A couple of months ago, I attended an anti-immigration rally to counterprotest. Someone at the rally, when they saw my “No borders” sign, asked me if I locked my house, telling me it’s the same thing as immigration restrictions.
Here’s why this a false equivalence.
I lock my doors to protect my possessions. I don’t want someone stealing my computer, for example.
What are Canada’s possessions? Government buildings? No one’s going to steal those. No matter how open the border is.
Even if you consider natural resources as belonging to the Canadian government (and I don’t), no one is really going to steal them. No one will steal our boreal forests or drain Great Slave Lake.
And speaking of keeping out crime, increasing border restrictions doesn’t prevent crime. The vast majority of crime committed in Canada is by people born in Canada; immigrants are seriously underrepresented in Canadian prisons. In addition, as Canada’s immigration rate has been rising over the last few decades, the crime rate has been dropping. In fact, the longer immigrants live in Canada, the lower the crime rate becomes where they live.
It’s just ridiculous to equate immigration and crime.
