Immigration 1: Arab Democracy

Some say that Arab culture is incompatible with the idea of democracy. I say the Arab culture is democracy perfected, and free in a way Americans can only imagine.

Democracy as practiced in the West, after all, only gives you the right to be dictated to by the majority. But in traditional Arab culture, we have the genuine right to choose your own government. Traditional Arab states, and to some degree the small Gulf states even now, are built on personal loyalties. If, as a Bedouin, you did not like the way a place was run, you simply packed up the family camel and moved on. It was, and sometimes still is, a free market in government. And it has led to the relatively good--very good--government in the Gulf States in comparison with most of the rest of the Middle East.

We seem to have forgotten this part of our own Western heritage, and of our traditional freedoms. The freedom of Britain, and later of the US, was founded very largely on the ability and the right to move. The British were sea traders. The Americans were sea traders, immigrants, cowboys, and pioneers—if the situation in this district was unappealing, they could pull stakes and move further West.

This was the key to how they developed all their other liberties: governments had no monopoly, and had to compete.

For this reason, I cannot go along with those on the right or the left who raise fears about immigration. Freedom of movement seems to me a fundamental freedom, on which many of our other hard-found freedoms have been based.

I’d like to see a series of reciprocal agreements: Canadians free to emigrate to the EU, say, in return for freedom of EU citizens to immigrate to Canada.

Would there be any value to striking the same sort of deal with poor, underdeveloped countries? Sure; and more than cheap labour. It would be great for retirees to be able to move in and buy property at much lower Third World rates.

I know what you’re thinking: a flood of poor immigrants would destroy Canada’s economy. I’ll deal with that issue next time.