For the last few generations Canadians typically prided themselves in their tolerance towards immigrants. Now, record numbers of immigrants continue to enter Canada. People are noticing, and they are talking about immigration in a way I’ve never heard Canadians talk. That shouldn’t surprise us, due to the astounding rate at which foreigners are relocating to Canada. Consider this report from True North:
From Jan. to Oct. 1 of last year, Canada accepted about 455,000 new permanent residents and another 800,000 non-permanent residents, like international students, temporary foreign workers and refugees.
Over 1.2 million people moved to Canada last year. By comparison, only 1.8 million people reside in Montreal proper, 1.3 million in Calgary, 2.4 million in Vancouver, and 1 million in Edmonton. We had 1.2 million people move to Canada, and that number is approximately equivalent to the combined populations of Kitchener, Hamilton, and Halifax. It is approximately eight times greater than the population of Barrie, Ontario. With a Canadian population of merely 40 million people, you don’t need to be a prophet or the son of a prophet to forecast that our country is quickly becoming something other than what it is. You don’t even need grade 6 math to know where this is headed. If one had a low view of our government, one could call this present policy “weaponized immigration” – an attempt to destroy the country.
The numbers, when compared to the existing population, are near the size of an apocalyptic army. It’s inconceivable. This is while young Canadians are priced out of the housing market, while encampments of vagrant-occupied-tents are now fixtures in all our cities, while our healthcare system is inept to support the existing population, and while crime rates are noticeably on the rise. Why do we need so many immigrants, and how is this policy not hastening the destruction of our country? Good questions.
Historically, theological liberals have been very much pro-immigration, describing it as good. That thinking, when taken ad absurdum, doesn’t work. Consider hypothetically importing 45 million Punjabis to Prince Edward Island, which has a present population of 157 thousand. Would you still recognize Anne’s green gables in Cavendish? Stepping foot on PEI’s red mud doesn’t magically assimilate you into the culture, anymore than moving to Punjab would make Anne Shirley a bone fide Punjabi. Cultures and nations are distinct. Beyond the obvious cultural and demographic concerns, if a region’s infrastructure cannot support immigration, then importing millions of more immigrants is scornfully hateful to both the native population and to the immigrants themselves. You can’t have mass immigration and keep your nation, anymore than you can keep your cake and eat it too. The theological liberals are wrong on immigration. Immigration can at times benefit a nation, but our present immigration policy is an existential threat to Canada.
How do we think this through Scripturally?
To answer that, we can reason up from the family to the national civil sphere. There is a relationship between the family and the nation, and because of that relationship the nation can learn from the family on immigration. I’ll flesh out how the nation should learn from the family in a bit, but before I do I need to explain the relationship between families and nations.
Nations come from families, and families lead to nations. We see this in the Bible, for example, when the nations were dispersed at Babel. In Genesis 10, one finds a table of nations, and each nation descends from a family. For example, the descendants of Ham, through Cush, built Babel and Assyria (Genesis 10:6-12). Families lead to nations. As the families multiply, they develop a shared language, history, tradition, and culture. Families then form alliances based on those commonalities, and they eventually settle land to form a nation within geographical boundaries. The same was true of Israel. Abraham, his son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob were the patriarchs of national Israel. Their descendants shared a language, a history, traditions, a religion, and eventually land. The family led to a nation. Eventually, in the land, the people built institutions that embodied and served the national identity and national interests.
Some will note an element of bloodlines in this definition of nationhood, wondering whether I’m pushing for some type of genealogical purity as a prerequisite to a national identity. I’m not doing that. Within the early Hebrew nation, for example, Egyptians joined the nation in the Exodus, the Canaanite Rahab joined the nation in the conquest, and the Moabite Ruth joined the nation during the times of the Judges. The Moabite Ruth and the Canaanite Rahab are each listed in the genealogy of Christ, each being a mother in Israel who bore the Messiah’s seed, so even Jesus Himself didn’t have purely Hebrew bloodlines. From that, we can deduce that bloodlines are related to national identity, but national identity and bloodlines are not the same. Nations are typically knit together with a common ancestry broadly speaking, but persons from other lineages and ancestries may join the nation, as they did in the case of Israel.
That being said, the foreigners who joined Israel took on the national identity of Israel. They melted into the nation. The Moabite Ruth, for example, told her Hebrew mother-in-law, “For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). Ruth, a Moabite by birth, entered the Hebrew nation by living in the land, speaking the language, identifying as one among the people, and adopting the customs and culture. She converted, forsaking her national gods for the God of Israel. Ruth joined a family when she joined the nation, and she joined the nation when she joined the family. The two are related: nation and family. Nations come from families, and families lead to nations. They are not the same, but they are related.
In the case of a family, someone can enter a family by either birth or adoption. In each instance, the child takes the family name, upholds the family rules, respects the family customs, honours the family’s lineage, and becomes beneficiary to the family’s resources and inheritance. No family is required to adopt someone, and the choice of adoption is contingent on the will of the head of household. The same could be said about a nation. One is either born into or adopted into a nation. Nations are not obligated to adopt people into them, but when nations choose to adopt individuals it is called “immigration”. The same principles apply. Immigrants are those who enter the nation when the nation adopts them into the national inheritance. That inheritance includes the public space of the nation, the shared institutions of the nation, and the economy of the nation. As nations render their immigrants beneficiaries of the national commonwealth, a healthy nation will demand that the immigrants uphold the rules, respect the customs, learn the language, and honour the history.
Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you (Exodus 20:12).
These are transcendent principles that apply to both the family and the nation. In either sphere they apply differently because the spheres are different. The principles are the same. The principles apply to the family and the nation, and they apply in accordance with the unique role of each sphere.
Moving on, how then should Christians view our present immigration situation?
- We should understand that our immigration system and immigration policy are disastrous because our nation is a disaster. Our civic leaders gutted us of our national identity with the advent of multiculturalism (for more on multiculturalism see here) in the 1960s and 1970s. That gutting occurred in tandem with and was related to the apostasy of Canada’s largest Protestant body, the United Church of Canada. Our national identity was that of a British colony, which rendered us heirs of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. The theological liberalization of the United Church and the national move to multiculturalism killed our national identity. Multiculturalism asserts that all cultures are equal unless they challenge the multicultural culture. Anything goes so long as one is just fine with anything going. It depleted us of any vitality to melt newcomers into our culture, and it encouraged newcomers to maintain their cultural and religious norms after immigrating. Beyond that, it encouraged degeneracy among the existing population.
- Immigration is a disaster because the nation is a disaster, and our nation is a disaster because the nation’s families are a disaster. When people fornicate, divorce, adulterate, consume porn, murder their children by abortion, murder the elderly by MAID, and exult in every vile sexual fetish under the sun, families cease to exist. The individual families lose their power, the social fabric weakens and dissipates, and the nation becomes one big amorphous blob of decadent individuals. It kills the civic spirit. If families lead to nations, amorphous families lead to amorphous nations. We are an amorphous nation that welcomes any type of behaviour because we are largely a nation composed, not of strong families, but of a formless blob of individual units. We can’t fix the national identity crisis until we fix the family crisis.
- We must see the invasion and ascendency of foreign and heathen peoples as a judgement of God. Consider one of God’s curses upon Israel for covenant infidelity: “The sojourner who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower” (Deuteronomy 28:43). The Canadian people intentionally forsook the Law of God. We were a nation who knew His Law and sought to uphold His Law. While not all Canadians were born-again, the national identity presupposed the supremacy of Christ over the nation – this is a fact of history that is as incontestable as it is well documented. Abandoning this rich inheritance has invited God’s curse. I have no doubt that that curse might include handing over the land to other peoples. As an act of judgement upon our decadence, God has appointed our treacherous rulers to hand over the national inheritance to nations not like us. We can only escape God’s judgement upon the land by repentance (Deuteronomy 30:1-10). God offers free grace in Christ to all who repent. Before we had an immigration problem we had a spiritual problem, and repentance to Christ is the solution to both problems.
- Christians must separate our view of the present immigration policy from our view of immigrants. We should loath what is happening to our nation and our children’s future. But we must also see the immigrants as divine image bearers endowed with dignity by their Creator. I am concerned that we will witness a backlash against the present policy, which would include unjustly lashing out on the individuals who have moved here. We must not be complicit in any injustice. Personally, I can understand why immigrants choose Canada over their homelands, which are often lawless and impoverished 3rd world backwaters. Furthermore, I am suspicious that our officials have been cunning and disingenuous in how they’ve convinced people to relocate to Canada. Those in high places who write these policies are dirty dealers, who have created this terrible scenario, and they deserve our contempt. But many of the immigrants themselves are, like us, victims of our leaders’ dirty ploys. They need the love of Jesus Christ and the free offer of His Gospel. In this we have an opportunity to proclaim salvation to people we wouldn’t otherwise have access to. We have a responsibility to offer them free grace in Christ, while calling them to repent. We are under no obligation to like all aspects of foreign cultures, but we are under divine obligation to uphold the dignity of each human being, immigrant or otherwise. Beyond that, I am convinced that there are immigrants among us who are a blessing to the country. Even as I am writing this, one of our church members just visited me in my office. His family is new to Canada, English is their second language, they are hard workers, self-reliant, wise in their child-rearing, and they are contributing to the creation of Christian culture in this decadent country. We must separate our view of immigration from our disposition towards individual immigrants.
- We must be hopeful about the future. Somehow the unsettling social change is part of God’s perfect plan. Like anything God uses to sanctify His people, it is uncomfortable and even painful, but He disciplines the ones He loves. He is certainly disciplining us to teach us faithfulness. Like all discipline it is painful for the moment, but in the end it will produce the fruit of righteousness. Instead of murmuring under His heavy hand, we should learn contentment and thankfulness. He is using all things together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes. Somehow, this will all work out for the good of God’s people and the glory of God’s Son. Canada will end, and it just might end soon if things don’t change, but His Kingdom is forever.
