Cultural Arguments For Lower Immigration Are Entirely Legitimate

July’s edition of the Maclean’s is a special issue devoted entirely to immigration, titled “41 Million Canadians – How the rush to grow Canada’s population is testing the country’s limits”.

This is one of the more striking examples of the mainstreaming of immigration in Canada’s national discussion. Last summer, op-eds questioning Trudeau’s out of control immigration policy began to appear in major Canadian newspapers in unprecedented numbers. At that time, I would put out tweets celebrating this as a major shift. Now, op-eds on this topic are so commonplace that I rarely make note of them.

Just a year later, Maclean’s – which boasts 114,000 email subscribers and a monthly print and digital audience of 3,100,000 – has published an entire issue discussing various aspects of immigration. The foremost position of this subject in the Canadian consciousness is becoming undeniable, and the mainstream media is reacting accordingly.

The thesis of the Maclean’s special immigration issue is simple: immigration is good in moderation, but the Trudeau government’s failure to control the numbers of newcomers is overloading Canada’s public services, housing, and infrastructure. This is summed up in the subtitle of Stephen Maher’s piece “How we got to 41 million”, which reads: “For decades, Canada has been a model of inclusive immigration. But over the past few years, the Liberals have admitted too many people, too fast. Why did no one see it coming?”

In a paragraph that could have come straight from a Dominion Review article, Maher describes the influence of Canada’s immigration lobby, particularly the Century Initiative:

“In 2016, the Trudeau government appointed Dominic Barton—then the global managing director of elite consulting firm McKinsey & Co.—to chair the new government’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth. The following year, the blue-ribbon panel came out with a report that called for Canada to gradually increase the number of permanent immigrants every year, peaking at 450,000 after five years. Although the government did not officially adopt the policy, it was quietly acting on it, tabling a plan for 500,000 immigrants a year by 2025. Outside government, Barton had established a business lobby group—the Century Initiative—to push for Canada to reach a population of 100 million by 2100.”

Before Maher makes the case for why immigration under Trudeau is too high, he spends no fewer than eight paragraphs lauding the benefits of diversity and multiculturalism – and rejoices at the overthrow of the “nakedly racist immigration system” which existed for the first 100 years after Confederation in 1867.

Maher laments that, during this time period, both English and French Canada opposed any immigration policy which would “change the ethnic character of the country”. He fails to mention that this same attitude is currently the official or de facto policy everywhere in the world outside of Canada, the U.S., and a small, shrinking number of countries in Europe.

Also absent is any logical argument demonstrating why structuring a country’s immigration system to avoid altering said country’s demographic composition is morally wrong. If it is it wrong for Canadians to oppose a level immigration which would dramatically change Canada’s historic character, is it wrong for the Himalayan mountain kingdom of Bhutan to wish to retain its Bhutanese and Buddhist character? Is it wrong for the United Kingdom to retain its English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh character?

In Maher’s view, criticizing immigration levels is acceptable, provided that it is not done on cultural grounds. We see this same line of thinking – only more pronounced – in Alex Cyr’s piece on Prince Edward Island later in the magazine. Titled “Boom Town”, the article discusses how P.E.I., and Charlottetown in particular, is struggling to accommodate rapid population growth from international migration.

The article explains how, ever since the early 2000s, successive P.E.I. governments have been attempting to attract newcomers to counteract its ageing population. Luring back Islanders who had moved elsewhere in Canada proved more or less unsuccessful. The Island’s population growth strategy turned to promoting immigration instead, including by dramatically loosening permanent residency requirements.

In Cyr’s view, P.E.I. has become a victim of the success of what he describes as a “last-ditch” effort to ramp up immigration to the Island in 2015:

“By 2019, word had gotten around that Canada’s smallest province was also its quickest entry point – and no one was prepared for the rush that followed….Erica Stanley, an immigration consultant from Charlottetown, says the provincial government clearly rushed to invite people into the province without a proper integration plan, nor any idea how to scale up housing, health care, schooling or the job market.”

Cyr provides an astonishing statistic to back this up. He was born in 1995, and for the first 18 years of his life, P.E.I. added 9,000 people. The Island grew by 9,000 people during the 18 months prior to the writing of his Maclean’s article.

As a result, P.E.I.’s healthcare system is buckling. Emergency room visits have increased by 20% between 2021 and 2023. According to Health Minister Mark McLane, the island needs a new physician every 80 days just to keep up with the current rate of growth.

Runaway population growth has also brought the housing problems experienced in most of the rest of the country to the Island. The average house price on P.E.I. has doubled in just seven years, and median rents for new apartment listings have soared by 10% in just one year. Homelessness nearly doubled between 2018 and 2021.

In Cyr’s view, these are legitimate grounds on which to criticize P.E.I.’s immigration strategy, and he is sympathetic to the Island’s recent move to slash the number of provincial nominees by 25% and redistribute most of the remaining allotments to immigrants with skills in healthcare, childcare, and trades.

The author firmly believes, however, that the increased diversity resulting from P.E.I.’s population growth is an unmixed blessing. His visits back to the island have “lost all of their routine”. The “sound of the city has become more polyglot, with people around me speaking Arabic, Mandarin, Punjabi and Hindi”. Charlottetown’s stage has become “more diverse”, with traditional musicals like Anne of Green Gables being supplemented by “a dance show that combines Island step-dancing with Caribbean and South American dance”.

Cyr ends his piece with a warning to P.E.I. not to close its doors in a bid to retain the predominance and homogeneity of its centuries-old culture:

“But growth still carries more promise than a march toward death, and eschewing youth and immigration would only widen the rift between the Island and Canada’s melting-pot mainland. The new island needs Black barbers for Burundian families, Middle Eastern and Asian chefs for locals, and journalists to document it all. If I had grown up in this new version of P.E.I., perhaps I would have stayed.”

Christopher Lasch describes the rootless attitude held by the cultural elite in Western societies in his prescient Revolt of the Elites, published in 1994:

“Multiculturalism…suits them to perfection, conjuring up the agreeable image of a global bazaar in which exotic cuisines, exotic styles of dress, exotic music, exotic tribal customs can be savored indiscriminately, with no questions asked and no commitments required. The new elites are at home only in transit, en route to a high-level conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international film festival, or to an undiscovered resort. Theirs is essentially a tourist’s view of the world — not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy.”

Skepticism of mass immigration is going mainstream in Canada, and that’s a good thing. It is increasingly normal to come across op-eds (and now entire special editions of magazines!) in the mainstream media criticizing immigration levels. The authors cite the overburdening of healthcare and infrastructure and soaring housing costs – solid and crucial arguments that I constantly write about myself.

These mainstream authors are translating the rising concerns over immigration among the Canadian public, who don’t have syndicated columns and connections with magazines, into polished articles which reach national audiences. In so doing, however, many of them have taken the liberty of cordoning off criticism of immigration on cultural grounds as a forbidden line of argument.

A few years ago, criticizing immigration on the basis of housing costs was considered unforgivably intolerant in polite society. The housing argument is now increasingly accepted, but opposition to drastically altering Canada’s historic character into what Cyr affectionally calls a “melting-pot” (an American, not a Canadian term) of foreign cultures is considered old-fashioned and parochial.

But just as criticism of immigration on the grounds of housing and healthcare went from the fringes to the mainstream, so too will cultural arguments – if they are held by a sufficient number of people.

The polls do not look good for Canada’s cultural elite. According to a Leger-Postmedia poll, a paltry 24% of Canadians see diversity as an unambiguous strength, while a majority view it as a double-edged sword. This view was held by 55% of white Canadians, and 56% of non-white Canadians. The same survey showed that 55% of Canadians believe that our immigration policy should be designed around “encouraging newcomers to embrace broad mainstream values and traditions,” and leaving behind beliefs “that may be incompatible with that.” An Abacus poll conducted late last year showed that 68% of native-born Canadians, and 62% of foreign-born Canadians, think immigration numbers should be cut.

If a majority of Canadians would rather that we remain a country with a distinctive identity rather than a global bazaar or melting pot, what does it matter if our cultural elite considers this desire to be provincial and out of date? Freedom of speech remains the law of the land. As Amor De Cosmos, the second premier of British Columbia, put it in the late 1800s: “It is too late in the day to stop men thinking”.