Biden’s Unlikely Better on Immigration: Canada’s Trudeau

2024/03/06 Leave a comment

Funny to see American conservatives using Trudeau to attack Biden on Mexican migration:

While President Biden was engaging last week in border-security political theater on the Rio Grande, Canada actually took concrete measures to stem the flow of Mexican asylum seekers. Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can act to protect his country’s national interest from out-of-control migration. Meanwhile, the immigration and border policies of the Biden administration are reaching new lows.

Like the United States, Canada is overwhelmed with economic migrants who are exploiting a poorly designed national asylum process. Our northern neighbor’s asylum system is currently at its breaking point with about 144,000 claims filed in 2023. This number might seem modest, even negligible, compared to the backlog the United States is facing, but, in the context of Canada’s population size, the equivalent number for the United States would be well over a million claims.

Remarkably, Trudeau ordered his government to return to the sensible policy that requires Mexicans to qualify for a Canadian visa before simply buying an airplane ticket, flying to Canada, and filing an asylum claim.

Trudeau, although rhetorically committed to his own version of open-borderism, is for the moment retreating in the face of political reality. Of the 144,000 asylum claimants in Canada in 2023, some 24,000 were Mexicans. In 2016, the corresponding number of Mexicans was just 260. Even our easy-going neighbors to the north know when enough is enough.

Trudeau was facing pressure from Canadian conservatives as well as from provincial authorities in Quebec, where his own family is rooted and easy immigration, particularly from the francophone world, has always been encouraged. Quebec province is about as politically conservative as is New York City, but as Mayor Eric Adams has discovered, basic common sense is rearing its head everywhere these days—except in the White House.

Even abstract open-border ideology melts in the face of trying to actually accommodate, in winter, tens of thousands of uninvited “newcomers,” who arrive with their elderly parents and children, speaking a different language, adhering to different mores, with limited capacity to work and little financial means.

Americans are still waiting for Biden to act a la Trudeau as our national crisis spins out of control. Amazingly, after his recent visit to Brownsville, Texas, it seems that the U.S. open-border lobby, whose smiling face is DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, still controls the waning political judgment of our aging 81-year-old president. …

Source: Biden’s Unlikely Better on Immigration: Canada’s Trudeau

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Conservatism Is A Collection Of Losers. It Doesn’t Have To Be.

2020/08/11 Leave a comment

A American conservative criticism of current American conservatives, with some parallels with some Canadian conservatives:

“I’m a conservative but at this point who cares?” said Donald Trump in 2016. “We’ve got to straighten out the country.”

Perhaps the only reason to care about conservatism today is that a preoccupation with the concept itself often presents an obstacle to “straightening out the country.” Indeed, it mostly prevents self-identified conservatives from achieving their own political goals. Going forward, whatever valuable causes might be associated with conservatives—and in my opinion there are many—will need to be rescued from conservatism.

I am not the first person to point out that conservative political coalitions are mostly just collections of losers, but the point nevertheless bears repeating. Today’s conservatism is merely the name used to categorize the rejects of the post–Cold War order: this includes a few oddball financiers who can’t play nicely with others, extractive industries and other declining sectors, the small businesses most reliant on low-wage, low-skill labor, and a group often referred to as social conservatives who have been almost totally marginalized from mainstream culture. At bottom, nothing holds this gang of misfits together except exclusion from the dominant group of big tech oligarchs, more respectable financial rent seekers, and the leading cultural tastemakers in media and academia.

The conservative favorite Lord Acton famously quipped that power corrupts, but as the self-described Marxist Slavoj Žižek is fond of pointing out, powerlessness corrupts, too. One effect of conservatives’ waning economic and social power has been a retreat into their own self-referential identity groups and subcultures—bizarre little cults ranging from Straussians to Burkeans to the various branches of “Austrian economics.” Conservatives applaud themselves for this apparent devotion to “ideas,” but it’s actually just an effect—and a cause—of their irrelevance with respect to matters of practical importance and almost total intellectual incoherence. Despite this obsession with theoretical inquiry, however, conservatives have been nearly banished from the academy, prestige media, and cultural institutions. The leading “conservative thinkers” of the last 20 years have influenced hardly anyone beyond the next generation of downwardly mobile graduate students.

As Gladden Pappin, deputy editor of American Affairs, has argued, contemporary conservatism is an attempt to articulate the role of non-state institutions rather than a serious approach to wielding political power. The result is an abundance of platitudinous books on Tocqueville and treacly essays on civility, but little serious study of how today’s economy actually works or how to coordinate diverse interests across complex institutions. Thus, even when conservatives happen to win office, typically all that they can imagine doing is reducing their own capacity to exercise power. Conservative foundations and donors have plowed millions into producing mind-numbing Adam Smith documentaries—last year, they even created a virtual pin factory, along with an absurdist farce featuring the Dalai Lama—but they have shown little interest in, say, planning for economic and technological competition with China or understanding the effects of financialization. In part, this may be owing to the fact that conservatism has become nothing more than an ideological gloss retrospectively applied to the machinations of lobbyists and grifters. Yet on a deeper level it seems that the conservative corpus is simply no longer capable of anything but reflexive spasms.

I state these matters so harshly—in a magazine called The American Conservative of all places—not to rub salt into the wounds of long-suffering conservatives, but rather because vast new possibilities have opened up for those willing to throw off the constricting ideologies of the “end of history.” The neoliberal economic system is falling apart under the weight of its own contradictions, while its intellectual and cultural energies appear increasingly exhausted. New policy options and even novel directions in culture are coming into view. New electoral coalitions are emerging to support, for example, more family-oriented economic policies, to strengthen communities from the neighborhood to the nation, and to challenge the moral-cultural dominance of radical liberal individualism.

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