Keeney:Restoring Canada Special SeriesPart III: National Sovereignty in the Age of Mass Migration

A conservative view of immigration, citizenship and belonging, overly nostalgic and assimilationist rather than the more balanced approach of integration and accommodation into a shared history and evolving identity:

…Scruton, Vance, Williams and Stove offer a much-needed corrective to the moral confusion that pervades Canada’s immigration debate. They remind us that a nation is not a moral abstraction to be administered by technocrats, nor a blank canvas upon which to project fashionable ideals of universal justice. It is, instead, a concrete inheritance – a web of affections, memories and obligations – into which we are born or invited and to which we owe fidelity. A healthy polity depends not on the erasure of boundaries but on their moral intelligibility. Only within the thick texture of family, neighbourhood, language, tradition and the other elements collectively making up community life do our ethical duties take on substance and meaning.

Canada’s immigration crisis is, ultimately, a crisis of meaning. The liberal vision imagines a world of rights-bearing individuals, untethered from history or place, free to roam wherever they will and with as much claim upon their destination as the locals. But real nations are not weightless constructs. They are moral communities.

Prioritizing the needs of distant strangers – recall the “telescopic philanthropy” of Dickens’ Mrs. Jellyby – over those of one’s fellow citizens is not, as our political class would have it, the peak of moral enlightenment; rather, it is the abdication of the responsibilities that make moral life possible. Such a stance reflects not compassion and generosity but forgetfulness: forgetfulness of the fragile bonds that sustain our civic life and the quiet duties we owe one another. In the name of unlimited kindness, we risk dissolving the forms of life that make kindness more than sentiment. At stake is more than simply a policy debate, but a philosophical one: What does it mean to belong? What do we owe, and to whom? If the answer is to be serious, it must begin in the ordered loves that bind us to home, history and each other.

Canada’s immigration crisis is, ultimately, a crisis of meaning. The liberal vision imagines a world of rights-bearing individuals, untethered from history or place, free to roam wherever they will and with as much claim upon their destination as the locals. But real nations are not weightless constructs. They are moral communities. Canada must rediscover the ethical grammar that views obligation not as descending from metaphysical abstraction but beginning with the individual and radiating outward. It must affirm that to love one’s own is not to hate or ignore the other, but to honour the structure of human affection and duty. This is not a call for exclusion, but for rootedness; not for parochialism, but for prudence.

Canada’s globalist supporters have grown frustrated with the increasing discontent of Canadians who perceive that relentless immigration is increasingly unravelling the nation’s cohesion. Although this unrest is real, it should not be read as a rejection of compassion but as a plea to restore a moral order that values the immediate bonds of community and country over the abstract claims of universalism. Canada faces a defining choice: continue eroding its identity for a borderless vision or reaffirm the deep loves that sustain a moral community. Only by grounding itself in these concrete affections can Canada maintain its humanity and act with true justice in a divided world.

Patrick Keeney is a Canadian writer who divides his time between Kelowna, B.C. and Thailand.

Source: Restoring Canada Special Series Part III: National Sovereignty in the Age of Mass Migration