Despite the strong anti-immigrant sentiment of many Americans, the Statue of Liberty still instructs the world to “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Luckily, Canada has no such iconic lines engraved anywhere, so we are free to treat immigrants like lobsters at the grocery store. If a particular one whets our appetite, he gets plucked out of the tank and into a job Canadians couldn’t or didn’t want to fill.

In a bid to turn the immigration system into more of a conveyor belt for industry, people who want to come to Canada will soon even be able to register online profiles with the government listing their skills and abilities in what will amount to a kind of mail-order worker service.

Or if that seems uncharitable, here’s Immigration Minister Jason Kenney explaining it: “It’s like a dating site.”

Minister Kenney has overseen a huge change to Canada’s immigration system since taking the portfolio in 2008. Gone are the days of people coming to Canada for the chance to improve their lives; now it’s strictly our lives that are of concern, and anyone who comes here and doesn’t single-handedly raise the GDP by a couple million dollars should get back on his boat or flying carpet or whatever and go home.

Since it came to power in 2006, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has decreased the number of asylum seekers and family class immigrants admitted to Canada, choosing instead to focus on economy class immigrants. Large backlogs, which plagued the immigration system, were largely reduced by simply throwing out the applications of millions of people and limiting the number of new applicants. Meanwhile, the number of temporary foreign workers has skyrocketed under the Conservatives; these workers are often exploited by employers in a variety of ways (intimidation, unpaid overtime, confiscation of passports, etc.) and thanks to new legislation, they can even be paid 15 per cent less than Canadian workers.

Naturally every pundit in Canada thinks all these changes to the immigration system are brilliant. The National Post editorial board even dubbed Kenney the best immigration minister Canada has ever had. While always noting various “left-wing” complaints, the conclusion is always the same: This is good for the economy so everyone get with the program already.

Canada’s birth rate is low enough that some level of immigration is necessary, and economic concerns are of course a valid part of choosing who gets to live here. But immigrants are more than chunks of coal to shovel into the economic furnace, and there’s something particularly unpleasant about the new dating-site program. Yet, it seems everyone has accepted that this is the way it should work. In a column for iPolitics, Lawrence Martin (obviously in favour of this approach) predicted that “there will be no stopping the new survival-of-the-fittest philosophy.”

That’s just awesome if you’re a fluently bilingual immigrant with a PhD from a wealthy country. Tough luck if you’re not.

Globe and Mail 20th Century Fox