Anthony Koch: Just because I'm a child of immigrants doesn't mean I support mass immigration
I am not a hyphenated citizen. I am not a guest. I am not a perpetual immigrant. I am Canadian. My parents are Canadian. My grandparents — immigrants though they were — became citizens of this country and thought of it as theirs. They never lived as permanent outsiders, and neither do I.
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What my grandparents experienced was not this. It was immigration governed by expectations, by rules, by culture, by a shared sense that the host nation mattered and that entry was not a right, but a privilege. They didn't arrive demanding accommodation. They arrived prepared to adapt. They weren't told Canada was racist or rotten. They were told to become Canadians. And they did.
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Now the very values that allowed them to succeed — things like speaking English or French, respecting the law, earning your place and pledging loyalty to Canada above all — are dismissed as relics of some oppressive past.
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You don't even need to speak one of the country's official languages nowadays — citizenship can be granted without a working knowledge of English or French. The border is treated as a formality, national identity as an embarrassment and Canadian-ness itself as something to be apologized for — unless, of course, it's being used to signal smug superiority over the Americans.
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And through it all, we, the children and grandchildren of immigrants, are told to keep our mouths shut. We're told we must support the demolition of our national identity, simply because once, long ago, someone in our family got off a boat or a plane.
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But I live here. I was born here. I was raised here. I pay taxes here. I vote here. I love this country as mine, not as a borrowed space on indefinite loan from history. So no, I don't think like an immigrant. I think like a Canadian.
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I will not allow my grandparents' sacrifices to be weaponized against the country they chose. I will not allow my name to be invoked in service of policies that degrade what they built. I will not be guilted, lectured or emotionally extorted into being complicit in our national decline.
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