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The lesson from the campaign of Donald Trump, France’s National Front, the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom and Sweden Democrats is that the polite constraints of western liberalism only extend so far. If the flood of newcomers overwhelms a society (or even parts of it), the firebrands inevitably will mobilize. That insensitive heckler who compared Kurdi to a Canadian child drowned in a swimming pool: there are many more potential populists like him out there, ready to form their own party if the circumstances are right.

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Even in the face of tragedy, there is no substitute for a seriously considered immigration policy: in the long term, we owe it to the immigrants themselves. And the creation of such a policy requires that we answer the basic question of what sort of newcomers do well in Canada.

Fortunately, the evidence suggests many of the Syrians now fleeing that country include many well-educated urbanites who would be a good fit in our society. As Doug Saunders argued convincingly in his 2012 book, The Myth of the Muslim Tide, the reason Europe has had trouble integrating so many Muslim immigrants isn’t that they are Muslim, it’s because they were brought in to provide cheap labour from rural regions of South Asia and the Middle East. The Canadian example shows that educated immigrants — East Asian, South Asian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or otherwise — adapt quickly if they come with the right tools.

Moreover, by way of precedent, we should consider the Cubans who arrived in Florida after the 1959 Revolution. Because they had been victimized by a communist dictatorship, they became some of the U.S.’s most consistently vigilant anti-communists. An analogous pattern may well play out among Syrian refugees, who know better than anyone the evil, nihilistic face of the Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant and other terrorist groups that purport to fight in the name of Islam.

The morally complex task of determining how many Syrians should be allowed to come to Canada must not be performed through the Tories’ usual practice of reciting jingoistic talking points and slogans. But it also cannot become a no-limit humanitarian bidding war. If we want to preserve the open and generous quality of Canadian society, we must balance our open hearts with hard heads.