Death Pays A Visit: How Covid-19 Destroys The Open-Border Myths.
There will be casualties in the Great Coronavirus Episode of 2020. Many, regrettably, will be human. A few will be political and financial. And not a moment too soon for them.
Two great political myths likely destroyed by the deaths, economic chaos and misery of Covid-19: 1) The adolescent fancy of Justin Trudeau’s Diversity® and 2) the open-border hustle being sold by progressives in America. Both are about to come up against the healthcare reality brought on by Covid-19. And an economic echo to follow.
Ever since Stephen Harper was mobbed in the media over the photo of a drowned Syrian child, it has been impermissible to critique the Trudeaupian notion, popularized by author Jan Martel, of Canada as a big hotel,. The cult of harmonious diversity has become accepted wisdom in the Laurentian consensus. Hell, CFL coaches were wearing Diversity® t-shirts.
The notion behind Martel’s pipe dream was the kumbaya of pan-national cooperation. Every nationality has a room in Hotel Canada. “Why can’t we all just get along?” It’s a familiar theme to anyone who’d ever been 18 and idealistic.
In practical terms Diversity® has turned out to be up to a million new people every three years without thought for how it stretches the social safety net. Hundreds of immigrants of indeterminate health streaming across the Quebec and Manitoba borders claiming asylum. Gun crime seemingly out of control. And a nation wondering why a government’s healthcare crash plan seems to have consisted of wishing ’n hoping as the deadly Covid-19 virus poured into Canada.
Hotel Canada is now quarantined. Its occupants are laid off, fired, short shifted. Others have lost their businesses or sources of income. They have squared the Diversity® circle. Reality has come knocking for M. Trudeau.
In the U.S, the packaged agitprop about Dreamers, asylum seekers and the southern border wall was a major tool of the Trump Resistance. Before the Mueller, Kavanaugh and impeachment dramas it led the nightly media dance card on behalf of reversing the 2016 election. It was kids in cages and families separated at the border, accompanied by heart-rending photos (many of which dated from the Obama days— but no matter).
Exalting the sainted immigrant was catnip for Democratic candidates. During debates they competed to see who could liberalize the illegal immigrant experience further. Even last Sunday Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders played “hold my beer” as they promised not to arrest or deport any but the most heinous criminals illegally in the country. Woke folk could play this immigration card in the media so long as they also kept the reality from their urban farms of guilt-ridden donors.
This plank of liberal dogma is meeting reality. Keen observers can see that their open-arms hygiene has suddenly gone out of fashion. No one is quoting the Status of Liberty poem at the moment. Many of those white-guilt penitents are now quarantined like border crossers in their own living rooms because of a killing virus originating outside the country that has passed through a non-border. The romance of an open frontier is disappearing fast for the NIMBY class.
It’s not simply health-care woes that will hurt the middle class. These same consumers are going to look at their retirement funds to discover that, while the virus has been partying, their future is getting the hangover. The expected nest egg was made into a bad omelette by shutting the economy to deal with Covid-19.
The chain of events set off by the virus has also affected the chain of debt and investment tied to every business now shuttered by the plague. In the 2008 derivatives crisis bad real estate collapsed the economic tent. Now, the clever folks in the investment club have tied credit-card, consumer and student debt and sold it off the same way. When someone defaults on their VISA bill it ripples all the way through the economic chain to the holders of that debt. The Western economy sits atop this fault line.
My friend, the futurist and writer Jesse Hirsh, captures the despair of these people. “I am increasingly overwhelmed by the sheer incompetence and dysfunction of our institutions. This is not a health crisis, but an existential crisis for many of our institutions. Government in particular, but the banks are just as bad.”
Not exactly the sentiment you want as we enter the presidential election this fall. A nation of 20 percent unemployed seeing its retirement savings squandered by a government that can’t even order enough testing kits that work for a pandemic. Good luck pitching that to a dubious electorate.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster. He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also a best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports And Why The Free Market Could Save Them is now available on brucedowbigginbooks.ca.