Siavash Safavi: Canada’s clueless immigration policy will not end well

Not one of the most informed critics, inordinately focussed on value concerns, but legitimate reactions to the prevalent ideologies among academics (York U). But concerns about vetting of Syrian refugees are largely unsubstantiated as experience to data has illustrated (Gazan refugees are being subject to even more stringent vetting) but it is natural for those who have fled the Iranian regime to have such views.

And effective vetting for values as he advocates, absent actions or other evidence, is extremely difficult to implement consistently in practice:

I came to Canada as a political refugee. In my home country of Iran, I was arrested, tortured and later received a prison sentence for my student-organizing activities. I had a month to surrender to prison. Instead, I decided to leave the country with the help of a smuggler. I escaped through the mountains, partly on horseback, to Turkey, where I applied for asylum through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

There, I waited one year for my UNHCR approval, despite all the proof and court documents I had provided. After that, I waited another 18 months for Canadian security agencies to vet me. It was a rough time. At age 28, I found myself in a foreign country with a language I barely understood, no money and no family or friends.

It’s popular nowadays for people to feel sorry for themselves and express feelings of victimhood. But I have no complaints. If someone is kind enough to let me into their home for life, they have a responsibility to their family to at least find out if I am honest or not.

I arrived in Canada after 2½ years of living in Turkey.

In 2013, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada was accepting around 24,000 refugees a year, and the Canadian middle class was surpassing the U.S. to become the richest in the world. Canada was respected worldwide, and I couldn’t wait to become a patriotic Canadian.

In my second year in Canada, I attended York University. As someone who was arrested for their student activism in Iran, I wanted to enjoy the university experience in a free country. And as a classical liberal, I was intent on familiarizing myself with current western thought in the humanities. So I took anthropology and gender studies.

Both courses taught me that almost all the injustice in the world is the fault of white men, that western ethnocentrism is the cause of most conflicts between East and West, and that all cultures are equal, only different. I remember walking out of the class thinking, “I guess the West had a good run. It was bound to end at some point.”

I was pretty shocked at the views promoted through Canadian universities, and quite horrified to find those ideas metastasizing in the cultural fabric. I’m sensitive to this issue because I’ve lived in countries in which a radical ideology has infiltrated the culture, taken over and ultimately undermined the national interest. It happened in Iran following the 1979 revolution, and again in Turkey with the rise of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Two years after I came to this country, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power and declared Canada the first “post-national” state. Soon after, tens of thousands of Syrian refugees were expedited into Canada, and I couldn’t help feeling insulted. It wasn’t just about the 2½ years of my life wasted away in Turkey, it was also because there were serious concerns that the refugees weren’t being properly vetted.

Proper vetting is very necessary when bringing in people from countries whose cultures clash with our own. There are many Iranians who I wouldn’t want in Canada, including the policeman who lashed me in public when I was 19 for allegedly holding hands with a girl in the street, or the judge who ordered the lashing.

This is not about a certain nationality or ethnicity. Cultures are shaped by their geography and their history. Some are more inclusive than others. It doesn’t mean one is necessarily evil. It simply means it holds values that are incompatible with those of some other cultures.

Newcomers are supposed to adopt the fundamental aspects of the culture of their new country, in order to fit in better and help maintain social cohesion. That’s just common sense. In my orientation before arriving in Canada, we were taught not to relieve ourselves in the street. I could have felt offended, but I understood that there might be refugees from countries with different cultures or no indoor plumbing.

For us to live with people from many different places, we need common cultural threads. Even in a multicultural country like Canada, the native cultural threads are the only things that hold society together. Immigrant cultures can add their own pearls and jewels to that thread, but the thread is the base.

When dealing with refugees from countries in which the dominant culture or state ideology differs from our own, we should invest the necessary time and resources to vet each individual properly, to ensure that those who hold extremist views are not admitted. But when the government imports tens of thousands of people from  these countries each year, a few things happen.

The newcomers, many of whom usually do not speak the language well, will feel the need to stick together in close-knit communities, forming a parallel society with a completely different culture to the country they live in. The culture of the old country is promoted and protected in these communities, usually by self-appointed authoritarian leaders through social pressure, or sometimes by force, leaving the people vulnerable to all kinds of corruption.

Their children, who naturally will go through their own identity crisis phase, will go to university and learn that every negative thing their old country’s culture says about their new country is true. So they will grow to resent their new country.

Newcomers in these communities are also easy prey for the criminals and sociopaths in their own communities, because they are not familiar with the law. And since they mostly come from countries with a negative view of authority, they don’t trust the police, so it is much easier to take advantage of them.

Over time, through mass immigration and high birth rates, their numbers grow, and they will be able to impact the political sphere, led by the most radical or corrupt authoritarians who take advantage of them.

Now imagine millions of Canada citizens who believe that all white people are evil and racist, or that Jewish people are a societal virus, or that the LGBTQ+ are demonic and need to be eradicated, or that women should be subservient to men, or, worst of all, that the use of violence is necessary against people who disagree with, or “disrespect,” their culture.

At that point, you risk balkanization. You cannot force people who have nothing in common — or worse, hold animosity toward each other — to share the same country. And owing to the freedoms afforded to people in a country such as this one, it is hard for authorities to combat citizens who despise their adopted country and are looking to undermine it through legal means.

None of us know what the best immigration policy is, but anyone with common sense should be able to see that if you bring in large groups of people in who hate your culture, while at the same time demonize your own country, it is just masochism, not policy, and it will not end well.

Source: Siavash Safavi: Canada’s clueless immigration policy will not end well