 Jay Fiedel, this is you from the North. Today we're asking how does Canadian immigration and immigration policy differ from that of the U.S.? And what can the U.S. learn from how Canada does it? And we've discussed this with Dr. Ken Rogers, retired Canadian businessman in Kelowna, British Columbia. Welcome to the show, Ken. Hello, Jay. This is a subject where Canada is very different than the U.S. Well, that's better because the U.S. ain't so good. The U.S. has needed immigration reform for decades and decades. A friend of mine worked in Congress on immigration reform, and he wrote so many bills that never even got considered over a lifetime. So, you know, what happens now is it deteriorates further. So my first question to you, is, Ken, to explore the differences, you know, have any migrants come to Canada from Latin America and from Africa, from Europe, from Ukraine? Do you have the same kind of border situation that we do, the same kind of policy issues that we do about migrants and immigration? Well, in theory, we have, you know, many of the same problems, but a lot of them, they're just at different degrees. You know, you start off with, you know, physically, Canada geographically has only one neighbor, and that's the United States. You know, so people can't walk across the border into Canada unless they're an American, or they're coming from the United States. Now, where the U.S., the Mexican border is a very major problem. That's the whole issue in the United States. Nobody cares about, you know, Canadians moving into the U.S., but they certainly care about the southern border. Well, your immigration in the U.S. is a big political subject. And yet, it's as if the subject was because the sheer quantity of immigration. Well, that's just not correct if you compare it with Canada, or let's just say Canada has a population that's about 11% of what the population of the U.S. is. But we have about one-third as many new immigrants into Canada each year as the U.S. does. You know, that is, we have one and a quarter million new immigrants into Canada. But the basis of the immigration is very different. The cornerstone of the U.S. immigration policy is what I call family reunification. You know, where in Canada, the family reunification amounts to about the same number of immigrants per capita relative to Canada. But most of our family reunification is where someone comes to Canada on a temporary permit to be a college student. When they have a college degree in Canada, they, you know, are attractive for Canadian jobs. And so, the family reunification then comes to a great extent because you've got some educated person bringing some of their family members. Well, the definition of family reunification in Canada is not as broad as in the U.S. You know, you can't bring your mother-in-law and your, you know, grandson or something. You know, it's got to be pretty direct family. Where the cornerstone in Canadian immigration is all economic based. You know, we have 12 times as many immigrants proportionally as the U.S. does on economic grounds. You know, our economy, for example, in the recent five-year period that they had some statistics, 80% of the labor force growth in Canada came from immigrants, you know, from the direct immigration. And Canada has a point system for, you know, who's better for the Canadian economy than the next person. You know, what are we short of? Now, we use two temporary immigration programs very heavily. Let's say about two-thirds of the immigrants that come into Canada each year are on a temporary basis. And virtually all of those are students or temporary workers. You know, and you get a special temporary work permit. For example, where I live, it's a very major agricultural area in terms of orchards, orchards and wine growing. And we have just tons of Mexicans come on temporary work permits. But if they've worked here for, you know, each season for two or three years, some of them even get to work year round, then, you know, they become attractive new residents. You know, like they, you know, can move from the temporary status to a full-time status. And so you really have a pretty smooth way of doing it. Similarly with the colleges, you know, Canada stands on their head in particular to get graduate students. And that they will, when somebody's got their college degree, then they obviously would be attractive to Canadian industry for jobs. And so they join the labor force and then they may bring their family members. Now, one of the big differences with Canada and the U.S. is we don't have a Mexican border. We did recently have a bit of a Mexican problem, as we had so many Mexican workers that had come here on a temporary basis that eventually became citizens, that it became, you know, evident to a Mexican that Canada wasn't really all snow and ice. There were some really nice places to live in Canada that even a Mexican could enjoy. And so they started to have, you know, because of all the tourist flights from Canada to Mexico, you know, there's some pretty cheap airline flights sometimes of the year. And so, you know, a smart Mexican with just not very many bucks could fly to Canada, you know, pretend they're coming on a temporary basis and then, you know, try to stay, you know, much like people try to walk across the U.S. border or wade across, if you're thinking of the Rio Grande. And they actually had a change, just a very recent change was that, you know, we used to have Mexicans could come to Canada without a visa. You know, the same as Americans don't need a visa to come to Canada. And they just, you know, change that back to requiring Mexicans to have visas to avoid that miniscule problem in terms of quantity. You know, somebody with enough money for an airplane flight, you know, wasn't going. So the U.S. Southern border, you're sitting where, as I understand the statistics, nearly 50% of the people that show up at the border get rejected. You know, well, Canada doesn't have a big rejection rate because how do you get here to be rejected? You know, like asylum or refugees are not a big problem. Why not? It seems to me that if I'm trying to get into the United States from the Southern border and the United States is theoretically attractive, you know, they hear nice stories from relatives and friends who live here. So they try to cross over and have a better life. But, you know, Canada is a rule of law country. It's a country with opportunity. In many ways, it's a country with a government that cares more about you than in the U.S. or at least the Republicans care less about you. But, you know, why doesn't somebody who's coming in from Latin America say, gee, I'm not going to fool around in the U.S. Southern border. It's too much trouble and risk. Bob Weyer, what have you, political machinations. Why don't I just go to Canada? I'll find a way to go to Canada. I'll beg, borrow, steal the money for that airplane and I'll wind up in Canada and I'll be happy there. I mean, I feel that's an opportunity waiting to happen for a lot of people from Latin America. Why isn't it happening? Well, the Latin America needs the money for the airplane flight, you know, and, you know, those people that arrive on an asylum basis would be, you know, sorted out the same as in the U.S. and probably the same percentage would be rejected. You know, but there's a, you know, just people don't do that. One of the odd items in Canada, because one of our provinces Quebec speaks French or at least the, you know, the official language is French, but about a third of the province primary language is English, mainly in Montreal. But, people from Haiti that speak English, which had all of, you know, their horrendous problems and made it into the U.S. somehow or another, they actually, you know, went to New York State, upstate to the border between New York State and Quebec and were walking across the border there. And, you know, they, the place they famously gave it a name that every Canadian knew, Roxham Road was, because you could, when you arrived in New York City, you could actually hire a cab and drive you to that border. You know, they had regular service to get people to go to that border. And those were Latin Americans that, that preferred particularly anybody that spoke French, you know, that was their spot that they preferred to come. So, yeah, the odd, you know, Caribbean island other than Haiti, where there was French speaking, and that was the route that they've used. This raises the question of the quality and intensity of enforcement of the immigration laws regarding immigration, sanctuary, refugee status, all that. How well organized is the border patrol to the extent that it's like, you know, that Canada has a border patrol? How well, how much enforcement do you see? How much contention do you see? I mean, how much legal process do you see rejecting people who want to come across who really don't qualify? How much investigation is going on to find the people who don't qualify and, you know, identify them, maybe put them in jail, maybe send them back? What kind of process is going on? What do you see in the newspaper about that? Well, border patrol, when you watch TV and you see the American southern border, you know, border patrol tends to be agents in airplanes or vehicles monitoring the US-Mexican border for people trying to come across illegally. Well, the only border we've got is with the US, about 4,000 miles worth, and I don't think there's anybody that patrols. We have official border crossings, you know, where you drive up and, you know, there's a booth on the Canada side and a booth on the American side, and you got to, you know, when you're leaving Canada, you just, you don't even wave to the Canadian booth, and when you arrive at the American, you know, it takes very little time and click, click, and you can go into the US from Canada and vice versa. Now, if you're not an American, you know, then the agent at the border crossing, you know, an official crossing, you know, checks your documents, and so on, and that's about it. I mean, if you could somehow arrive in Canada, you know, without going through a border station, you could be here for a long time, and nobody would give a hoot unless, you know, you need a work permit, you know, like a social insurance number or the equivalent driver's license, those kinds of things, you know, eventually those, you know, would have you registered somehow somewhere, but generally, we just don't have a problem with undocumented residents. So, you don't have immigration agents running around doing raids on businesses and arresting people and foster raiding them, and then deporting them, you don't have that? No. What about the ocean? Actually, I know of one example, just show you how extreme this one is. A lady that I knew reasonably well was a flight attendant for a Middle East airline, and, you know, they suddenly decided that they weren't going to pay any benefits or something, and they could hire staff that, you know, were cheaper than these people. She was from Britain. Well, she had parents that lived in Canada who became ill, and so when she left this airline, she came as a caregiver, and she just came in by an airplane and, you know, showed her British passport and so on, and you're here to, you know, as if it was like a visit, you know, but she decided to care for her parents. Well, eventually, both parents died, and 15 years later, she applied for some government aid, and they said, well, how come you're here? Because she was on, you know, in a sense, welfare need, you know, the Canadian government paid for her airplane and flew her back to England. And this is the only case I know of, of anybody, you know, in that sense, where I had any personal connection with anybody that had any role. So interesting. What about, what about the oceans, you know? I mean, we have a lot of, for example, we have a lot of drugs that are moving into the United States through, through the coasts, through the ocean. Why, why can't you talk about these sort of stations along the 4,000 mile border? But why can't I just get in a boat and come from somewhere in the Caribbean, or come from somewhere in the U.S., you know? I mean, as an illegal U.S. immigrant, and take a boat through Nova Scotia, I mean, in the summertime, Ken, in the summertime. And enter Canada that way. I mean, is there any action to find me, to exclude me, to arrest me, to enforce the immigration laws against people who come in by odd means that way? Well, we do have a Coast Guard, but it's really not much. It's, it's pretty pathetic. And, you know, their equipment is pretty old, so that if your boat was fairly new and fast moving, you could get around them anyhow. But in order to get to, to a port in Canada, you either have to come across the Arctic Ocean, or you have to come past the U.S. You know, like if you have an ocean crossing craft, you, you have enough money, you don't need to come to Canada illegally, you could easily get to Canada or the U.S. on some other logical basis. You know, it's, it's really asylum seekers that are trying to walk across a border and, and you just can't walk across very easily in Canada. So, you know, we just don't have the problem with the illegal immigration, but one of the, the key points is just the sheer quantity of immigration. Like the United States, if you listen to the news, one of the favorite phrases in the U.S. is, we are a country of immigrants. Well, you're sure not a country of immigrants compared to Canada. You know, that, your population, you know, 330 some million, and you let in 1.6 million immigrants in, in, I think, either last year or the year before. And we let in 1.2 million immigrants. You know, like, like now two thirds of ours were those two temporary categories, you know, but those convert fairly quickly. You know, give them a five-year click and, and at least 80% of those temps convert into permanent immigrants, permanent citizens. And similarly, in the United States, about 15% of the U.S. population was born outside the United States. Well, nearly 25% of Canadians were born outside Canada. I mean, it's just a huge difference. Well, you know, this reflects the public opinion of Canadians, and certainly of Canadian officials, about, about allowing immigrants to come into the country. You know, it reminds me of Singapore, where Singapore will say, hey, we need, we need a million people to staff various businesses. So we're going to open the floodgates. We're going to take in a million people. They're going to give them whatever visas are appropriate. We're going to give them jobs. We'll place them and we'll give them homes and we'll let them buy the homes, usually apartments in these high rises. And that, that way we make sure that our economy is staffed by, you know, the necessary number of people, namely immigrants. And I suspect that that's kind of the public policy in Canada, where, you know, the officials over years and many administrations have said, we want extra people, more people. So we'll open the floodgates, we'll be really liberal about letting people in, letting diverse groups of people in. We're not opposed to that. We'll encourage that, you know, we'll structure it, we'll manage it, but we're going to take a lot more people. This is not an accident that you have so many people coming in relative to the U.S. So what's your sense of the public opinion and public policy that underlies all of that? Well, before COVID, there was never anybody grumbled about immigration in Canada, where before COVID, that was always one of the top subjects in the U.S. political era of just what stinks about American policy and immigration was pretty high on lots of people's list, despite the fact that immigration, as a proportion of the population or the sheer size of it just didn't compare at all to Canada, you know, as Canadians that have, how could you possibly complain about immigration? It's a great thing. I mean, they're filling all these jobs, you know, like, you know, your demographics are such that the birth rates, you know, how many children are there per woman, you know, in Canada, it's only about one and a quarter. In the U.S., it's about one and three, or one and three quarters, you know, still less than two, which you need to maintain the population. Now counting the baby boomer era coming of, you know, retirement age, you know, your workforce shortage is exaggerated and to avoid the problem like Japan has, declining population and, you know, they just don't allow much in the way of immigration. You know, the immigrants provide a lot of things that are really important. You know, one of the factors that are, you know, jobs that other people don't wish to do, that's a main thing like, you know, all of the agriculture in California and Florida, immigrants work in the hot weather very well compared to a typical American or typical Canadian. You know, Canadians don't like to, you know, pick cherries and apples and, you know, other fruit. So, you know, we have, the Mexicans come and then they integrate into the economy and then the next wave of them come and it's all good. It's all good. So, you know, you mentioned, I think it's really important that the central difference in policy between the U.S. and Canada is that we have this kind of family connection system that allows people to come in and get visas and permanent residence on the basis of a family connection rather than an economic skill grade that's useful to the economy. Although I can tell you there are certain limited categories of people who demonstrate that they have some skill that's necessary and helpful. They can come in, but I don't think it's that many people. The bar is much higher than you would imagine. Okay. And so in Canada, they've got to demonstrate that they have some value to the economy. In my view, that's a really much better system. But what happens in the world of trouble? What happens when you have to consider groups of nationalities? If I'm, for example, potentially I could be a member of Hamas or Hezbollah or some other terrorist organization, am I being screened out? Am I being profiled as an Arab? You know, Trump, at one point, he was going to stop everybody from every Arab country. If you remember, I mean, people forget these things, but that's what happened when he first took office. And it was pretty gross because he was profiling hundreds of millions of people that way. But what does Canada do? Does Canada like this group and dislike that group? Does Canada have racial or ethnic or cultural divides when it allows people to come in, even for an economically valuable purpose? Well, we have always had, on the world scale, a fairly positive attitude towards asylum seekers. Now, of course, they can't show up on their own. They've got to have help getting there. So we've had a bunch of Afghan or Afghan, I don't know whether you call them Afghanis or people from Afghanistan, anyhow. But they were mainly ones that helped the Canadian military force there. And, you know, even though we, in theory, would have them, we've still been pretty slow to do it. You know, a lot of Afghanis who assisted the Canadian military there actually, you know, had panicked and went left and went to Pakistan because Canada was so slow to get them here. You know, similarly, we had a ton of people from Vietnam near the end of the Vietnam War. You know, even though, you know, Canada didn't play a military role in Vietnam, we still, you know, had asylum seekers from there. We've had a ton of people from the Middle East. And, you know, our, you know, screening system is no more brilliant than the American, you know. So when you've got, you know, somebody with a passport that says they're coming from the United Arab Emirates, how was your border authority to know that they really came from Syria? And they were, you know, one of these, you know, Iranian mob squads or whatever you call you know, riot groups. But we do get our share of people. I mean, you still end up with, you know, somebody who was, you know, German Nazi lived in Canada for, you know, 30 or 40 years, you know, without anybody recognizing who they were, what they were. So we've got, you know, far from perfect. And it's only in the last two years that there really has been any major complaints by Canadians about immigration. And that's solely because of our housing crisis. You know, is the cause and then it goes back up the chain. And part of the housing crisis was this, Canada was so open on these student visas, especially for graduate students, that some of these private universities, you know, call them Trump University type of scams, okay, it opened solely to, because foreigners could come in and apply for a university permit. And these were all set up almost as a way to get into Canada without really wanting to get a university degree or whatever. And so you had a ton of these universities where somebody had come and they would, you know, they'd get into Canada because they were a student and had the university papers. And then the college would then, you know, let them go for one course, let's say, and they would be able to get a, you know, a job somewhere. And so, you know, five years later, somebody finds out here's this person that only took one course the first year, or maybe they kept taking one course, you know, and five years later, they still have been finished their first year of college. You know, and that abuse, you know, is one of the items that without the housing crisis, nobody would have ever even followed up the chain to find out, how come we have this problem? How about the marriage abuse? You know, that has been, you know, a steady example of abuse in the country, in this country, where you marry somebody, and based on that marriage, you know, you get some kind of visa, maybe citizenship, because of the marriage. But the marriage isn't real. The marriage is a fraud marriage only for the purpose of getting immigration status. Do you have that? In other words, if I marry a Canadian citizen, will I get a visa? And if I marry that citizen without the intention of really being married, will I be caught and thrown out of the country? I would assume it happens here about the same as the U.S., and I would just assume that you wouldn't get caught about the same as in the U.S. It's not a big issue. Okay, well, you know, we must discuss one thing before we run out of time, and that's this, you know, it looks every day more and more like Trump could be the next president. And there are people, you know, who don't care, they don't realize what changes will take place, and there are other people who do care, as a philosophical matter, an ideological matter, and they worry a lot about their life and their quality of life changing. Whether it's, you know, real or, you know, exaggerated, they worry. So the question is, if they wanted to leave, you know, the number one possible country that's like the U.S., the number one place that has a rule of law and civil rights, you know, an economy that is similar to the U.S. Economist, a quality of life similar to the U.S., it would be Canada. But the question is, you know, how does the average American get to go there legally and get an immigrant visa legally? And then from that, get to be a citizen of Canada legally. How long does it take? That's a really big question. How long does it take? And what does that individual have to do to go through the process to get to be a Canadian? I remember during, you talked about Vietnam, I remember, you know, all these young people, they didn't want to serve in the army, so they went to Montreal. They didn't necessarily speak French either. They didn't just go to Montreal. We have a huge area of British Columbia that was just loaded with Americans who wanted to avoid the draft. You know, it's the area, it's in British Columbia called the Kootenays. It's just an absolutely gorgeous area. It's, it's, you know, right north of Idaho, like northern Idaho and western Montana are two of the most beautiful places in the United States like Glacier Park and that type of stuff, although they don't have glaciers anywhere at ground level. It's like, you know, go up the Columbia River, you know, where it starts in Canada or, you know, that area. And we have tons of those, but in terms of your question, the, it's easier to come from the United States to Canada than it is to come from almost any other country. You know, we started off in the British Commonwealth, so you could come from Britain or Australia or New Zealand, you know, pretty easily, but an American with a job and with economic talent would immediately be high on the points list. You know, Canada's jobs orientation or economic basis of immigration is, you know, you'd have a secondary factory be language. Well, Americans don't have a language problem, custom problem. Well, they'd say you've got to leave your gun behind. You know, that is, you know, on some basis, you know, if I were the agent, I might say I'd led an Australian in before I'd led an American in if I had to pick for two people with exactly the same qualifications, you know, just that minor difference in some social attitudes. However, the ability of somebody to an American to come to Canada on really short notice, you know, could easily be in Canada doing, working away if they were employable while their, you know, status is processed, you know, but the likelihood of a rejection is almost negligible if they've got a job. I mean, I remember growing up in Calgary, Alberta, and, you know, in, you know, when I started university, there was maybe 150,000 people in Calgary. You know, there's now a million and a half people in that city. It's more than a million and a half. I mean, very successful sparkly city, you know, much like Massachusetts, the, you know, very high standard living compared to everywhere else. Well, the high school I went to was about 50% Americans or sons of Americans who came to Alberta to work in the oil industry. They just transferred in with their corporations, much like, you know, I worked in Salt Lake City for several years, you know, and I had, you know, an employment visa. I forgot what it was called, but, you know, it was really the employer said, you know, we need this person and they've got qualifications that really suit our purposes and we are having trouble finding somebody else that can do that. And so, click and I get this three-year visa and then, you know, it was diddly squat to have it renewed and, you know, I was not at the time interested in applying for full-time citizenship, but that type of thing in reverse is readily available for any American with any skill. What about citizenship? Suppose I really like it in Canada and I don't feel like how could one not, I gotta interrupt say, how could one not like it in Canada? I suppose one could say, it depends where you go, you know, like one of our temporary work permits was for, you know, a bunch of the industries in the far north, you know, where, you know, I don't know that that would be too attractive for so many people. However, sorry to interrupt you there. No, I just wonder what the track is to get from a, you know, a work visa, call it. I'm sure there are multiple possibilities, you know, categories of work visa, but from a work visa to a permanent resident, I'd rather, well, to a citizen. How many people in the high school, if you follow them, or in Calgary or, you know, in the cities of Canada that came from the U.S., ultimately became or become Canadian citizens? Well, a lot were dual citizens. I can remember a bunch of the kids in my high school, you know, they were pretty startled with their getting American draft, you know, that was the Vietnam era, you know, but anyhow, a bunch, you know, became Canadian citizens, you know, and a bunch did not, you know, just move back to the U.S. But there's lots of Canadians that moved to the U.S., worked there for a while, then moved back to Canada and vice versa. You know, one of my sons lives in Los Angeles. Canada has a certain kind of open door policy. And a lot of people, you know, are very appreciative of that. A lot of people came from Europe after World War II, and nobody would accept them, except Canada. Canada accepted them, and then ultimately they wended their way into the United States. But Canada was a tolerant, accepting place along the way. And it had a global reputation for that. Now you have complications in the world that you have described here. And I wonder where it's all going. Is Canada going to remain an open door country? Or perhaps is Canada going to start closing its doors? Are people going to react to events around the world and kind of shut the door, maybe on certain groups or in general? What are your thoughts about the future? Well, the Canadian government officially increased the number of immigrants they're allowing per year. You know, that's sort of measure one, where the U.S., the whole orientation of the Republican Party is to reduce the immigration, even though Canada has proportionally about three times as much immigration as the U.S. The racial tensions do arise in Canada. For example, there's a neighborhood in metropolitan Vancouver called Surrey. Or it's, you know, let's call it much like you'd say the Bronx is part of New York. Surrey is part of Vancouver. And there's about three quarters of a million people live in Surrey, but it's very, very heavily Punjabi. Or let's call it from the Sikhs, SIHK, however you say it's Sikh or Sikh, how it's said. And that there's a ton of gang wars that really came from the countries that those people came from, you know, where they want to fight each other and the violence is just un-Canadian. Like this one suburb of Vancouver has more crime than all the rest of the metro together, including the downtown. And so there's actions of people create disgruntled attitudes, you know, like my example a couple of minutes ago. The Canadians become disenchanted with the groups that are fighting among themselves. Yes, but also the example of, you know, Netanyahu, you know, massacring people in Gaza, you know, doing inhumane things against the Gazans, you know, develops an animosity towards whoever he is in his group, you know, and the anti-Jewish sentiment that it wrote has risen, has solely related to that. You know, like, you know, the sympathy, there was no great problem before that. You think this is going to be a change in Canada, you know, sensitivity to things happening elsewhere and maybe disapproval of groups that are coming from elsewhere by association? Is the open door policy going to change? No. Okay, I just wanted to get your thought on that. We got to go. We're way over. So Ken Rogers, Dr. Ken Rogers retired businessman of a par excellence from Kelowna, British Columbia, helping us understand not only the immigration laws and policies of Canada, but how it works on the ground. Thank you so much, Ken. Aloha from Western Canada. Aloha.