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By Root 959 0

also draws heavily from undocumented migrant labor. Throughout history it, too, has suffered from bouts of xenophobia, presently directed at Hispanics. However, by any global measure, the culture of the United States is immigrant-friendly. Its population, fueled greatly by foreign immigration, is growing smartly by over 2.6 million people per year. Each year approximately 1 million new immigrants are admitted as legal permanent residents (LPRs), another 1 million become citizens, and another 1 million are apprehended at the border trying to enter illegally.439 Nearly 4 million more are admitted as temporary residents. The number of undocumented migrants is difficult to know but is probably around 10-12 million people, roughly comparable to the Russian figure.

The first and foremost goal of stated U.S. immigration policy is family reunification. Applicants who already have relatives living in the United States enjoy highest priority for legal permanent residency, and over 65% of all LPRs are admitted for this reason. The other stated U.S. objectives, in decreasing priority, are admitting skilled workers, protecting refugees from political, racial, or religious persecution at home, and ensuring cultural diversity. Competition is fierce, especially in the last category with 6-10 million applicants per year vying for just 50,000 slots. Even family reunification applicants face processing backlogs of five to ten years. In a world of aging population and falling births, the United States is remarkably advantaged among developed OECD countries, still with no lack of willing settlers ready to move to the United States from all over the world.

Canada enjoys a similar situation, but with some important differences. Like the United States, its immigration policy objectives are to reunite families, to attract skilled workers, and to protect refugees. However, the priority of the first two is reversed. The first and foremost goal of Canada’s immigration policy is to admit people with economically valuable work skills.

Out of the quarter-million legal immigrants admitted to Canada in 2008, skilled workers outnumbered family members by nearly three to one.440 Since 1967 an intricate point system has been used to score an applicant’s value for the workforce, e.g., up to twenty-five points for education level, up to twenty-four points for language skill, up to ten points for suitable working age, and so on. Put simply, Canada has sharpened its immigration policy to attract educated, multilingual, skilled workers above all else.441 While less emotive than U.S. policy of prioritizing family reunification first, it clearly makes Canada’s workforce globally competitive despite its much smaller population.

Canadian policies have also suffered from ugliness, such as exclusion of non-Europeans until 1976. Since then, however, the country’s culture has become unusually welcoming of immigrants from all over the world. Nearly one in five Canadians today is foreign-born. Not long ago I watched thousands of Tamil protestors flood the streets of downtown Ottawa, badly snarling traffic on Parliament Hill. Entrapped drivers just calmly waited it out, some politely tooting their horns in support. A popular television show in Canada is Little Mosque on the Prairie, a situation comedy about Muslim immigrants trying to adjust to small-town life in Saskatchewan. My favorite example comes from the CBC television network, which recently introduced sports commentators Parminder Singh and Harnarayan Singh to broadcast Hockey Night in Canada (equivalent to Monday Night Football in the United States) in Punjabi, now poised to become the country’s fourth most-spoken language. A photograph of these two gentlemen preparing to call out a game of the Toronto Maple Leafs appears in the pictorial section of this book.

In the Nordic countries, public sentiment and national immigration policies tend to fall somewhere between the dysfunctional xenophobia of Russia and the fast-growing ethnic cauldrons of Canada and the United States. Viewed collectively they are morally