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When Canadians go to the polls later this
En se rendant aux urnes plus tard cette année,
year, many of them will be making their choice
based on their impression of who can best
manage persistent economic uncertainty. Others
will be concerned about caring for older loved
ones or having the means to adequately provide
for their family. Others still will be assessing each
party’s response to global terrorism and domestic
radicalization.
To help inform voters’ choices, Policy Options
asked leading researchers and practitioners in
diverse fields to identify a pressing policy issue
that should be a priority in the election and to
make the case for how decision-makers can best
address it. While it certainly is not an exhaustive
list, taken together, their responses provide a
compelling agenda for public debate that all
political leaders should consider.
beaucoup de Canadiens donneront leur voix
au parti qui leur semble le mieux apte à gérer
l’incertitude économique persistante. D’autres
seront préoccupés davantage par les soins à
prodiguer à leurs aînés ou les moyens de subvenir
aux besoins de leur famille. D’autres encore
évalueront les mesures préconisées pour lutter
contre le terrorisme international et la radicalisation
des jeunes d’ici.
Pour éclairer le choix des électeurs, Options
politiques a demandé à des chercheurs et des
spécialistes reconnus de déterminer quel enjeu clé il
faudrait mettre au cœur de la campagne, et comment
nos décideurs peuvent s’attaquer à cette priorité.
Sans former une liste exhaustive, leurs réponses
composent un solide programme qui enrichit le
débat public et devrait inspirer tous nos dirigeants.
Strengthening the Canadian Community
Learning from immigration
in Europe
Ratna Omidvar
Troubling trends in public attitudes toward immigration and Islam have had
a negative impact on public policies in many European countries. To what
extent should Canadian decision-makers be concerned about the same
trends appearing here?
Des tendances inquiétantes de l’opinion publique face à l’immigration et à
l’islam ont influé négativement sur les politiques publiques de plusieurs
pays d’Europe. Dans quelle mesure nos décideurs doivent-ils se préoccuper
de l’apparition des mêmes tendances au Canada ?
a
t a time of aging populations, skills shortages and
high global demand for labour mobility, some
Western European countries are reducing their
immigration levels. There are a number of reasons for
this, none of which has its roots in evidence-based public
policy. Instead, by and large, they are driven by short-term
political and ideological considerations.
The first such driver is unemployment, in particular
youth unemployment. In Spain and Greece, for instance,
youth unemployment topped 50 percent last year. It is
through this lens that the issue of immigration is often
debated. Reducing the number of newcomers who will compete with those already having difficulty finding work is cast
as a rational response to persistently high unemployment.
A second driver is misconceptions about Islam.
Europe’s challenges related to an aging population, declining birth rates and labour market shortages should lead
to migration as the solution. But since Europe’s migrants
are largely from Pakistan, Turkey and elsewhere in North
Ratna Omidvar is the executive director of the Global Diversity
Exchange at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson
University, Toronto.
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Africa and the Middle East, the debate shifts quickly from
“migration” to “Muslims,” with all the attendant complexity. Each country in Europe has its own history, pressures
and tensions. In France, for instance, management of the
integration of North African migrants is viewed as a failure.
If debates there on increased migration were met with skepticism before the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January, they
are likely to be even more deeply mired in it now.
A third driver is the significant gap between the perceived and the actual size of immigrant and minority
groups. In the United Kingdom, for instance, Ipsos Mori
surveyed respondents about the percentage of immigrants in
the population. On average, they guessed the proportion was
24 percent, whereas the reality is 13 percent. The misconception was even greater about the presence of Muslims in
their community. Respondents guessed that 1 in 5 people in
the country is Muslim, when in reality it’s 1 in 20. In France,
the gap is even larger: 8 percent of the French population
is Muslim, but the perception is that Muslims make up a
whopping 31 percent. It is therefore not surprising that the
anti-Islamic Pegida movement in Germany originated not
in a German city with a large share of migrants like Berlin or
Hamburg, but in Dresden, where only a very small share of
the population is either of migrant origin or Muslim.
Strengthening the Canadian Community
In Europe
mainstream parties
struggle to convince voters
that they understand their anxieties.
There are other myths. For example, in the United
Kingdom, people think that it is poor migrants from the
European Union who are overrunning the welfare system,
when in reality more Britons than poor migrants are claiming benefits in European jurisdictions.
Then there is the perception that integration in Europe
has failed. I say “perception,” because in reality there are
many innovations in Europe, primarily at the local level,
that Canada could learn from. But the predominant images
of ethnic ghettoes and the rise of a subclass of immigrant
male youth who are disaffected and disengaged and pose
a risk to all society have become the caricatures of what
many see as failed integration.
There appears to be one exception to the downward
immigration trend — Germany — and at first glance, that
exception seems enormous. The Federal Statistical Office
(Destatis) documented a 13 percent increase in immigration in 2013 over the previous year, bringing the number
of people moving to Germany to 1,226,000. Over the same
period, 789,000 people left Germany, a year-on-year increase of 11 percent. This ostensibly makes Germany the
most immigrant-friendly nation after the United States.
Part of this immigration is fuelled by asylum seekers as the
situation in Syria worsens. But a closer examination of the
numbers reveals that by far the largest block of migrants to
Germany are from other EU states — as high as 60 percent
of the total. It is not clear whether they can be thought of
as “immigrants” in the Canadian sense — as people who
come, stay and put down roots. Perhaps it is more useful to
think of them as individuals who move from one province
to another. To get a true comparator to the Canadian figures, therefore, one would have to look at the equivalent in
Germany of permanent residents. In 2013, 189,000 applicants were granted the relevant permit in Germany.
But still, Germany stands out for its pro-immigration
politics and policies. Why?
Germans more than other Europeans have read the
tea leaves on population growth and labour market trends.
This is because Germany has a strong institutional capacity
for engaging employers and trade unions in labour force
development, so there is a greater institutional and shared
concern for the future of the labour market. As the gap in
science, tech and engineering job applicants is projected to
reach 1 million by 2020, Germans are paying attention. A
further look at its immigration figures, however, suggests,
that Germany is not experiencing the success that it hoped
for in attracting highly skilled immigrants from non-
European-Union jurisdictions. In 2012 less than 3 percent
of its intake came from this cohort, notwithstanding changes introduced the same year that lowered the minimum
wage level from €63,000 to €43,000 annually for immigrants wanting to work in Germany.
Notwithstanding its lack of success to date at attracting
the highly skilled immigrants they had hoped to attract,
there is a real desire in a certain segment of the German
intellectual, political and academic elite to see Germany as
the leader of a nation of immigrants in Europe. Chancellor Merkel has publicly declared that Germany is a nation
of immigrants and that Muslims are an integral part of
its identity. Of course, the primary reason that Germany
has more progressive immigration policies today is that
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29
Ratna Omidvar
its economy is flourishing
and its employment rates
are stable. But there is an
important caveat: there
is no certainty this new
liberalizing thrust is
here to stay. Germany
is not immune to rising
anti-immigration and
anti-Islam sentiment.
Should the economic
situation deteriorate
significantly, a different
narrative could well
emerge.
In contrast, the narrative that has proven
popular in election after
election in the United
Kingdom, France, Italy,
Sweden and the Netherlands
is the one driven by the far
right. Some explain the rise
of anti-immigrant, far- right
parties as a result of the economic downturn and austerity. But as
the Economist pointed out in August
2012, there could be another reason
that is far more deeply ingrained: the
concerns that national identity, culture
and way of life are threatened or eroding. The
article quotes Matthew Goodwin (Nottingham
University) who has found that national identity,
culture and way of life matter more to many voters
than material worries. Whether in the Netherlands, with
its triple-A credit rating, or in Greece, which is tiptoeing
around bankruptcy, a xenophobic party can gain significant traction among the electorate. According to Goodwin,
“All it needs is for a semi-competent party to pick up on
these sentiments.”
Many of these far right parties have more than competently exploited fears about national identity to make
their mark on the political landscape. They have successfully defined who they are against, whereas mainstream
parties have struggled to convince ordinary voters that
they understand and share their anxieties. At times, mainstream parties have embraced at least some of the anti-
immigrant agenda of the far right in order to protect their
share of the vote.
Where does Islam feature in all of this? In the United
Kingdom, UKIP has linked anti-immigration views to
an anti-EU stance. In Holland, Geert Wilders has linked
anti-Islam positions with support of Israel, gender equity
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Strengthening the Canadian Community
and gay rights. In Germany, the Pegida movement has
linked anti-Islam views to its positions against the EU, the
euro and global finance speculation, to name a few. In the
Nordic region (Sweden, Denmark, Norway) right-wing parties have successfully linked concerns and nostalgia about
loss of a way of life, care for the elderly and declining law
and order to migration and Islam.
Public attitudes have also given confidence to the proponents of anti-Islam politics. In Germany, for instance, a
2013 survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation showed that
57 percent of non-Muslim Germans feel threatened by
Islam. A striking 40 percent feel like strangers in their own
country because of Germany’s perceived Islamization. The
same survey found that one-quarter of Germans would like
to forbid immigrant status to Muslims.
istock
Our particular
brand of multiculturalism
is deeply ingrained
in our
DNA.
In light of these trends, Canadian decision-makers should
take heed. After all, we are not immune to what is happening in the rest of the world. That said, we are protected
from this European virus by virtue of a few factors.
One is that we do not have a perception of large-scale
integration failure as in parts of Europe. We have immigrant role models as part of our national narrative, including authors, media hosts and two governors general. Teachers in our classrooms look more and more like the students.
Home ownership rates among immigrants are strong,
citizenship uptake is high, intermarriage is rising, and the
children of immigrants for the most part perform well. We
have our problems, but we have our successes, too.
One important difference in Canada is that immigration does not draw from one region alone. In Europe
it is easy to conflate immigration from the Middle East
and North Africa with Muslims. Canada’s immigrants
come from all over the world. The caricature of Muslims
in some parts of Europe does not cross the Atlantic. In
Canada, Ismaili Muslims are one of the most successful
immigrant communities.
Moreover, we have no anti-immigrant political parties.
The immigrant vote counts much more in the political calculus of the nation and is heavily courted. It would be political suicide for a national party leader in Canada to say, as
Germany’s Merkel once did, that multiculturalism has failed.
Finally, our particular brand of multiculturalism is
deeply ingrained in our DNA. It is a policy but it is also
lived experience. It is alive in our schools, city governments
and community centres. At the practical level, the multiculturalism principles that have been embraced by many of
our local institutions are at the heart of Canada’s success in
this domain.
So while we argue about how immigration should
work, where immigrants should come from and how we
should qualify them for entrance into the country, we do
not argue about whether we need them. That, more than
anything, is what sets us apart from Europe. n
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