Visible human minorities, to those of a less generous or downright bigoted bent, can seem to present a bit like plants out of place who threaten to overwhelm the garden of our culture. As such, those dreaming of a better life by entering North America bear the brunt of unfair criticism. But let us to be balanced: raw facts do bear out some concerns if you remove any context. Economist E.J. Antoni this past week noted that “the August jobs report shows more pain for native-born Americans, who’ve lost more than 1.3 million jobs over the last year, while foreign-born workers have gained over 1.2 million jobs”. That’s quite a replacement – if this was a garden we’d not be winning all Fall Fairs. Of course, the context removed includes that there are almost 100 million more native born workers and that both have seen increases in their unemployment rate, with the foreign-born workers unemployment rate increasing faster and almost reaching parity with the native-born.
Perhaps some botanical truths can at least provide levity to the situation. The sun is here, free for all, the soil is here, ready to be claimed, and any intrepid seed can waltz or breeze right on into any fertile habitat. Flowerbeds have no Border Security show on the television that folks half watch after their nightly newscast, and no literal border guards separate one backyard garden from another. In any case, no fence can really mitigate the arrival of new plants to a given horticultural landscape – we’d be whistling through the graveyard if we thought we could exclude those pesky weeds.
Much newcomer fauna enters by breeze and some by way of the peristalsis magic that is a larger organism’s intestinal tract: plopped unceremoniously as bird turd or bear dung, newcomer plants arrive from a literal toilet bowl of an origin. Guided by primal necessity plants and animals alike seek to survive wherever they’re dropped. This gives a whole other meaning to the trite injunction to bloom where you’re planted. Surely, when we think of the human species as a whole, rather than as plants that belong or don’t belong in a given locale, we can attain a better empathy for immigrants among us. We must combat the aphoristic human nature belief that humans eat one other with their inborn selfishness.
That being said, ecosystems have been drastically altered by the colonizing impacts of plants that new Canadians have brought with them over the preceding centuries. A quick glance at the history of Indigenous plants, how they fared or wilted, since the advent of modern agricultural colonialism, shows some stark results: “of over 900 plant species “listed” as threatened and endangered, the primary driver of decline was invasive species, followed by habitat alteration, and development, which collectively accounted for 93.2% of the primary drivers for listed species”. Scientists note that in 1950 half of all land in North American was farmland, causing a loss of habitat for indigenous plants. But now the main culprit for habitat loss is the all-too human habitat necessity: houses and pavement. Today homes and roads cover more land and make the life of plants, endemic and introduced, untenable. In this sense we see plants having a common cause vis a vis our human efforts to find some affordable living space.
When organisms from different habitats converge, conflict is the occasional, if not inevitable, outcome. In fact, in my 31 years as a forestry worker I can report that in nature, when a new plant arrives in the mountains by way of a truck bumper or range cattle, it almost always remains relegated to a life along roadsides and disturbed areas, rarely venturing en masse as a species into the forests and meadows already occupied by endemic plants. The opposite is true in farm landscapes, where human disruption to create crop space also provides fertile ground for all manner of other introduced species.
Complex conflict between newcomer and resident species—and the humans who love or abhor them, extends in kind to the human-on-human realm. Conflict over ideas about who belongs and holds dominion over given sections of land—cultural property rights, leads not only to government policy shifts but also to war and terrorism. A few days ago Munich police engaged in a shootout with a “suspect, who was carrying an old long gun with a bayonet attached to it”. The man, a Syrian, was seeking to shoot at the consulate of Israel—a land base on this planet that symbolically represents the holy grail garden for multiple varieties of Homo sapiens. Elsewhere, recently in Austria a rifle-toting young Muslim man decided to stab, hack, shoot and slash twenty-seven people during a “festival of diversity” coinciding with the city of Solingen’s 650th anniversary. He may have even been to have taken part in an Austrian educational program designed to mitigate radicalization among young Austrian-born Muslims—an after school program for would-be terrorists designed to remind them. In the words of a defence lawyer named Nikolas Rast, who, in 2020, defended another Austrian attacker, that “if he hadn’t gone to a Mosque, but to boxing, he wouldn’t have become a terrorist”.
The way plants strangle and exclude one another from habitats seems, in a sense to have some parallels with the common vetch (pun intended) of anti-immigrant sentiment – that, given a choice, newcomers will damage our pristine cultural ecosystem. This is a dubious certainty but it’s worth nothing that, just as the introduction of a few weed seeds on the under carriage of a quad during a back country joy ride can have consequences for patches of hitherto naturalized roadsides, so too does an excess of population influx have dire consequences—specifically for the availability of human habitat.
The Feds and Their Fertilizer
To that end some changes have after nine years been announced to Canada’s generous immigration policies, in an effort to thwart the calamitous rent increases and general paucity of housing for people across the country. “The chickens are coming home to roost,” said Kareem El-Assal, an immigration expert and consultant in Toronto. “There was a bit of hubris, thinking that we can just increase our immigration and temporary resident levels in perpetuity without there being any blowback whatsoever.” Chickens are a useful metaphor, as it happens, as anyone knows when they introduce a flock of chickens to their lawn or garden and find that realm utterly transformed into a plant desert by pecking, scratching, and turding birds. Even the most desirable of newcomers bring assorted side effects, as anyone birthing their first child, much anticipated with fanfare and joy, will happily attest. This is borne out in parallel by government policy: “the shift in public mood prompted the federal government to cap those permanent resident visas to 500,000 starting next year and to cut study permits for international students by 35% to 360,000 starting in April.”
These moves are part of the effort to significantly reduce “the sheer volume” of newcomers “that has just gotten out of control”, Immigration Minister Marc Miller stated. But, like a patch of plants that begin in a corner of a fallow lot and, if given a chance take over vast swathes of one’s pasture, the damage may, for a generation or more, be done. Here’s where things get difficult, and scary.
This past week we collectively held space in a portion of our hearts and minds by commemorating the attacks of September 11th 2001, a historical junction when we collectively as Canadian citizens and residents, found out that we were not immune to violent forces that blow in as a response to our leader’s policy in far-off corners of the world. Newcomers bring many things with them, including their grievances. We do well to bear in mind a framework provided by holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s: “all collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them. No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior”. The seeds of peace, like those of a noble gardener, must for thinkers and students be those that seek to understand society within the broader framework of the world and nature of which we are a part.