A Vast Empty Space

Marjorie Taylor Greene claims that Canada is helping Mexicans invade the United States. Alex Panetta reports:

Here's an attention-grabbing charge: the idea that Canada might be assisting an invasion of the United States by the other country on the continent.

Even more surprising? The comment came from a member of the United States Congress during a congressional hearing in Washington.

That member was Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversy-courting Republican best known as a gleeful flinger of partisan bombs.

It came during a hearing organized by Republicans titled: "Biden's Growing Border Crisis: Death, Drugs, and Disorder on the Northern Border."

Ms. Greene pointed to the number of apprehensions at the Canada-U.S. border:

She alluded to an increase in Mexicans being stopped trying to enter the U.S. between ports of entry, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials reporting 1,604 such incidents at the northern border in the first four months of this fiscal year compared with 882 for all of last year.

"It's extremely concerning, and dangerous to the United States of America's national security, that Canada's immigration policy allows Mexicans to travel, to Canada, without a visa," Taylor Greene said. 

"It seems that Canada wants to participate in Mexico's invasion of the United States.... They end up coming into the United States."

Those numbers should be placed in context:

The number of apprehensions is indeed up significantly from the last few years. But even at the current pace, Border Patrol Agents would stop fewer than 9,000 people coming from Canada this year; that's less than in the early 2000s, and a rounding error compared to the more than two million on the Mexican border. 

Several Republicans, other than Taylor Greene, went out of their way to point out that their issue wasn't with Canada. The chair of the hearing, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, said: "They're friends — not anything other than that." 

The problem, several Republicans said, was that the northern border is severely understaffed. Barely 10 per cent of U.S. Border Patrol Agents are stationed along the vast Canadian frontier, and even among that limited pool many are seconded for stints at the busier Mexican border.

The head of the U.S. Border Patrol Agents' union, Brandon Judd, said: "It's impossible to patrol the [northern] border." He said there's only one agent every 30 miles (48 kilometres).

Those kinds of details escape Ms. Greene. Americans are proud of their vast empty spaces. One of those spaces sits on Ms. Greene's shoulders.

Image: NY1