It’s easy to agree with Chris Alexander, Canada’s minister of citizenship and immigration, that citizenship should not be simply a passport of convenience. It’s harder to say what his proposed Bill C-24 does about it, if anything. Four years instead of three before one can apply? Big deal. It used to be five years 50 years ago.
As an immigrant, my natural sympathy is with immigrants; as a Canadian, my natural sympathy is with Canadians. The two aren’t inimical. They complement each other rather nicely, unless we make them collide by policies that are too clever by half, such as multiculturalism.
This isn’t a theory; it’s what happened. Canada, along with some other great immigrant societies, such as America or Australia, evolved into a coherent whole by welcoming new arrivals from the four corners of the Earth, offering them a chance to become a Canadian, American or Australian as they desired or managed to be, and then rewarding them according to how close they’ve come. In the process immigrants suffered casualties, but generally enriched the societies that enriched them, often within a single generation.
The assumption, unspoken but taken for granted until the 1960s, was that immigration was beneficial as long as it was designed to serve the interests of the host society first. The immigrant’s own interests would be served by the opportunity to eventually join the host society. For this to have any meaning, of course, the existence and desirability of a host nationality had to be taken for granted. If there had been no “Americans” or “Canadians,” there would have been nothing to join. Inherent in the American model of a “melting pot” as well as the fussier Canadian model of a “cultural mosaic” was the pre-existence of a nation to which the immigrant was applying to belong.
Until recent times, the West has been spoiled by the loyalty of immigrants, even from hostile regions or cultures. During the Second World War, for every Tokyo Rose (the American GI’s nickname for Ikuko Toguri, a Japanese-American woman, born in Los Angeles, who broadcast Japanese propaganda during the war) there were thousands of Japanese-American soldiers who gave their lives to fight Fascism.
The pattern continued during the Cold War, when former nationals of hostile Communist countries often found refuge in North America. These newcomers of various ethnicity and religion, from Eastern Europe to Vietnam, were as supportive of the values and interests of their adopted countries as native-born citizens of Western descent. Few Americans opposed the anti-American antics of Fidel Castro more resolutely than Florida’s ex-Cuban community.
It was in the past 40 years that the immigrant of dubious loyalty emerged, followed by the disloyal native-born, sometimes of immigrant ancestry, sometimes of Islamic conversion. The new immigrant seemed ready to share the West’s wealth but not its values. In many ways he resembled an invader more than a settler or an asylum-seeker. Instead of making efforts to assimilate, the invader demanded changes in the host country’s culture. He called on society to accommodate his linguistic or religious requirements. In 1985, a Sikh CNR railway worker refused to exchange his turban for a regulation hard hat. This was innocuous enough, but in 1991, less innocuously, a newly appointed Toronto police board commissioner of Asian extraction declined to take the traditional oath to the Queen.
The host societies’ usual response was accommodation. Turbans were substituted for hard hats; the language of the police oath was changed. Even ceremonial daggers were allowed in some schools. But accommodation only escalated demands. Requests for cultural exemption were soon followed by openly voiced sentiments of disloyalty. By the late 1990s a Muslim group in Britain saw fit to express the view that no British Muslim has any obligation to British law when it conflicts with the law of Allah.
Disturbing as such talk was, it wasn’t unlawful. Dissent was within our democratic tradition. Unfortunately, the new dissenters weren’t democrats. Their “dissent” culminated in threats, fatwas, assassinations, and finally massacres in American and European cities.
How did this come about? Three reasons stand out.
One, we retreated from the principle that immigration should serve the interests of the host country first. We embraced the idea of non-traditional immigration. We forgot that when groups of distant cultural and political traditions arrive in significant numbers, they may establish their own communities, not as expressions of ethnic diversity — festivals or restaurants — but as separate cultural-political entities.
Next, we tried to turn this liability into an asset by promoting multiculturalism. We stopped ascribing any value to integration, and began flirting with the notion that host countries aren’t legitimate entities with their own cultures, only political frameworks for various co-existing cultures.
Finally, in fundamentalist Islam, we’ve come up against a culture for which the very concept of rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s is alien. Puritanical Islam considers that everything belongs to God (or rather, some mullah’s idea of God). This concept doesn’t envisage one’s citizenship commanding a higher loyalty than one’s faith.
It’s not a matter of where immigrants come from but where they’re going. Refugees from the East are no threat; colonizers are. That’s where non-traditional immigration and multiculturalism become a volatile mix. Extending our values to others is one thing, but modifying our values to suit the values of others is something else.
By now multiculturalism has made it difficult to safeguard our traditions and ideals against a new type of immigrant whose goal is not to fit in, but to carve out a niche for his own tribe, language, customs, or religion in what we’re no longer supposed to view as a country but something between Grand Central Station and an empty space.
When Canada is no longer regarded as a culture, with its own traditions and narratives, but a clean slate for anyone to write on what he will, immigrants of the new school will be ready with their own texts, including some that aren’t very pleasant. The sound you hear (as I wrote 12 years ago) is the sharpening of their chisels. Increasing fees for citizenship applications from $100 to $300, as Bill C-24 proposes, is so small a step that it’s not worth wondering whether or not it’s in the right direction.
National Post