September,
2005 Another
First
Then, in
1986, I met Charles Campbell. Charlie was not your typical
'nativist.' He had been an immigration bureaucrat (eight years as
vice-chairman of the Immigration Appeal Board) and was a former
president of the federal Liberal Party in In What
we have witnessed in Although
the
Chinese talkshow hosts universally decried the terrorist attack on
But it is a third theme that should unnerve
Canadians -- the collapse of the Londonistan Compact: if London would accommodate jihadis,
surely jihadis would accommodate London an not do anything
nasty like set off bombs? Well, as we see.
What common thread bound eight (or 9) totally disparate characters --
working class husbands and fathers, terminally unemployed layabouts,
British-born second generation Pakistanis, East African career
thugs-dopers-and-dole-collecters, some fully Westernized, some
hopelessly unassimilated -- together in common cause to spill British
blood? At first
glance, that factor is Islam, but, on a second reading
of their mala fides, something
more secular leaps out at you: They were fairly representative of
what's going on in any multicultural city.
If you can overlook the
awkward fact that they wanted to sow shrapnel in their fellow citizens,
their circumstances read like hundreds of other multi-ethnic,
multi-racial narratives. But consider: If
it is at all possible, it is incumbent on every Moslem to perform the hajj
(pilgrimage to Mecca) during his lifetime. However,
with
the rise of mass immigration into the West, and the not incidental rise
of disposable income, a secondary codicil has been added -- the
obligatory extended visit to the homeland for
recalcitrant youth to get back on track, soak up some traditional
values, finalize an arranged marriage, even attend mujahadin
camp or a madrassa. (At independence, in 1947, there were 137 madrassas
in Pakistan; there are 13,000 today, with enrolment approaching
1.7-million). A poll
of UK Moslems conducted after the US
invasion of Afghanistan asked whether respondents considered Islam a
key feature of their identity? Among those over the age of 35, just 30%
agreed; among those under the age of 35, the rate climbed to 41%.
What is it the multiculturalists say? Don't bother yourself about the
recalcitrance of the older generation, their kids will assimilate
seamlessly? In the event, the only appreciable difference between
homegrown and foreign-born bombers was that the home-grown managed to
contrive bombs that detonated. Aatish Taseer conducted
extensive interviews with second-generation Pakistanis in the north of
England for Prospect Magazine, and found a
fallen-through-the-cracks generation making up a radicalized new form
of Islam as they go. The
young, male product of the voluntarily ethnic
ghetto was steadily drawn to "an Islam that could bring order to his
life. Accepting Islam meant the creation of a social equilibrium that
had been absent before. Islam was playing the role it had in
7th-century Arabia of bringing law and structure to decaying
communities. [In Beeston, Taseer found older men wearing shalwar
kurta, the tunic and trouser costume of Pakistan, standing] around
on street corners chatting as if in a bazaar in Lahore. They oppose
Britain's involvement in the Iraq war, they 'hate' America, they might
even think that the west has united in a fight against Muslims, but
these are not the faces of extremism [for that, you want their
children, the] second-generation British Pakistanis. One appears next
to his father on the street corner. Unlike
his father, there is nothing
about his appearance that indicates he is a Punjabi Muslim. He is
wearing long Arab robes and keeps a beard cut to Islamic
specifications. I ask him why he is dressed the way he is. 'It's my
traditional dress,' he says in English. 'Isn't your father in
traditional dress?' I ask. 'Yes, but this is Islamic dress,' he
clarifies. His father looks embarrassed. ... In the 55 years that
Pakistan has been a country, it has been a dangerous, violent place,
defined by hatred of the other — India. For young British Muslims, if
Pakistan was not the place to look for an identity, being
second-generation British was still less inspiring. ... When our tube
bombers were growing up, any notion that an idea of Britishness should
be imposed on minorities was seen as offensive. Britons themselves were
having a hard time believing in Britishness. If you denigrate
your own culture, you face the risk of your newer arrivals looking for
one elsewhere. So far
afield in this case, that for many
second-generation British Pakistanis, the desert culture of the Arabs
held more appeal than either British or subcontinental culture. Three
times removed from a durable sense of identity, the energised
extra-national worldview of radical Islam became one available identity
for second-generation Pakistanis. The few who took it did so with the
convert's zeal: plus Arabe que les Arabes."
(Prospect Magazine, August 2005) Having before him the model of a country
bereft of confidence and too riven with doubt and self-loathing to
"inflict" its fundamental values on newcomers, the apt pupil will seek
an identity further afield -- with the global brotherhood of Moslems,
the Ummah.
Your VCP
corporation develops its NAFTA distribution centre in Canada
and you, or a close relative, qualifies for Canadian citizenship. Of course your distribution centre or acquired
Canadian business must create jobs for at least one
Canadian. That seems to be a small price
to pay for Canadian citizenship. ... For
the first five years of your Canadian residence, you aren't subject
to Canadian income tax. Nor does
Canada tax you on foreign-source income. After
you secure your Canadian passport, if you choose to live outside of
Canada for more than half of each year, you aren't subject to
Canadian income taxes. ... Send a
close relative to manage your Canadian subsidiary.
Expect that relative to apply for Canadian citizenship. After
you complete the Venture Capital
Profits strategy, you can have that Canadian relative sponsor you
and your family into Canada. This entire
Canadian immigration process costs you nothing." (Press
Release Newswire, August 22, 2005) Well,
first of all, it may be stretching the truth to call it an investment. Actually, it's an interest-free loan that
Canada first finances then repays to the so-called investor: "To
facilitate the promotion and recruitment of the Immigrant Investor
Programme, a CDN $28,000 commission is paid to specific
institutions that facilitate the application process.
These institutions ... have entered into agreements with CIC. The commission is paid by CIC
on behalf of the provinces after visa issuance. The
commission payment does not affect the underlying requirement to repay
the full investment amount after five years. (CIC, Immigrant
Investor Financing, March 11, 2005) Clearly,
our esteem problems are so severe that we've been reduced to luring
foreigners by, not just paying top dollar to keep this endlessly
discredited investor scam up and running, but actively conspiring when
newcomers avail themselves of a grab-bag of goodies and dodge taxes in
perpetuity. Let's see how the programme
has served Canada's preferred terminus: "In 1996, about 54 per cent
of all the investor immigrants chose B.C. as their intended
destination, while the province received less than six per cent
of all the funds invested during the same period of time. As a
result, B.C. might have been
disadvantaged, compared to other provinces, by the imbalance between
the costs of settling the investor immigrants and the economic benefits
from their investments. The high costs
associated with settling investor immigrants include provincial medical
services and English language training for the investor immigrants
themselves and their children. As pointed
out in previous issues of Immigration Highlights,
despite the relatively small numbers, immigrants in the Investor Class
have the lowest average English language ability, and at the
same time the average number of accompanying children is the highest
for the Investor Class immigrants. [According
to the Sept. 2002 issue of the publication, over 'the ten year period
of 1992-2001 ... almost three in every four immigrants
to B.C. aged 19 or younger possessed no English language ability. This is higher than the Canadian average of
about one-third of immigrants in the same age group who had no English
Language ability.' The
March 2003 issue
notes: "Among immigrants who landed in 2000-03, 21% of those from China
and 33% of those from India reported English language skills." Believe it or not, English is an official
language in India. As per ordinaire,
Quebec is rather a special case. The Canada-Quebec Accord on
Immigration signed in 1991 has given Quebec unparalleled authority over
the administration of independent immigrant selection and processing. This different treatment for Quebec has made
it more difficult for B.C. and other provinces to compete for
investments due to the flexibility that Quebec enjoys in the
administration of its own immigrant investor program.
During the period 1986 to 1995, Quebec attracted 35.6
per cent of all the subscribed investments in Canada, while it only
absorbed 15.2 per cent of immigrant landings under the Investor
Class. Some of these investor
immigrants who made their investment in Quebec were believed to have
settled in B.C., as B.C. absorbed 53.0 per cent of investor immigrant
landings during the same period of time." (Immigration
Highlights, April 1997 (government of BC publication) On Nov. 10, 1997, the Vancouver Sun
reported that a Vancouver Sun/CBC-TV poll had revealed
that "65 per cent of British Columbians feel that immigrants should be
required to speak English or French before moving to Canada [and] 79
per cent want new immigrants to contribute to ESL programs. ... Only four per cent of British
Columbians believe government should continue to solely fund such
programmes." BC's problem was that
investor immigrants were permitted to invest at bargain basement prices
($250,000) in Canada's so-called tier-1 provinces in order to acquire
citizenship, but preferred to actually live in tier-2 provinces like
B.C., Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, which would have cost another
hundred-thousand had they been compelled to park their money where they
settled. Between
Mulroney's 1986
introduction of the endlessly re-patched immigrant investor plan and
the end of 2003, about 91,000 investors and their dependants cashed in
on the scheme (47% of whom identified BC as their destination). The bigger the family, the better the
citizenship deal. However, a decade ago, ESL
programme costs were $1,100 per student per year in B.C. "The average
number of years a student stayed in the ESL program was 3 years
for Spanish speaking students, 3.4 years for Punjabi speaking students,
3.5 years for Chinese speaking students" [or nearly $4,000 for minimal
ESL instruction alone] (Immigration
Highlights, January 1997). Apart
from cost-free acquisition of Canadian citizenship, cost-free language
training, and, if you're careful, a life-long exemption from ever
contributing to Canadian taxes, our so-called "investor" class enjoys
cost-free access to Canada's faltering health-care system: "Spending on
[prescription] drugs in Canada doubled between 1996 and 2003. ... From 1996 to 2003, per capita expenditure
on prescription drugs in British Columbia more than doubled (from $141
to $316) and per capita days of treatment supplied increased by
just over half (from 194 to 301 days)." (British
Medical Journal, September 2, 2005)
Low
Income Rates in percentages
(StatsCan, 2003) Year:
1980 1985 1990
1995
2000 Total
population 17.1 18.7 15.5
19.1
15.6 Canadian-born
17.2
18.5 15.1
17.6
14.3 ALL
IMMIGRANTS: 17.0
19.3
17.1
24.7
20.2 less
than 6 yrs here 24.6 34.2 31.3
47.0
35.8 6 to
10 years here 18.7 26.0 24.2
35.3
28.3
Assuming
you can bring
yourself to overlook the everlasting cost, what really rankles is that
immigrants -- in the class admitted precisely because they seemed to
have something to offer -- are so curiously reluctant to do anything
for themselves: "Immigrants in the economic class might have been
expected to cite economic factors as their chief reason for settlement
choice, but this was not the case. In all
three [of Canada's largest cities, Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal] 44%
of those newcomers who entered as principal applicants in the economic
class said they chose their destination because family and friends
were already living there. Only 19%
said they were influenced by job prospects [another 7 per cent settled
in one of those three cities because of the 'lifestyle' on offer]" (Statistics Canada, Longitudinal
Survey of Immigrants to Canada, September 4, 2003)
Yeah baby, keep the money rolling.
CRIME
WATCH
It's
A Black Thing! Among
Toronto's English-speaking Whites, the ratio of children with two
parents in the home is 69%; among Caribbean-born Blacks, 38%; among
Canadian-born Blacks, 39%. (Globe
and Mail, November 24, 2004) The
alibis for Black single parenthood are twofold: Slavery destroyed the
family unit 150 years ago and it has since become an unbreakable habit,
or, contemporary racism fosters single-parent families through poverty
and joblessness. In fact, the absentee
parent -- and not just fathers as you'll see -- appears to be the most
enduring of African cultural artefacts (less benignly, the presence of
a child is an obstacle to mother's future romantic ambitions): "In
Barbados, at the time of its 1990 census, only 30 percent of mothers
between the ages of 15 and 49 were married. Of
the unmarried mothers, a few -- roughly 3 percent -- were divorced, but
the vast majority had never been married. Much
the same story exists in every West Indian nation where the
illegitimacy rate ranges from 35 to 72 percent.
... When Judith [Blake, who has studied
Jamaican family life in great detail] interviewed Jamaican women, she
found that they were often deserted by the men who had fathered their
children. And having had a child by
one man, their chances of marrying another were greatly reduced. Some women tried to adjust to this possibility
by giving their children away to relatives so that someone else would
raise them. So extensive was this farming
out of children that, by 1986, fewer than
half of all Jamaican first-born children were being raised by their
mothers. [This "matrifocal" tendency
was evident early among North America's manumitted blacks.] Based on a careful analysis of census data,
historian Steven Ruggles concluded that single parenthood was
two to three times more common among African Americans than among
Whites in 1880. The gap widened after
1960, but it was only a widening, not a new event.
One can argue that this early difference was the result of
greater African-American poverty, and no doubt that may have been part
of the story. But it was far from the
whole story, or even most of it, because in 1880 one measure of social
standing, literacy, had the opposite effect. That
is, literate Black mothers were less likely to live
with a husband than were illiterate ones. Moreover,
single parenthood was more common among Blacks in counties with a high
per capita wealth than it was in those with less wealth.
The relationship was reversed for white families; among
them, illiteracy and poverty increased the rates of single parenthood. [Indeed, the author suggests that Black
illegitimacy would have been far higher than was ever realized, because
social conventions 100 years ago would have induced black single
mothers to opt for "widowed" over "never married" when describing their
circumstances to census takers.] It is not
enough to say that Blacks were the objects of discrimination and so
their families were weakened. In
America,
the Chinese, the Japanese, the Jews, and many others have experienced
racial and ethnic hatred, yet their families stayed together. In India, the Untouchables have suffered
centuries of discrimination, but family life, though impoverished, was
not weakened. [In fact, patterns of Black
family life ascribed to slavery and racism appear to be firmly rooted
in traditional African norms, where] marriages are carried out under
the influence of kinship considerations. ...
Kinship connections in much of the world, and certainly in most of
Africa, are more important than marital ones. ...
Unlike the norm among clan-based marriages in Eastern Europe or the
Near East, no one attaches much value to the bride being a virgin. ... All of these marriage arrangements are
worked out by kin, and each person's identity is largely defined by his
or her position in that larger kinship system. 'The
whole society,' Evans-Pritchard has written, 'is one great
family.' But, of
course, to a European or
an American, 'one great family' is no family at all.
Here we derive our identity from our parents; there they
derive it from their kin. [Note that
gangbangers consistently refer to their criminal associates as 'their
family.' In Gangs: The New Family -
Socio-Economic Factors, HG Lingren estimates: 'From 50
to 85 percent of gang members come either from a single-parent home, or
one in which no parent resides.' Having a
completely deviated perception from the rest of society as to what
constitutes a family is problematic to say the least, but] children in
West Africa [from whence most slaves were drawn] are often raised by
people who are not their parents. In
some communities, more than half of all of the children spend much of
their young lives away from their parents, often living with close
kin but sometimes with adults who are not related to them at all. ... So far as we can tell, fostering in West
Africa is a centuries-old tradition. It
occurs for many reasons, but mostly because one parent is dead or
missing. If the husband is dead, the
mother may find it difficult to remarry, especially if she tries to
bring another man's child into the new household. And
if the mother is gone, the child may not be well received by the other
wives in a polygynous family. ... West
Africans regard fosterage as a perfectly acceptable means of raising
children. Families
there approve of
delegating parental roles to other people, often beginning at a quite
early age, especially if the mother is unmarried or is part of a
polygynous family. But even when they
remain at home, children in much of Africa, especially south of the
Sahara, grow up pretty much on their own. They
learn for themselves the habits of life, taking lessons from the games,
songs, and routines of daily existence. Today,
as in the past, they are overseen by the people who live around them,
and these, especially the women, keep an eye on them.
[Who'd have believed the saccharine refrain of the Clinton
years, 'it takes a village to raise a child,' could take on an even
more sinister aspect?] Sarah Blaffer
Hardy refers to them as 'allomothers,' that is, all of a
child's caretakers other than the mother. But
mothers and allomothers give much less face-to-face instruction
or conversation than American mothers, especially those in the middle
class. American mothers talk to their
children, teach them lessons, and exchange jokes with them. They play not only a protective but a
pedagogical role. But though African
adults certainly protect their children, they are much less active as
teachers. In many African societies, it is
striking how little parents and children interact, especially fathers
and children." (The Marriage Problem,
James Q. Wilson, HarperCollins publishers, Wilson is a
professor of public policy at Pepperdine University and
professor emeritus at UCLA.) One
final point, the tendency of certain young, White males to adopt Black
social mores do so at disastrous personal cost. Again
from The Marriage Problem: "Robert Lerman
discovered that young, unwed African-American fathers are much more
similar to married Black men than unwed White fathers are to married
White ones. For example, the reported use
of hard drugs and alcohol among young unwed Black fathers is roughly
the same as it is among young marriedBblack men, and is much lower
than among young White unwed fathers. White
unwed dads are three times more likely than Black unwed dads to use
hard drugs or to be charged with a crime in an adult court, and half
again as likely to have an alcohol problem." |
