Editor:
Immigration is a twoway road, to be travelled to the mutual benefit of both the newcomer and the host country. A nation that knows its own worth and preserves its own values makes citizenship mean more than just an easily obtained piece of paper after a residency of a mere three years.
However, little progress will be made to "Canadianize" new immigrants unless we face up to what has always been the elephant in the room: Canada's legislated policy of "We-Are-The-World" multiculturalism, celebrating and perpetuating cultural differences.
Instead of providing for newcomers an incentive for truly and unequivocally accepting Canada and its national customs, its cultural values and its laws, and leaving their own wars, hatreds and divisions behind, Canada's officially imposed multiculturalism has in fact encouraged newcomers to remain outside the country's mainstream, isolating themselves in their own ethnic and lingual cocoons and enclaves, instead of integrating into Canadian society.
Indeed, it has become the aim of politically correct self-proclaimed so-called "progressive" middle class higher purpose white folks who think it is the very essence of enlightened liberalism to diminish their own cultural traditions and values as offensive to others.
So long as, after 150 years as a nation, we view ourselves, bereft of a culture of our own, as just a geopolitical repository for a motley multitude of co-existing cultures and values, our immigration motto and message to the rest of the world might as well be summed up as follows: "Come as you are. Stay as you are. And if you don't like who we are, we will change for you!"
E.W. Bopp
