 give me your tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Emma Lazarus on the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1883. And it was a statement of the American openness to diversity, to immigration, Ellis Island, the whole experience. And it lasted for a while. But there came a time in the 20s and 30s when it was no more. And the country turned in on itself and stopped tolerating and stopped allowing immigration just in time to reject the St. Louis, remember the St. Louis. So, you know, we don't have a good history in immigration. I'm sorry to say. And the question today is whether, when you compare our immigration policies and attitudes and sensibilities with Canada, whether Canada has been better. I suggest that maybe it may have been better. And Ken Rogers, a retired Canadian businessman in Kelowna, British Columbia joins us today as every couple of weeks to make that comparison. Welcome to the show, Ken. Hello, Jay. I really don't think that Canada's record is an awful lot better than the US. The US has certainly got some things that are better than anywhere else. For example, you know, there's more people living in the United States that were born in some other country than any other country on earth. You know, so you'd say you're housing more immigrants than anybody. Now, but that relative to the US population that, you know, would not stand a good test. For example, about one in seven Americans or let's say permanent residents in the United States were born somewhere other than the United States, where in Canada, it's just about a quarter. And Australia is like 30%. Now, those, you know, three countries have a long history of having, you know, lots of immigrants, whereas, you know, in the most recent years, you've got countries like Lebanon, which was just totally ruined because of immigration, you know, people fleeing from Syria, plus the unstable government. And they compounded each other and made a real mess. But, you know, the US is just in the last few months has really entered a new phase where they have a unique mess on the southern border where you have nearly half a million people a month, you know, coming in. I mean, it's just way, way more than the US has had. I mean, you know, just before the pandemic, you were doing, you know, two million a year, well, when you have half a million a month in the last half dozen months coming in, you know, you're talking between five and six million. You know, that's a dramatic change. So one can understand why, you know, the governor of Texas is jumping out of his cake, you know, whether he thinks his methodology to get the point across makes any sense or is, is at least bit humane. Certainly, you know, it highlights the problem. You know, I remember my wife and I went to Europe back in the early 70s. And we were trying to drive driving driving from France to Germany. And we looked around at this town that we had just entered. And it was a German town. It wasn't French. And I said, where's the border? We crossed some river. But it was, you know, not really noticeable. There was no guardhouse. There was no, you know, no guardrail at all. We just drove down the road into Germany. So this is new. Europe has, you know, dropped borders. And, you know, for time, even in the context of think tech, you know, the song we were singing, the phenomenon we were observing was that the borders in Europe had essentially dissolved. There were no borders. It was a very optimistic time and enlightened time that you could have Europe, which was so focused on borders up to that point, lose the borders, dissolve the borders. Then there came the migrants, what you described in Lebanon. And it was a big problem because there were virtually millions of people coming out of the Middle East and Central Asia trying to get to a better life in Europe. And that tension existed between, though we do the moral things, so we allow them in or across our country to be, you know, try to take care of them, or should we turn them around because they do create an economic problem and a political problem, you know, our natural, our citizens in this country don't like it. And that happened in many, many countries, if you recall. And it's not a long time ago. This is what, 10, maybe 15 years ago. And, you know, there's a lot of resistance in many, many countries, except Angela Merkel. Angela Merkel was a leader. And she, you know, maybe it was a German guilt thing, or it was just her, you know, enlightenment, she let them all in. And she gave them jobs. She made a life for them. And the German people accepted that. And Germany was special in those days. I remember running into a young woman who was here in Hawaii Pacific University, and she was Swedish. And I said, I asked her, what do you think of the migrants? And she said, I'm really sad that my country, Sweden, is so hard on the migrants, I would rather my country be just like Germany. And I think, you know, Angela Merkel is right. But you know, like all the history can, it changes. And it changes every day. And what I have described to you, and what you have described to me, is in the process of change right now. And we can think that borders are coming down one day, and the next day they're going up. And so in this country, we have an expression of racism. There's no other way to look at it, racism. And my question to you is, do you have racism in Canada? We have racism. But, you know, some things about Canadian immigration might surprise a lot of people. For example, this year, Canada's expected to bring in about 425,000 new immigrants. Now that would be, you know, far more relative to Canada's population than the U.S. has been doing for years and years. And you've had this recent problem at the southern border. But your southern border problem is about the same scale as what Canada is standing on its head to accomplish rather than fight. But one of the surprising things racially is the largest source of the immigration is from India. You know, that you can find, you know, a neighborhood in Vancouver where, you know, people are speaking Punjabi. You can find people in Kelowna, a small city in, you know, 50,000 in Western Canada, you know, 500 miles from the ocean is, you know, you've got to, you can see or hear people speaking Punjabi on the street, another similar one, you have Cantonese, but, you know, Canada will bring more than 100,000 people from India this year. Where the U.S., you know, has had about 50% of the immigrants coming in have been from Latin America, you know, half of them from Mexico and the other half spread around between the other South American and Central American countries. But, you know, Canada's not immune from its, you know, social problems. We don't start with a large mixture, you know, like the U.S. probably has, you know, 60 million people of Mexican or Latin American heritage and, you know, 40 or 50 million blacks, but Canada doesn't, didn't start with either. You know, you're a business guy. You're well-trained in business, finance, economics, all that. You know, I've always thought that human resources are the most valuable asset to an economy. And that a country that does allow immigrants in, if they're trained, it's all the better, but even if they aren't trained, they're the best resource you can have to develop an economy. And all you have to do is manage them. You have to, you know, when they first come in, you have to, you can't over-regulate them. You have to let them live. You have to let them eat. You have to let them find a place to live. But after a while, they're very valuable to you. They build your economy. They build, they're usually immigrants are better motivated because they've had a hard time. And they come in and they make businesses and they start. Singapore is a good example of that. But so my question to you is, am I right from a business, finance, economic point of view? Are immigrants a resource that helps build a country or are they a burden? For sure. With a little bit of time, they are a great contributor to a country. In fact, the reason that Canada's government is so strong on pushing for a high amount of immigration and why, you know, you know, too many places that people could possibly go to emigrate to, Canada looks like a good place or at least a more welcoming place than many others. Is that our birth rate is lower than almost any other, you know, advanced country on earth. Like the U.S. birth rate is less than, you know, two per woman of bearing age, you know, but it's not much under two. Canada's like about 1.3 or 1.4. And that, you know, to replace the baby boomers in the economy, you know, and to handle an aging population, you need an awful lot of talented workers. You know, for example, right now in Canada, between 35 and 40% of all physicians are immigrants. Between 35 and 40% of all pharmacists and all dentists are also immigrants. I mean, when you think of that, you know, Canada and the U.S. are both dealing with a shortage of adequate medical people. Well, how do you replace them, especially when the baby boomers are retiring? Well, I mean, if you have low birth rates, what do they call it, the hourglass start, you know, low birth rates, then ultimately if it's less than enough people to replace the existing population over a generation or two, that does affect your economy, doesn't it? Yeah. Japan is a great example of that. Japan has never welcomed immigrants. And they have, you know, a birth rate that's less than two and therefore, you know, that's two children for a woman during her lifetime, you know, like the, so that if every woman had two kids, then in theory it'd be breaking even, maintaining your population. However, you know, the United States, you know, the, let's call it white caucasians or whatever you call them, you know, their birth rate is no different than Canada's, you know, it's the growth, the birth rate in the U.S. relates really to the, to the non-caucasians. Yeah, that's so interesting. Because over time, the country changes in its complexion, you know, brown and black babies, more, and caucasians, stable or down. And so what you have is a change in complexion. And that, and that enhances the racism, doesn't it? You know, they will not replace us. We don't want them here. Send them back. Don't let them in. And this is translated into policy in, in Washington in the immigration service and the Department of Homeland Security. And I, I think we see that emerging, not only in the wall, you know, across the southern border, but we see it emerging in Washington. We see it emerging in so many ways. And that it's really not, A, it's not sustainable as an economic factor, as we discussed, but it's also not sustainable as a legal factor, call it, you know, equity, call it justice, call it social, social, you know, fairness. And, you know, it goes to a bit, if you look for the enlightened view economically and socially, what you get is relax the border. You get public policy that is open, more open on immigration. And we don't have that. So what's, what's the sensibility in, in Canada about that? Do people recognize this or do they fall back on, on the same, I want to call it, they will not replace this kind of mentality in terms of, you know, determining immigration policy and the rules, you know, back, back after the war, a lot of Europeans who needed a place to go went to Canada. I mean, I know them, you must know them and they, and they settled in Canada. And in many ways it was preferable to settle in Canada then to settle in the U.S. Some of them as a, as a phase two came to the U.S. You know, the first stop was in Canada, which would be easier to come in, you know, get into. And second phase was trying to get across the southern border into the U.S. And a lot of, a lot of people I know made that trip from Canada to the U.S., Europe to Canada to the U.S. And I think that's so with the Asians too. I was, I was very surprised looking at some statistics the other day that, that there is approximately 800,000 Canadian people born in Canada that now live in the United States or are, you know, permanent residents of the U.S. But there's a million Americans living in Canada. You know, I was surprised there were slightly, you know, roughly the same but, but slightly more. Now I'm not, those, those statistics would not include somebody if they were, you know, born in Ukraine, came to Canada and then went to the U.S. You know, I, I, you know, didn't see that type of statistic. Speaking of Ukraine, it gives me an example of, of the kind of biases that occur in both Canadian and U.S. immigration. Canada has, you know, already admitted more than 100,000 Ukrainians. Now the Ukrainian mess is less than a year old. Now, on the other hand, you know, Canada was a major ally in the Afghan war and had the same scenario as the Americans that, you know, where he should help all the people that helped us and everybody who was at risk from the Taliban. Well, Canada might have less than 40,000 Afghans that they're even going to have total and less than half of them have, have now arrived in Canada. You know, the rest, who knows where they are, you know, whether they're still in Afghanistan or they're just some governmental promise, but obviously, you know, the employees that handle the immigration processing, whether it's in Canada or the U.S., whether it's the government policy or their biases, you know, if you're white and Christian, you know, you can get in more easily than if you're white and a Jew. If you're, you know, if you're brown, you get in more easily than if you're black. Like I'm surprised, for example, in Canada, we have special immigration policies for anybody from a British Commonwealth country. Well, the Commonwealth includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Ceylon or Sri Lanka, you know, in that Central Asian area and Malaysia as well, but also includes, you know, half of Africa, you know, like Nigeria, every country in East Africa, like, you know, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, South Africa, you know, but, you know, big ones, populous ones like Cameroon and Nigeria. Now, you know, obviously people from an African country might think, you know, if they use the same Commonwealth thinking, they might prefer Australia because the weather's similar closer to what they're used to. The image of Canada's weather where somebody from, you know, the Orient, like we have a ton of people from Hong Kong, like that's where we get Cantonese as there's a district in Vancouver where the language in the district, the signs in the shops are Cantonese. You know, because they come from via Hong Kong and they know that Vancouver has really nice weather. You know, where some poor guy in Africa, he would think Canada, they play hockey, it must have all ice and snow. So where's this going? You know, I mean, in my heart I would like to see, you know, open borders, that's what I would like to see. But I know that a lot of people don't like that idea, really in a lot of countries all over the world. And I know also that if you don't manage the people who come across an open border, that's going to have an economic effect on you because you'll have to take care of them. I give great credit to the Poles and the Eastern European countries who have accepted the Ukrainians without hesitation and given them, you know, food and shelter and what have you. But I wonder what happens if this invasion lasts for longer, for a year, for two or three. You know, the Ukrainians better get cracking on finding jobs and contributing to the economy and being, you know, part of the economy in those countries. They may, they may not, we'll see. But I think it's management. And if you manage it well, I think an open border is just fine. But I don't think a lot of people agree with me. You agree with me? Oh, I definitely agree with you economically. You're, you do not need to be discriminatory like Canada is generally in terms of the economic ability of the person that's emigrating because, you know, in Canada, you can't get to Canada, you know, by walking across a border, you know, unless you're going to walk from the United States. Well, you know, you can go either way and it doesn't make much difference. But the Canadian emigration biases anybody with good training. You know, if, if, you know, you apply to come to Canada and you have a medical degree, you know, you're a shoe in to get in compared to, you know, if you're coming from El Salvador and you're, you know, hard done by, and you're just trying to flee because, you know, you've got a bullet wound in your side, you know, like some of the people arriving at the southern border in the US, you know, they, they're not as high on our list. However, history shows that the emigrants that have no skill, like the United States used to just let anybody that could possibly make it to the Ellis Island come in prior to 1924, I think it was when the US started to, you know, mess up their immigration. No, they, they started requiring a sponsor and people had to sign off and had to have some money in your pocket or your sponsor had to have some money and, and that cut down a lot of the immigration. And then their policies, even during the Roosevelt administration were, you know, the result of some racial prejudices. And that's why the Jews trying to get out of Europe had such a hard time to come to the US. The US would not accept them. The State Department was racist. This is all covered in Ken Burns' movie on the Holocaust, which is at pbs.org right now. You've seen part of it and so have I. And it's extraordinary how much trouble people had to try to escape, you know, certain death in the, in the death camps in Hitler's Europe. But the United States would not accept them to come in, in safety. And you know, it all goes to a larger issue I want to ask you about. And that is, you know, people say, well, you know, and El Salvador, terrible life and it's always going to be exporting its people. They're going to be looking for a better life in the US or anywhere where they can escape the gangs and the government. Why doesn't the US try to improve life in El Salvador? You know, is it, is it, do we care about our brothers and sisters in El Salvador? Or do we just shut it down and let it be their problem? And then, you know, wonder and worry why they're stacking up on our border. I have no great answer for that. However, I could come back to our previous point. It was that the unskilled workers that showed up in Ellis Island, you know, the history has shown that they were great contributors to the American economy. Similarly, you know, in Canada, we have a foreign workers program where, you know, when we have, for example, we have orchards in the area where I live. And, and, you know, picking fruit, you know, such as whether it's apples or peaches or cherries or whatever, you know, is a pretty laborious thing. And so for several years, you know, typical Canadian was unwilling to do that kind of job. And so the employer or the companies could get the approval of the government to bring in, you know, foreign workers. Most of the time they were Mexican, you know, for the particular area where I live in those orchards. But it didn't take very long before those Mexican temporary workers could apply and could apply for immigration to Canada and become accepted because they could then pass the odd test, you know, and they clearly were not going to be a drain on the economy. They weren't taking jobs that somebody else was lining up for. Where what I think is pathetic in the American push, anti-immigration push is where there's a pretty straightforward shortage of labor. You know, you have, you know, how many job postings are there compared to how many people are unemployed? I mean, you know, when in U.S. history, if you ever had such a gap that there were more job, that many more job openings compared to unemployed people or anybody wanting to work. And so how can you not, you know, open the floodgates and bring in, you know, immigrants? Singapore is the best current example of a place where they let in all kinds of people. And the economy has boomed in the standard of living in Singapore is higher than it is in the United States now and it never used to be. I mean, it just has exploded in terms of its economic success. You know, Norway is another example where, you know, they had the advantage of oil, you know, but their quantity of oil was fairly large relative to the population. But they have had, you know, way more immigration as a percentage of their existing population than the United States has even with the floodgate at the southern border right now. You know, you can, you know, if people, if countries are rational about this and they do serve their economic interests and their, I call it their geopolitical interests, it seems to me to be okay to regulate. It's okay to put barriers because, you know, it's in their collective interest to do that. I can't get too excited about that. But when they do it on a racist basis, I do get excited about that. And when they do it on an immoral basis, I can't tolerate that. And because I feel that going forward, and this is the question I put to you, going forward, what's going to happen? You know, right now we have, we have autocrats in a number of countries. They have an effect on immigration in and out. These autocrats make it, make you want to leave. They also don't want other people to come in. They want to control the border. So the notion of open borders gets actually further away for an autocratic country. Would you go to Russia right now? And if you were Russian, would you want to get out? The same thing with Hungary, the same thing with China and certainly, you know, other autocratic countries that, as well it comes to mind. But, you know, what my concern is that if you look forward, not only in this country, which I think is declining in terms of its moral openness, and I don't know about Canada, you'll have to tell me about, you know, the future of Canada. I don't see open borders. I don't see a moral imprimatur on this issue. I don't see a rational determination of policy. I see a lot of racism and autocracy, you know, to control the populations for purposes of retaining the autocrats in power. What do you think? Well, Canada is nowhere near having an autocracy. I know that. And we're, very much, I would call it pretty open borders. When the, you know, nearly a third of the new immigrants coming into the country are from India. You know, how the heck would you define open border any more than that? Well, you're lucky in the sense you have the Commonwealth tradition, the Commonwealth openness. That's a great thing for Canada. Well, we have tons of bigots the same as the US does, you know, or racists. And you have, you know, the basic concept of saying the United States was essentially like North West Europe, you know, and so you, you know, if you came from Sweden or Denmark or Germany or France or England, you were welcome to come to the United States and Canada because that's where everybody came from when the borders were pretty open anyhow. Well, then the US started the bias of saying, well, if you were from Southern and Eastern Europe, you weren't as welcome to the US, you know, where Canada didn't have that difference. That is, we have one in a quarter million people of Ukrainian heritage in Western Canada alone. You know, it's just huge. That's why we've got lots of people from the Ukraine wanting to come to Canada now. But, but I wouldn't think of a person from Ukraine as, you know, being a racial discrimination, you know, or, you know, the really skin color. Well, the United States is far more cosmopolitan than Canada is right now. I mean, you have probably more than a third of the US population is either black or brown. You know, that is not the case in Canada, but our open doors are getting there pretty quickly. Well, certainly the city I live in or Vancouver, you know, the big city on the west coast of Canada, they're certainly, you know, up to the US level of racial mix. Let me ask one last area here. And that is something that I've asked you about before. Let's assume that, you know, the US continues to have all its political problems, including the duration of the rule of law, the Constitution, all these social mistakes that the mistake is a mild word for it, that the Supreme Court and Congress are making. And I would like to come to Canada. American citizen born and raised in the US. How much trouble am I going to have to get to Canada or other places in the Commonwealth countries that might accept me as an American? Will I have a lot of trouble with taking a long time? No. You know, you much like the US, you know, if, if you arrive in the US, you know, you in theory, you can stay there while you're, you know, application for immigrations being processed. But if you're an educated American, and you are in Canada, and you can either look after yourself in terms of getting a job or financially, you know, that you'd have no sweat whatsoever. You know, stay in Canada as a permanent resident. It's very much like the reverse. I mean, you have, have tons and tons of people where I live, that, that when they're retired, they spend three or four months in the Southern US. Like you've got a ton of, of people that, you know, fly south and or you don't drive their Winnebago south and they, you know, stay in, you know, the Phoenix, Tucson, and the Arizona area or all parts of southern California, you know, some parts, not as many. To Texas, you've got Eastern Canadians do the same going, you know, to Florida, not unlike somebody from, you know, Rochester, New York who retired may spend, you know, have a condo and spend the winter in Miami. So what's your, what's your, your sense of, of the border crossings now between the US and, and Canada would seem to me that a lot of Americans would want to at least take a look at that given the decline in the country. And I'm not sure if they are coming or seeing them. Are they applying for permanent resident status or citizenship. And on the other side, on the other side of that coin are Canadians applying for American. Are they, are they running away from Canada in the same fashion, or are they concerned about running to a place that's in decline. Oh, I, I don't think there's anybody running from Canada out of fear. You know, you have lots of Canadians look to the US for some, you know, for a job opportunity. You have lots of Canadians in all kinds of high jobs in the United States. You know, if you were a, an entertainer or a professional athlete, you know, if you, whether you're, you know, what's the difference, whether you're playing for the Toronto Blue Jays or the, or the Detroit Tigers. No, it's, it's really interesting the way, you know, that, that's overcomes everything. There was a, there was a piece in the paper this morning about, about American basketball players or was it volleyball players, despite the fact that, that tall black woman is in jail already for some long sentence. Russia, the one in Russia. Yeah. Yeah. In Russia, there are American athletes doing exactly the same thing that she was doing right now. They don't, they don't mind going. I guess it, it pays well and you get a lot of acclimation from the crowd. So, you know, at the end of the day for a lot of people, it's the economics that went out rather than the political, you know. Well, I, I okay, but I think in the end of political, maybe, maybe very important. And key to that, you know, like Griner, the name of the lady that's in, in the Russian jail, you know, she was there, you know, on an invitation and playing and traded really well and just got caught with, you know, Putin suddenly making a mistake and, and, you know, needing to get a couple of examples. I mean, it's just a very unfortunate to be in the wrong place at the wrong time where, you know, you got hockey players, you know, for example, the best hockey player for the, for the Washington Capitol happens to be a Russian. You know, and, you know, and he was one that, you know, Putin gave him special medals or something in the past. And I mean, can you imagine the poor guy being asked by some American or Washington City news bureau saying, you know, tell me what you think of Putin, you know, and he had to, I mean, he's, he was born and raised in Russia. He's played for their national team when you have Olympics and, you know, and he's, you know, a hero in Washington City, you know, but don't try to embarrass the guy, you know, leave those notes and say, you know, how could you possibly answer that kind of question? Well, you know, in the past years ago, sports were a diplomatic exercise, you know, and you wanted to make better relations with the other country, you know, bring the athletes together. I'm afraid it's not like that anymore. Well, you know, this is a very interesting and I think I would conclude from this discussion that all the factors that we have talked about that affect immigration policy in the U.S. and Canada and elsewhere these days are on occasion, surprise, surprise, they're overcome by geopolitical issues, by international arguments and the like. And so, and that's the way it's always been. And that's that factor will always be in play. Well, thank you, Ken. Very interesting discussion, very interesting subject and we'll be back in two weeks with more. There are so many things we have to compare notes on. It's an endless list of possibilities. Thank you so much. Well, hopefully we can encourage more open borders all around the world. Yes, sir. I'm with you. Take care. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.