It’s about time we hammered the stake through the heart of the bogeyman on economic refugees. Of all the freedoms we insist on – freedom of speech, freedom to worship as we please, why don’t we insist on the freedom of movement? Living and working where we want? For the entire world.

It’s time for a campaign of Global Free Trade in People.

I plan to investigate this further and do more research, but no one has yet made a compelling case to me for why corporations are allowed to go where they please on any continent but genuine human beings can’t.

Two recent events in my own home of Canada bring the hypocrisy into sharp focus. Sergio Marchionne, CEO of Fiat-Chrysler, had the Neptune-sized brass balls to demand that the Harper government pony up at least $700 million in investment or he’ll yank the company’s two assembly plants out of the country. Canada, he says, is “a guppy in shark infested waters.”

Right wing logic dictates that corporations are supposedly people. A person comes to you with his hand out, not asking but demanding cash for the privilege of staying in your house – not only that, but he insults you and claims that others are falling all over themselves for the privilege of putting him up. Faced with this jerk, wouldn’t you kick him to the curb?

This is not even the “free market” – not when taxpayers are paying the subsidies. So why is the math suddenly against ordinary people if they come from say Ethiopia or Senegal or Cambodia, looking for a better, prosperous life in North America or Europe? The reactionary venom insists these refugees live off the welfare rolls, sucking an economy dry. Oh, really? Who is the bigger parasite? The individual woman from Paraguay, one person, who struggles and tries and may be a bad investment for a few thousand dollars, or the goliath automaker who gets a bailout worth millions and then demonstrates absolutely no loyalty to the nation that invested in it?

For the argument that a corporation brings jobs, this rings hollow if the corporation can extort funds a government might spend on infrastructure programs (which yes, also create jobs) and pull up stakes whenever it pleases. Then there’s the argument that an illegal alien dodges taxes. Compare that to corporations who dodge taxes with breaks handed out by welcoming governments – the only difference is they have the stamp of legality. A refugee still creates national wealth – albeit at a micro level – by spending on food, transport, etc.

Which brings us to the second recent event, the clear evidence that crackdowns and visa restrictions actually hurt a country economically.

In 2009, the same year that Chrysler was sucking on the bailout teat after the economic meltdown, there was a tide of phony refugee claims in Canada from Mexico, ones that were admittedly infuriating in their breathtaking chutzpah, as if we were the easiest marks in the world to buy lies about human rights abuses. But these were a handful in the greater picture, and the Harper government chose to fire a cannon at a fly. The result was a strategy that was designed to punish all Mexican visitors with expensive visa requirements and blinding paperwork. As the Globe and Mail succinctly put it a few days ago: “A recent report released by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives found that Mexican tourists spent $365-million in Canada in 2008, and less than $200-million in 2012, three years after the visa requirement was imposed.” Take cannon, tilt down, aim at foot.

The United States and Canada do billions of dollars worth of trade together, cross-border shopping and on it goes, but even with these two developed countries, you can invest everything but rarely yourself. Goods still seem to be wanted more than people. There are scores of Americans who would love to be up here; scores of Canadians – skilled professionals – who wouldn’t mind working in the States, and they wouldn’t necessarily all flood New York or Los Angeles. So why don’t we make the process easier?

The EU has been getting by just fine for decades by allowing its member citizens to work where they please, and while I want to study the issue more, several years of living and working in the UK has left me with the impression that the sky has not fallen and the world has not come to an end by allowing a French accountant to go work in Spain if she likes or an Italian orthopedist to move to Germany. There are even mechanisms for handling your unemployment benefits. Yes, the Brits and others squawk over the newer Eastern countries joining the union, but frankly, too many Brits squawk over anyone daring to land at Heathrow who is not white and even if they are white, who doesn’t have full fluency in English.

The argument goes that by allowing in immigrants from say Africa or South America, you would depress the job market and lower wages. To which I say: Bullshit. When you apply for a job, any job but especially a professional position, you almost never meet your competition for an interview and you have no idea what wage they are willing to take, which might easily undercut you. But the villain is the company, not the applicant, and if we have all the administrative machinery to track people, why can’t we simply shift the burden to better monitoring of fair wages and in fact, raise the minimum wage?

Someone else put it to me that people would go where the companies offer the most jobs, but this is another fallacy. In point of fact, when you lift the restrictions on people, skilled professionals go where they can both work and want to live. If we had free trade for people, they would call the shots and companies would be chasing skilled professionals, not the other way around. Sensible minimum wages and safer work conditions would be instituted around the globe because no one would be stuck, no one could be held for ransom, save the holdout nations like Iran or North Korea.

And as I’ll point out in a follow-up column, we might actually rescue ourselves from the worst excesses of human rights abuses and even of climate change if we allow this…