Storm Husbands Copy Editor

January in North America brings biting polar vortexes, centimetres of snow, and slippery sidewalks, but the ice on the streets is clearly not our only worry. On January 24th, federal agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) department fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Pretti is the second civilian to die at the hands of border patrol agents, following fellow Minnesotan Renee Good, who was shot and killed in her car at the beginning of this month. It might be tempting to dismiss these devastating occurrences as just another American political issue, but this immigration crackdown is not unique to our Southern neighbours. Despite being seen globally as extremely welcoming towards immigrants, Canada has also steadily begun closing avenues for immigration, with caps for international students on the rise. Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) reports that study permits will decrease by 7% from 2025-2026, a 16% fall from the previous year, 2024. The question must be asked — why is this mass panic suddenly so ubiquitous in our news and media?

It will surprise no one to read that Canada and the U.S. are built upon centuries of oppression directed initially, and most especially, towards indigenous communities. Indigenous groups like the Anishinaabe, Navajo, Cree, and Sioux have had their cultures erased and populations depleted under the guise of false treaties and trades. The ‘Doctrine of Discovery’, as described by Arthur Manuel in award-winning bestseller Unsettling Canada, is a pervasive concept in North America outlined by declarations that granted colonial European powers the right of conquest over non-Christian lands due to their inherent superiority, a concept later echoed in the Manifest Destiny ideology of the United States. Some might argue that time washes away these wounds, but that notion would be ridiculous as Canada still continues to neglect the rights of native nations, sometimes even outright refuting them. That was the case with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which was passed in 2007 with a vote of 177 to 4. Take a wild guess as to which countries voted against the international and undeniable rights of Indigenous people’ to self-determination and cultural preservation.

From first contact to present day, the law has repeatedly failed Indigenous people. In fact, the Canadian Constitution only recognized their rights in 1982. Yes, you read that right, the invention of the email predates constitutional native rights in Canada. The conflation of legality and morality drives a lot of the anti-immigration argument, but the law can be horribly unethical. For example, the 2014 Tsilhqot’in ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada explicitly states that governments, be that federal or provincial, can legally override native title if they can justify doing so. In what world could it be morally right to negate someone’s right to land they have occupied for centuries? Moreover, misinterpretations of the law can further anti-immigration ideology. Americans notoriously praise documentation, expressing that the correct path is to legally come into the country with papers, but it is their very own sacred laws that declare that asylum seekers must physically step foot into the U.S. before applying for protection. Objectively, our faith in the legal system must be questioned. Unjust law is no law at all.

Apart from the legality, misinformation easily spreads with a topic as polarizing as immigration, creating myths disguised and promoted as truths, even by government officials. Many often attribute their dislike of immigration due to the classic “they’re-stealing-our-jobs” narrative. This harmful rhetoric is spewed by the likes of Mark Carney, who aims to cut temporary migrant workers from 7% to 5%, and Pierre Poilievre, who wishes to axe the program altogether. However, the opposite often proves true with immigration expanding and diversifying economies. Another common argument is that immigrants place pressure on social services. In a study conducted by Viewpoints Research (2025), 64% of Canadians respondents believed that immigration causes pressure on systems like healthcare and housing, but research has proved the opposite. In a study conducted by the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants in the U.S. paid up to 100 billion USD in taxes in 2022, a large portion of which is allocated for services like medical care, which they, being undocumented, cannot even access.

Furthermore, these myths even target immigrants themselves. The Latinos for Trump coalition expanded in the 2024 US Presidential Election, which saw a surprising 46% of Latinos voting in his favour — record-breaking for a Republican candidate! Despite what one might think, studies have shown that being an immigrant oneself is not enough to make a person pro-immigration. Kaesar and Tani (2023) found that immigrants’ views on immigration may be influenced by their own socio-economic status or elitism, negative myths on crime and terrorism, and perhaps most importantly, the cultural similarity between origin countries.

Every argument, be it national, legal, or socio-economic, eventually falls through. It quickly becomes apparent that the only thing that makes the narrative surrounding immigrants negative is their race. The intrinsic system of racism that these countries are built on labels the white man an expatriate and the Latino man an alien. No one bats an eye at the British migrant, but everyone loves to complain about the Indian one. The distinction has never been the documented versus the undocumented but rather the white versus the racialized.

In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” We cannot allow increasingly right-wing governments to erase their past humanitarian crimes while feeding us falsehoods about the ‘ immigration problem ’. These mechanisms in the US and Canada have become a covert manifestation of the brown-paper-bag test to determine who deserves stability and safety and who deserves to be on the boat sent back. It determines who is protected by the national idea of justice and who is victimized by the system that enforces it. It determines who lives and who dies, and we cannot allow it to do so any longer.