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An impressive number of Canadians, it seems, are prepared to exercise great strength by shouting loudly about the threat posed by toddlers and their mothers stumbling across the 49th parallel, even if their shouting does exacerbate any existing threat by alienating the very people they wish to keep out and who will inevitably make it in.

Nearly as many seem prepared to show great generosity by encouraging any and all would-be arrivals, even if they don’t offer to implement whatever measures might allow them to host the very people they’re offering to host.

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Politicians in both groups, however, will find no scarcity of role models for cowardly law enforcement and disingenuous generosity among Western governments.

For those politicians who enjoy a vicious, unhinged rant, might I suggest Hungary?

Hungary is notable not only for declaring “a state of migration emergency,” but for imagining that such a thing exists. To make up this type of emergency, it seems a state must invest sizeably in: The production of openly racist posters, the arming of young thugs with guns and awkward nicknames like “border hunters” and, not least, scores of dogs, water cannons and other tools with which to so violate the rights of asylum seekers that the government makes itself more of a confirmed international outlaw than the migrants it universally subjects to this very charge.