ports. In fact, during one occasion, Grosse Isle [the immigrant processing point in Quebec] had a line of 40 ships, carrying 15,000 souls, waiting to land there. Of that number, many were seriously ill with fever and some were already dead.
This created thousands of orphans, most of whom were assigned to Canadian families. A special decree ruled that these children, to be raised in French-speaking Canadian families, would retain their Irish names out of respect for their heritage. Conservative newspapers and the Orange Lodge — influential in Canadian politics and high society — screamed that these refugees would all be nasty, bomb-throwing Catholic terrorists, and that the streets of Montreal and Toronto would be seething with ape-like, sub-human Irish criminals. Those orphaned Irish names — Riley, Kelly, Ryan, Johnson… now resound in Canadian history and culture.
Sound familiar? Here’s the latest news from the United States:
While Democrats initially stood up to Republican fear-mongering and bigotry, too many of them lost that conviction on the final vote for a bill that creates additional barriers for Syrian and Iraqi refugees coming to the U.S. Forty-seven Democrats voted with Republicans in a final vote of 289–137.
The same assholes are always around. We have such assholes in Canada, but, hopefully, fewer of them. At least we don’t have, as Americans do, the majority of our politicians falling over themselves to support ISIS. The Syrian and Iraqi refugees turned away by the triumph of the stupid in the U.S.A. should be welcomed to Canada with open arms. And we will end up all the wealthier, happier, and wiser for it — for we are the future, not the past.
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