Lyndon Johnson was not a very likable president. He came into office after a hugely popular president (who reportedly hated him) was shot. He was known to be rude and overbearing especially when he was the leader of the Senate and wanted to push legislation. He physically assaulted Lester B. Pearson. He effectively turned the Vietnam war from a minor regional police action into full-fledged quagmire.
He is also known as the American president that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most fundamental pieces of legislation in American history. It dissolved voter registration requirements and integrated schools at a time when "separate-but-equal" was something African-Americans experienced on a daily basis. As a result, all Americans could use water fountains, attend decent schools, and freely vote for the first time in the history of the United States. He did this by using his considerable legislative pull and knowledge to manipulate Congress in a process that would make Frank Underwood blush.
He also did this at a time when the Democratic party in the United States could still get elected in the south. Apocryphally, after signing the bill he turned to a staffer and said that he had single-handedly lost the south for the Democrats for a generation. Johnson was re-elected by a landslide in the 1964 election but his prediction was prophetic. As a result of signing the Civil Rights Act, Democrats had become endangered legislators in the southern United States by the 1990s.
Lyndon Johnson was many things, but amoral he was not. He knew his strong support for civil rights legislation came with a cost to his party and his own election chances. He did it anyway because it was the right thing to do.
Contrast that episode with how well this meatball has handled the issue of Syrian refugees this last month or so. If history judges Lyndon Johnson to be a bad president despite what he did for civil rights, how will history judge Stephen Harper?
Now, partisanship is unseemly and I try my best throughout my blog to avoid it. So in the spirit of tri-partisanship let me say that neither of these other two meatballs really seemed to care about the Syrian refugee issue until it became politically expedient to do so. That should tell you something about their character. But lets face it, it's pretty easy to crap all over politicians. On the ease-of-crapping-on meter, it goes Nazis, then murderers, and then it's a toss-up between politicians and fat-cat Wall street bankers.
So while we're being all self-righteous, let's remind ourselves that really, the reason why politicians didn't care is because Canadians didn't really care. It says something about our character that it took this horrible picture to ignite this issue. Before there was Aylan Kurdi, 2,500 other refugees died trying to cross the Mediterranean to get to Europe in 2014 alone. And since 2011, over 200,000 people, many of them children, have died in a brutal civil war in Syria.
So while we're being all self-righteous, let's remind ourselves that really, the reason why politicians didn't care is because Canadians didn't really care. It says something about our character that it took this horrible picture to ignite this issue. Before there was Aylan Kurdi, 2,500 other refugees died trying to cross the Mediterranean to get to Europe in 2014 alone. And since 2011, over 200,000 people, many of them children, have died in a brutal civil war in Syria.
And while I'm pointing the finger at all of you quite frankly, it's not like I've had the initiative to write about Syria or refugees or anything like that. Crowing about how I'm going to Moneyball a playoff hockey pool (I'm going to finish that series, I swear) and discussing my coffee consumption habits are not going to change the world.
Nobody comes off smelling good in this whole affair and it's a reminder that just because people are reduced to a number doesn't mean they're irrelevant. When refugees are described by a statistic they still matter. There's a lesson about empathy here when we don't pay attention to 200,000 deaths but we do to a single photograph.
This post has gone pretty Disney so let's get back to some hard-hearted statistics. And to compensate for that Kodak moment let's make this post extra boring by introducing some history. There have been a lot arguments against letting a large number of refugees into the country in very quick order. How will they integrate? Do we have to pay for them? Terrorists?
Luckily we have a reasonable historical test case of what would happen if we decided to accept a large number of refugees into Canada. Coincidentally, we also have Lyndon Johnson to thank for this.
We also have Richard Nixon to thank, which is a sentence I never thought I'd write. By early 1969 Nixon began withdrawing American forces from a war that Johnson had started because even Richard fucking Nixon could see that Vietnam was a loser. As a result of that decision and the comically inept performance of the American-trained South Vietnamese army, North Vietnam swept through the south and turned the whole place into just Vietnam.
In turning Vietnam into their version of Vietnam, the communist party decided that many people needed to think the way of North Vietnam. So they tried that old communist stand-by known as "re-education" which is a euphemism for hard-labor camps and beatings. In doing so they created a giant group of people trying to flee from Vietnam. This group of refugees became known as the Vietnamese boat people. On top of that, conflicts in Laos and Cambodia meant that millions of people (literally 3 million) were looking for a new home.
The Indochina refugee crisis lasted from 1975 when Saigon fell to about 1995. It peaked in 1979/1980 and during this period Canada took in about 15,000-25,000 refugees from Southeast Asia. By the end of 1985, over 100,000 refugees came to Canada from the region. The following time series reflects that with the huge rise in Southeast Asian immigrants in the 1975-1979 and 1980 periods. Just to add some context I've added the immigrant data for entrants from the UK and the USA. This allows some comparisons to a group of immigrants one might consider more like "old-stock Canadians".
Nobody comes off smelling good in this whole affair and it's a reminder that just because people are reduced to a number doesn't mean they're irrelevant. When refugees are described by a statistic they still matter. There's a lesson about empathy here when we don't pay attention to 200,000 deaths but we do to a single photograph.
This post has gone pretty Disney so let's get back to some hard-hearted statistics. And to compensate for that Kodak moment let's make this post extra boring by introducing some history. There have been a lot arguments against letting a large number of refugees into the country in very quick order. How will they integrate? Do we have to pay for them? Terrorists?
Luckily we have a reasonable historical test case of what would happen if we decided to accept a large number of refugees into Canada. Coincidentally, we also have Lyndon Johnson to thank for this.
We also have Richard Nixon to thank, which is a sentence I never thought I'd write. By early 1969 Nixon began withdrawing American forces from a war that Johnson had started because even Richard fucking Nixon could see that Vietnam was a loser. As a result of that decision and the comically inept performance of the American-trained South Vietnamese army, North Vietnam swept through the south and turned the whole place into just Vietnam.
In turning Vietnam into their version of Vietnam, the communist party decided that many people needed to think the way of North Vietnam. So they tried that old communist stand-by known as "re-education" which is a euphemism for hard-labor camps and beatings. In doing so they created a giant group of people trying to flee from Vietnam. This group of refugees became known as the Vietnamese boat people. On top of that, conflicts in Laos and Cambodia meant that millions of people (literally 3 million) were looking for a new home.
The Indochina refugee crisis lasted from 1975 when Saigon fell to about 1995. It peaked in 1979/1980 and during this period Canada took in about 15,000-25,000 refugees from Southeast Asia. By the end of 1985, over 100,000 refugees came to Canada from the region. The following time series reflects that with the huge rise in Southeast Asian immigrants in the 1975-1979 and 1980 periods. Just to add some context I've added the immigrant data for entrants from the UK and the USA. This allows some comparisons to a group of immigrants one might consider more like "old-stock Canadians".
So what happened to this cohort of Southeast asian refugees who came to Canada? The first available long-range data we have on them is probably contained in the 1981 Census which was a very good vintage (unlike the current 2011 National Household survey version of the census). The 1981 census asked about immigration to Canada and when these immigrants landed. They also asked about the amount and sources of their income. Now in this particular census the whizzes at Statistics Canada didn't provide any information on where in Asia any of these people came from, which means we can't see any in-depth information on Southeast Asian immigrants in particular. Nevertheless, below is a boxplot of the incomes of each cohort of immigrants from Asia, the USA, and the UK based upon the year they arrived in Canada. It's census data, so this is essentially a complete picture of the immigrants that arrived in Canada from Asia, the USA and the UK between 1971 and 1981 (because of weighting). It accounts for a sample of about 12,000 people. This is in complete contrast to the current 2011 NHS survey which couldn't count immigrants with Sesame Street's help (one immigrant, two immigrant, THREE IMMIGRANT, AH HA HA HA HA!)
The middle bar of each boxplot is the median or 50th percentile. The top and bottoms of the boxes are 75th and 25th percentiles respectively. The whiskers on each side are basically a measure to show outliers, which are any of the dots outside of those whiskers (it's technically a measure of 1.5 times the interquartile range).
What the above plot shows though is that at the height of the massive influx of immigrants from Southeast Asia there was a discrepancy between the incomes of immigrants from Asia and immigrants from the US and UK. The Asian cohort that arrived in 1980 did have measurably lower incomes than their American and UK counterparts. But that difference did not persist very much longer than 1979. Asian immigrants who arrived earlier than 1979 seemed to adjust to Canada and earned just as much as American and UK immigrants who arrived in the same year. Notably when you take a look at this same boxplot for just government transfers, Asian immigrants don't seem to receive any more government assistance than immigrants from the USA or UK at any point between 1971 and 1980.
But "So what?" you say. This is probably being driven by all of those rich immigrants from Japan and Hong Kong and Taiwan. "Touché", I respond: I can't exclude that possibility in this data. What I can do though is fast forward to the 1986 census (another good vintage in contrast to the vinegar-tasting 2011 NHS) and repeat the same exercise. In 1986, someone at StatsCanada clued in when they saw a bunch of Southeast Asian names on the surveys they were sending out and started asking questions about immigrants from Southeast Asia. So this particular sample is about 30,000 people from the 1986 census who immigrated at some point between 1971 and 1986. The benefit of this is that we can actually see how the incomes of the Southeast Asian cohort who landed in 1979/1980 adjusted as compared to their American and UK "old stock" counterparts.
And what this shows is that the the 1979/1980 cohort probably did a little poorer than their UK counterparts but about as well as immigrants from the US. Even Southeast Asian immigrants who came after 1980 are not all that worse off than the other groups of immigrants. Immigrants from Southeast Asia integrated pretty well and in very short order after coming to Canada.
There are a number of issues with comparing the experience we had with the Southeast Asian boat people and the current Syrian refugee crisis. The refugee samples are most certainly different. Say what you will about the North Vietnamese, they were able to keep a semblance of order in Vietnam after they took over. This is in complete contrast to Syria, which is currently doing its best impression of 1992 Somalia. In Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, it was mostly the intelligentsia trying to get out. Everyone wants to get the hell out of Syria.
People also worry a lot about cultural differences in the Syrian refugees but I don't really think this argument holds a lot of water. Syria, prior to the civil war, wasn't some backwards regime that didn't allow women to drive cars or show their faces or go to university (ring any bells?). The government is ostensibly secular (for those people trying to play the radical Islam card). I'm not defending any of the obviously horrible things that the government of Syria has done or did but I am saying that Syrians have grown up in an essentially modern middle eastern society. The culture argument is an overblown one.
Finally, we also should remember that when we took in 100,000 Southeast Asian immigrants it was the 1980s. Walkmans were just becoming cool. Ronald Reagan, a (pretty mediocre) ACTOR, became the most powerful man in the world. Canada basically couldn't change its own constitution until 1982. We were a lot poorer and a lot more uncertain of our place in the world. If we could accept 100,000 immigrants in that weird decade from a war-torn area of the world how can we not do the same today?
