As Canada becomes more and more the place where immigrants can make their way financially with little interest paid to their backgrounds, a German and an Austrian have hogged the headlines of late, and for diametrically opposed reasons. It used to be that “the American dream” was an understood concept that suggested that anyone entering US society had the chance to reach any goal, even to become president, and the election of Barack Obama suggested that that dream is still alive. However the way he is being treated by what seems to be a significant (majority?) part of the population as he attempts to make his dreams a reality, suggest that this assumption might be seriously misplaced.
Meanwhile, north of the border, where a health care system is in place that is being attacked in the US parliament in extraordinarily ignorant ways, an Austrian immigrant, who arrived in Canada with $200 in his pocket, has just bought a well-known car brand , Opel, the European version of GM cars, as he tries to fulfill his long dream of manufacturing his own cars in Canada. Frank Stronach, who transformed his tiny savings into a multi-billion dollar car-parts business and whose daughter came close to becoming Prime Minister, is given a good chance of actually doing this by economists, thugh he has been hamstrung by having sales to the US and China blocked. By and large, Canadians wish him well.
The deportation two weeks ago of Karl-Heinz Schreiber, on the other hand, an immigrant from Germany, was met with a collective sigh of relief. He managed to lead Canadian legal experts, law enforcement folks and immigration officials on a decade-long merry chase through the sleaze left by carefully-leaked documents that left a former prime minister as well as an apparently grotesquely incompetent legal system flailing in hopeless panic. He apparently was having a good time for a whole decade as the country squirmed uncomfortably and could not figure out how to get rid of him. His absence is as welcome as is the presence of Frank Stronach.