Immigration is one of the major global issues that will mark the 21e century. It is estimated that more than 280 million people are now outside their country of birth, representing approximately 3.6% of the world’s population. If they all lived in the same country, that country would be the fourth largest in terms of population, behind China, India and the United States.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
We recently learned that the federal government wants to increase the number of immigrants it plans to welcome over the next few years, to reach 500,000 newcomers in 2025.1. Obviously, this announcement provoked several reactions, in particular from the economic community and the Quebec government.2. Among the underlying reasons given by those who oppose this increase in the number of new arrivals each year is that of security.
Or rather the insecurity caused by immigration.
It should be remembered that in recent Canadian political history, the tendency to see the issue of migration through the lens of security takes root in the early 1990s – and not after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
To describe this phenomenon, researchers speak of securitization of migrations, that is, the process by which migrations are integrated into a security system that emphasizes defense and control.
While in some countries, such as France, the propensity to link immigration to national or even societal security is very strong in political discourse, it remains much more timid in Canada. Let us remember, for example, that France detains more than 45,000 migrants every year, whereas this figure is around 9,000 migrants in Canada. It should also be remembered that in France, the political discourse on immigration is very often preceded by “the problem of”, whereas immigration is more widely discussed positively in Canada.
Resilience
But one perspective that seems essential to us at this stage of the debate is that of resilience.
Resilience, which has its origins in psychology and ecology, can be defined as the process of adjustments adopted by a society or an individual facing one or more shocks in order to maintain, marginally modify, or transform an object. reference.
Being resilient sometimes means “bouncing back” after a shock; being resilient sometimes means seizing the opportunity of a shock to renew oneself.
It is necessary to overcome the reductionist tendency to associate resilience only with the “personal development” section of a bookstore. The scientific literature on resilience is now ubiquitous in several disciplines, notably in social sciences and international studies. Similarly, resilience has been embraced in the context of counter-terrorism: the UK, US, Canada, Netherlands, France and Australia have all published official reports identifying the resilience as a national defense strategy or mechanism. In 2020, the French military operation deployed to help counter the coronavirus was called Resilience.
Resilience offers useful lines of thought, particularly by distinguishing between three types: resilience as maintaining the status quo, resilience as a marginal adjustment and resilience as a driver of renewal. It is not a question here of establishing a normative evolution between the resilience of maintenance and the resilience of renewal. And one does not necessarily lead to the other.
A society fearing that massive immigration would radically upset the foundations of its collective identity could favor maintaining the status quo and, in so doing, broadly accepting the security reading of immigration proposed by some. The survival of the object of reference (collective identity) would thus be protected by a strategy of resilience (aiming at maintaining the status quo) in the face of an exogenous shock (immigration). To survive, you have to maintain.
Conversely, a society could opt for a strategy of resilience as a driver of renewal in favor of a redefinition of the way of conceiving the issue in question. The survival of the object of reference (the collective identity) would thus be ensured by renewing the way of seeing the issue carrying the potential threat (immigration) – and not by maintaining the status quo or the search for an existing situation in the collective past to which a society would like to “return”. To survive, you have to renew yourself.
In short, the debate to come, for example on the “acceptable” threshold for the number of immigrants, on the federal-provincial balance of power in terms of political power, on demographic decline and on the shortage of labor which will accompany the federal announcement and the various reactions, would benefit from being tackled by a resilience approach.