What makes our ideas acceptable? It is always easier to adhere to what is familiar to us. So our ideas are often rooted in the poverty of simple reflexes. We reproduce, in the present, conventional ideas inherited from the past, without dreaming of updating them. We wear, in doing so, the blinders of our fathers and our mothers.
No wonder conventional ideas are popular. In the mainstream media, you can see it, you can hear it. On television in particular, in front of hosts who pose, for the form, as arbiter of speaking time, speakers all repeat essentially the same thing. Immersed in these places formatted and oiled to be slipped between two advertisements, can the listener draw something new from it?
There are many reasons to explain this uniformity among those who make a business of their image by showing us above all their beautiful clothes and their habits. Starting with the fact that it is always easier to convey an idea that has been repeated a thousand times than to start discussing new ones in a small space. When it is repeated over and over, even in a tone of indignation, the banal hardly needs explaining. The predigested—prejudice, if you will—is thus more easily assimilated than any other televised intellectual food.
When it comes to ideas, that is why conservatism is always, at least in appearance, one step ahead. Yet posterity is cruel to such ideas, as the present irresistibly undermines their foundations. Until the day when everyone admits that such judgments are outdated.
It is still difficult to talk about immigration today without the discussion being influenced by old ideas.
In the past, in the era of protectionism and cautious nationalism, the refusal of immigration could be partly understood. But in the day when almost all our consumer goods are manufactured abroad, in the name of the free market, by virtue of what should we delay the entry into our country of this part of humanity towards which we have relocated our industries as much what our troubles?
The northern hemisphere is monopolizing more and more of the planet’s wealth, at an unprecedented speed. But we don’t want to see the consequences of problems that we have helped to create elsewhere appear at home. Can we sincerely blame a part of humanity for wanting to take to its heels in an attempt to enjoy a plate of butter that we have taken to our side?
It is repeated that refugees must be profitable to be accepted. What’s more, they should speak French. On the day my ancestor Nadeau arrived in New France, he only spoke, like many other immigrants, an Occitan patois. Of the world, he knew only an old Roman road capable of leading him to a tub sailing on the ocean. In Quebec, less than 3% of the population — Aboriginals divided into eleven nations — are not the result of immigration.
French is important. But a language is learned. It would still be necessary to start by giving ourselves the means to transmit it with the culture it carries. Our school system appears to be as sick as our hospital system. François Legault has come to endorse the idea that barely trained teachers can still teach. The consequences of a lack of planning and vision, we pay a heavy price in front of the future.
Roxham Road, is this where our ideas now take flight when it comes to rethinking our society? For months now, all the ills of Quebecers—education, health, the environment, poverty, inflation—seem to be exorcised when Roxham Road is invoked, as if, moreover, it was the only one of its kind. Attention is constantly diverted to this side. So much so that Minister Jean Boulet, a collector of profanity, said last year that closing this path would avoid the overflow of a health system that had already been overloaded for years! The same had hinted that there was a link between the Roxham Road and the spread of the Omicron variant… Better to rely on robots, he also said, than on immigrants to make up for the labor shortage!
Many commentators obsessed with immigration look like agitators because they seek at all costs to create favorable conditions for the growth of their number of listeners and voters rather than to enlighten public debate. According to old clichés, the immigrant is a threat and a danger, when he is not reduced to a mere commodity. In the name of a narrow vision of national identity, should we hunt down and hunt down these people like cows, to lock them up, terrorize them, mistreat them and milk them, on the sole pretext that they come from elsewhere?
The number of people who now migrate to the country on a temporary basis, whether to plow our land, ensure the crops or care for our elders, has tripled. Such revolving doors, through which people are exploited and then expelled, is that a better pledge of humanity?
An immigration planned at high cost by the firm McKinsey, in the name of the powers of finance, then endorsed by a yes-yes-yes of a spiritless morality à la Justin Trudeau, this obviously does not reassure anyone that it would be. But that doesn’t mean you can throw people away like kleenex, knowing what hunger, cold, misery, insecurity, fear are. The major problems that weigh on our world are not due to immigration, but to its causes. They are the ones to attack.
There is no brave new world. But a better world is possible. It would still be necessary, to begin to consider the terms, to agree to remove our blinkers from times past.