Born to Leave

Unless you’re Native American, you came from someplace else. So said U.S. president Barack Obama in a speech on immigration urging his fellow Americans to consider that, when it comes to new immigrants seeking a better life, “most of us used to be them.”

This point should be obvious to Canadians who, like Americans, belong to a country that was founded and forged by waves of immigrants arriving on its shores. If we need a reminder it is because, like mass immigration itself, the passions it instils have rarely subsided.

If such arguments are effective in North America, they are certainly less effective on the other side of the Atlantic, where the idea of outsiders assimilating into the general population takes on a more threatening tone. Perhaps nowhere is the debate over immigration more contentious than in present-day Europe. Anti-immigrant parties have been gaining power right across the continent, from the rise of the UK Independence Party, now the...