Thanks MaryLou!!!!
>>>Hi All:
Salim was invited to make a presentation in Ottawa to the
Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration which he's given me
permission to post on our website.
Feel free to share with your readers so they can see there
are Muslims out there who agree with them that unchecked immigration from
Muslim countries might be a problem. :)
>>>>>
Salim Mansur: Presentation to the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration
Salim Mansur, author of Delectable Lie: a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism,
was recently invited to Ottawa to make a presentation before the
Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. Below are his remarks
to the politicians who we elect to safeguard our interests, our values,
our country.
Hearing of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, Ottawa, Monday, October 1, 2012.
Witness Statement by Salim Mansur
____________________________________
Honourable Members,
Many thanks for inviting me to share my thoughts with this Standing
Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. I appear before you as a
common citizen deeply apprehensive and concerned about the drift of our
country as it changes due to the rate of immigration that is without
precedent among any of the advanced liberal democracies of the West. My
expertise, or to the extent my expertise is recognized by this Committee
for which I have been invited to appear before you, is that of a
professional academic, a researcher, writer, author and public
intellectual of some recognition in this great country of ours, and I am
both proud and humbled to come before you as an unhyphenated Canadian.
Let me state right at the outset, before I share with you my
perspective on immigration, I support all measures under consideration
that modern technology provides for in securing our borders, monitoring
those who seek to gain entry into Canada, those who arrive here without
proper documentation and claim refugee status, and those in legions
outside of Canada who want to come here as immigrants. I believe it is a
no brainer to work towards a more secure Canada, and to implement smart
cards, biometric systems, and other tools available now or will be in
the future for the purpose of keeping Canada and Canadians secure from
those who would do us harm. I have no doubt on this matter that were we
to have the thoughts of our founding fathers inform us, and those
remarkable leaders who have come after them such as Laurier and King,
Pearson and Trudeau, Knowles and Douglas, they would remind us that a
constitution agreed upon by a free people to provide for, as John A.
Macdonald put it, “peace, order and good government” is not a
suicide-pact.
In the small amount of time I have before you I want to stress upon the
first principle behind the Immigration policy as it has evolved since
the centennial year and presently stand. Needless to remark that Canada
is an immigrant country, and our history tells us as we should know it
has been immigrants from Europe over the past several centuries that
built this country. On the whole they built it well and, indeed, so well
that Canada has come to be an eagerly sought country for people from
around the world as I did. But, and here is the point, at some stage of
Canada’s historical development since at least 1867 those who built
Canada in the early years of its history could have reached an agreement
to close the door to further immigration. They did not. They believed
the strength of their country would be maintained through a judicious
policy of accepting new immigrants from Europe. But the key point here I
want to emphasize, and I have written about this at length in the
public media, is they all believed that immigration judiciously and
carefully managed (I emphasize manage) in terms of numbers and source
origin of immigrants should be such that the nature of Canada as a
liberal democracy is not undermined.
It is numbers and the nature of numbers that matters and, given the
nature of things, determines how existing arrangements are secured or
undermined. Since the open door immigration policy was instituted around
the time of Canada’s centennial year, the nature of immigration into
Canada started to change from what had been the pattern since before
1867 to around 1960. During the past fifty years immigration from
outside of Europe, from what is generally designated the Third World,
has rapidly increased in proportion to those immigrants originating in
Europe. Furthermore, given the revolution in transportation with the
introduction of wide body trans-continental jetliner that has made mass
travel economical and easy the distinction between immigrant and migrant
workers has been eliminated. This means, and it is not simply in
reference to ethnicity, that Canada is rapidly changing culturally in
ways our political elite, media elite and academic elite do not want to
discuss. But the fact that this is not discussed, or driven under the
carpet, does not mean the public is not keenly aware of how much the
country has changed in great measure in a relatively short period, and
if this pattern continues for another few decades there is the
likelihood that Canada will have changed irrevocably, and not
necessarily for the better in terms of its political tradition as a
liberal democracy.
So in terms of first principle, we need our governing institutions and
those individuals we, as Canadians, send to them to represent us, to
boldly re-examine our existing immigration policy and re-think it in
terms of what it represents and how it will affect the well-being of
Canada in the years to come. I do not need to remind you that any set of
policy, however benign or good the intent is behind the making of such
policy, is riddled with unintended consequences. History is a paradox.
What you intend is not how things turn out in the long run, and not even
in the short term. Pick any example you want, and think it through and
see for yourself the paradoxical nature of history and how it surprises
us by confounding our expectations.
I have at hand the recent publication of Statics Canada, Projections of
the Diversity of the Canadian Population: 2006 to 2031. In other words,
this projection affects me now and what remains of my life, but more
importantly affects my children, my students, my friends and neighbours
in their life time. Your views, as our representatives, are critical and
will affect all of us, and you will be responsible in terms of our
history, if you take your place in these hallowed halls with the
seriousness it demands, for the good and the bad that come out of your
decisions.
Let me quickly, time permitting, point out from this Statistics Canada publication the following:
- Given the nature of our immigration policy since the 1960s, the foreign born population is growing about 4 times faster than the rest of the population; consequently, in 2031 there will be between 9.8 million and 12.5 million foreign-born persons compared to 6.5 million in 2006, and the corresponding number in 1981 was 3.8 million.
- According to Statistics Canada projection, the population estimated for 2031 will be around 45 million of which 32 per cent, or around 14.5 million people will be foreign-born.
- One more interesting, and yet critical, figure is the cultural/religious make up of Canada in 2031. The fastest growth, according to the report, is “the Muslim population… with its numbers tripling during this period. This increase is mainly due to two factors: the composition of immigration… and higher fertility than for other groups.” The figures are for Muslims in 2006 at around 900,000 constituting 2.7 per cent of the population, and rising to in 2031 to around 3.3 million constituting 7.3 per cent of the population.
If the levels of immigration in Canada is being maintained, and
defended, on the basis of the needs to deal with the problems of
Canadian society in terms of an aging population, fertility rates among
Canadian women, skilled labour requirement and maintaining a
growth-level for the population consistent with the growth of the
economy, then this policy needs to be seriously re-evaluated.
We cannot fix the social problems of the Canadian society by an open
immigration policy that adds to the numbers at a rate that puts into
question the absorptive capacity of the country not only in economic
terms but also, if not more importantly, in cultural and social terms
and what this does to our political arrangements as a liberal democracy.
The March 2012 Herbert Grubel and Patrick Grady study for the Fraser
Institute on Immigration and Refugee Policy should end once and for all
the naivety that immigrants add in the short and medium term to economic
gains for the country. Indeed, the cost-benefit analysis the
Grubel-Grady study provides, based on government sources and revenue
Canada numbers, indicates immigrants are a net cost to the rest of the
society. “The fiscal burden imposed by the average recent immigrants,”
Grubel and Grady write, “is $6,000, which for all immigrants is a total
between $16 billion and $23 billion per year.” This is unfair,
unsustainable, and disruptive to the Canadian society when set against
the demands of Canadians for their needs, especially in distressing
economic times as we have been witnessing since 2008.
The flow of immigration into Canada from around the world, and in
particular the flow from Muslim countries, means a pouring in of numbers
into a liberal society of people from cultures at best non-liberal. But
we know through our studies and observations that the illiberal mix of
cultures poses one of the greatest dilemmas and an unprecedented
challenge to liberal societies, such as ours, when there is no demand
placed on immigrants any longer to assimilate into the founding liberal
values of the country to which they have immigrated to and, instead, by a
misguided and thoroughly wrong-headed policy of multiculturalism
encourage the opposite. It is no wonder that recently the German
Chancellor Angela Merkel and the British Prime Minister David Cameron,
among other European leaders and a growing body of intellectuals, have
spoken out in public against multiculturalism and the need to push it
back, even repeal it.
I have written a book on the wrong headed policy of multiculturalism published recently under the title Delectable Lie: a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism.
Time forbids me to discuss this matter at any length, but I would
surely hope members of this Committee might take the time and read my
book even if they disagree with me. Here I want to leave you in your
deliberations to reflect upon the following situation of a paradoxical
nature:
We may want to continue with a level of immigration into Canada
annually that is about the same as it is at present; i.e. somewhere in
the vicinity of 300,000 immigrants, refugee claimants, and students and
workers under visa provision entering Canada.
We cannot, however, continue with such an in-flow of immigrants under
the present arrangement of the official policy of multiculturalism based
on the premise all cultures are equal when this is untrue, and that
this policy is a severe, perhaps even a lethal, test for a liberal
democracy such as ours.
This means we cannot simultaneously continue with both, the existing
level of immigration and official multiculturalism, as they together
endanger greatly our liberal democratic traditions.
If we persist we will severely undermine our liberal democracy or what
remains of it, compromise the foundation of individual freedom by
accommodating group rights, and bequeath to our children and unborn
generations a political situation fraught with explosive potential for
ethnic violence the sort of which we have seen in Europe as in the riots
in the ban lieu or suburbs of Paris and other metropolitan centres.
In conclusion, I want to emphasize we need to consider lowering the
number of immigrants entering into Canada until we have had a serious
debate among Canadians on this matter. We should not allow bureaucratic
inertia determining not only the policy, but the existing level of
immigrant numbers and source origin that Canada brings in annually. We
have the precedent of how we selectively closed immigration from the
Soviet bloc countries during the Cold War years, and we need to consider
doing the same in terms of immigration from Muslim countries for a
period of time given how disruptive the cultural baggage of illiberal
values is brought in as a result. We are, in other words, stoking the
fuel of much unrest in our country as we have witnessed of late in
Europe. And lest any member wants to instruct me that my views are in
any way politically incorrect or worse, I would like members to note I
come before you as a practicing Muslim who know out of experience from
the inside how volatile, how disruptive, how violent, how misogynistic
is the culture of Islam today and has been during my lifetime, and how
greatly it threatens our liberal democracy that I cherish since I know
what is its opposite.
Thank you.
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