Juno News - June 20, 2019


The importance of integrating immigrants

Mentioned
Ahmed Hussein Francis Fukuyama Les Miserables Andrew Scheer Ahmed Hussain Carrie Lam Leger
Catherine McKenna has lost all credibility Conservatives should withdraw from the Paris Agreement

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

185.0

Word count

940

Sentence count

33

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the podcast, I discuss a new poll on immigration in Canada, Ahmed Hussan's response to it, and what's happening on the ground in Hong Kong right now. I talk about the Hong Kong situation, and how it relates to Canada's immigration policy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I want to discuss two issues that at first don't seem to have much in common but there's a thread
00:00:15.000 between the two of them and that's a new Canadian poll on perspectives on immigration and Ahmed
00:00:19.680 Hussein's response to it and what's happening on the ground in Hong Kong right now. So first,
00:00:24.960 the poll. This was commissioned by Leger and it asked Canadians do they believe there should be
00:00:31.080 more immigration to Canada or should they pause it and decrease it barring changes and approaches to
00:00:38.280 integration matters. Two-thirds of Canadians said yes we have some concerns about immigration as it
00:00:45.660 relates to integration and a third said no it's it's okay keep increasing the numbers. Now Ahmed
00:00:51.140 Hussein he jumped at this opportunity to say he is concerned about all of this and he was implying
00:00:56.880 of course that there's some sort of prejudice or racism going on and he jumped at the opportunity
00:01:01.220 to use this to vilify conservative leader Andrew Scheer talking about his conspiracy theories and
00:01:07.240 alt-right views and all that sort of implication. But hold on a second here it's very important that
00:01:13.320 integration was a part of that question. This wasn't Canadians saying oh we don't like immigration we
00:01:19.280 don't like immigrants we don't like this group or that group and so forth. It was about whether or
00:01:24.220 not one can effectively integrate immigrants into our community or at least the way we're doing it 1.00
00:01:28.900 now if it is being done effectively. And it's really important that Ahmed Hussein I think stop and
00:01:34.500 reflect on that and what it all means. I mean two-thirds of Canadians are saying this.
00:01:39.420 You don't want to vilify people for having this perspective. You're a public servant. This is the view of
00:01:44.360 the majority of the people you're tasked with serving. So take a moment, a pause, and reflect on
00:01:49.200 what all this means. And I've been reflecting on an essay I read written by Francis Fukuyama who is
00:01:54.500 one of the most prominent political science professors in the English language and as his name
00:01:58.920 should be a dead giveaway for he's no alt-right white supremacist. In fact he's somewhere you know
00:02:03.960 centrist, liberal, maybe a bit left and so forth. He's liked by general liberal communities. He wrote an
00:02:09.560 essay in foreign affairs magazine, again no you know intellectual right-wing dark web kind of thing
00:02:15.080 but one of the most prestigious centrist journals out there for sort of the liberal consensus. He
00:02:20.620 wrote an essay in that publication talking about integration issues, why integration matters,
00:02:25.880 why there's only a certain number of immigrants a country can absorb in a way that is is sort of
00:02:31.000 efficient with integration principles and said if not you're going to fray at the social fabric and you
00:02:35.780 might even have security problems. Again this is Professor Fukuyama speaking. I think Ahmed Hussain
00:02:41.720 would be wise to reflect on what all that means to strike the balance. Okay so where does the Hong
00:02:47.000 Kong thing come into this? Well in recent weeks we have seen hundreds of thousands of people take to
00:02:52.800 the streets to protest the communist regime overstepping their reach in Hong Kong, the communist regime
00:02:59.320 in Beijing, wanting to bring in that extradition law in Hong Kong that says they can extradite anyone
00:03:04.860 for wrong think or wrong speak or what have you. I mean that's not what they're saying but those are
00:03:09.380 the people's very valid concerns and given it happens in mainline China, people being disappeared
00:03:14.440 for various reasons, you better believe there's good reason to worry it will happen there. It's been
00:03:20.000 really inspirational to see all of these people take to the streets. They've been singing songs from
00:03:24.080 the musical Les Miserables. They're saying no we don't want to be under this authoritarian regime,
00:03:29.580 under this communist regime. Now a similar thing actually happened a couple decades ago in the 90s
00:03:35.440 when people in Hong Kong were concerned about the handover from Britain to China and a lot of them
00:03:41.260 came to Canada at that time. A couple hundred thousand people said we got to get out of here
00:03:46.200 we're heading to Canada. My idea is that we do hashtag welcome to Canada the right way this time and if
00:03:54.920 this extradition bill goes through and it looks like Carrie Lam is still kind of keeping it floating
00:03:59.720 around they've suspended it but she's not ruling out bringing it in let's welcome people from Hong Kong
00:04:05.820 to Canada once again like happened in mass over 20 years ago. The things this will do is send a clear
00:04:13.260 signal that Canada's interested in bringing in immigrants for sure not anti-immigrant at all and of course
00:04:18.740 we bring in 250, 300,000 people a year but a large amount of that quota for the next few years can be
00:04:24.900 filled with bringing in a number of people from Hong Kong welcoming them in because it's pretty clear
00:04:29.980 when you look at Hong Kong society you've got people anti-authoritarian, anti-communist, a lot of
00:04:36.020 similarities with Canadian society. This is a great sort of harmonious way to actually take those concerns
00:04:42.100 that people have in those poll numbers and bring them into action. Canadians are not at all saying
00:04:47.840 they have a problem with immigration they just want immigrants I think more consistent with the
00:04:52.100 Canadian way of life and Canadian values and if there's anything that is more indicative of
00:04:58.140 Canadian values it's people taking to the streets and saying we want liberties, we want freedoms
00:05:02.560 just like the people in Hong Kong have been doing.