We live in interesting times.  In June of this year, the U.S. national soccer team played an “away” game against Mexico—in Los Angeles.  Many of the 93,000 fans in the Rose Bowl booed the U.S. squad, chanted obscenities directed at the U.S. goalkeeper, and blew air horns during the U.S. national anthem.  After Mexico won the match, these fans had the added pleasure of listening to a postgame ceremony conducted in Spanish.  As related by Pat Buchanan, U.S. coach Bob Bradley said, “Obviously . . . the support that Mexico has on a night like this makes it a home game for them.”  Obviously it does, Coach Bradley.  But how can that be?  And why do we seem to accept it as unremarkable and even inevitable?  U.S. goalie Tim Howard saw things a bit more clearly: “It was a disgrace that the entire post-match ceremony was in Spanish,” said Howard.  “You can bet your [expletive] that if we were in Mexico City it wouldn’t be all in English.”  And, as Mr. Buchanan wrote,

Were US fans in a Mexican town to boo, cheer, and chant obscenities at a Mexican team before, during, and after a match, and blow horns during the Mexican national anthem, they would be lucky to get out of the stadium alive.

One of the Mexican fans told us all we need to know about mass immigration in the 21st century: “I was born in Mexico, and that is where my heart will always be.”

None of the contributors to the Fraser Institute’s two volumes on mass immigration and its impact on our neighbors to the north formulates the problem in such blunt terms, but one can gather from the material (drawn from two conferences sponsored by the Canadian institute) that, if mass immigration is not halted very soon, you can say goodbye to Canada as well, since Canada admits more immigrants—vastly different from the native population, many of them Muslim (a significant number of whom, according to Canadian polls, are sympathetic to terrorists)—proportionally than the United States does.  According to Herbert Grubel, since 1990, Canada has admitted 0.75 percent of her population annually, “the highest [immigration level] in the world.”  Daniel Stoffman notes that if the United States admitted legal immigrants at the same rate per capita as Canada, U.S. immigration levels would stand at about 2.6 million instead of the current 1 million.

There are differences in the problems faced by Canada and those faced by the United States.  Canada is not bordered by a source of mass immigration but has a special problem with her very loose refugee and asylum policies, policies that make it very easy for anyone reaching Canada to claim refugee status and very difficult for the government to deport them.  There is no significant questioning of mass immigration in Canada: The development of the immigration myth and its carrier, liberalism, is even more advanced in Canada than in the United States.  Nevertheless, the problems faced by Canadians who want a rational immigration policy are in significant ways very similar to those encountered by immigration patriots in America.  Politicians in Canada, as in the United States, see immigrants as potential voters and clients for the welfare-state bureaucracy, so talk of immigration restriction is practically a political taboo, around which a vast immigration lobby has been built up.  Canadians are told there are jobs they won’t do, that Canada is a “nation of immigrants,” and that, under official multiculturalism polices, there isn’t anything particular that defines what a “Canadian” might be.  In spite of a clear and present danger to Canadian security (as early as 1998 Canadian intelligence was reporting that as many as 50 terrorist groups—not all of them Islamic—were operating on Canadian soil), contributor James Bissett writes that “it may be argued that Canada is more vulnerable to a terrorist attack today than it was in the months following 9/11.”  Mr. Bissett notes that “We fail to keep criminals and terrorists out of Canada and if they get in, we cannot remove them.”  The blatantly irrational and ideological nature of Canadian immigration policies will be all too familiar to American immigration skeptics.

That said, these volumes can be useful for American immigration patriots.  Some of the contributors explode certain immigration myths in ways that can aid our understanding of the apocalypse that is unfolding before our eyes, elaborating on themes many who favor immigration restriction have developed elsewhere.  And ironically, what fails to get said in this work has much to tell us about the battle to salvage our country.

A number of contributors demonstrate that today’s mass immigration does little, if anything, to improve the economy of Canada.  (It was the government of “Progressive Conservative” Brian Mulroney that detached Canadian immigration policies from economic conditions in the late 1980’s.)  The immigrants are, in fact, poorer, less skilled, and more likely to be a drain on the national budget than “rooted” Canadians.  Mass immigration overwhelms the system, making selectivity (and security) impossible.  And Canadians will do most jobs if they are paid decently and have fair working conditions; while cheap and readily available labor retards technological development and productivity increases.  (Oddly enough, “guest workers” hardly ever leave.)

Several writers advance the economic argument by making a point concerning the allegedly necessary role mass immigration plays in sustaining Canadian retirement and social-security programs, and bolstering the shrinking working-age population.  According to these contributors, even if Canadian immigration levels, already very high, were vastly increased, and even if the selection process favored younger immigrants, the contribution to stabilizing the age structure of the population would be small at best.  Robin Banerjee and William Robson tell us that credible studies demonstrate “the dynamic of aging among the resident population is so strong that immigration’s ability to affect it is remarkably small.”  And the situation appears to be much the same in Europe.  This reviewer suspects that, even allowing for differences between Canada, Europe, and the United States, the situation in America is similar.  Banerjee and Robson propose, as one alternative, gradually raising the retirement age.

Critics of immigration are quite aware that today’s mass immigration is different from that of the past—the immigrants from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are simply incompatible with our society.  The vast number involved in this incursion of alien peoples who are often hostile to our country (or, at best, indifferent to it other than as a means to improve their lot materially) means that it is not they who are becoming “we,” but we who are becoming they.  In addition, the ideological commitment to mass immigration by our elites means that there will no longer be “waves” of immigration, but a constant flow (lasting at least until the receiving country is no longer an attractive place to move to).

Some of the Fraser Institute writers understand that what we are experiencing is the colonization of Canada (and America) by alien nations, a colonization so far advanced in some cases that in Canada’s major cities (where most of the immigrants settle) there is increasingly “no there there”: A visible, defining culture is disappearing into a gamut of enclaves as Canada becomes, as Stephen Gallagher writes, “a global suburb,” a diaspora society for a “range of peoples whose identities are not rooted in Canada but in the countries and regions of origin,” countries that do not have “free markets or liberal governments as we understand them.”  Gallagher argues that not only are the immigrants themselves different, but at some point “Canada will cease to be anything approximating a nation,” a significant difference between past and present immigration being that modern immigrants can and do make use of technological advances in communications and air travel to sustain and reinforce their identities while living abroad.

Several chapters in these books touch on important questions of identity, national interest, and demographics.  More striking, however, are the questions they hardly raise at all.  Can, say, a Somali be a “Canadian” in any real sense?  (Let’s rephrase the question in a form that will be more digestible for postmodern minds: Can a hypothetical Canadian who winds up in Somalia be a “Somali” in any real sense?)  Why does Canada admit Muslim immigrants at all if large numbers of them support terrorism and obviously hate Canadians?  For that matter, why does Canada need immigration?  If immigration does not aid the economy (not the most important issue, but one that usually comes up quickly in immigration debates); if it undermines social solidarity and the cohesion of the country (which has enough trouble as a bilingual society in the first place); and if it is creating security threats, causing overcrowding, pollution, and generally degrading the lives of “rooted” Canadians, then why have it?  What is any public policy for, if it is not primarily to preserve, protect, defend, and improve the well-being of the “rooted” population?  But this is where we get to the basic problem, which is liberalism itself, whose egalitarian, anti-Western, antiwhite, and anti-Christian assumptions have been internalized to such an extent that not many of the contributors to these useful volumes even think to ask such questions.

 

[Immigration Policy and the Terrorist Threat in Canada and the United States, edited by Alexander Moens and Martin Collacott (Calgary, Alberta: The Fraser Institute) 236 pp., free download]

[The Effects of Mass Immigration on Canadian Living Standards and Society, edited by Herbert Grubel (Calgary, Alberta: The Fraser Institute) 236 pp., free download]