Logical Fallacies of Mass Immigration Supporters: The False Equivalence.

The False Equivalence.

The false equivalence fallacy takes two opposing arguments and presents them to be the same.  

In immigration debates the false equivalence presumes that because an earlier immigrant cohort successfully integrated into Canadian society future ones will as well.  It’s assuming that because Irish Catholics who came to Canada in the early twentieth century and integrated reasonably well then so will Middle Eastern Muslims who come to Canada in the early twenty first.  

But past success of one group of immigrants is no indication of repeated success for future ones especially for ones that are a completely different group of people altogether.  Despite the negative reception Irish Catholic immigrants may have experienced when settling in early twentieth century North America they still held much in common with the receiving culture providing a pathway for acceptance by the host society and greater ease of integration whereas Arab Muslim have even less in common with the host society if any at all.  

And given the current state of technology one could effectively live in another country while maintaining strong ties with the native one.  The Chinese have been in North America for well over a century yet the Chinatowns across the continent haven’t disappeared.  They’ve grown in number.  Toronto alone has at least three now, four, maybe more if you include the GTA yet you’d be hard pressed to find an Irishtown anywhere in the city.  

And given how we’ve abandoned any sense of a common identity in favour of a vague, multicultural one integration is now subjective and in the eye of the beholder.

The Liberals Won Because Canadians Grew Bored With The Conservatives.

Winston Churchill famously said the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter and his observation is no less true of Canadian voters today than it was of British voters back then.  How else can you explain the enduring popularity of Justin Trudeau without concluding the average Canadian voter is too politically ignorant to vote and should be forced to pass a test before they are allowed to exercise their franchise.  But listening to the pundits you’d be led to believe Canadian voters are a well informed and politically engaged electorate but they’re giving them too much credit.  They need to hype up Canadians’ political intellect because they need to be convinced Canadians believe the same things they do to justify their mistaken perception of themselves as the voice of the people.  They want to believe Canadians turned on the Conservatives because they opposed the Niqab ban (they didn’t) and they rallied around the Liberals Syrian refugee resettlement scheme because it was the Canadian thing to do (not true either).  The real reason why Canadians turned on the Conservatives is because they grew bored of them and wanted something new.

A review of the history of the popular vote in past elections reveals how unremarkable the Liberal victory was.  With just 39.5% of the popular vote it seems pathetic compared to the Progressive Conservatives 50.03% of the popular vote back in 1984 and 43.02% of the popular vote in 1988.  And this was when the deservedly hated Brian Mulroney was party leader.  Indeed, the Liberal’s 39.5% support is slightly poorer compared to the 39.6% Stephen Harper’s Conservatives got in the previous election when the party secured a majority.  And despite the constant muck thrown at Stephen Harper and his Conservatives by our allegedly objective press in the run up to the election they still walked away with 31.9% of the popular vote.  They were defeated but hardly crushed.

Reading the press you’d think the Liberals destroyed their opposition but they didn’t.  Such is the nature of our first-past-the-post system.  You can win a riding and form the government with the majority of voters voting against you.  It’s not a perfect system but a truly perfect democratic system doesn’t exist.  That didn’t stop the Liberals from trying to give us one even though their effort was a masked attempt to gerrymander the next election and all elections after that.

So why did the Liberals win?  Part of it has to do with the stupefying popularity of their vacuous party leader most of it fabricated by a media shamelessly acting as Trudeau’s press agents and not the adversarial fourth estate they pretend to be.  That an obvious nitwit like Justin Trudeau can ascend to the highest office of an advanced industrialized nation speaks not only of the power of pedigree but says a lot about the influence of media bias on the people of the nation that put him there.  These are the same people who detest Stephen Harper but can’t exactly tell you why.

Equally so they can’t tell you why they voted for the Liberals, or NDP for that matter, without condemning the Conservatives because they didn’t know where the Liberals stood on anything because the Liberals didn’t tell you where they stood on anything beyond climate change, diversity, and gender equality, the holy trinity of fashionable social justice causes guaranteed to get you good press.  Oh and legalized pot.  And middle class tax cuts that really aren’t.  It was just a carryover from Trudeau’s bid for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada where he was just as vague and noncommittal about everything outside of climate change, diversity, and gender equality.  Oh, and pot.  You can’t forget about the pot.

Ennui and not anger is why the Conservatives lost.  The Conservatives had become familiar and boring breeding irrational contempt in a populace whose personal lives had become equally familiar and boring compounded by increasing insecurity and a sense of powerlessness to do anything about it.  Elections are great in that they not only fool people into thinking that they can change their lives, that they can overcome that sense of powerlessness, through the mere act of voting but a change of government provides the fleeting novelty their indebted, precarious, stagnant lives are looking for.

The “hopey, changey” fluff of the Obama campaign is exemplary in this regard.  Not only did Obama provide the illusion of giving power to the powerless he provided the novelty of voting for America’s first black President.  But “hope” and “change” was just “marketing pabulum” to avoid discussing important issues.  And given Justin Trudeau’s knack for sounding stupid when he thinks he’s talking smart the borrowing of pages from the Democrats’ campaign playbook was a sensible move, choosing to concentrate on image more so than merit for in Justin’s case, as so for Obama, there is plenty of the former, not much of the latter.

The Liberals will win the next election.  I don’t see how they can lose but a third term is pushing it. I’m hoping by then Canadian’s would have grown tired of Justin Trudeau’s “Look at me!” antics and yearn for a real statesman, not some jet-setting wannabe world celebrity with a messiah complex who cashed in on his politically famous last name and sought the highest office in this country because he lacked both the talent and the intellect to achieve international fame any other way.  I doubt very much the Liberals will do anything in power to effect positive change in the lives of Canadians (governments rarely do) but as long as they can be duped by the “hope” and “change” superficiality that is Trudeau the Lesser the longer he will remain “popular” and the Liberals in power. 

Logical Fallacies of Mass Immigration Supporters: The Appeal to Antiquity/Tradition.

Appeal to Antiquity/Tradition.

Appeal to antiquity/tradition is the position that because something worked for us in the past we should continue to do it seemingly in perpetuity.  This is problematic because it ignores the modern context.  Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean it’s still beneficial today.

In immigration discussions this fallacy manifests itself as the “Canada was built by immigration” meme.   While it may be historically factual that Canada was built by immigration it’s not an argument for continued and ever increasing immigration in the present.  This is because “current year” Canada is a different place than the Canada of one hundred years ago.  We have to take into consideration the health of the economy, immigration’s impact on the environment, its effects on social cohesion, technology and its potential impact on the labour market, among other things.

To illustrate the absurdity of this argument we can perform a thought experiment where we imagine a Canada were every space of land is occupied by an individual so that you couldn’t take a single step in either direction without stepping on someone’s toes.  It would be insane to continue to allow immigration in this scenario just because tradition demands it.  If the country hadn’t become an undesirable place to live long before it got to that point it definitely will become an undesirable place to live when it does.  The country’s economy, society, and institutions would have collapsed under such weight.   I acknowledge this is an absurd example because it’s highly unlikely the country will ever reach that point but it does bring to light that population sizes do have their limits and immigration cannot be spoken of independent of a myriad of other considerations solely because it worked so well for us in the past.  Canadians cities consistently rank in the top tier of best places to live in the world mostly because they are medium sized cities however unrestrained immigration will undo that.  These once livable cities will become unlivable, a process already in the making for Toronto.

If we were to remain true to the "Canada was built by immigration" meme then we would be favouring European immigration almost exclusively because it wasn’t just immigrants who built Canada.  It was European Christian immigrants who did.

Majority of Canadians Reject Multiculturalism? But it’s Current Year!

As if we need more evidence to drive the point home that Canadians reject multiculturalism the CBC reports on a CBC-Angus Reid poll that found 68% of Canadians want minorities to “fit in” by which we mean we want more assimilation and less accommodation.  Also, the underlying subtext is we want immigrants who look more like us so we’re not overwhelmed demographically.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s completely understandable.  Some will say “that’s racist” to which I say f*ck that!  I’m really getting tired of hearing that shit because shouting racism isn’t an argument.

This poll suggests, to me at least, that Canadians don’t see their country as a multicultural one and don’t want it to be one either.  Those who state otherwise harbour the real marginal opinion.

And if a referendum were held today asking Canadians if they wish to see their country adopt multiculturalism as the driving social policy guiding the national character they’d oppose it outright with a clear majority to erase any confusion.

This is why it had to be imposed upon us by our self appointed betters in government and their enablers in the media.

It cannot be stressed enough that multiculturalism, along with the restructuring of our immigration system to favour immigration from non-traditional sources, was conceived out of elite arrogance and not popular will.

Multiculturalism and mass immigration is cultural and demographic suicide for a host society.  I think Canadians have come to understand this if they hadn’t arrived at that realization already so it shouldn’t be so shocking to learn that, according to this CBC-Angus Reid poll, the majority of Canadians have their objections.  They know there was nothing wrong with the old Canada and, quite frankly, would like to have it back.  The new Canada to them is just so new Coke.

Polls Show John McCallum's Full of Shit.

Here's a Globe and Mail article that doesn't require much commentary.  It pretty much speaks for itself.

It basically tells us John McCallum is full of shit based on his own government's internal polling.  By this I mean Canadians don't want more immigrants despite pronouncements from McCallum to the contrary.  And his government knows this.  This follows a Nanos poll conducted on behalf of the Globe which saw 16% of Canadians favouring an increase of immigrants with more than twice as many, some 39%, wanting a decrease with 37% thinking the numbers should remain the same.  Put another way 76% of Canadians polled don't want an increase in the numbers of immigrants.

Canadians don't want more immigrants and we haven't wanted more immigrants for a long time. Here's an EKOS poll conducted in March of 2015 and published in the Winnipeg Free Press that found 46% of respondents felt there are too many immigrants coming to the country with 41% saying too many of them are non-white.

Here's another poll.  And another.  And yet another.

Despite poll after poll telling the government time after time, be it Liberal or Conservative, that we don't want more immigrants, in fact we want less, they go ahead and give us more immigrants and John McCallum is going to do the same.  He's already hinted at it.  Since he's already made up his mind his national consultations were just a PR stunt.

They tell us we need immigrants because of labour shortages and an ageing population but those go-to excuses have been debunked.

Were they to be truthful with us it's too keep, I believe, Canada's housing market from imploding because we're in too deep now and no one has a solution on how to deal with it and no one in Ottawa wants to confront it because no one in Ottawa would know how to handle a crash.  It's amateur hour on Parliament Hill for the next four years at least.  So it's best to keep pushing it off into the indefinite future with fingers crossed and hope it solves itself for without the housing market Canada's economy doesn't have much going for it at the moment and it's a market driven by debt and cheap money.  If cheap money is how immigrants are paying for their shitty urban sprawl houses on incomes from shitty paying jobs many of them get then we're making the situation worse by making the bubble bigger.  Because if interest rates were to rise how many people will still be able to afford the house they bought when interest rates were low.  If you're a gambling man you might want short Canada's banks.

If You're A Syrian Refugee In Canada You Can Thank Justin Trudeau's Narcissism.

I haven’t read the Toronto Star ever since comments were disabled at their website.  Being denied the opportunity to challenge their editorial slant in both commentary and selective news reporting I saw little reason to venture to the paper’s online source and give them my page-view.  It was a stupid business decision if you ask me – to disable commenting that is – because page-views are a website’s bread and butter and what better way is there to increase page-views than to attract those who typically ignore your paper by allowing them the opportunity to give you a piece of their mind in the comments?  TorStar deserves to go bankrupt and it can’t happen fast enough.

That being said, it’s hard to not notice a headline or two in one of the many Toronto Star boxes that litter the streets of the city and a recent headline bleated “31,000 Syrians Welcomed.”  When I read that I thought, “Welcomed by whom?” only to quickly realize they mean us Canadians.

It always bugs me every time the word “welcome” is used to describe the latest batch of “new Canadians” as if to imply they are wanted here in the first place.  I, for one, don’t welcome them here at all.  They’re not needed, they bestow no tangible benefits to us a country or people, they clog up our roads, create more problems than they’re supposed to solve, they drive down wages while contributing to the general scarcity of good paying jobs, and generally are oxygen consuming slabs of meat that just get in the way of where you’re going.  Immigrants are overrated and if it’s meant they’re “welcomed” like a spring thaw after a long, cold, dark winter then no.  It’s more like “welcomed” like a case of Chlamydia.

“31,000 Syrians Dumped on Canadians” would be a more accurate headline.  Or, “31,000 Syrians Imposed on Canadians” would be another.  Perhaps, “31,000 Fashionable Charity Cases of the Virtue-Signaling Class Arrive in Canada, Taxpayers Expected to Now Take Care of Them” would be the most honest if too long.  But “Welcome”?  Please!  Speak for yourself.

Below the picture accompanying the print edition of the front-page story ran the text “Trudeau applauded at UN for Syrian Intake” and that says it all now doesn’t it?  That’s what this is all about it now isn’t it?  Here we have a man of no accomplishment despite his having great privilege and the advantages that come with it, whose only contribution to the whole affair is shooting his mouth of during an election campaign, taking credit for the efforts of others and being applauded for it.  It was an event where a man of little accomplishment was applauded by many for doing practically nothing.  31,000 Syrians arrived in Canada, with more to come, on Justin’s insatiable need for narcissistic supply to feed his inveterate narcissism.  It was a cheap and easy PR stunt to impress the right people and Justin knew others would do the work for him and he’d get all the accolades.

  

Let’s abandon pretension and stop kidding ourselves.  Canada didn’t rush to aid in the Syrian crisis out of altruism.  It did so because of the vanity of our political class.  I’m not opposed to assisting refugees but I object to the way we do it.  I don’t agree with uprooting them from their countries and regions and airlifting them to resettle here permanently which doesn’t make them refugees anymore but immigrants.  But if we didn’t do that then there wouldn’t be any opportunities for airport photo-ops and pats on the back from the UN would be shortcoming.  Well, I’m not getting a pat on the back for having refugees dumped into my community and then being expected to support and accommodate them but then again my last name isn’t Trudeau.  But then again maybe I am getting pat on the back only Prime Minister Potato Head is receiving it on my behalf in New York City.  So, you’re welcome I guess???

John McCallum’s National Public Consultation on Immigration Is a Cross Country Sales Pitch and not a National Public Consultation.

John McCallum’s national consultation on immigration is a sales pitch and not a consultation.  I’m convinced the targets are already set and he’s travelling across the country as a public relations stunt.

 

He wants to fool Canadians into believing they have a say in establishing immigration policy even though it’s apparent John McCallum is primarily consulting with those who he knows will tell him what he wants to hear: the members of the immigration industry and the business lobby.  It’s like the Minister of Public Safety consulting exclusively with NAMBLA over changes to age of consent laws.  They, along with the immigrants themselves, are prime beneficiaries of mass immigration and seem to be the only people John McCallum cares to listen to even though the rest of us are equal, nay greater stakeholders than they are since we’re the ones mostly affected by the impact of mass immigration not just financially but also socially, culturally, environmentally, and demographically.

The bullshit coming out of this guy’s mouth is the same crap shoveled by previous Ministers irrespective of party affiliation.

Take what John McCallum said in Alberta I assume with a straight face.  He tells us Alberta needs more immigrants because his consultations have told him that that’s what the laid off oil worker wants.  To justify importing more immigrants than current levels he said, “I think people tend to take a longer term point of view and there remain labour shortages in some sectors and they want to be in good shape for when the recovery begins.”  He said this in a province currently shedding jobs yet vaguely tells us “labour shortages” remain in “some sectors” whatever those sectors may be and we need immigrants to prepare us for when the recovery begins.  So we need to stockpile labour for that "any day now" recovery is what he is saying.  This is pretty much the same nonsense Jason Kenney said when he doubled down on the immigrants when Canada was experiencing an economic downturn in 2008 and hasn’t fully recovered from.  You’d figure job losses, an economic downturn, and an overall shitty job market would suggest a cautionary approach to immigration but nope!  In Canada now we need immigrants to support an economic boom and we need even more immigrants in an economic bust to prepare for the recovery.  One has to wonder what it takes to decrease immigration targets when negative economic indicators don’t matter anymore?

It should raise eyebrows every time a Minister of Immigration has these consultations and the result is always the same: we need more immigrants.  Whoever they’re consulting with it’s definitely not us.  I think they know what the majority thinks about immigration and don’t want to confront it.  Instead they prefer to lie to our faces and tell us we want more immigrants hoping this will be enough to convince us that the majority actually does want more immigration and the only person who has a problem with it is you, the sole mass immigration skeptic in the country. 

I’m predicting, hoping to be proven wrong in a not-as-bad-as-I-expected kind of way, the Liberals will set immigration targets for 2017 at the arbitrary 1% of the population number.  That means 350,000 people will be given their membership cards to club Canada.  This will be an increase of over 80,000 more people from the current level of around 270,000.  I also expect them to provide a pathway for TFWs to become permanent residents meaning TFWs aren’t really TFWs at all but, like refugees, immigrants by another stream.  Speaking of refugees expect more of them.  Perhaps even asylum for all the illegals.

Do we need all these people?  No, but we’re going to get them anyway because immigrants need housing and right now without the housing market Canada’s economy doesn’t have much going for it.  And if housing is the main thing driving your nation’s GDP numbers immigrants are just a band aid solution to a deeper problem because if the jobs aren’t there how are they expected to afford the mortgages on their cheaply built urban sprawl shit-boxes?  How low can interest rates go and stay there for how long?

Logical Fallacies of Mass Immigration Supporters: The Appeal to Emotion.

The Appeal to Emotion.

If you’re opponent isn’t calling you the next Hitler then they’re most likely asking you to think of the Syrian refugee children.  As common as is the ad hominem is the appeal to emotion fallacy.  They are arguments that seek validation by making us feel a certain way but just because an argument makes us feel a certain way doesn’t make it an argument because feelings aren’t arguments.

One way is to appeal to our sense of compassion.  This was most evident in the case of Alan Kurdi.  Photos of his lifeless body lying on a Mediterranean shore became an argument for Canada opening its borders to Syrian refugee resettlement.  Dismissing the fact that little Alan’s death had more to do with paternal negligence than it had with the Syrian refugee crisis his death is not an argument to bring in 50,000 Syrian refugees.  Allowing 50,000 Syrians to effectively immigrate to Canada won’t accomplish much aside from allowing Canada’s virtue signaling class to parade like moral peacocks on social media and make them feel good about themselves.  Syria is still a destabilized country that, according to the UN, has produced an estimated 6.6 million internally displaced persons and has sent over 4.8 million to seek refuge abroad primarily in camps in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Removing 50,000 of them won’t make much of a difference.  The money and resources being spent to resettle a select 50,000 people would have gone further and benefited more had it been utilized in the camps.  This would allow the refugees to stay in the region and hopefully return to rebuild their country and lives at a future date.  Indeed, what are we really accomplishing if what we are doing is removing the very skilled people Syria is going to need to rebuild itself?  It seems we’re doing more harm than good when you look at it that way but then again poaching the developing the world of its skilled talent is what Canada does best.  While Canada is committed to helping the refugees of the world resettling them in Canada is not necessarily the best option since doing so introduces a new set problems such as integration challenges, job skills training, language training, stresses they place on the communities they settle in, and so on. 

Another way our emotions are tickled is to flatter us by saying how a wonderful, tolerant, accepting people we are and variations on that theme.  While it’s nice to be called those things they're completely irrelevant.  It shouldn’t distract us from the fact that there are problems with the immigration system and that there are legitimate concerns of the host society that need addressing.  Ignoring those will make us wonderful, tolerant, and accepting to a fault.

In essence arguments advanced whose only purpose is to make us feel pitiful or prideful or angry are arguments seeking to appeal to our emotional and therefore irrational self which is where they draw their strength from.  They aren't arguments because, as I wrote earlier, feelings aren't arguments.

Logical Fallacies of Mass Immigration Supporters: The Ad Hominem.

When the current Minister of Immigration, John McCallum, announced Canada was opening its border even wider to immigrants while the rest of the world seemed to be closing theirs part of his reasoning was that Canada was continuing a tradition of immigration based on compassion.  In doing so he committed two logical fallacies in one sentence.  Logical fallacies are commonly employed by the pro-mass immigration crowd so I figure I might as well tackle the ones I’ve encountered over the years.

My feelings on logical fallacies are mixed because in debates about any topic the one who incessantly points out logical fallacies tends to be some pedantic twerp who cares more about pointing out the fallacies than actually discussing the issue.  I think they believe doing so makes them look smart.  It gets annoying, inviting your fist to their mouth as the only satisfactory retort to their nitpicking.  However, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong and they do have a point.

Furthermore, I intended this to be a single post but in writing it I found it becoming quite lengthy so I decided to break it up into a series of posts addressing one fallacy at a time.  I’ve found that there is nothing more off putting to the short attention span, tl;dr, internet age that we live in than a lengthy blog post, a crime I've committed many times before and appear to be in the act of committing right now.  So let’s get started.

The Ad Hominem

Let’s get this one out of the way first because it’s one of the most common logical fallacies readily employed by mass immigration proponents too intellectually lazy or too intellectually ill equipped (by which I mean stupid) or just too cowardly to discuss the issue as mature adults.

 

The ad hominem fallacy is the name calling debate tactic.  Its purpose is to discredit the message by discrediting the messenger.  Hopefully it will derail or shut down the debate by forcing the messenger to defend his or her character to the satisfaction of the arbitrary criteria of the name caller instead of arguing their position.

When it comes to discussing immigration ad hominem attacks encompass accusations of being a racist, xenophobe, Islamophobe, bigot, redneck, right-wing extremist, nationalist, white nationalist, white supremacist, and so on.  The fallacy of the ad hominem is that it seeks to conflate the merits of what is being said with who is saying it even though one is not dependent upon the other.  The Big Bang Theory is not invalidated by the fact a devout Catholic Priest was the one who first proposed it giving way to early criticisms of it of being "creationism in disguise.” Likewise, valid criticisms of the immigration system are not invalidated if presented by the most unrepentant racist ever to walk the planet. 

If you find yourself in a debate and your opponent can do nothing but hurl ad hominem mud then consider yourself the victor.  It’s also best not to further engage this person because you’ll just be wasting your time.  Just give them a lollipop and a colouring book and direct them to their safe space where their fragile world view cannot be challenged, where they’re always right, and where everyone gets to ride the rides for free except for you, of course, because you’re a f**king racist.

Canadian Job Market Has Not Recovered From 2008 Recession.

So says the OECD but what do they know?  It's sunny ways here in Canada or haven't they heard? Our out-to-lunch (and seemingly always out of the country) PM says so.

Besides, we're importing even more immigrants this year and the years to come.  True, they're mostly the C and D students of the developing world along with illiterate-in-their-own-language refugees and the useless "sponsored" relatives of immigrants.  But unlike the previous waves of immigrants who have failed to provide any real economic benefits to the country these ones are different and will create the jobs that will put us back on track because of neoclassical economics and reasons, I guess.