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Dear Deborah,

Letters like the ones you sent last week — missives predicting civilizational collapse at the hands of outsiders, filling my inbox for most of the Syrian refugee crisis — tend to illicit either boredom or laughter. They don’t typically inspire a written reply.

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Yours aren’t typical letters, though. True, they cite the existence of Very Bad Muslims as evidence that every Muslim is very bad; they fret about the niqab on women, about ISIS among refugees, about Islamic prayer in schools. But where others in your cohort say, “I’m not racist, but here’s a racist belief I have,” you say that you are indeed racist, that you don’t want Muslims to come to Canada, and that you feel really badly about all that. But that you’re scared, really scared. You say you’d appreciate hearing something to set your mind at rest.

That something depends on what kind of thing you’re comforted by.

Do statistics help you sleep at night? You might like numbers that confirm Canadian culture isn’t under siege: Muslims account for less than 3% of the population, though Canadians estimate that Muslims account for more than 20%; birth rates are only slightly higher among Muslims who have migrated to Canada (2.4 children compared to the national 1.7), and The Myth of The Muslim Tide author Doug Saunders points out that birth rates for third-generation Canadian Muslims fall to approximately the same level; finally, only two Muslim women have tried to wear a niqab at citizenship ceremonies since 2011 and, as far as I’m aware, in neither incident was a Canadian maimed, killed or religiously converted by the garment.