9/11 - the immigration legacy

It's been five years since that sad day that America was attacked. Five years since the towers fell in New York and the Pentagon was punctured; since flight 93 went down. Five years since this nation and many other Western nations began to live in fear.

While many in the press are summarizing 9/11 from the point of view of loss of freedom vs. security issues; or they are looking at the impact on health to the emergency responders at ground zero in NY; there is one impact I don't want to go unmentioned, and so tonight I decided it was a good time to mention it.

9/11 has made immigration more difficult than ever to both the US and Canada. It has taken away manpower and budgets that used to go to process cases. It has bred an atmosphere of mistrust in new immigrants. It has led to calls to close borders. It has empowered racist tendencies. There are calls everywhere for reductions in immigrants allowed in and a tightening of requirements that would even allow for application in the first place.

The dream of a free and open North America has been replaced with the dream of a big wall on our northern and southern borders.

9/11 has impacted all of us, but living in fear of the world through a bias against immigration can only harm us in the long run. Answering the call to secure our borders and biometricize the world in order to allow it access to us will lead to our econmoic and political undoing. Business is conducted where it is free to be so and business WILL migrate to those markets. In the arena of World Politics, our cries of freedom and liberty for all will be reduced to hollow rhetoric when viewed against our actions.

The greatest damage done on 9/11 was the freeing of the forces of fear. It has already done far worse to this nation than anything that happened five years ago.