Читать книгу Intent For A Nation: What is Canada For - Michael Byers - Страница 7

— INTRODUCTION —

UN CANADIEN ERRANT:

Why I Gave Up My U.S. Green Card

“THIS IS THE FIRST time I’ve met someone who wanted to do that.”

The U.S. immigration officer’s southern “ drawl, so out of place in the Vancouver airport, was accentuated by incredulity.

A “green card,” which is actually off-white in colour and called a Permanent Resident Card, provides full rights to enter, live and work in the world’s most powerful country. It conveys most of the advantages of U.S. citizenship, so much so that it can be traded in for an American passport after just five years. Yet there I was, four and a half years after I had acquired it, asking for my green card to be taken away.

Acquiring U.S. permanent residency is an arduous process, involving blood tests, chest X-rays and numerous documents, including police certificates attesting to a crime-free past. Even with a prominent sponsor, Duke University, it had taken me three years to get my green card.

Apart from the 50,000 “diversity immigrants” selected by lottery each year, the 50,000 refugees and the roughly 140,000 who, like me, are targeted for universities and high-tech jobs, most of those who aspire to live and work in the United States have no chance of legally settling there. Still, millions flock to the country, like moths to a flame.

I was on my way to a conference in San Diego when I surrendered my green card. The next morning, out for an early run, I saw scores of Mexican men tending lawns and flower beds. Later, a woman from Guatemala cleaned my hotel room. I remembered one of my graduate students at Duke, now a law professor in Mexico City, explaining that most such labourers hold forged social-security cards that are convincing enough to protect their employers from the police, while providing no protections for the workers.

Some illegal immigrants do have decent jobs. In North Carolina, my colleagues and I frequented an upscale restaurant where one waiter, “Mark,” spoke fondly of his family in Calgary while admitting, with evident regret, that he had not been home for ten years. I wondered why not—an arrest warrant, perhaps?—but I knew that Mark was working solely for tips and probably not filing taxes in either the United States or Canada. This, in itself, was likely reason enough for him not to approach the border.

In 2000, Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson estimated that 660,000 Canadians were living and working illegally in the United States. Most Canadians blend easily into U.S. society. The lack of a “foreign” accent helps, as does our fluency with American pop culture. It is also true that many Americans assume that Canada, like Puerto Rico, is very nearly part of their country.

Immigration papers acquired greater significance after September 11, 2001, as concerns about security escalated into hysteria and fear replaced curiosity as the standard response to things unknown. Before 9/11, my wife’s English accent often generated a friendly response, including the comment, “You sound just like Princess Diana.” After the attacks, the warm chatter gave way to a strained silence.

At least my princess had a green card and was, therefore, on the legally advantageous side of the divide between “us” and “them.” Thousands of men of Arab ethnicity were rounded up and either detained or deported without charge or access to lawyers. Significantly, none of them were citizens or permanent residents of the United States.

Of course, even U.S. citizenship does not provide the protections it once did. In 2002, the Bush administration jailed two Americans without charge or access to lawyers, in direct denial of habeas corpus, a common-law principle that dates back to the Magna Carta. And then there is the secret, unconstitutional wiretapping program.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” the immigration officer whispered as she ushered me towards the secondary-screening room.

“Yes,” I replied. “I don’t want to lie to you. I no longer live in the United States.”

Under U.S. law, permanent residents lose that status if they leave the country for more than one year. Yet many green-card holders flout this law, returning to the United States periodically to “keep their options open.” Many maintain U.S. addresses, sometimes with family or friends but often with commercial providers, to sustain the fiction that they reside in the United States. Some companies even rent street addresses, as opposed to box numbers, and will automatically ship mail onward to a designated foreign address.

Absentee green-card holders in the past often used their driver’s licences to cross the border, or they relied on new passports that were free of stamps that might alert an attentive immigration officer to their dubious status. If asked, they denied having a connection with the United States.

Such ploys are becoming riskier as the computer systems of different U.S. government departments, and different national governments, are linked together as part of the post-9/11 drive to improve security. At particular risk are green-card holders who have failed to file U.S. tax returns, as all those with permanent resident status are required to do.

As of January 2007, anyone entering the United States by air or sea has been required to have a passport. From June 2009, the same requirement will apply to all those who enter at land crossings. The Canadian government has lobbied against this move because of concerns that it will deter millions of Americans—less than one-quarter of whom currently have passports—from visiting Canada. The cruise ship and conference industries are particularly vulnerable, along with the 2010 Winter Olympics to be held in Vancouver. The new requirement will also make it more difficult for green-card holders living in Canada, and Canadians living illegally in the United States, to move freely between the two countries.

At the secondary screening, I was greeted by an immigration officer whose name tag, features and accent suggested Vietnamese origins.

“Which form should I use?” he asked his supervisor. The supervisor, a stout man with a Midwestern accent, gave a world-weary sigh: “Voluntaries get the short form.”

It took forty-five minutes to complete the short form. It was an entirely businesslike procedure: no small talk, no smiles. At one point, I commented on the complexity of the process. The immigration officer replied, “Well, this is a big deal. It’s like getting married.”

More like getting divorced, I thought.

My wife and I had moved to North Carolina in 1999. The stock market was booming, most Americans felt prosperous and secure and Bill Clinton—despite Whitewater and Lewinsky—was still capably in charge. It seemed obvious that one of two smart, experienced, open-minded internationalists, Al Gore or John McCain, would follow in January 2001.

But then we were amused, perplexed and finally appalled at the dirty tricks deployed in the 2000 election campaign, first to defeat McCain and then to steal victory from Gore. And we felt nothing but horror as the Twin Towers collapsed, knowing not only that thousands of lives had been lost, but also that George W. Bush’s neo-conservative advisers would seize their chance to plot a militaristic course.

My instinctive response was to put words to paper. Five days later, on September 16, 2001, my article “The hawks are hovering. Prepare for more bombs” appeared in London’s Independent on Sunday. I continued to write about the Bush administration, almost exclusively for British papers, chastising it for its violations of human rights and international law, its hostility towards multilateral institutions and its destabilizing doctrine of pre-emption.

Needless to say, my opinions attracted considerable hostility, all the more so because I was expressing them from within a conservative law school at a conservative university in the very conservative South. I stood my ground, but it was not easy. And then it occurred to me: the United States was not my country; it was not a place for which I wanted to fight. My thoughts drifted northward, to the place where my values had been forged.

The immigration officer worked his way through a series of questions designed to confirm my identity and soundness of mind. The last question was the toughest: “Why do you wish to surrender your permanent resident card?”

How do you explain to an American—especially one with a flag on his shoulder and a gun on his hip—that you no longer wish to live in his country?

I thought about the man across the counter, how he might have fled the postwar chaos and poverty of Vietnam, how he might have been plucked off a rickety boat by the U.S. Navy and perhaps gravitated towards the immigration service out of gratitude to his new homeland.

At the same time, I thought about how I might be replicating his experience in one small but important respect. My principal motivation in surrendering my green card was not to avoid problems at the border. I was seeking to commit—without hesitation or qualification—to my own special place.

You see, as someone who was born in Canada, I never had to affirm my citizenship. I never had to demonstrate my deep love for this country, with its vast and spectacular landscapes and diverse yet tolerant peoples, its distinct and complex history, values and institutions and its oh-so-promising future. Unlike the millions of Canadians who were born outside Canada, I had never made my choice.

The moment was upon me. My heart bursting with pride, I looked the immigration officer in the eye and said, as simply and non-judgementally as possible: “I have chosen to live permanently in Canada.”

“Permanently?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

INTENT FOR A NATION

When Stephen Harper was asked whether he loved Canada, he hesitated, pursed his lips and replied, “Canada is a great country.”

The Canadian political philosopher George Grant would not have been surprised. He wrote about people like Harper four decades ago in his influential 1965 book, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism: “In its simplest form, continentalism is the view of those who do not see what all the fuss is about. The purpose of life is consumption, and therefore the border is an anachronism.” Grant pronounced that Canada had effectively ceased to exist, since the distinctive aspects of Canadian society and politics could not withstand the integrating forces of continental capitalism and universal modernism radiating from the United States.

Was he right?

Grant said foreign policy would be first to succumb: “A branch-plant society could not possibly show independence over an issue on which the American government was seriously determined.” He thought that the defence crisis of 1963 proved his point: when the U.S. State Department publicly rebuked John Diefenbaker for refusing to allow nuclear-armed missiles on Canadian soil, Canadians did not rally around their embattled prime minister; they voted him out of office.

I was born in 1966, one year after Lament for a Nation was published, and I have lived with Grant’s thesis ever since. As a student at McGill, I remember one of my professors arguing that the 1988 “free-trade election” confirmed Grant’s prediction. Canadians had given Prime Minister Brian Mulroney a clear mandate to eliminate tariffs on U.S. exports and thus the need for U.S. corporations to maintain subsidiaries here. They also endorsed Mulroney’s acceptance that U.S. domestic law would apply to disputes between Canada and the United States over “dumping”—a technical term for the export of products, such as softwood lumber, at less than their alleged cost of production.

Around the same time, another young man was falling under the influence of a group of neo-conservative professors at the University of Calgary whose policy prescriptions would have made Canada almost indistinguishable from the United States. Although Stephen Harper ran against the Mulroney government in 1988 under the Reform Party banner, he supported the free trade agreement unequivocally.

Four years later, when I left Canada, I was convinced that the country was finished. My conviction deepened in 1994 when Jean Chrétien broke an election promise and ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement. The expanded pact shielded U.S. investors from Canadian environmental, health and safety regulations while mandating U.S. access to our energy supplies.

Chrétien’s decision to stay out of the 2003 Iraq War was momentous. Forty years after Diefenbaker’s downfall, a Canadian prime minister had declined to participate in a major U.S. military action. It seemed that, after all, economic sovereignty was not a prerequisite for independence in the foreign-policy domain.

Grant’s thesis was tested again in 2005. George W. Bush had deemed missile defence essential to U.S. national security and requested Canadian participation. But with polls indicating that most Canadians were against it, Paul Martin swallowed hard and said no.

Around the same time, pollsters discovered that the values of Canadians and Americans were diverging. Canadians had become more secular, tolerant of diversity and questioning of authority, while Americans were moving in the opposite direction. In Canada, these changes manifested themselves in the legalization of same-sex marriage and near-decriminalization of marijuana. In September 2003, the cover of the Economist was a moose in shades, under the banner “Canada is ‘cool’.”

Political scientists question whether individuals—as opposed to economic and political structures—have much influence on history. Yet it is difficult to explain Canada’s continued independence without referring to Tommy Douglas, Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Douglas held the balance of power in the two minority parliaments that followed Diefenbaker’s defeat. Together, he and Pearson introduced universal public health care and the Canada Pension Plan and kept Canada out of the Vietnam War. Trudeau then introduced the Official Languages Act, the Foreign Investment Review Agency, wage and price controls, and the national energy program. None of these leaders exhibited the all-encompassing, small-l liberalism and subservience to Washington that Grant had predicted of all subsequent Canadian governments. Diefenbaker was gone, but remnants of a socially conscious Canadian nationalism remained.

During the 1990s, Canada drifted towards the United States under the influence of free trade, a burgeoning U.S. economy and the charismatic moderation of Bill Clinton. So did many other countries. The relative peace and prosperity of the post–Cold War period—and the apparent victory of the liberal democratic capitalist model—prompted the economist Francis Fukuyama to announce the “end of history.”

Were it not for George W. Bush, Canada might be on its way to becoming the fifty-first American state. But the U.S. president’s bellicose rhetoric and overt religiosity made many Canadians nervous, while his administration’s regressive cuts to taxes and social programs and massive increases in defence spending transformed the United States into a more unequal, fearful and militaristic place. Canada might still be moving in the direction of the United States, but since the year 2000, the United States has been moving away much faster.

Grant’s thesis extended beyond the absorption of Canada into the United States. He believed that all countries would eventually unite into a “universal and homogeneous state” founded on a U.S.-centred modernism. Again, this prediction looks less likely today that it did in 2000, when the United States still seemed in ascendancy.

Bush’s advisers squandered “soft power” through their evident contempt for international law and the opinions of other countries, while running up a national debt that has given foreign creditors— most notably the Chinese government—a stranglehold over the U.S. economy. At the same time, they became locked in a nihilistic struggle with radical Islam, creating chasms in international society that are more reminiscent of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” than they are of Fukuyama’s—or Grant’s—transnational blending of differences into a worldwide version of the United States.

Today, China is not the only country that is gaining power and influence relative to the United States. India, with a population of 1.1 billion and an economic growth rate of 8 per cent, is poised to become a great power. Europe is now a single economy that is larger than that of the U.S. Russia, which made the ruble a fully convertible currency in 2006, is returning to geopolitical relevance on the back of high prices for oil and gas. Instead of hegemony or homogeneity, we seem to be witnessing the emergence of a multipolar world made up of interdependent—though still fiercely independent—nation-states.

Canada’s influence should be growing too, for all the reasons identified above and more: our geographic size and location; our well-educated, globally connected population; our high standard of living, strong public services and infrastructure; our abundant resources, large economy and firm fiscal foundations; our membership in international organizations and reputation for moderation and progressive thinking. Moreover, Canada has demonstrated the ability to achieve great things. We have done so internationally, for example, with the 1997 Landmines Convention. We have done so domestically, with universal public health care and our diverse, harmonious and livable cities. If Canadians have an inferiority complex, it is only because we became accustomed to living in the shadow of the world’s most powerful state.

All of which made Stephen Harper a strange choice for prime minister in January 2006. Harper had wanted Canada to join the Iraq War in 2003. As he explained to the House of Commons: “In an increasingly globalized and borderless world, the relationship between Canada and the United States is essential to our prosperity, to our democracy and to our future.” He also thought Canada should join the U.S. in missile defence. As early as May 2002, he criticized opponents of missile defence for offering “knee-jerk resistance… despite the fact that Canada is confronted by the same threats from rogue nations equipped with ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction as is the United States.”

Being elected prime minister changed neither Harper’s views nor those of his rebranded Conservative Party. Although the quest for a majority government temporarily modulated their domestic policies, in foreign affairs their continentalism remained starkly evident. In just one year, the Harper government extended our involvement in a U.S.-led war in Asia, gave the Pentagon access to maritime surveillance over our coastal waters, followed the lead of the Bush administration on climate change and the Middle East and took surreptitious steps towards participating in missile defence.

Harper and his colleagues have always believed that Canadians would just as happily be Americans, and they have done their best to make us so. Fortunately, George Grant was wrong. Our distinctiveness—our love of country—is rooted in the non-economic compartments of our national psyche.

It remains to be seen whether Stéphane Dion is all that different. Is the new Liberal leader up to the task of withstanding the inexorable pressures of continentalism while providing meaningful leadership at the global level? Certainly, when it comes to Dion’s signature issue of climate change (the focus of Chapter 6 of this book), his record as former federal environment minister is not encouraging.

At this point in Canadian history, we need vision and action, not just a “safe pair of hands.” As Grant pointed out: “But a nation does not remain a nation only because it has roots in the past. Memory is never enough to guarantee that a nation can articulate itself in the present. There must be a thrust of intention into the future.”

Canadians are confronted with great challenges, ranging from our deep economic, cultural and military exposure to the United States to climate change and nuclear proliferation. We need a vision to light the way, something more inspiring than keeping the U.S. border open to trade. This country is not a shadow of someone else’s destiny; we have a greater purpose. Let’s find that thrust of intention. Let’s decide—by ourselves—what Canada is for.