By Alan Broadbent

Excerpts from a speech to the Metropolis Conference, Toronto, October 18, 2005

There are several elements of a good immigration policy:

It should serve the economy. Both immigrants and our countries are served when immigrants can quickly fit in our economic life, creating wealth for themselves and those around them. That works best when they can do the kinds of things for which they have been educated and trained, and in which they have experience. I do not need to talk about doctors driving taxis, or technicians sweeping floors, because we know these sad examples of our failure to connect immigrants to the economy in all our countries. We need more effective strategies to link immigrants to the economy quickly, appropriately, and enduringly.

It should build international relationships that serve multiple national objectives. Obviously immigration can make vital connections between our economy and that of other countries. Several months ago I was at a dinner of the Indo-Canadian Chamber of Commerce where my colleague Ratna Omidvar was being honoured. Several thousand people were in attendance, including any politician of ambition, and there were a plethora of stories about enormous business successes, both immigrants who had succeeded in Canada, but even more commercially impressively about Canadian-based businesses doing massive business in India. But there are other important relationships that can resound to the benefit of our international goals in peace-making, peace-keeping, the provision of humanitarian aid, research and education, and arts and culture. It is important to understand that, in Canada, the value of remittances from immigrants to their families in their countries of origin is worth more than five times our international aid budget. These relationships are always at work informally, and a smart country will illuminate and celebrate them.

It should alleviate suffering. The humanitarian component is perhaps the most glorious expression of our immigration policy, and our soul as a people, although this is often the area most fraught with controversy. Canada, like many countries, is a signatory of important international covenants, and we have important domestic precedents that commit us to a code of respect for the individual like our Charter of Rights and Freedom, and judicial precedents that define the nature of our internal relationships. We also have historical practice, such as our support for international development assistance and international diplomacy in pursuit of peace and security that bind us to the creation of better conditions around the world to make people more secure in their home countries. All of our countries have these bundles of policy, program and practice which seek humanitarian goals, and we can all enhance them. And a good immigration policy can promote diversity. This is a controversial goal, but one that we at The Maytree Foundation have come to embrace. Diversity is a worthy goal in itself, and we believe it promotes vigour in societies. I was listening to the Toronto poet Andrea Thompson at a recent Diaspora Dialogues reading in Kensington Market, and in her poem One, she said,

“as a woman of colour
I know – in the future
everyone will look like me”

And I thought, “that is a good thing”. We are all familiar with botanical diversity, where smart farmers and gardeners plant a mix of crops for a variety of benefits. They avoid the risks of monoculture, where one germ or insect can wipe out the entire crop. They get the benefit of the natural repellent nature of one crop keeping the area clear for others. My mother taught me to plant nasturtium flowers around my garden to keep the aphids away from others flowers and plants. It has worked for almost half a century in my garden. That kind of diversity works well in societies, where different ideas, beliefs, and practices can each strengthen the other.

This runs very counter to the protectionism prevalent in all our societies, where we are seeking to maintain the supposed integrity, if not purity, of our national beliefs and values; as if those beliefs and values themselves were not an amalgam of a multitude of fragments that have arrived from different places at different times in our past. The reality of any society is that it is constantly being made and remade by those seeking to make their lives within it. Clearly we have base-line values which are expressed in our laws. In societies like Canada, they protect people from violence and harm, but also from discrimination based on race, gender, religion, and other important matters.

But we should be clear on one very important thing: how we treat immigrants is absolutely a reflection of how we treat our own citizens. That is, if we are a society with deep class or race divides, we will not settle immigrants well. If we cannot provide the basic services of a modern society to all our own citizens – good education, good health care, quality affordable housing, ease of movement, and appropriate access to jobs – then we will struggle providing them to immigrants. We will, at best, add to an underclass which we already find we aren’t prepared to support.