PORTABLE CITIZENSHIP

When the going gets tough – the tough get going – somewhere else! There is an enormous gap between mythology and reality. The mythology is that immigrants come to your country for a new life, for a life of freedom after the oppression of their native land. A new life free from fear. A life in a free country where democratic principles rise above everything. Those brave and noble words encapsulate what has been one of the great myths of immigrant behaviour.

Of course, it is true that many people flee oppression. It is also true that many people, cynics will say most people, come for economic advantage.

In this country we had what were called “the astronauts.” Like space travelers they shuttled between homes. It was a label applied to many Hong Kong Chinese who could afford to “buy” Canadian citizenship by investing here and providing jobs. Did that make them Canadians? Did that make them honour and praise our democratic traditions, our institutions, our sense of tolerance, our health care system? No it did not. Canada was an address of convenience. They would ship their children here to attend school, have a Canadian address, but fly between Canada and Hong Kong where their real interests were. The principal reason for it was uncertainty about the future of the once-British colony.

I am prompted to write this, not because of my lingering distaste for “portable” citizenship, like the Lebanese whose Canadian citizenship allowed them to complain that ”their” government was not acting quickly enough to evacuate them from their real home – Lebanon, which had erupted in civil war.

Those are passing irritations. What prompted this item is the news that thousands are fleeing the “Celtic Tiger” the once miraculously prosperous Ireland. They came from all over Europe to cash in on the new prosperity and the minute it started to sink – they were off and running. Even more glaringly obvious is the current “brain drain” exodus from the United States. According to a recent article in USA Today there are hundreds, maybe thousands of highly skilled people, mostly Indian and Chinese who are fleeing the downturn in America and running to their homelands for better jobs. I don’t blame anyone for wanted to be where the opportunity is, but I do blame the hype and patriotic drivel that keeps telling us how glad these people are to come to the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” Even more irritating, is how these portable citizens proclaim their love of their new country – until – until they can make more elsewhere.

Closer to home, will you try to persuade me that the exodus of doctors from this country, the exodus of nurses and health technicians, was anything but a flight to where there was more money, and a complete disregard for the deeper sense of being Canadian in Canada?

I am not flag-waving. I am simply looking around me at the truth: survival comes first. And in the words of Cuba Gooding in that great movie: “Show me the money.”