Crossing Canada: South Park’s Critique of Immigration Ideology

Throughout South Park, the main primary school teacher, and later presidential candidate, Mr. Garrison, has harsh opinions of Canadian immigrants. A montage of Mr. Garrison’s crude and explicit words and behaviors toward Canadian immigrants can be seen here:

Massey, Durand, and Pren argue that politicians, pundits, and bureaucrats have framed Latino immigration “as a crisis and illegal aliens as a threatening out-group” in order to incite a moral panic that increases their respective media ratings, book sales, and job security (1562). Specifically, border enforcement has become a “symbolic line” that keeps these criminalized and stereotyped individuals away from the moral innocence of America (1563).

South Park writers parody this moral panic through Mr. Garrison’s contempt for Canadian immigrants. However, this seems light and ironic because Canadians haven’t been framed as an economic, social, and moral threat to American life by popular media and politicians. This is idea is further parodied when the president of Canada, Donald Trump, builds his own wall to keep Americans out of Canada. The whole situation seems absurd in this context. Nonetheless, Massey, Durand, and Pren find that border enforcement between the US and Mexico is also absurd. The increases in border patrol throughout the last 30 years have actually increased the undocumented population in the US by making it riskier to return to Mexico (1593). Ironically, South Park is highlighting the same heightened concern surrounding immigration that the authors attribute to contemporary increased border control. Conceptualizing Canadians as a drain on resources and undeserving of fundamental rights is entertaining, but it is a common theme in American politics toward undocumented Mexicans despite Mexico’s growing economy, increased levels of education, and sizable middle class which imply an increased propensity for return migration aside from crossing a dangerous border (1595-6).