David Suzuki and the rise of a new xenophobia
When David Suzuki hung a big no-vacancy neon sign outside the entry gate for immigrants to Canada, he was giving birth to a new kind of xenophobia. In case you missed it, here is an English translation of what he said to the French weekly L’Express:
“I think that Canada is full too! Even if it’s the second biggest country in the world, our usable land is reduced. Our immigration policy is enough to make you sick: we pillage the countries of the south by de- priving them of their future professionals and we want to increase our population to help our economy grow. It’s crazy!”
People reject newcomers for various reasons. For example, we sometimes hear immigrants themselves wanting to limit Canadian immigration.
The desire is not uncommon. Whether it springs from a wish to preserve an exclusive social status, or to keep economic gains by attempting to prevent greater competition from entering the field, it is a rational attitude in response to a perceived scarcity.
However, it cannot be termed xenophobia because it is not always motivated by a fear of the other. In many cases, it is fear of one’s own people.
Suzuki is not motivated by a fear of economic scarcity, however. His statement (that Canada is already full and that the country’s immigration policy is disgusting) exemplifies rather the notion that the more people in Canada, the more the environment will be harmed, and the equally simplistic assumption that emigration translates into an irreplaceable loss of skill to a country.
By holding such beliefs, Suzuki is, instead, patronizingly assuming that he is a better judge of what is best for individuals looking for better economic opportunities.
At best, he assumes that there are no similarly skilled people left in a country to replace the emigrant; at worst, his prescription removes freedom of mobility and one’s inherent right to seek one’s fortune in places other than where we were born. Suzuki’s implied conclusion is that people aspiring to a better life should stay where they were born.
Suzuki’s intentions to limit the movement of others from developing societies are anti-freedom, anti-competition and antimarkets. They resemble the views which immigrants to western democracies find oppressive and want to leave behind in their native societies.
In spite of their restrictiveness, Suzuki’s fears are not old-fashioned xenophobia.
The typical xenophobic sentiment against immigration is moved by a fear that newcomers will ruin a romanticized status quo, which may be understood as racial (outsiders pollute blood lines), cultural (outsiders water down our language and culture) or economic (outsiders steal our jobs). Such beliefs assume that newcomers will damage the idyllic good that has been achieved from the sacrifice of those already there or will stop progress, which, in turn, leads to deterioration. Suzuki says he favours multiculturalism, but I guess more in the abstraction than in the practice.
While Suzuki places himself above the mundane issues of race, the diluting of culture and economic degradation, he does decry the arrival of others to this country for the assumed harm they will cause to an “already wounded” natural environment. He sees his motives as noble and altruistic, manifesting concern with the “exploitation” of immigrants by their new country and the loss their leaving “inflicts” on their developing home countries.
In other words, Suzuki’s rejection of immigration is a new type of xenophobia, one we have never seen before. It is not motivated by self-interested fear. Rather, he wants to keep immigrants out of Canada for their own good and with the messianic goal of saving the planet from impending doom. It may be appropriate to call it altru-eco planetary-xenophobia, but such a bastardized and unpronounceable mouthful of compacted Latin into Greek will never stick.
Neo-xenophobia seems less of a tongue twister.