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Photo by Ryan Remiorz/CP

Neither Grubel nor I nor any reasonable Canadian believes immigration is a bad thing in itself. We’re all for it. And reasonable people understand that first-generation immigrants can be a financial drag on the system as the price of investment in the second and third generations who fulfill their promise and become value added to Canada in all ways. That has always been the traditional premise on which immigration policies were based, and on which their public acceptance rested.

But what happens if the number of immigrants should exceed the capacity of the country’s ability to absorb them? It isn’t orderly immigration that sets many Canadians’ teeth on edge; it is mass immigration promoted as a good in and of itself without regard to our actual present and future needs or interests. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants now arrive here each year. In Vancouver alone they require 300 housing units every week. This can only drive up housing costs and add to the crowding in our hospitals. It can also reshape the cultural ecology of old neighbourhoods, which residents seem generally fine with when it happens more naturally over time, but find very jarring when it happens with unsettling rapidity.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants now arrive here each year

I recognize that even raising any “cultural” factor like that is a red flag to those progressives who insist that culture is a construct of privilege and trying to protect the culture we have is an act of bigotry. But discussing it shouldn’t be off-limits. People all over the world desire to live in Canada because of its stability, prosperity, gender equality, excellent quality of life and respect for the law. All of these national qualities are downstream from culture. It is perfectly legitimate to worry that high rates of immigration to Canada could undermine the very tenets of equality, freedom and justice, those products of our own culture, that attract so many in the first place. Of course, even the words “our own culture” are in themselves divisive: to many progressives they are a shibboleth for oppression; to me and my more conservative friends they are, relative to all other cultures, words that evoke pride, yet we feel anxiety saying them.