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Sometimes this is justified by analogy to home ownership. You are not obliged to let anyone into your house just because they knock on your door — why should we be obliged to let outsiders into our “home”? But “we” don’t “own” Canada: property rights to all of Canada’s territory have already been assigned — there isn’t some collective ownership to it that transcends private and public — and in any case immigrants are not proposing to take any of it, but only to buy or rent. Or if what is asserted is a sort of property right to citizenship, it is not a thing one can really own, for the simple reason that it is neither scarce nor, as the economists say, rivalrous: one person’s consumption of it does not diminish another’s. You might as well claim ownership of the air.

To say there seems no basis to our assumption of an unconditional right to exclude others is not to say that we cannot do so under any circumstances. The occupants of a lifeboat are not obliged to take on more survivors, if to do so would sink the boat. But we are surely required to show that, in fact, there is some danger of the lifeboat sinking. One such threat has emerged in the form of modern macro-terrorists, with both the will and the means to kill in vast numbers. The necessity of screening for security risks is now so imperative as to place logistical constraints on the numbers we can admit, depending on the resources we are prepared to allocate to it.

Perhaps there is some limit beyond that on our “absorptive capacity,” but we should not make the mistake of assuming that current numbers are any guide. Certainly there is no “natural” or “right” level of population for a country, but if there were it would be an astonishing coincidence if, wherever we were, we should happen to be precisely at it. And yet that is the very thing our immigration restrictionists assert. Indeed, they always have.