One thing to be said of the characterizing of non-white people as “the other,” as disloyal, grasping schemers out to defraud the good and innocent West: it has staying power.

Whether we’re called “you people” or told there are “too many” of us wrong kind of Canadians, the country’s short history is rife with examples of monochromatic determinations of who deserves citizenship here.

A recent CBC Fifth Estate documentary called “Passport Babies” continued to feed these negative immigrant tropes.

The following is a rough storyline of the doc that aired Sunday night: Foreign women, mostly from China, fly in to the country to have babies at our hospitals so the infants can become Canadian citizens and reap the attendant benefits. The mothers are plowing up to $70,000 into the country to give birth. Some don’t pay up. In any case, they are burdening the system. Some 5,000 babies have been born to non-residents.

The show begins by letting U.S. President Donald Trump set the framework: “Birth tourism. Big business.”

What on earth were they thinking? Did anyone on the team have concerns about how this would come across? Catherine Legge, executive producer of The Fifth Estate, told the Star by email: “This story isn’t focused on the mothers” but on the shadow industry that facilitates “birth tourism.”

“Our research shows this has created a strain on the health-care system in these places,” Legge said.

It’s mind-boggling that producers could negatively portray a demographic that is the target of xenophobes in British Columbia and remain oblivious to its implications. Or that they would give the film a loaded title like “Passport Babies” and say it’s about the health-care system.

I’m not here to defend the decisions of somewhat rich people from repressive countries presumably exploring legal ways to keep options open for their children. I am challenging the underlying assumptions that establish “passport babies” as a legitimate and urgent worry for Canada, enough to warrant a national discussion that hits upon white nationalist talking points on public television.

Five-thousand babies. Out of how many annual births in Canada? The film didn’t say, but it’s about 350,000 a year. That’s about 1.4 per cent of all births.

Are all those 5,000 babies being given preferential treatment over deserving Canadian babies? Are they all “passport babies?” How many are being born to international students? How many to tourists? How many are medical emergencies? Undocumented migrants? New immigrants? Does “resident” mean card-carrying permanent residents and citizens? Where do people with work permits fit in?

Alternatively, are fears of “passport babies” simply the irrational ruminations of nativists to the perception of threat?

As Robyn Maynard pointed out in Policing Black Lives, Canada invokes “passport babies” to justify stricter border regulations. Back in 2012, Jason Kenney, then-immigration minister, sought an immigration crackdown on “birth tourism,” and “named women from ‘French-speaking African nations’ as well as Chinese women as the most likely culprits,” she wrote.

In 2014, then-prime minister Stephen Harper considered changing citizenship rules, but ultimately did not because the numbers were too small to justify the change.

By the summer of 2018, this was a different Canada and the Conservatives passed a resolution to end citizenship by birth unless one parent was a citizen or permanent resident if they won the 2019 federal election.

Like the new CBC doc, a Global news explainer at that time said: In addition to receiving benefits like health care and education, when the children become adults, they can also sponsor their parents to immigrate to Canada.

There are logical fallacies to this. To receive health care and education, the children must live here, which as minors they usually don’t because their parents don’t have status. If they study in Canadian universities and live here long enough to sponsor their parents, they become contributors. (Sponsors have to commit to support immigrants financially.)

The benefits at birth then boil down to avoiding the hassles of applying for citizenship later and paying higher international student fees in universities.

This might raise questions around fairness. Those concerns would carry weight if we calculated equally the burdens of, say, Canadian expats who take residency elsewhere to avoid paying Canadian taxes but whose kids are still entitled to domestic university fees. I’m guessing we don’t see that as a statistically significant number to care.

Since the actual number of “passport babies” within the minuscule 5,000 non-resident births remains unknown, and since there’s no data on how many of them come back to study and sponsor their parents, the whole concept appears to be a manufactured issue designed to exploit cheap xenophobic sentiments politically.

Canadians who oppose refugees often paint asylum seekers as liars seeking to jump the longer but legitimate immigration queue.

Those who oppose immigrants often paint them as welfare leeches or as job thieves who don’t quite fit in.

Those who oppose rich non-Canadians, the type who can afford to pay $70,000 just to have kids in another country? Well, it appears they are responding to the root of all those fears — that we will be overrun by them.

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It always boils down to that, though we can’t even consistently define who “we” are.

In this current build-a-wall era, media portrayals are allowing an insignificant unknown number of legal but controversial births to become proof positive of the scamming foreigner stereotype.

Whoever we believe “we” are, I’d like to hope we’re better than to fall for that.