Don't Let the Door Hit You....
By Michael R. Bowen (07/22/03)
This week the Associated Press reports on certain Americans who have concluded that their homeland has become politically intolerable. They're moving to Canada, where, presumably, they can breathe free.
Right out of the chute, the very existence of this article tells a tale about our oh-so-evenhanded media. For the fact is (as acknowledged, naturally, in paragraph 17 of a 25-paragraph article) that immigration from Canada to the United States dwarfs any movement in the other direction. In 2001 fewer than 6,000 Americans moved to Canada, while more than 30,000 Canadians pulled up stakes and moved here.1 In what possible way is there a story here about discontent with the American system? How is this news? It's only news if you already hold America in contempt, so that the merest pimple defines an otherwise surpassingly beautiful face. Then again, maybe it's another clever ploy by those rotten conservatives who "dominate" America's media: playing unfairly by accurately quoting the Left. We'll never know.
I don't know how long it took AP to find the people in this story, but it must have required the real Dragnet. "A husband and wife in Minnesota, a college student in Georgia, a young executive in New York." That's not Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack they're talking about. She's a "puppeteer"; he's a lawyer. Oh, and the young executive is moving with his "partner" Tony, who happens not to be a U.S. citizen. Just your typical cross-section of America, folks. I shudder to think what could happen to our economy if all our puppeteers up and move.
Thomas Hodges, the college student, moans that "The U.S. education system is unfair—you have to live in certain areas to go to good schools." Tom, you might want to check with the National Education Association, which, by the way, is quite as socialist as any Canadian, and is moving heaven and earth to make sure that students trapped in inferior schools stay that way.
"In school I was always told that this is the best country on earth, and that everyone else wants to be an American, and that never really rang true with me", says Molly the Minnesotan puppeteer. "As I got older it occurred to me that there are other choices." You may not need math skills to manipulate wooden figures, Molly, but I assure you that 30,000 is bigger than 6,000. And any place you'd really want to move to is pretty much living on Uncle Sam's nickel.
"If you befriend a starving dog", said Mark Twain, "and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. That is the principal difference between a dog and a man." Our aspiring expatriates don't seem to have achieved canine-level intelligence; otherwise they'd understand that the utopias they're thinking of gracing with their presence can exist only because America is what it is. If Canada, France, Japan, or Germany actually had to pay for their own defense, they would need an 80 hour workweek and the return of child labor to finance their socialism. Penicillin would be the hottest new antibiotic in Ottawa, because nobody could make a buck developing new drugs. Canadians would be slipping across the border to get modern medical care. Oh, wait—they already are.
It all makes me think of my teenage years. I thought my parents worked hard all day and didn't party much because they were just squares. I didn't have the latest clothes or gizmos because of their rotten attitude. It was years before I grew up enough to understand that they were carrying the weight of eight non-producing citizens.
But, trapped in adolescence, these folks look longingly northward. And, like teenagers everywhere, they will storm off in a huff, off to the house of that cool family down the street, the one which lets their kids do whatever they want.
Feel free, kids. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
1. "Every year since 1977, more Canadians have emigrated to the United States than vice versa--the 2001 figures were 5,894 Americans moving north, 30,203 Canadians moving south." Discontent Americans Consider Canada, by David Crary, AP National Writer, July 19, 2003.
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