Stuart Anderson said, “The surest way to change the law in America is not by lobbying Congress but by convincing enough of the public the laws must be changed.” When talking about the immigration debate in politics, there seems to be many political pressures felt by policy makers to make the immigration policies we see today. Political pressures that cause policy, however, are different for every country because of geographical location, wealth, and beliefs and values. For example, in 1924, the United States Congress was forced to establish the U.S. Border Patrol to catch illegal Hispanic immigrants who were trying to run across the border to the United States. This is an example of the United States’ geographic location causing policy change. Canada does not have an illegal immigration problem because it only boarders the United States, so they do not need to put a lot of political resources in containing illegal immigration.
Throughout the history of Immigration Policy in both the United States and Canada, we can see different political pressures that affected both immigration policy. The opposition towards immigration to Canada and the U.S. was borne mostly by the Chinese during the mid to late 19th century. Not only was immigration rising during the mid to late 19th century, but diversity in the immigration groups was also on the increase. There were still English, Irish, and Germans coming into the United States and Canada; however, new ethnic groups, like Hispanics and Asians, were taking advantage of the great opportunities that these countries offered. This brought about a sense of national identity to the already settled natives, and their distrust and dislike for different ethnic groups were becoming greater and greater as the threat of an ethnic takeover was a possibility. What the natives felt threatened by was the different traditions, values, and loyalties that the diverse immigrant population would bring to what the natives thought was an already great nation. There was even Protestant opposition towards the Catholics; however, there were already too many Catholics groups settled and not a big enough ratio of opposition towards them for legislation to be passed restricting Catholics. The Chinese came to the United States because of the gold rush and they were willing to work for lower wages than the natives. The natives did not feel like this was fair, so with extreme pressure from the West Coast and the Democratic party, the Republican Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
After the Second World War, Canadian immigration policy became a little less race oriented and geared more toward economic profitability. Finally in 1962, Ellen Fairclough, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration basically eliminated racial discrimination by implementing a new Canadian immigration policy. This new immigration policy stated that if an immigrant wanted to come to Canada and was not sponsored, as long as that immigrant proved his educational skill or quality that seemed desirable for Canada, he or she was allowed to immigrate without racial bias. Whereas the United States took a more humanitarian approach to immigration policy reform in the 1960s, Canada’s immigration reform was geared more towards the economic needs of Canada, as evidenced by its point based system.
Opposition towards immigration began in the late 19th century as the immigrants coming into the United States (Irish Catholics, Germans, Chinese, Spanish) were ethnically different than the immigrants who had already established themselves (English Protestants). Eventually the opposition became strong enough to create political pressures that called for immigration restrictions during the early 20th century.
“What do the American people want immigration to do for the United States”[1]? According to George Borjas, one of the leading labor economists who specialize in immigration issues, this should be the fundamental question in the modern immigration debate. Technically, everyone who now lives in the United States has some ancestor that immigrated to the United States from abroad and there was a point in time where there was no immigration policy. As the United States became wealthier and wealthier, an immigration policy became necessary to keep overpopulation and major wealth divisions from happening. Typically, when policy makers of the world focus on the immigration debate, they seem to use economics as their main basis for policy change. This is how immigration policy is implemented in most countries. If immigration were to make the native people economically worse off, why wouldn’t a country impose a strict immigration policy? On the other hand, if immigration were to make the native population economically better off, why wouldn’t a country impose a more lose immigration policy? This paper will describe the political forces in Canada and the United States that led to their different historic approaches to immigration, and then analyze their respective current policies in both political and economic terms.