Will we become 'Canarabia?'
George Jonas, National Post
Published: Friday, March 31, 2006
A poet friend in Europe, who prefers to remain anonymous, sends me this postcard from Florence, Italy. (The English translation is my own.)
In European politics
people play for keeps.
What a bigger power sows,
a smaller power reaps.
Lawrence of Arabia's dead.
Ah, but never mind,
in Florence of Eurabia
his legacy's left behind.
A few day later, looking at a copy of Oriana Fallaci's The Force of Reason, I come across this paragraph:
"In 1978, I remember it well, they were already occupying the Historical Centre of Florence. 'But when did they get here?!?' I asked the tobacconist of Piazza Repubblica where they assembled with particular delight. He spread his arms and sighed: 'God knows. One morning I woke up and here they were.' "
The Force of Reason, hot off the press, is the second of the fiery Italian journalist's book-length pamphlets that have been creating a publishing sensation in Europe. (The first volume, The Rage and the Pride, published in 2002, had 16 printings in two years.) The "they" in the passage quoted refers to the Arab and/or Muslim immigrants who have turned Italy's (and Christendom's) historic city into the "Florence of Eurabia" in my anonymous poet friend's postcard.
On the other side of the Atlantic, writing about a recent demonstration of illegal immigrants protesting a proposed U.S. law that would sanction employers who hire undocumented workers, the columnist John O'Sullivan offers this description:
"The demonstrators occupied the public square in the thousands. Though asked by the politically cautious organizers to bring along only American flags, half the flags they waved were Mexican. They brandished placards and shouted slogans accusing the United States of stealing their land."
Just a snapshot maybe, but not a pretty picture. It bears no resemblance to those beaming faces of multicultural harmony in citizenship brochures.
Arab or Hispanic, legal or illegal, in North America or in Europe, the last 30 years have marked the emergence of a new kind of immigrant. He isn't new to history, strictly speaking, only to his immediate predecessors. He's unlike the immigrant types to whom he bears a superficial resemblance: the explorer-adventurer, the refugee, the exile, the asylum-seeker, the settler, the pioneer.
The new immigrant is none of these, though he may share one or another of their attributes. The new immigrant is an invader.
The invader-immigrant appears in times of fundamental population shifts, the Great Migrations of history. Such migrations occur from time to time. They did, for instance, between the 3rd and the 5th centuries, and they appear to have started again in the 20th. Just as the invader-migrants of other historic periods could be of any tribe -- Visi- or Ostrogoth, Hun, Gepid, Lombard, Avar, to name a few -- the invader-migrants of our times may be Asian or Levantine or Caucasian. They may be Muslim or Sihk or Christian or anything else. Invasion as a concept isn't race- or religion-specific, though it's usually tied to specific groups and cultures at specific points in time.
Whatever their background, the new kind of immigrant doesn't simply compete with the host population for jobs, economic opportunity and space (all of which can be shared) but for identity, which cannot. Immigrants can and do create jobs, as well as compete for them, making the score even. But immigrants can't create identities for the host population, only compete for the existing identity of a nation.
This makes certain "small" matters, often dismissed as merely symbolic -- permitting turbans on construction sites, say, or ceremonial daggers in schools -- actually more important than ostensibly hard-nosed economic issues between immigrant and host communities. They can be more divisive for being demanded as well as for being denied -- and they can be especially divisive for being granted.
A flag -- a piece of fabric on a stick -- is just a symbol, but a demonstration in America conducted under an American flag is materially different from one conducted under the flag of Mexico. The first is a country trying to share a problem; the second is a problem trying to share a country.
A country like Canada can share its space, resources, job opportunities and wealth with newcomers more easily than Italy, but it cannot share, let alone give up, its identity any more than Italy could. Toronto may be an immigrant city in a way Florence isn't, but "Canarabia" is no closer to Canada than Eurabia is to Europe. If we fail to keep this in mind, one night we'll go to sleep in a familiar place and wake up next morning, feeling as helplessly puzzled as Fallaci's tobacconist in the piazza Republica.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/....html?id=fb7aebc2-a2e8-4d83-967b-f0abd128e237
