Be that as it may, Kenney has certainly been busy recasting the country’s immigration system. He’s revoked the citizenship of hundreds of immigration fraudsters and restricted the ability of refugee claimants to obtain health benefits from a system to which they haven’t contributed. He’s scaled back family-class immigration. He wants to tighten up spousal sponsorship rules to curb marriage fraud. His Bill C-43 would allow immigration ministers wider powers to deport refugees, permanent residents and visitors for “serious criminality.” He supports legislation to strip dual citizens of their Canadian citizenship if they engage in terrorist acts abroad.
Most Canadians, I imagine, endorse these measures regardless of the bleatings of the immigration industry — all those lawyers, consultants, welfare agents, academics, politicians, self-described rights activists, etc. whose careers depend on a steady supply of newcomers. However, there’s one area of immigration policy that Kenney has, as it seems, proscribed for public debate — the number of newcomers.
Last year, 257,515 permanent residents arrived in Canada, slightly more than in 2011. (The Tories’ current annual target is between 240,000 and 265,000 each year.) Add to these numbers a quarter-of-a-million temporary workers, 100,000 foreign students and some 20,000 refugee claimants. Close to three-quarters-of-a-million “newcomers” arrive in Canada each year — that’s the equivalent of a city with nearly Ottawa’s population. Such numbers mean Canada opens it doors proportionately to twice as many immigrants as any other western industrialized country.
Does this serve the long-term national interest? Canadians have been instructed to believe so. Since at least the 1980s they’ve been told to think large immigration numbers are necessary to keep the economy humming and provide the tax base to sustain the social benefits system. Is this true? Even if it is — a doubtful proposition — are we getting those we want?
I have no idea whether Kenney asks himself such questions but even if he does it’s unlikely that he or his fellow politicians will raise them for public debate. Votes are at stake.
But then even raising such matters in a country where multiculturalism, diversity and unthinking tolerance — that is, tolerance of those who are intolerant — form the trinity of a secular religion is blasphemy. To suggest too much diversity weakens national unity or that current immigration levels and the resulting demographic shifts will in the long run undermine Canada’s liberal democratic values — you know, notions like freedom of speech, individual rights, equality under the law, etc. — is to be tagged as a bigot and a racist, the ad hominem insults deployed to silence those who dare question the prevailing orthodoxy. (David Lam, the former lieutenant-governor of B.C., had a ready response to this labelling: “When a Canadian is concerned about his own way of living, this concern is not racism.”)
Happily, some Canadians still think for themselves regardless of the opprobrium they bring down on their heads. Gilles Paquet, an economist and one-time president of the Royal Society of Canada, and currently professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, has published a book, Moderato Cantabile: Toward Principled Governance for Canada’s Immigration Regime, that challenges the ideas that prop up our immigration practices. It is a short book — 115 pages, so even a busy minister could absorb it — but it is packed with cogent observations about the inadequacies and incoherence of the immigration system.
Paquet tells me on the phone the book has generated “hate mail.” But that, he says, reinforces his sense that “the intellectual health of this country is jeopardized (because) people are afraid to speak out. I’ve been involved in a lot of controversies in my academic life, but I’ve never seen such narrow-mindedness and fear of uncomfortable ideas as I’ve seen on immigration.” It’s not hard to see why. The book attempts to expand the public mind by offering a different way of thinking about immigration. “If the integrity of the immigration system is to be rescued, the process of decontamination of the public mind needs to work in such a way that those initiatives are seen by the public as reasonable and necessary,” he writes.
Paquet doesn’t pronounce on what he thinks would be an intelligible immigration level — that can be determined after the system is reformed — but he does challenge the ideological assumptions that sustain the current system. In particular, he argues the trinitarian formula that structures Canada’s immigration policies — multiculturalism, diversity and tolerance — ill-serves the maintenance of a sense of solidarity among Canadians. “Being solicitous of diversity risks generating silo-societies, tolerance emphasizes the negative leave-them-alone kind of virtue, and multiculturalism further works at maintaining and enhancing cultural differences.”
Indeed, ideologically committed politicians and public officials have fostered a system of entitlements that leads to abuses of Canada’s social services system. “Public officials boast of having no concern about defining any ... set of expectations in terms of integration for newcomers on the grounds that one does not require explicitly from the native born. Making any additional demands from newcomers is automatically branded as intolerance, chauvinism or racism.”
He has a point. I’m not aware of any “scientific” study of the issue, but there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that some immigrants (please note, I’m not saying “all” immigrants) regard Canada as a motel where they can check in and enjoy the services without having to abide by the rules, much less respect other guests. For instance, in 2008, Madeleine Meilleur, Ontario’s minister of community and social services, admitted she was “perturbed” by reports that several hundred Muslim immigrants in the Toronto area were in polygamous marriages and receiving social welfare benefits for their multiple wives, after having assured officials the women are aunts or cousins of nieces. Recent years have also seen pregnant Chinese women arriving in Vancouver as visitors, but then hiding with friends or relatives until they go into labour, thus ensuring their children — anchor babies, as they’re called — receive Canadian citizenship, which can then be used to bring other relatives to Canada.
Paquet, a trained economist, also questions the claim that mass immigration is an economic necessity. The current regime has produced an “excess supply of unskilled labour.” Contrary to the Potemkin-style propaganda of successive Liberal and Conservative governments, recent cohorts of immigrants are having increasing difficulty integrating into the country, both economically and culturally. Citing a 2007 Statistics Canada report, Chronic Low-Income and Low-Income Dynamics among Recent Immigrants, Paquet says recent newcomers “have found their integration more painful, and their earnings in relation to native Canadians significantly lower and continuing to deteriorate even further.” Even well-educated immigrants are having a hard time, he says, quoting a 2004 study that shows immigrants “struggling — with declining success — to find jobs commensurate with their knowledge and experience.”
Paquet doesn’t spare the intellectual elites whose theories have promoted this regime. Prominent thinkers such as Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka, among others, have been instrumental in generating the “manufactured consensus” that sustains unwarranted immigration levels. “The intelligentsia may be considered as complicit in this hoodwinking exercise; it has supplied the rationale for what can only be regarded as an irresponsible immigration regime.” Canadians genuflect before the altar of multiculturalism because of decades of “continuous disinformation about immigration, massive government propaganda in support of the view that diversity is an absolute social good, and that all cultures are equally worthy.”
What is to be done? Paquet’s answer is reflected in his book’s main title, which is borrowed from a Marguerite Duras novel and is translated loosely as “moderately and melodiously.” Canadians, he says, need an immigration regime that is generous but conditional. The host society must be able “to impose conditions that will ensure its common public culture, a way of life developed over time, and protect its security and solidarity from being eroded.”
No reasonable person expects immigrants to abandon the traditions of their native lands, but they should understand that entering Canada is “a matter of privilege.” And with that privilege come obligations. They cannot expect, or claim a right, to replicate the political practices, social attitudes and moral values of their home country if those practices and values are inimical to the norms of a law-based liberal democracy. Canada can absorb diverse cultural conventions, but there are aspects of the established way of life, often latent and unspoken, that are “quintessential and not negotiable.”
Reforming the immigration system requires replacing the mindset of multiculturalism with a new vocabulary, a new paradigm, grounded in “notions of fair play, the obligations of hospitality, and the expectation of reasonable accommodation,” Paquet concludes. Would this new language better serve the nation than the clichés of multiculturalism? Interestingly, a new poll by Forum Research found that 70 per cent of Canadian adults support restricting the number of immigrants allowed into this country. But even more interesting is that even a majority of Canadians born elsewhere — 58 per cent — agree curbs on immigration numbers are needed.
Such findings suggest that many people want a new approach to immigration, something better than the multicultural paradigm. The difficulty is that if Canadians want the immigration system reformed they’ll have to force the issue onto the political agenda because the elites won’t, not when the current arrangement serves their self-interest so well.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Robert Sibley
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