Quotation

Community quotations are the opinions of contributing users. These quotations do not represent the opinions of Port Moody Public Library.
We see it repeatedly when a new group of immigrants arrives who are members of a religious minority, usually poor and ill-accustomed to the language and folkways of their new country and the workings of its economy. In response to these strange newcomers writers and politicians offer the same set of frightened, frightening ideas: They are different from previous groups. They don’t want to integrate. Their religion compels them to impose their values on us. Their reproduction rates will swamp us. They are disloyal and capable of violence... That said, the circumstances and context of each immigrant wave are profoundly different, and the outcome will never be exactly the same. But we should learn to recognize the pattern and to remember the long, awkward struggle for integration endured by those earlier waves, to identify the arguments that appear every time in literature, scholarship and politics, and then take care to make sure that we don’t repeat those mistakes.