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 British Columbia. Charlie explained to me that the transformation of Vancouver (and Toronto and Montreal) was not solely a consequence of numbers, though they were important. More important was ‘family reunification’—’the cornerstone of Canadian immigration policy.’ Charlie asked me (and countless others) this question: Suppose you have a young man from Vancouver and a young woman from St. John’s and they meet at the University of Toronto and decide to get married and settle in Toronto. Would you expect them to bring their mothers and fathers and then their extended families to Toronto to live with them? Of course not, I replied. That would be silly. Well, Charlie said, that’s how family reunification works in Canada. The scales fell from my eyes. … The new model, in Canada and elsewhere, is the gradual uprooting of entire villages to the West. In Canada, these uprooted villages were located previously in Guangzhou (formerly Canton), the Punjab, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere. These villagers, regardless of their origins, do not speak English or French, and their traditions are alien, even hostile, to established Canadian values. Combined with official policies of multiculturalism and positive discrimination (and large numbers, of course) these factors make assimilation (the ‘melting pot’) almost impossible. (Transformation of the host country is not dependent on ‘official’ multiculturalism, however; unofficial multiculturalism will do just fine, as the example of America demonstrates.) What we have witnessed in Canada since the 1970s is not ‘immigration’ as traditionally understood. More accurate terms for the process are ‘settlement’ or ‘colonization.’ Canada is now host to millions of people who, regardless of citizenship, are not particularly loyal to this country or do not even regard themselves as ‘Canadian.’ Two years ago … I spoke with immigration reformer Steve Kaufman, another atypical ‘nativist.’ Kaufman, who has a Chinese wife and is fluent in Chinese, monitored Vancouver Chinese-language radio on September 11, 2001, and was disgusted by what he heard. Although the Chinese talkshow hosts universally decried the terrorist attack on America, about half the callers argued that ‘America had got what it deserved.’ One caller, a former Reform Party candidate, argued that the attack on the World Trade Centre was a suitable punishment for ‘America bombing our embassy in Yugoslavia.’ He meant the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, attacked in 1999 as part of the War on Serbia. One would think that the creation of Fifth Columns in Canada would excite widespread alarm, but this is not the case. If discussed at all, it is normally in whispers.” (The Ambler, May 11, 2004)
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:
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.”
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