Sixteen Volts

Last night I casually browsed through last Sunday's issue of Toronto Sun, which is probably the most conservative of all the major newspapers available here. (To get an idea, my Finnish readers can imagine Iltalehti so that Aarno Laitinen was working at the helm.) There was an amusing (or not so amusing, depending on your point of view) article that caught my eye so I read it in full. It was about some Canadian woman who had married a Cuban man and then sponsored him to permanent residency in Canada, diligently going through the same bureaucratic hoops that I am familiar with from our experience. After we had got married, my wife could move to Finland just like that by pretty much filling in a few forms, but being married to a Canadian even for six years does not similarly give you an automatic entrance, but only allows you to apply in the family class.

After the permanent residency had been granted to this man so that he could move to Canada to be with his beloved wife, he mysteriously totally changed and then one day dumped her (and her daughter from her previous relationship) and started living on his own, almost as if he had planned this all along. During these events, the woman had also lost her life savings of $60K. The cherry on the top of this cake is the fine print in the Canadian immigration law that says that she is financially in the hock for whatever her ex-husband can successfully get from the Canadian welfare system for the next three years. Once again, incentives matter. Oh, scratch that: the cherry in this cake is actually the fact that this man can now sponsor all his relatives to move in to Canada. Apparently you don't have to be a citizen to sponsor an immigrant, but being a permanent resident of Canada is enough.

As I said, this is an amusing story, and certainly very educational. Certain commonsense suggestions for immigration reform that the article and this woman expressed are pretty easy to second. By the way, do you know who we get to thank for the fact that a new family class immigrant will maintain his or her status even if s/he immediately divorces his or her spouse? (Dammit, the English language sure does need a gender neutral third person singular pronoun, just like Finnish has.)

Of course, before deciding how much sympathy this woman deserves, we should first apply the feminist tool of "regendering" to this story to provide us additional insights. Since I am a stern believer of equality between sexes, I believe that the moral verdict should be exactly the same as it would be had it been a Canadian man who had imported himself a new wife from Thailand or some other Third World country, after which she had immediately left him and taken his money with her. Would the main character in this perfectly equivalent story evoke much sympathy from readers? Probably not.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, June 28, 2006 at 10:21 AM