Immigrant Song

One Immigrant’s Case For Assimilation

The Canadian Mosaic: A Polite Fiction

A few years ago, my wife and I were hosting a New Year’s brunch when we found ourselves in a rare situation: an honest discussion where people actually said what they thought. The topic? Immigration and assimilation. As immigrants ourselves—each from different corners of the world—we made what we naively assumed was an uncontroversial case: if granted the privilege of Canadian citizenship, one should fully assimilate into the culture.

Our friends, all born Canadian, were aghast at this suggestion. They acted as if we'd proposed some kind of Borg-like collective absorption, completely missing the point. They waxed poetic about Canada's "cultural mosaic" versus America's "melting pot," naturally concluding that the Canadian approach was superior.

They prided themselves on the idea that Canada allowed immigrants to retain their distinct cultural identities rather than blending into a homogeneous whole. The American model, with its expectation that immigrants should become American in every meaningful way, was, in their view, oppressive and outdated.

Then, I made what turned out to be the most scandalous statement of the afternoon:

"What people have difficulty admitting is that some cultures are better than others."

You would have thought I had just proposed reinstating colonial rule. Gasps, indignant scoffs, and wide-eyed looks of disbelief swept across the room. Even the children fell silent, sensing a shift in mood. I had, apparently, blasphemed against Canada's sacred doctrine.

The Contradictions of Multiculturalism

The conversation that followed was revealing. I pressed my friends to consider: can we really claim that all cultures are equal? In matters of human rights, governance, and law, are there not objective measures of success?

To avoid any accusations of "Islamophobia," I used a female genital mutilation (FGM) analogy. I asked whether they would consider it acceptable for a culture to practice, say, demanded that all boys when they hit the age of 13 should have their left eye gouged out.

Instantly, they were unified: "Of course not!"

“So,” I pointed out, “we do make value judgments about cultures. We do recognize that some cultural practices are abhorrent.”

There was an awkward silence. The contradiction was clear. And yet, within minutes, they were back to arguing that cultures should not be judged, that things were "more complicated than that”—The favourite go-to excuse of people suffering from cognitive dissonance, and that expecting immigrants to assimilate was oppressive

What was even more fascinating was that they had, just moments earlier, been making value judgments about American culture—insisting that Canada's multicultural model was superior to America's melting pot. The sheer ideological contortion on display was breathtaking.

And so, in a final act of pure absurdity, a group of Canadian-born guests lectured the only two immigrants in the room on why assimilation was wrong.

My friends couldn't grasp my position: I didn't come to Canada to exist as a perpetually hyphenated "Mexican-Canadian" or to sequester myself in a cultural enclave. I came to be a Canadian who happened to be born in Mexico. The distinction matters, not semantically, but fundamentally.

The Unspoken Truth About Immigration Distinctions

Let's be clear about something our political betters would prefer we forget: there is a world of difference between legal and illegal immigration. The deliberate conflation of these distinct categories has become a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, designed to render any critique of open borders as xenophobic or racist.

As someone who spent over two years meticulously preparing documentation, undergoing background checks, proving financial stability, and demonstrating language proficiency to immigrate legally, I find it not just frustrating but obscene to watch others simply cut the line. The distinction isn't merely administrative—it speaks to fundamental questions of respect for the rule of law and the social contract of the nation you purport to join.

And let's be crystal clear about what "cutting the line" means. At best, it's economic opportunism—at worst, it provides cover for petty criminals, cartel members, jihadists, and others who wish to do us harm.

Even among those seeking entry through legal channels, there's a vast difference between economic migrants (like myself) looking for better opportunities and genuine asylum seekers fleeing persecution. The latter deserve expedited compassion (although with strong vetting); the former should be evaluated based on what they bring to their new homeland. This isn't heartless—it's the basic self-preservation instinct that every functional society must maintain.

When politicians and their media enablers deliberately blur these lines, they're not displaying compassion—they're engaging in emotional blackmail that ultimately harms both citizens and immigrants alike. The consequences of this blurring are felt most acutely by legal immigrants like myself. We didn't leave our homelands because everything was working perfectly. We fled corruption, crime, inefficiency, and cultural pathologies that made life less prosperous and secure than it should be. It's therefore particularly maddening to see these same dysfunctions imported wholesale into our adopted countries under the sanctimonious banner of "diversity."

Don't Bring Your "Normal"

Former Mexican law enforcement operative and security specialist Ed Calderon coined a phrase that should be emblazoned at every port of entry: "Don't bring your normal." As an immigrant to the US from Mexico who worked against drug cartels, Calderon understands better than most that cultural habits—both good and bad—travel with people.

Your bad habits from home—the very pathologies that made your country of origin dysfunctional—are disruptive in your new home. And just as your bad habits are disruptive in a functioning society, your good habits in a dysfunctional environment could be positively suicidal. In parts of Mexico, for instance, naively trusting authorities or expecting rule-following might get you killed. The adaptation must be conscious and deliberate.

Your "normal" might include mundane behaviours like cutting in line, littering, or disregarding honour-based payment systems. I'm old enough to remember when in Toronto people took off their backpacks in crowded subway cars as a matter of course. In isolation, these seem trivial. Collectively, they represent the erosion of the social cohesion that makes Western societies function smoothly. The little things matter precisely because they're the canaries in the coal mine—early indicators of whether an immigrant respects not just the laws but the unwritten social contracts of their new home.

More alarmingly, when we import large numbers of people from regions with endemic corruption, authoritarian governance, or religious extremism without insisting on assimilation, we're importing the very social problems many immigrants ostensibly sought to escape. It's a strange form of cultural self-sabotage, encouraged by those whose theoretical commitment to diversity trumps their practical commitment to maintaining functional societies.

Of course, we cannot place blame solely on immigrants for societal decline. Citizens bear responsibility for their own neglect in upholding social order. However, it is undeniable that failing to require newcomers to adopt our rules of civility is a significant contributing factor to this erosion.

I didn't leave Mexico to recreate its problems in a colder climate. Yet progressive immigration policies seem determined to ensure that immigrants bring along exactly the dysfunctional elements that made them leave their home countries in the first place. This isn't just foolish—it's actively destructive.

What Canadians Really Think

Despite the progressive consensus that dominates Canadian media and political discourse, ordinary Canadians harbour doubts about the mosaic myth. A 2016 Reid poll revealed what many suspected but few dared articulate: the majority of Canadians want immigrants to "fit in" better. When asked about the infamous "barbaric cultural practices" tip line proposed during the Harper era—a policy that would have allowed Canadians to report practices like forced marriages or honour killings—most Canadians seemed to support it despite elite mockery.

From CBC: Results of a poll by the Angus Reid Institute on Canadian values and identity, compared to a similar poll done on American values and identity in the same time period.

What's particularly telling is the reflexive social media response from the cultural commissars when these results emerged. Rather than engaging with legitimate concerns about cultural compatibility, they immediately equated expectations of assimilation with "white values"—as if rule of law, gender equality, or freedom of speech were somehow racially exclusive concepts rather than universal aspirations.

There was, notably, no indication that the poll results reflected only white respondents. In fact, many immigrants and minorities are among the strongest proponents of assimilation, understanding better than most what's at stake when cultural relativism runs amok. Yet their voices are consistently ignored in favour of a narrative that casts any expectation of cultural adaptation as oppressive.

This represents perhaps the most insidious form of condescension: the soft bigotry of low expectations. The suggestion that immigrants are somehow incapable of adapting to Western norms of civic behaviour, gender equality, or secular governance isn't progressive—it's deeply patronizing. It assumes that certain cultural groups are so rigidly defined by their racial and national background that expecting change is unreasonable. This isn't respect; it's a soft form of dehumanization that denies individual agency and adaptability.

What could be more racist than the suggestion that certain groups cannot be expected to stop practicing female genital mutilation, honour violence, or religious intolerance because "it's their culture"? Yet this is precisely the position taken by many self-described progressives who claim to champion human rights. The contradictions are glaring to everyone except those most deeply committed to the multicultural orthodoxy.

The Failure of Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism began as a well-intentioned attempt to accommodate differences in increasingly diverse societies. While its institutional adoption emerged in 1970s Canada, its intellectual foundations can be traced to Marxist and neo-Marxist thought of the early-to-mid 20th century. Scholars like Antonio Gramsci and theorists from the Frankfurt School shifted focus from economic determinism to cultural hegemony, providing the theoretical underpinnings for what would later become multiculturalism and set the basis for a philosophy that has mutated into an incoherent doctrine that undermines the very possibility of shared civic identity.

The fundamental contradiction of multiculturalism is that it simultaneously demands that we view all cultures as equal while insisting that the host culture make all the accommodations. It requires Western nations to be infinitely flexible and accommodating while expecting nothing similar from newcomers. It celebrates all cultural differences except one: the culture of the host nation, which is treated as either non-existent ("[In Canada] there is no core identity" as Justin Trudeau infamously claimed) or inherently oppressive.

This asymmetry reveals multiculturalism's fatal flaw. A truly multicultural society in which no culture takes precedence cannot function as a coherent political community. Some foundational values must be non-negotiable. You cannot simultaneously maintain cultural practices that subjugate women and uphold gender equality under the law. You cannot preserve religious doctrines that punish apostasy while maintaining freedom of conscience. You cannot import tribal or clan loyalties and maintain the rule of impartial law.

Multiculturalism promised to manage diversity through tolerance. Instead, it has fostered division by fetishizing difference over commonality. It has created parallel societies rather than integrated communities. It has emboldened the most reactionary elements within minority communities while undermining reformers. And perhaps most perniciously, it has convinced many in the West that defending our foundational values is somehow an act of bigotry rather than civilizational self-preservation.

The results speak for themselves. In nations that have most enthusiastically embraced multiculturalism, we see increasing balkanization rather than harmonious diversity. Cultural enclaves become entrenched, integration stalls and social cohesion deteriorates. Far from creating the promised multicultural utopia, this approach has revitalized ethnonationalism on both sides of the divide.

The tragedy is that this was entirely predictable. Any society that declines to assert its core values inevitably fragments into competing groups with incompatible visions of the good. The multicultural experiment represented a form of civilizational self-doubt masquerading as enlightenment—a doubt that our adversaries never shared.

Europe's Slow Motion Suicide

For a glimpse of where this leads, one need only look at Europe, so brilliantly chronicled in Douglas Murray's "The Strange Death of Europe." The continent is committing demographic and cultural suicide before our eyes, with political elites insisting that the patient is in perfect health even as the flatline beep grows louder.

In Malmö, Sweden—once the poster child for progressive social democracy—Jewish residents now flee neighbourhoods where antisemitism has become commonplace and grenade attacks constitute a new normal. In Britain, the systematic sexual exploitation of thousands of girls by predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs was ignored for years by authorities paralyzed by fears of appearing racist. In France, Belgium, and Germany, no-go zones where state authority has effectively collapsed have become accepted facts of urban life. In American cities, we see the beginning of this as we witness organized migrant gangs like Tren De Aragua taking over entire apartment complexes while authorities stood by, helpless or unwilling to intervene.

These aren't isolated incidents but systematic failures resulting from a multicultural orthodoxy that prioritizes cultural sensitivity over social cohesion or even basic safety. When immigrant communities are encouraged to maintain parallel societies rather than integrate, the result isn't vibrant diversity but fragmentation and conflict.

Europe's experience demonstrates that when societies import large numbers of people with fundamentally different values—particularly regarding women's rights, religious freedom, and the relationship between religion and state—without insisting on assimilation, they aren't promoting diversity. They're undermining the very foundations that make liberal democracy possible. When citizens dare to question the wisdom of this radical experiment, they're immediately branded as far-right extremists or xenophobes. The range of acceptable opinion has been so narrowed that even moderate concerns about the pace of change or the compatibility of certain cultural practices are treated as beyond the pale.

The clearest articulation of this clash comes from the jihadists themselves. As they've repeatedly stated, "We love death as you love life." This isn't hyperbole but a fundamental philosophical divide. Western civilization, for all its flaws, celebrates life, individual flourishing, and material progress. Its adversaries explicitly reject these values in favour of theological absolutism that subordinates human flourishing to divine will as they interpret it.

When immigration policies refuse to acknowledge this reality—when they pretend all cultural differences are superficial variations like cuisine or music preferences rather than fundamental disagreements about human rights and social organization—they set the stage for inevitable conflict.

A Call for Civilizational Confidence

If we are to avoid Europe's fate, we must rediscover the courage to make what was once obvious: Western liberal democracy, for all its imperfections, represents humanity's best attempt at creating societies where individuals can flourish regardless of background. Its core values—individual rights, rule of law, religious tolerance, gender equality, freedom of expression—aren't merely cultural preferences but hard-won achievements worth defending.

This doesn't mean embracing xenophobia or closing our borders. It means being honest about the conditions under which immigration strengthens rather than weakens our societies. It means distinguishing between those who seek to join our civilization and those who seek to undermine it. It means insisting that immigration comes with responsibilities as well as rights.

Most fundamentally, it means abandoning the fiction that borders are merely arbitrary lines on a map or that nations are nothing more than administrative units. Nations represent distinct cultural and political communities with legitimate interests in self-preservation. Securing borders isn't an expression of hatred for outsiders but of love for one's own community and its way of life.

Legal immigrants like myself understand this intuitively. We chose our adopted homes precisely because they offered something our birthplaces couldn't. We recognized that these societies functioned better because of their distinct values and institutions. We wanted to join them, not transform them.

The path forward requires abandoning the naive universalism that dominated post-Cold War thinking. Not everyone shares Western values or aspirations. Not every culture is compatible with liberal democracy. Not every immigrant arrives with the intention of integration. These aren't expressions of bigotry but acknowledgments of reality—a reality that shapes the lives of billions regardless of elite opinion.

If we continue to deny these truths for fear of appearing illiberal, we will ultimately lose liberalism itself. The stakes couldn't be higher: they involve nothing less than the survival of the free societies that generations fought to build and preserve.

The choice before us isn't between compassion and cruelty, or between diversity and homogeneity. It's between a realistic approach to immigration that benefits both newcomers and receiving societies, and a self-destructive fantasy that serves neither. As an immigrant who chose assimilation, I can attest that integration isn't oppression—it's liberation. It's the opportunity to become part of something larger than oneself while bringing one's unique gifts to a shared cultural project.

That opportunity is precisely what's threatened by policies that prioritize multicultural symbolism over meaningful integration. If we truly value immigration—and we should—we must insist on assimilation. Not because we fear difference, but because we understand that successful pluralism requires unity of purpose beneath surface diversity.

In the final analysis, a nation that cannot articulate why its values deserve defence will inevitably fail to defend them. The time for such civilizational confidence is now, before the delusion of assimilation avoidance claims more victims.

This cultural insecurity is perhaps the greatest threat we face. Without confidence in our values, without conviction in our principles, we cannot ask others to embrace them. We cannot demand integration if we no longer believe we have anything worth integrating into.