Moderato Cantabile: Toward Principled Governance for Canada's Immigration Policy

Canada has engaged in an immigration policy experiment of momentous importance over the last 25 years: it has almost doubled the flow of new immigrants. This has not only strained Canada's absorptive capacity and the common public culture, and increased the costs of immigration for Canadians, but it has also led the more recent cohorts of immigrants to experience much greater difficulty integrating into their new homeland, causing them to fall more and more below the level of income of the Canadian-born.

Canadians have been disinformed by officials, the intelligentsia and the media about the real impact of mass immigration on the economy and about its potential capacity to counter the effect of the aging of Canadian population. Canadians have been hoodwinked into accepting that maximum diversity is optimum diversity.

This book questions certain toxic myths in good currency about immigration, points to grievous administrative pathologies about the selection process of immigrants, and proposes new guide posts to shape a principled Canadian immigration policy - based on fair play and rules of hospitality - that include a clear understanding that permission to become a member of the host society must not be granted unconditionally. Moral contracts with newcomers should define the expectations of the host country as the quid for the quo represented by the entitlements that are afforded to the newcomer.