Selecting Refugees

There are about 5 million Syrian refugees seeking asylum and millions more who would be if they could do it safely. Canada took in 25,000 refugees. Even this is a quite a stretch given how tight housing in Canada, especially low cost housing for large families. We are cherry picking the best 1 in 200 applicants.

One of the families we selected had 13 members. I would not have selected them. Why?

• For the same quota, I could have spread the benefit around and welcomed three smaller families. You get richer genetic diversity that way.
• Muslims encourage large families to grow the faith, but having large families is irresponsible. Our planet is grossly overpopulated. Nobody should be having more than two children.
• You want to select people who will assimilate easily. A giant family like this likely has values very different from those common in Canada. When women have a say in reproduction, they don’t treat themselves as baby factories. Further, large families trigger fears immigrants are taking over inspiring bigotry.
• If you select a large family, if one of them has a disease, a mental problem, a learning disability etc, the odds are others in the family will have it too. If you select several small families, you spread the risk.

The federal government has announced it is making refugees pay for their plane trips to Canada at rates considerably higher than the cost of a commercial flight. The effect of this is to skim the richest refugees for inclusion in Canada. We are helping those in least need of help. I don’t think your average Canadian wants to do that.

~ Roedy (born:1948-02-04 age:68)