Pad­dling a kayak across a pris­tine lake pro­vides not only solace for the soul, but often as not, unex­pect­ed lessons. Ear­ly one morn­ing this week, I came upon a clus­ter of male mer­ganser ducks frol­ick­ing, fish­ing and preen­ing. It occurred to me that the lake I love is pop­u­lat­ed with migrants.

The mer­gansers, loons, Cana­da geese, mal­lards and many oth­er species who come here each spring, will soon flee to warmer climes — anoth­er coun­try in human terms. An untold, uncount­ed num­ber won’t sur­vive the jour­ney. But soon they will have no way to sus­tain them­selves,  leav­ing the birds no alter­na­tive oth­er than to accept the risks and take flight.

The human migra­tions that are caus­ing so much anger and indeed fear in the West are dri­ven by cli­mate change in the form of floods and drought, polit­i­cal chaos and eco­nom­ic ruin — vari­a­tions of the unsur­viv­able win­ter that forces the birds to migrate.
The short peri­od of chang­ing colour we find so glo­ri­ous, sends a clear sig­nal to species that nor­mal­ly live in pairs or small fam­i­ly groups to begin what is known as “raft­ing”, gath­er­ing in shel­tered bays to form flocks for the jour­ney south. For them, there is rel­a­tive safe­ty in num­bers.  

That’s the same rea­son migrants from Cen­tral Amer­i­ca form “car­a­vans” for the trek to the U.S. bor­der. It’s why Syr­i­ans, Afghans and oth­ers stum­ble and strug­gle across Europe in long human chains, why migrants from Eritrea, Ethiopia and sub-Saha­ran Africa are will­ing to be jammed into leaky boats to brave the Mediter­ranean crossing.
Unlike humans flee­ing home­lands to escape unten­able con­di­tions, how­ev­er, the birds who leave here will be wel­come wher­ev­er they go.

Although maybe not the Cana­da geese so much, giv­en that they eat near­ly two kilos (4 pounds) of food a day and the end-to-end process of their diges­tive tract takes twelve min­utes. They’ve also been known to run into planes over the Hud­son River.

                                       MIGRANTS ONE AND ALL

What I don’t under­stand is why so many peo­ple in wealthy coun­tries, includ­ing my own, are so anti-immi­grant. Unless you’re First Nations, who have a wealth of his­tor­i­cal rea­sons for being wary of them, every­one in North Amer­i­ca is his­tor­i­cal­ly an immigrant.
I’m the grand­son on one side of my fam­i­ly and great-grand­son on the oth­er of eco­nom­ic migrants who came to Cana­da, steer­age class, seek­ing bet­ter lives. And they built them, for them­selves and for us. Each gen­er­a­tion has done bet­ter than the last, both edu­ca­tion-wise and eco­nom­i­cal­ly. The major­i­ty of today’s migrants leave their homes, and in many cas­es risk their lives, not seek­ing to live for­ev­er on hand­outs, but for the chance to work for the bet­ter­ment of them­selves and their families.
Don’t believe it? Go to the near­est con­ve­nience store after hours for some small item you fan­cy or need. The chances are bet­ter than good that the per­son behind the counter is a mem­ber of a migrant fam­i­ly who own the place and work uncon­scionable hours to make it prof­itable. Data from the U.S. Depart­ment of State’s World­wide Refugee Pro­cess­ing Sys­tem, showed that 9 of the 10 cities in the US that received the most refugees rel­a­tive to their pop­u­la­tion, “actu­al­ly became con­sid­er­ably safer, both in terms of their lev­els of vio­lent and prop­er­ty crime.”
 One of my favourite UN High Com­mis­sion­er for Refugees posters from the 1990s has a pic­ture of Albert Ein­stein, and the text: “A bun­dle of belong­ings isn’t the only thing a refugee brings to his new coun­try. Ein­stein was a refugee”.

                                           GIVE THANKS

Autumn, in all its glo­ry, is when Cana­di­ans and Amer­i­cans cel­e­brate Thanks­giv­ing. There are sev­er­al (unproven) ver­sions of why we do it. Pop­u­lar wis­dom, myth if you will, is that the Amer­i­can Thanks­giv­ing is based on the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, bring­ing “…an assort­ment of reli­gious sep­a­ratists seek­ing a new home where they could freely prac­tice their faith and oth­er indi­vid­u­als lured by the promise of pros­per­i­ty and land own­er­ship in the New World.”
In fact: “Like tens of mil­lions of new­com­ers who would fol­low in their wake to Amer­i­ca, the Pil­grims were eco­nom­ic migrants.”
The trend for which they serve as a kind of “poster child” just keeps grow­ing. Accord­ing to fig­ures com­piled by the Inter­na­tion­al Organ­i­sa­tion for Migra­tion (IOM), in 2020 an esti­mat­ed 272-mil­lion peo­ple, some 3.5 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion, were inter­na­tion­al migrants, sur­pass­ing pro­jec­tions for 2050.
Like the birds they are dri­ven by neces­si­ty, by forces beyond their con­trol. But there the com­par­i­son ends. The flights of the human migrants who sur­vive aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly going to end with ‘safe­ty, sun­shine and food in abun­dance’. Many will be sent back where they came from, no mat­ter what the conditions.

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