INTRODUCTION

In comparative immigration studies, Canada stands out as an outlier: it is the only country in the world in which a majority of citizens want existing (that is, high) or higher levels of immigration. A majority in every other country, including the United States, wants fewer immigrants (Reitz Reference Reitz2011). Canada is also an outlier in its support for state multiculturalism. Globally, state-endorsed multiculturalism has been in retreat. Trevor Phillips (the black British Labour Party member and head of the Commission for Racial Equality), David Cameron (Conservative former prime minister of Britain), and Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic chancellor of Germany) all declared it “dead” (Joppke n.d.). The Netherlands, the only country adopting anything resembling substantive multicultural policies (more on this below), has repudiated them. Even Australia, like Canada an early adopter of official multiculturalism, has quietly downgraded the policy and placed greater emphasis on somewhat ill-defined “Australian values” (see Castles and Vasta Reference Castles, Vasta, Cornelius, Tsuda, Martin and Hollifield2004). By contrast, in Canada, it is inconceivable that a senior politician outside Quebec would denounce multiculturalism. ^{Footnote 1} The reasons are not difficult to discern: according to Environics polling, 85% of Canadians believe that multiculturalism is important to the country (Adams Reference Adams2008).

This article seeks to explain why both immigration and multiculturalism are so popular in Canada when they are so unpopular everywhere else. As any scholar who has heard a Canadian giving a paper on immigration policy will know, Canadian academics and policy makers offer a self-flattering interpretation that comes in two parts. The first, a state-driven explanation, is historical: since Quebec has long forced the country to cope with diversity, Canadians are more tolerant of immigrants than Europeans and less insistent on assimilation than Americans (see Government of Canada 2012). The second interpretation is policy based: by allowing people to retain their cultural commitments, official multiculturalism eases the integration of immigrants into society, which in turn makes Canadians more likely to support immigration (Adams Reference Adams2008; Angus Reference Angus1997; Fleras and Elliott Reference Fleras and Elliott1992; Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka1998).

In this article, I will argue that both of these views are wrong. The first is easily dispensed with. If Canada and Canadians had any particular talent for coping with diversity, then the country’s oldest “minority”—aboriginal Canadians—would be well incorporated into Canadian society and the Canadian economy. The situation of aboriginals (“First Nations”) is in fact a disaster: the unemployment rate among aboriginals is twice the national average (2011 figures: 15% vs. 7.5%); annual income in 2005 was $23,889 vs. $35,872 for non-aboriginals; and high school completion rates are 62% vs. 80.6% for non-aboriginals (2011 figures) (National Aboriginal Economic Development Board 2015, 17, 26, and 33, respectively). These indicators include First Nations who live on reserves as well as those who do not; outcomes are far worse for the former. Aboriginal people in Canada occupy a worse socio-economic position than African Americans in the United States, and there is no aboriginal equivalent of a visible black middle class or of massive cultural influence, as with African Americans in the United States (Gilmore Reference Gilmore2015).

The second claim—that multiculturalism eases migrants’ transition into Canadian society—is superficially more appealing. Yet, in the end, it too is baseless for one simple reason: Canada has never had anything other than a rhetorical multicultural policy.

Developing this point requires definitions. Much of the global debate about multiculturalism obscures the fact that the term means all things to all people. The most basic confusion is between multiculturalism as a sociological fact (that is, there are migrants from all corners of the globe living peacefully in the same country) and multiculturalism as a policy (which conceives of a particular way of incorporating migrants into a given society). ^{Footnote 2} The two have nothing to do with each other. A highly diverse society can be consistent with both a robustly anti-assimilationist and a robustly assimilationist policy. That is, one can think that immigration is a “good thing,” that immigrants should come from as many parts of the world as possible, but that immigrants should fully assimilate to their new country’s culture. Or one can think that immigration is a brilliant idea, that immigrants should come from everywhere, and that their own culture should be nourished and supported regardless of the effect on the receiving country. And one can, of course, think that there should be very little immigration, or immigration from only one part of the world, and that those who come should assimilate or that they should retain their own culture. Support for or opposition to multiculturalism as a policy is thus perfectly consistent with high or low levels of migration and with high or low levels of diversity.

Another basic distinction is between “thick” and “thin” multicultural policy. Thick multiculturalism implies that migrants integrate, if at all, through their own culture and that they privilege that culture over national laws, customs, and traditions. This conception of multiculturalism is the bête noire of multicultural critics in Europe, and they have something of a point (Phillips quoted in Adams Reference Adams2008, 134–5; Young Reference Young2001). Until commentators pointed to widely available data showing terrible outcomes in employment, education, and (something that matters least) neighborhood segregation, the Netherlands pursued a thick multicultural policy that subsidized foreign languages, separate faith schools, foreign radio and television programs, and so on (on this, see Koopmans Reference Koopmans, Cuperus, Duffek and Kandel2003, 163–68). Celebrated by academics around the world, multiculturalism in the Netherlands contributed to, or at least failed to prevent, lower educational achievement, higher unemployment, and worse earnings than those found among the same groups in neighboring Germany, a country that had itself long been the bête noire of the left-leaning academic activists dominating immigration studies (e.g., Mushaben Reference Mushaben2008).

Thin multiculturalism implies a right to one’s culture insofar as the expression of it harms no one and is consistent with national laws and human-rights culture. Although it may shock some Torontonians, who think that they invented multiculturalism sometime after the Beatles, you can find thin multicultural policy everywhere. French citizens of African descent wear dazzling, colorful dresses in Paris; Muslims attend mosques in Berlin; Italians operate restaurants in London; and Ukrainians tired of Edmonton’s weather may organize dances and performances in Los Angeles. Thin multiculturalism exists everywhere because it is basic to liberal democracy and a respect for human rights. There are small differences in how liberal states approach such matters as religious dress in state institutions (which France largely bans but Germany and the UK do not), but these differences rest at the margins (Banting and Kymlicka Reference Banting and Kymlicka2012; Multiculturalism Policy Index 2012). No liberal democracy attacks freedom of religion or association in principle; there are, rather, differences of opinion on what these freedoms mean. Non-democracies, by contrast, are culturally homogenizing and constitutionally hostile even to thin multiculturalism. One of the most consistently persecuted groups in the world is Christians in the Middle East. ^{Footnote 3} Similarly, there is no greater threat to religious minorities than the establishment of a theocracy, as the examples of Pakistan, and above all, Iran make abundantly clear.