Jews and immigration

Editorial

Canada's Jewish community has traditionally been highly supportive of liberal immigration policies. Few cultural groups have had the history with closed doors that Jews have had and this memory has conditioned Jewish Canadians to recognize the sometimes existential need for welcoming immigration policies.

Never was the impact of closed doors more catastrophic than in the years of European darkness of the 1930s and '40s. Jews fleeing for their lives from the advancing cloud of Nazism were denied entry to many countries, including Canada. In one of the most notorious incidents, a federal immigration official summed up the government's attitude toward Jewish refugees with the now-immortalized phrase "none is too many."

In another incident, the SS St. Louis, whose 930 Jewish refugees had been refused landing rights in Cuba, the United States and elsewhere, met similar closed doors in Canada. Forced to return to a Hitler-ravaged Europe, some of the passengers were eventually granted refuge in England, France, the Netherlands and Belgium, but many of those succumbed to Nazism after the invasions of continental countries.

The lesson that Jews learned from the pre-Holocaust experience was that even places whose leaders expressed lip-service in support of Jewish protection were not willing to act in tangible ways to save the lives of Jews. This, ultimately, is the justification for Israel's Law of Return.

But for Canadian Jews, our country's policies during that period remain a festering sore in our national history. For this reason, among others, Jewish Canadians have tended to look favorably upon policies that are sensitive to the needs of the world's most vulnerable.

There has been a degree of self-interest, as well as a measure of tikkun olam, in our view of immigration. But self-interest is giving some Canadian Jews a new consideration on the issue of immigration.

Canada's immigration minister, Joe Volpe, is expected to announce next month that Canada will increase the number of immigrants we accept over the next five years. Plans have not been finalized, but sources tipped the number of immigrants accepted annually from about 235,000 last year to maybe as many as 340,000 in 2010. This number would represent a goal the government had previously set of admitting immigrants representing a total of about one per cent of the total Canadian population annually.

This is a positive development, on the face of it. Canada's economic realities demand a population increase well beyond natural growth. (Natural growth is a misnomer in this case: without immigration, the populations of Canada's major metropolitan areas would actually decline.)

But Canadian Jews might rightly express a concern that wasn't a worry several decades ago: anti-Semitic immigrants.

Anti-Semitic immigrants can come from any place. Obviously, anti-Semites can emerge from any culture – and have. But some Canadian Jews have expressed concern that an increasing number of immigrants to Canada are coming from countries where Jew-hatred, in the guise of anti-Israel activism or less fashionably dressed-up old-style bigotry, is taught as a part of public school curriculum.

Nobody has ever made the assertion that all immigrants from Muslim countries are anti-Semites and, though this has the potential to be misinterpreted, this is not at all the position here. But extensive research has been done on the content of curricula in places like the Palestinian Authority, Syria, pre-invasion Iraq and elsewhere, identifying deeply entrenched strains of anti-Jewish principles in education systems. Added to this are the theologically supported prejudices that emanate from some religious sectors and a small industry across the Middle East and North Africa of entertainment programming that reinforces hideous anti-Semitic stereotypes that most other parts of the world have left in the past. In Egypt recently, for example, a TV mini-series dramatized the famously false anti-Semitic canard, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

It would be a massive shift in community values to alter our support for relatively free immigration. Yet there are valid reasons why Jewish Canadians might look at the curricula, social norms and public discourse in some countries of the world and wonder what kind of fellow citizens these states might produce. The solution, if there is one, would avoid the folly of racial profiling – that is, we must not assume that ill-will is an inherent part of any individual's character based on their place of origin.

But it may be necessary for Canadians in general and Canadian Jews in particular to address the possibility that the inculcation of Canadian values of tolerance for diversity will require strong, deliberate and well-conceived plans on the part of governments and nongovernmental agencies whose job it is to integrate new Canadians.

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