Now that it's confirmed that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who live and work in the US will never be able to return on account of Trump's ban on Muslims, I think Canada should start thinking about allowing these people to relocate northward.
The conversation among Canadians up to this point has been overwhelmingly about Canadians accusing American movie stars of being privileged - which isn't wrong, but the assumption so far has been that the only Americans that would ever want to move to Canada work in Hollywood. Of course other people do, but Canadians so far have written them off as (in the words of a Cracked article) weak people who run away from their problems rather than fighting them, or people who really should take responsibility for those who can't move, or that they just don't know enough about Canadian culture. Not a single article has been published, in either Canada or the US, that suggests that perhaps someone might have a legitimate reason to want to move to Canada, or that Trump's meddling in American law might make life in the US impossible for some people. It's one of those magical issues, like Syrian refugees and the seal hunt, where David Suzuki and Don Cherry are in perfect agreement: the Canadian government needs to keep on telling Yankees to stay home.
Then there's the people that everyone assumes, but no one refers to: people that are too poor to move to Canada, because Canadian immigration throws up enormous and unreasonable class-based barriers to entry. The fact that Canadians don't think this final group merits mention, let alone reconsideration of Canadian immigration policy, says a lot about this country: Canadians are horrified of the thought that working class, or even middle class Americans might move up if (or when) they find America unlivable. You even hear the old brain-dead standby that any suffering that these Americans experience as a result of their being forced (by Canadian law) to stay in America is worth it because they will then have to work to make "their" country better. The fact that Americans say this about Mexicans should go more than far enough to invalidate the argument, but what really bothers me about this is that in my seven years in Canada, I've never seen Canadians take a similar responsibility for their own government, so the demand is more of a hypocritical excuse than an argument. Deep down, Canadians feel that any one of the 50,000 predominantly working class Muslim Americans in Dearborn, Michigan moving 15 minutes south to Windsor constitutes a threat to national sovereignty and need to be policed, while a Canadian making the 10,000 km move from Fogo Island to Inuvik is just exercising freedom of movement.
Now a ton of people who have lived much of their life in American are not, and may never, be allowed to return home, regardless of whether they are privileged movie stars or not. At the very least, they have the privilege of international travel, but ultimately what unites these new excluded Americans is that they had the bad luck of being away from home on January 28th. I'm sure that Canada looks like a pretty good alternative to quite a few of these people, particularly those that only know of the US as their home, live(d) somewhere near the Canadian border, have family up here. Canada really should really allow these excluded Americans to live and work in Canada as a way to maintain some semblance of continuity in their lives (if that's something they could find up here). But to Canadians, these people will always be privileged Americans who need to stay out of Canada just as much as they need to stay out of the US, and to the Canadian state, they are probably all too poor to think about.
And that's why I really fucking hate this country sometimes (the same way I've always hated the US).