Is American immigration out of control?

Maybe, but Canada's is worse

In 2022, there were 2.7 million immigrants crossing the Southern U.S. border, a number about equal to the number who crossed year to date 2023. Mainstream media shows daily videos of the illegal aliens crossing, and report the migrants include people from Africa, China, Asia as well as Latin America and the West Indies. If you want to enter America, forget about applying using normal channels, just show up at the Southern border and let yourself be apprehended, given date to appear in Court (not everyone is given a Court date), and start receving $7,000 a month in support, health care, help finding a job and travel to your preferred destination in U.S.A. It doesn’t really matter if you are a felon, smuggler, human trafficker, terrorist or just someone trying to get a better life - the overwhelming numbers make it almost impossible for the under-resourced border officers to do more than a cursory review. Mountains of drugs are coming in including enough fentanyl to kill all Americans.

So does that sound out of control? A lot depends on your objective. Biden’s objective is to let as many people come as possible and hope they vote Democrat, painting Republicans who want American laws enforced as enemies to the migrants. Immigration is not out of control if it is meeting the President’s goals.

United States has a population of about 337 million, so 2.7 million immigrants a year is less than 1% of the population. Canada has a population of 40 million and in the past year had almost 500,000 people immigrate into Canada, almost 50% more than the United States if adjusted for the base population. Canada has 2.3 million “non-permanent residents” today, largely students and immigrants yet to be granted residency. Pew Research says the number of undocumented immigrants in U.S.A. is about 10.5 million. Wait, Canada’s number of non-permanent residents is larger than than the U.S. if adjusted for the base population. Both countries seem to have immigration issues.

The outrage in United States is legion. You can’t watch fifteen minutes of Fox News without a heartbreaking story of the immigration crisis, or listen to New York Mayor Eric Adams or New York Governor Kathy Hochul without hearing them bitch about the immigration crisis.

But where is the outrage in Canada? Canada has a far greater problem and no one seems to care.

Canada and United States both have housing problems but Canada’s is worse since our government controlled markets don’t let the free market adjust supply to meet demand, they just give our elected leaders at federal, provincial and municipal levels, fodder for speeches that have no real audience. Trudeau claims the Liberals will “solve” the housing crisis but imposes a carbon tax and leftist rules on “green” construction eschewing natural gas and oil and favoring electricity from wind and solar, driving construction costs higher. Doug Ford proposed to open up a few acres of Ontario’s “green belt” only to reverse course in the face of NIMBY opposition pretending that Canada’s more than 1 billion acres of boreal forest are not enough “green belt” and the handful of acres Ford proposed to develop are a rounding error on Canada’s “green” areas. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow pays lip service to the housing problem but imposes senseless municipal rules on what can be built and where that drive builders to other venues.

Canada and United States both have homelessness problems, with tent cities and drug addicted homeless people cluttering up sidewalks in major cities, and progressive leaders who think the answer is to provide free drugs, “safe spaces” and show “compassion” instead of enforcing laws. This silliness is seeing major retail outlets close up, crime rise, and, thousands of young people die from drug-related causes.

But no one seems upset in Canada about the level of immigration. Nor should they be. They should be upset that the immigration is taking place in an environment where our Liberal government has done a piss poor job of enacting policies that promote building the infrastructure (home, hospitals, schools, transit, etc.) needed to make it possible to absorb the inflow of welcome immigrants, saying the new workers are needed to build the infrastructure their own policies have starved for decades.

Immigration is not the problem in either country. Leftist governments are the problem. Vote them out, elect leaders with common sense, and expect the work to right the ship to begin immediately post-election and take about a decade to bring back the needed balance.