Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land! (Sir Walter Scott)

When I was a teacher, I used to write an objective for each of my lessons -- it's something we were taught at Teachers College, and it's an excellent idea. I usually have an objective in mind for my talks, not usually written down or articulated, but underlying what I say. This time, my objective is more explicit than usual, and I'll lay it on the table for you: I want to make you question your current thinking about such things as immigration, nationhood, ownership of land, who can come to live in this country or go to other countries, how we understand citizenship.

Of course, being human, I'd love to have you all end up thinking like me, but I know it's unlikely that even one of you will do that. My thinking is rather far-out and radical, and I don't expect you to agree with me. But experience assures me that you'll listen with open minds to the questions I raise, and if you ask yourselves seriously what the grounds for your convictions are, and consider that for a awhile after you leave here, I'll have achieved my objective. I've been enormously helped by the discussion of this topic after last week's service -- and it was also the liveliest of the discussions that I remember! Several of you expressed thoughts that have helped me to consider other ways of looking at the questions, and I deeply appreciate that.

Like most of you, probably, I'm very attached to this land of ours, Canada. "This land of ours", I said, and that's how we think of it if we're Canadian citizens, or even Canadian residents, for the most part. I'm becoming quite attached to the Kitchener-Waterloo area, too, after living here for over a year, and I'm certainly fond of my own little house and backyard on Market Street in Kitchener. The Waterloo Region is "my" region in the sense that I live and work within it, and my home is "my" place not only because I live there and love it, but because I was lucky enough to be able to pay the necessary sum of money to do something called "transferring the title" from the previous owner to me. I suppose in a way Kitchener is my town and Ontario my province for similar reasons: I pay taxes to the local and provincial governments and so have a part-ownership in the town and province.

And the same with Canada. Some of us think we pay dearly for our ownership, for being able to call these places ours, to say they belong to us in a way they don't belong to other people. Others would say that the responsibilities of ownership and the commitment which it engenders, make for a equitable state. Yet others of us have an uneasy sense that our ownership is at the expense of non-owners, and is a questionable privilege or right. I'm one of the latter and I want to explain what I mean.

The land that we live on is not called "real estate" for nothing. It has real and intrinsic value, in the way that gold and money, for example, don't. Gold and silver, in themselves, are good only for ornamentation and some rather limited industrial uses; paper money is even less valuable in itself -- it's purely a symbol, a convenient exchange mechanism, too small in format even for the use to which the pages of the Eaton's catalogue traditionally were put. But land is really precious, the source of our food and our shelter and the other basic necessities of life. To own a piece of the earth -- to have rights over it that other people don't have -- this is valuable indeed.

I came to Canada in 1962, as a newly-wed, with my husband who had been given a research fellowship at the University of Alberta. He was welcomed to this country because he had knowledge and skills that were needed; I was welcomed as his spouse. We thought we were coming just for two years, but that's more than 37 years ago and I'm still here. My children can sing, "O Canada, our home and native land" without any mental translations, although I rather hope that since they're all girls they have some trouble with "True patriot love in all thy sons command".

But for me, as for many of you, this is my adoptive country: I adopted it because I liked it and I was allowed to; it adopted me because I was clearly the kind of person that was wanted -- white, married, British, churchgoing, educated, stable, extremely unlikely to upset the applecart in any way. How lucky I was! How different it is for many other people trying to come to this country. How different it is for those Chinese stowaways -- and by the way, I planned this talk before the latest incidents on the West Coast, but those happenings do provide a wonderful embodiment of the problems.

I first spoke about this topic about five years ago in Olinda after attending a community meeting about immigration in the nearby town of Leamington. At the meeting, which was a gathering of invited guests, mainly clergy and representatives of some other organizations, discussion centred around who should be allowed into Canada, on what criteria and with what stipulations about where they could go and how they could live once they're here. What struck me with unexpected force was how it seemed to be taken for granted that we who live here have the right to decide whether anyone else shall live here. We think we have the right; we think we own the country. Let's examine that assumption.

The concept of ownership of land is neither unique to humans nor universal among humans. Many animals, as we all know, defend the territory which they regard as theirs, with their lives in some cases. Many, but not all, human beings do the same thing. A territorial sense seems to be about as pervasive as the regulation of sexual relationships: the customs vary, but many animals and most humans abide by certain rules. Among humans, there's been a gradual but (thank God) essential evolution, still incomplete, out of the primitive but widespread concept of women-as-property towards the recognition that women cannot be owned, and we're working on that in relation to children. Perhaps a similar evolution will take place in our attitude towards the land on which we live; perhaps we shall come to see, as some ancient peoples even on this continent have always seen, that the land cannot be owned except by us all. It belongs equally to everyone.

It doesn't belong more to Queen Elizabeth or the Governor General than to anyone else; it doesn't belong more to the English than to the French or even the Italians or the Mexicans. It belongs, for want of a better phrase, to the interdependent web of existence, of which we are only a part, and "having title" to a piece of it can only mean a kind of extended rental agreement, a long-term loan -- not from a landlord, but from the world at large.

The basis for maintaining our supposed ownership of real estate, at the personal or local or national levels, seems to me to be at rock bottom little else than brute force. The rationale takes two forms: "I was here first" and "I'm stronger than you are", and sometimes both together. On this continent, "I was here first" didn't work initially, because the aboriginal peoples who might justifiably have said it seemed to be lacking in the territorial sense and alsobecause the European invaders were stronger. The colonization of Canada, like colonization everywhere, was based on brute force, with almost no reference to the rights of those who were here first. This doesn't come as a surprise to any of you, but what's much less generally acknowledged, I think, is that we've now based our whole claim to own the country, our whole right to decide who shall come in and who shall be refused, on the fact which seemed to have no relevance at all when we were grabbing the country from the Indians and Inuit: "I was here first". I suggest that neither of these bases for our control of immigration is valid in the sense of being founded on good values. Neither "I'm stronger than you are," nor "I was here first," is a high ideal.

What, then, might be a valid foundation for an immigration policy? Well, I'm going to suggest that we might take seriously some lines from a poem by a rather obscure nineteenth century American poet, Emma Lazarus, whose claim to fame is that this verse from her poem "The New Colossus" is inscribed on the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

I have to say at this point that I remember most vividly a skit by some British comedians in the sixties -- Dudley Moore and Peter Cooke, it might have been -- who were talking about the sad deficiencies of American society and how they'd come about. "The whole problem's contained in those words on the Statue of Liberty," one of the Brits said. "Africa and Asia were told, `Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.' Well, they did!"

I suppose they didn't do it for long, because that poem wasn't taken seriously by anyone for more than a few years, but I suggest it's worth reconsidering as a noble statement of national purpose, far more worthy of respect than "I'm stronger than you" or "I was here first". After all, what's the worst that could happen? Australia was colonized largely by convicts who didn't have a great deal to say about the matter and today wouldn't be considered anyone's first choice of immigrant. Mary Gilmore's poem urges us to remember those rejects of society who shaped the country. Australia didn't do too badly in those early days, and maybe it would have been better to have continued that way than to have developed, as it did for a while, a "white Australia" policy. We might do better, I suggest to you, to say to the world, "Give us the wretched refuse of your teeming shore! Send us the homeless!" than to pursue a policy of letting in those who need least to come, that is, those who've had a privileged upbringing and are already educated, skilled and financially stable.

For a short while some years ago I was on the mailing list of the local ProLife organization and every month I received a journal called Prolife News. There was usually not a great deal I could feel much sympathy with, although I tried to read it with an open mind, but an article in one issue caught my attention and had me agreeing with some of the points it made. It was headed, "The Myth of Over-Population", and of course it was written from a viewpoint very different from mine, aimed among other things at discouraging contraception which I would encourage with all the energy I can. But here's the part I liked:

Since 1965 the world's population has almost doubled; however, food production has more than kept pace with it. In the period 1951-92 food production actually increased by 30 percent, and the price of food fell substantially over the same period. As a result, chronic malnutrition in the Third World declined, from 36percent during the late 1960s to 20 percent during the late 1980s.

But even supposing you can feed them, will not the poor become poorer if the wealth . . . has to be divided into ever smaller shares? No, because that is not how national economies actually function. Wealth is produced by work. It is just as easy to argue that population growth is necessary for economic development as the reverse.

The prolife people are arguing for population growth by birthrate, of course, whereas I was reading with population growth from immigration in mind. That article was actually taken from Britain's Sunday Times, and it links up nicely with an article I read some time ago in the Globe and Mail which asked how we know what is the appropriate level of immigration to keep Canada's economy healthy. The writer [Andrew Coyne, not exactly a bleeding-heart liberal, I think] pointed out that the number we have chosen (through our government and civil service) is purely arbitrary. A million immigrants a year, or more, might work perfectly well; in fact we might all benefit from the dramatically increased labour pool. After all, we keep hearing about the aging of our society and how there won't be enough young workers to pay our old-age pensions -- well, increased immigration is one answer!

My partner John was born and raised in New York City, home of the Statue of Liberty, like Herb and Barb Lefcourt and maybe some others here. I asked John once what he thought would happen if we adopted Emma Lazarus' statement, or some words from an old hymn, "Whosoever will, may come." John's immediate response (and he said he didn't mind being quoted) was, "Instead of having to work till July to pay off my taxes, I'd have to work till September!" Well! I thought that sounded like a pretty easy way to save the world. Just a tax hike. Surely it would be worth it, to give a place to those huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I suppose it's barely possible that some of you might disagree with me on that, but it could
lead to an interesting exploration of what price we would be willing to pay . . . !

I think economic fears are certainly among the weightiest factors determining our immigration policy at present, but there are others as well. We fear all kinds of changes in addition to the economic ones -- changes in demographics and culture and religion, changes in "the face of the country". I've been very much struck, in the time I've been here in the K-W area by what a family feeling there still is here, not only in this church but in the community at large.

So many people have been here for generations; so many know their neighbours; so many lead similar kinds of lives. It would be hard to say goodbye to that, even if it didn't happen overnight but over a matter of years. As was pointed out in our discussion last week, too little change may mean we stagnate, but too much change, too quickly, can kill us.

Since I came to Canada, and on my now-yearly visits to England, I've seen both countries change to some extent, although the change is often exaggerated. It's certainly true that in the major cities white faces sometimes appear to be the minority, and the English language competes with many others from all parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. As a visitor to England, I enjoy the colour and variety and what seems like a broadening of the conventional British outlook. If I were living there, I might feel a few more of the negatives, I suppose, some more nostalgia for the way it was when I was growing up, some concern about the conflicts that almost inevitably arise from the meeting of cultures. But I think I would see it, overall, as being part of life at the turn of the millennium, a time when people are more mobile than ever, when ethnic groups and rich and poor are getting all mixed up together and you often can't tell whether someone's a newcomer or has been here from the beginning. Above all, I see it as a matter of what's right: it's right that people who want to live in England or Canada should be able to do so, whether they have money or skills or nothing. To me, it's as right for them to be able to do this as it's right for me to be able to move from Ancaster to Montreal to Kingsville to Kitchener.

Nobody asked me to prove first that I wouldn't be a drain on Kitchener's economy. I'm a citizen of Canada, so I can live where I wish in Canada. Well, I'm a citizen of the world, too, and so are the huddled masses, and they should be able to live where they wish in the world, I believe, even if that interferes with those of us who were here first, even if we're stronger than they are.

The reality is, of course, very different. It's true that Canada has had a relatively open immigration policy compared with other developed countries, but that's only like saying that we have a relatively low rate of infant mortality -- it doesn't mean it's satisfactory. And the trend at the moment is to tighten the rules, rather than relax them. We seem to be moving further towards entrenched ownership of territory, away from seeing the world as a global village.

You probably know that at the moment there are two categories of people coming to live in Canada from other countries: refugees and immigrants. In relation to the first category, refugees, we don't do too badly, in theory at least. (In practice, it's a mess, through incompetence and backlogs of cases and confusion about what constitutes a reasonable fear of persecution. But with goodwill and effort, the practice could be tidied up to reflect the humane theories behind it.) It's the second category that bothers me more, immigrants. There are currently two main classes of immigrants: those who are coming to be reunited with family members and those who have contributions to make to our economy. The government has moved to define family very narrowly indeed, so that fewer and fewer relatives are eligible to join their families in Canada, and to define "contribution to the economy" more and more in terms of the money that an applicant has to invest in this country or the way in which their skills match jobs open for them.

I have to say here that polls show that the vast majority of Canadians are in favour of these moves. O.K. -- I'm perfectly used to being in a minority and I long ago stopped thinking that being in a majority position makes anything right. I think, though, that we should all recognize that in the two categories of people who can come to live in Canada there is no provision at all for the people described by Emma Lazarus: tired, poor, huddled masses, wretched refuse. As one who loves word-play, I can't help lingering over that word "refuse", noticing that these, the "wretched refuse", are the ones we refuse, and wondering whether that does not make us as wretched, in some ways, as them.

I'll end with these words, from an unknown source, which were part of an old service at the little church of Olinda, which in many ways epitomized the old, rural, stable, related Canada. They are words used for a candlelighting ritual:

Come share the kindling of the candle. In joy and faith, our religion flickers and flames. Were we to bring a flame from Peru, China, India, Africa, Europe, Boston, Montreal, or anywhere in Ontario, and place the wicks together, There would be no boundaries. The flames would merge into one, brighter and warmer than before. These are auspicious times. The world is becoming one in ways unseen.

We pray that we may truly know ourselves and others, that in freedom's way all may lose fear, make the long journey, and enter the dance and love of the universal flame.