Of Cuckoos And Canadians: Birth And Dual Status

It is often said that anyone can be a Canadian. That in every respect, there should be no distinction between the man from Timmins and the man from Timbuktu. It would offend good conscience to treat one as more worthy than the other. All things being equal, I agree. It might disrespect the very basic value of citizenship to have one welcomed into the fold only to be stripped of rights and status. What is gained by earnest oath and mutual agreement must be just as good as blood.

Many people have come and settled here, renouncing foreign ties and working their sweat into the soil. Many people have adopted the values and propositions of the broader society so far as we have asked them, and so far as any reasonable mind could expect. We can say, clearly, that citizenship is legitimately gained regardless of race or place of origin. We can recognize that there are people outside the country today, who, being earnest, productive, and of good character, would be a benefit to meet on equal terms.

Yet every practice and every policy must be considered not just in the ideal case, but in the perverse and the unjust as well. Two policies of citizenship now threaten our future: dual and birthright. Those being the ability to hold multiple citizenships, and the automatic entitlement to citizenship by being born in Canada. These policies diminish the virtue of Canadian citizenship, disrespect the Canadian people, and endanger the long-term security of our national project. As these policies are not constitutionally enshrined, it would be good and sensible for Parliament to end them.

Cuckoo birds are famous for a phenomenon known as “brood parasitism”. They will often lay eggs in the nests of other birds, tricking them into raising their young.

Anyone who happens to give birth while visiting Canada gives birth to a Canadian citizen. These children are often leveraged to chain-migrate entire extended families into the country. Typically born with an additional citizenship, an additional loyalty and a second fallback, they represent a vulnerability to foreign influence and a potential social and economic cost to the Canadian people. Putting aside cultural concerns and lifetime service costs, our hospitals are left, even on day one, holding the bag for yet another among thousands of unpaid operations worth millions of dollars. Wealthy and politically connected foreigners often come with the explicit intention of leaving cuckoos in the nest or else collecting a Canadian passport in wait for their child’s eighteenth birthday.

People come to Canada on the order of entire towns’ worth of people not to participate in a joint national project, but to extract the benefits that come with status, and to have their run of what is increasingly a post-national shopping mall. Often, they take their little bundles of citizenship to go be conditioned and educated abroad, returning years later with a full status foreigner “just as Canadian as you or me.” Birth tourism is well-advertised abroad. We are a first-page web result in any search online for suckers to take advantage of. Consultants make a killing selling out our country, helping foreigners come, and connecting them to dozens of illicit citizenship factories. The same occurs in America, a nation constitutionally obligated to accept it.

For China in particular, and for many nations with developing middle classes, this is a deliberate and well-known method by which to enhance soft power and exert indirect influence over Canadian policy. Considering poorer and less connected temporary residents, birthright and dual citizenship remain a problem.

The current population of Canada is seventy times smaller than the combined populations of China and India. Already, these two nations have diaspora populations that account for over 10% of Canada’s inhabitants. These are states which, unlike ours, claim to represent the particular blood-bound interests of their ethnic diasporas.Their political and cultural beliefs become threatening after they have gained the number of votes and resources to be publicly assertive. They can easily tip the balance of electoral outcomes, nudged or not by foreign regimes. It is easy to see how this kind of demographic change can dispossess and disrupt a democratic system. It is for this reason (among others) that the numbers admitted should be in-line with community will, reflective of community standards, and watchful of balkanizing tendencies.

Birthright and dual citizenship represent a circumvention of the usual standards which (in theory) confer citizenship by merit and mutual consent. In a country whose government has long abandoned the philosophy of assimilation, this state of affairs embodies a further spit in the eye of all Canadians who believe in a Canada that stands for values besides profit in abstract. From the most liberal immigrant to the most reactionary crown loyalist, we can all recognize the obvious risks in granting unvetted, automatic, and split-loyalty citizenship. China and India do not have dual or birthright citizenship. No self-respecting country would. Select nations in the Americas are curious exceptions and only have this problem due to the past difficulties of frontier administration and the legacy of premodern attempts to ensure universal enfranchisement. These are structural weaknesses, not moral commitments.

Birthright and dual citizenship inherently water down the authority and potency of the governing culture in a zero-sum way that reduces the effectiveness of political representation for both native-born and authentically established immigrant populations. We should not allow opportunistic, self-interested, zero-sum, and parasitic citizenships that do nothing to better the lot of the Canadian people. These policies are a disrespect to real Canadians, immigrant and native-born alike.

As the abortion of our national future continues, the legitimacy of Canada will be challenged, its majority culture undermined such that Canada will definitively and irrevocably become an administrative zone. That is, unless we awake from our slumber and begin to speak with authority about who it is that we are and what it is that we expect. We do not permit our government to be negligent about our national inheritance.

With dual and birth citizenship, scant standards, a mere 20-question online multiple-choice citizenship test for residents, we will see a growing war of influence and group preference, battles fought between rival block interests. Canadians will be marginalized in their own country, their representation less and less, the slice of their birthright cut thinner and thinner. “Who are you, Canadian, to say what is Canadian? You have no right even to repudiate what are naked efforts to advance foreign causes. Yes, I have my country, and yours as my playbox.”

On both the left and the right, all the parts that cherish the Canadian project, we must agree that it is sound only to grant citizenship to those people who genuinely want to be Canadians, and actually like the country they are laying claim to. To become a Canadian is to satisfy community standards. Unless you have a Canadian parent, unless you are raised a Canadian, it is not a birthright. And unless you are willing to set aside your loyalties, you have no irrevocable right to be here, least of all to vote, lobby, or hold public office. To be a Canadian is not merely to have rights, but duties and obligations as well.

The Citizenship Act should be revised accordingly. We will end dual citizenship. We will mandate that to gain birth citizenship, you must have at least one citizen parent. And further, we will raise our standards and expectations so that there can be no dispute that we are all Canadians and that our lot is together.