Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was correct: Canada is doing a much better job than western European countries of integrating immigrants. However, we would add, Canada has some important challenges still to be met.
Kenney was commenting after German Chancellor Angela Merkel said last weekend that multiculturalism in her country, Europe's richest, had "failed utterly." Similar views are often heard across western Europe these days.
In her next breath Merkel explained, perhaps without realizing it, the failure she admitted: "We kidded ourselves for a while that they wouldn't stay, but that's not the reality."
In the postwar economic boom West Germany brought in "guest workers," mainly from Turkey, who were widely expected to leave after a few years of low-status employment at low pay. In East Germany, meanwhile, foreign workers had it even worse: kept in gender-segregated dormitories and not allowed to socialize with Germans. Much of western Europe shared the same utilitarian attitude, especially toward visible minorities and more recently toward Muslims.
North Americans, very many of us knowing the names of our immigrant ancestors of just one, two, or three generations ago, have had a different approach: We understood that new immigrants, too, were here to stay. Successive waves of newcomers to the U.S., and to a degree to Canada, faced sometimes-fierce anti-immigration sentiment. But both countries have historically been dependent on immigration for growth, and in both the U.S. melting pot and the Canadian cultural mosaic that reality has won out.
Canada has expected immigrants to integrate, but has not demanded that they abandon their cultures. The multiculturalism policy of the Trudeau years told newcomers they could keep the best of their homelands while enjoying Canada's advantages. Some scoff that this policy amounted to little more than "colourful old-country costume" festivals, but over the decades it also surely helped re-assure many newcomers.
The result, paradoxically, has generally been healthy cultural and economic integration of immigrants and their children and grandchildren. This week Calgary elected a Muslim mayor with south Asian roots, a fine example of how cultural integration should work.
But in Europe attitudes have hardened with the recession. Voters fear for their jobs. And the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam did much to increase the not-utterly-unreasonable concern that parallel societies are growing in some places, threatening both rights and traditions.
With integration never much encouraged in Europe, these concerns have in some cases led to literal and/or cultural ghettoization. This is especially true of recent Muslim immigrants to Europe, and may have made them more susceptible to the malign influence of fundamentalist religious zealots.
Today many Canadians, too, worry about these issues, as we see in the heated debate over the niqab, which symbolizes much deeper concerns. Muslim cultural integration is an important challenge still to be met.
Our leaders do appear to understand that although Canada has done well in making immigrants into Canadians, new challenges in this area demand our attention. Representatives of all three federal parties acknowledged this week that immigration is "a two-way street," as Liberal multiculturalism critic Rob Oliphant said. New Canadians need to be open to their new neighbours and Canadian values; and meanwhile established Canadians, and their governments, must keep working to remove any barriers to success.