“It’s true that in Canada, you have all the space you need. Every time a Quebecer in France mentions Canada’s stratospheric objectives in terms of immigration, this is what he risks being told. As if we piled up our immigrants to the confines of the North Pole! This line heard a thousand times is just one example of the irrationality that characterizes the debate on immigration. A subject that stirs up all the myths of our time.
When it comes to immigration, however, one would have to be blind not to recognize that Canada is located at one of the most extreme poles of the developed countries.
Wanting to multiply the country’s population by 2.7 by the end of the century through immigration alone, as the Trudeau government seems to want, would not only propel Canada to the top of the OECD countries, but would make the most immigrationist developed country in the world. As if Canada were to frenzied immigration what Japan is to the closing of borders. Two policies as extreme as each other.
No imagination is needed to predict what would happen to Quebecers, whose demographic decline within Canada seems already programmed. This assimilation, which awaits Quebecers — but also Aboriginals and Acadians — had been desired since 1839 by the proud Lord Durham, but it was dragging on. Spiritual father of United Canada, this good Whig reformer, who wanted to make us disappear for our good, would he not be basically the true inspiration of the “theory” of the “great replacement”? “Demography is destiny”, said the philosopher Auguste Comte in other words.
If we are willing to disregard Canada’s immigrationist jovialism and the sole reasoning of ambient economists, it is clear that immigration is everywhere one of the most glaring political problems of this beginning of the millennium. Regardless of the political color of the countries it strikes, the migration crisis makes few distinctions.
Since the start of 2023, more than 45,000 people have arrived on Italian shores, almost four times more than in the same period last year. And this in a country where the government of Georgia Meloni is perceived by a majority of Italians as the last resort to stop the waves of migration that have been overwhelming the country for years. In Ireland, a country which has hitherto been very liberal in this area, where there is a serious housing crisis, not a day goes by without a demonstration against the reception of immigrants. We would have identified no less than 115 in just two months!
What is happening in Ireland is only a carbon copy of what has been happening for several years in Sweden and Denmark, two social democratic kingdoms renowned for their extreme tolerance. Faced with the rise of insecurity and the appearance of ethnic ghettos, in just a few years opinion has turned around. From the United Kingdom to Hungary, from the shores of the Mediterranean to those of the North Sea, there are hardly any countries in Europe where immigration does not cause what must be described as real identity malaise.
Against all evidence, a certain moral left allied with big capital and blind to the sufferings of these people persists in seeing in it only the evil hand of the extreme right. Far from being primarily an economic issue, immigration is above all a political issue. In all these countries, mass immigration undermines what the economist Pierre Fortin rightly calls “social cohesion”.
Everywhere, mass immigration is a choice of the affluent classes that is hard felt by the working classes, who experience this surge as an authentic downgrading both in terms of work and housing and in terms of security and cultural identity. .
The example of Europe should warn us. Especially since, recently, we have seen the same phenomena of ghettoization and insecurity appear in Montreal. Sooner or later, the same causes will produce the same effects.
With the proliferation of appeals and the supremacy of judges, in many countries mass immigration has escaped the political authorities, however duly elected. In France, a clear majority of citizens have been calling for better control of migratory flows for nearly 40 years. Whether out of powerlessness or a refusal to hear the grievances of the people, the French elites have never ceased to take refuge in denial. With the result that legal immigration alone is now approaching 500,000 entries per year when asylum applications are also taken into account. A summit which is radically transforming all the major cities of France.
No matter how much we lecture the people, if there is one principle that should guide us in matters of immigration, it is respect for the absolute right of the latter to control their borders and to choose who, when and how they wish welcome anyone who knocks at his door. Failing this, the democratic denial that strikes so many countries today will only produce an even more serious crisis with ever more unpredictable consequences. And it’s not the wide open spaces that will change anything.