An Immigration Debate

Just finished listening to an interesting round-table debate on immigration featuring a number of prominent Canadian bloggers of all political stripes. Listen to it here.

One point which I noticed that was not raised during the debate--although understandably so due to it being slightly off topic--was addressing the issue of immigration's flow. Indeed, since the topic of immigration is inextricably linked to such broader philosophical issues as cultural relativism, the idea of immigration flow is critical when discussing these topics. So what is meant by "immigration flow?" Quite simply, it means the direction that immigrants move. And when we examine that particular fact, what is very clear is that the flow of immigration is overwhelming in one direction: to the West--with all its Common Law traditions and Judeo-Christian heritage. Indeed, one does not hear of any massive immigrant backlogs in Saudi Arabia or China or Sudan, as we do for the countries traditionally seen as part of Western Civilization.

Thus, everywhere outside the halls of liberal academia and especially in the non-western countries from which thousands of immigrants come, it is eminently obvious that cultural relativism does not stand. So the next time the issue of immigration and cultural relativism arises, just ask the cultural relativist why immigration only seems to flow one way. (Although I will admit that I do not believe that this will continue in the future for the simple reason that we are losing our Judeo-Christian heritage, but that is a topic for a different post.)

UPDATE: Deborah Gyapong addresses this topic in an excellent post Multiculturalism and Immigration on her blog:

I think immigrants should integrate into the variant of Western Civilization that Canada represents and graft themselves onto its history and its founding stories. While I think there should be lots of room for religious freedom and unique cultural expression, it should not be a kind of "anything goes." Practices like honor killings, widow burnings, genital mutiliation, cannibalism (even if the victim volunteers on E-Bay) should be circumscribed by reason founded on Judeo-Christian principles that form the bedrock of everything that is good about the West.