QotD: Canadian Immigration Policy

What worries me is when settled nations start to fetishize immigration to almost absurd degrees. In 1997, the government in Ottawa festooned the land with posters marking the 50th anniversary of Canadian citizenship and showing people of many lands holding hands around a globe — ie, Canada's idea of itself is as a great compilation of other people's hits rather than as a concept album in its own right. The idea that a nation expresses itself as merely an ongoing receiver of people from elsewhere, that it's Gate 57 at Heathrow writ large, no more or less than whoever happens to be standing in it, is very reductive.

Mark Steyn, "Re re re re re: Nation of immigrants", The Corner, 2007-06-07