The challenges of integration and multiculturalism

By Sen. Leo Housakos, October 17th, 2012

A sense of alienation has accompanied the challenges confronting immigrants coming to North America.  European and Chinese immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries not only faced racism and discrimination when carrying out routine activities such as renting a house or booking a hotel room, but in many cases physical abuse.  Pathetically, the so-called “true-blue old stock” boasting relatives who arrived at the beginnings of colonization  took exception to people who looked and sounded different. 
Jews, Catholics, Greeks, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, and indeed Muslims bore the cruelty and disdain of their neighbours,   because they dressed and looked different, belonged to other faiths, cooked strange foods such as pizza, souvlaki, curry and other such exotic dishes that are today a staple of North American cuisine. 
Lynchings, beatings and other abuses were the price some immigrants had to pay for the promise of a better life in the new world.  They did not have the protection of laws or lobbies and their only asset was the ability to survive in a hostile environment.
Just before the Second World War, Canada itself turned a blind eye to the plight of Jews seeking refuge from Nazi persecution and tragically only 5,000 were admitted to this country during an eight-year period. Millions of Europe’s Jews perished in the Holocaust.   Whatever the complaints of the Jihadists, especially those who have twice tried to inflict acts of terrorism in Canada, their co-religionists have not had to face industrial scale killing. 
A great deal has changed since the harsh decades of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Today, we have laws against discrimination, punishment for hate crimes and protection for religious freedom.  However, governments cannot legislate how people think and feel. 
In this respect, the challenge confronting Western societies with respect to Islam and the rapidly expanding Muslim minority has become increasingly formidable.  Despite the laws protecting minorities, there has been considerable unease after 9/11 and the subsequent attempted terrorist attacks in the United States, Canada and Europe.  A case in point was the murder in 2004 of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim extremist in Holland.  This single act turned an otherwise extremely tolerant Dutch society into one that now demands conformity of values from all its immigrants. 
The backdrop to this Dutch tragedy was the large and then welcome influx of Muslim immigrants from Turkey, Morocco and Arabs from the Middle East, who took up a variety of low paying jobs.  Unfortunately, by the 1990s the economic boom of the 1960s was over and the Dutch no longer needed the immigrants.
The Swedes also welcomed thousands of Muslim immigrants in the 1960s and in the post-economic boom quickly found them alien and incompatible with Swedish values.
Sadly, North American society is slowly drifting in the same direction as the Europeans since some North Americans too are ignoring or fearing its Muslim communities.  Unfortunately, the mountain of misconceptions and misunderstandings is growing.  Fear of Islamic terrorism is ratcheting up fear of all Muslims, prefaced in 2010 by the backlash to the proposed Muslim community centre in New York City. 
According to the most recent statistics, the Muslim population in North America is growing rapidly.  Surveys from the last couple of years indicate that the Muslim population of the U.S. has reached seven million.  Statistics Canada in 2001 counted 540,000 but in 2010, the Pew Research Center estimated there were about 940,000 Muslims in Canada. In effect, 2.8% of the population of this country is Muslim and growing.
But this data only presents a broad picture.  On closer examination, Muslim-Canadians are as diverse as Christians with distinct cultural, linguistic and political characteristics.   For example, 65% are Sunni, 15% Shia and 8.5% are Ismailis.  In addition, their home countries range from as far as South Asia to Lebanon.  Yet, some come to Canada ill-prepared for a new life in the West.
Remarkably little effort is made by immigration authorities in embassies and consulates in the Middle East and South Asia to prepare Muslim as well as other religious and secular applicants on the laws and norms of North America. For example, no one is informing prospective immigrants that in this country men and women enjoy equal status and that we maintain separation of Church and state – which means that religion’s place is in the home and in the confines of the church, synagogue, mosque and temple.
Such preparation would facilitate the ability of immigrants to adjust to their new environment and reduce the anxiety of the indigenous population.  Pretending that North American society can accommodate immigrants who would be oblivious to Canadian laws and values can only do them a disservice and increase the spread of alienation, breeding more extremism. n