The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

It is the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War. Over 300,000 dead in Syria. One and a half million injured or disabled. Four and a half million people fleeing the country as refugees. And Syria is just one of a growing number of failed or failing states in the Middle East and North Africa. How should developed nations respond to human suffering on this mass scale? Do the prosperous societies of the West, including Canada and the U.S., have a moral imperative to assist as many refugees as they reasonably and responsibly can? Or, is this a time for vigilance and restraint in the face a wave of mass migration that risks upending Western nations' openness, tolerance and ultimately their very way of life? Arguing for the motion are Louise Arbour and Simon Schama Arguing against the motion are Mark Steyn and Nigel Farage The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail]. To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz and Christina Stewart Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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To arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, adapted from the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, be it resolved. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. A fire that tore through a major refugee camp in Greece has forced thousands of its occupants to feel. onto the island of Lesbos, even while dozens of them tested positive for coronavirus. Mattresses on the floor overcrowding. Social distancing seems impossible at the moment in the only migrant reception center of Lampedusa. The British government has come under criticism after newspaper reports that it's considering

plans to house asylum seekers offshore on remote islands. Since August, more than a thousand migrants have made illegal crossings from the French port of Calais. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudier-Griffis. Well, the COVID-19 pandemic may have frozen much of the world in its tracks, but the desperate and dangerous journey of 30 million refugees fleeing their homes to escape wartime violence and economic hardship continues. Critics say the massive wave of migrants that we've witnessed since 2015 do not meet the

definition for protection described in the Geneva Refugee Convention. They argue that prosperous and state. stable countries should feel no moral obligation to provide safe harbor to individuals crossing borders simply to improve their standard of living. We will send you back. And, you know, the UK should not be regarded as a place where you can automatically come and break the law by seeking to arrive illegally. If you come illegally, you are an illegal migrant and I'm afraid the law will treat you as such.

Advocates for refugees say that the hostile reception that greets them today is no different than the xenophobia encountered by previous generations of migrants. They argue that we do have a moral obligation to the millions of people whose lives and livelihoods have been devastated by the never-ending wars and conflicts of our time. Our failure to offer refugees safe harbor and sanctuary betrays our values and undermines the inclusiveness that makes our democracies, vibrant and strong. Exclusion is costly and inclusion pays. We must uphold human dignity in the face of the pandemic and learn from the handful of countries that have shown how to implement travel restrictions and border controls while fully respecting human rights and international refugee protection principles.

On the main monk debate stage of Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto, Canada, two teams composed of international thought leaders grappled with the question of our moral responsibilities to global refugees and migrants. Here for your listening pleasure is an abridged podcast version of this memorable debate.

Thank you. Welcome to the Monk debate on the global refugee crisis. My name is Rudyard Griffiths. Once again, serving as your moderator. Let's get our two teams of debaters out here, center stage and our debate underway. Our resolution taken from the inscription, the Statue of Liberty,

be it resolved. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Please welcome our first speaker for the resolution. She's a former Canadian Supreme Court Justice, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and a United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, among many other accomplishments. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Canada's Louise Arbor. So glad we could do this. Now, Louise's teammate is an internationally acclaimed historian,

cultural commentator, and art critic. Please welcome big thinker, Simon Shama. Well, one great team of debaters deserves another. Speaking against the resolution is a renowned column. author and conservative human rights activist, ladies and gentlemen, Mark Stein. While Mark's debating partner is the leader of UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party,

and a member of the European Parliament. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Nigel Farage. Let's now go to our opening statements. The words of the motion that I'm here to support were written by a woman, Emma Lazarus. And these words are engraved on a face statue representing a woman holding a torch, and maybe less noticeably holding also the tablets of law with a broken chain at her feet. So it should come as no surprise to you that

this has considerable appeal to me. Understood in today's term, it's a moving, poetic way of capturing both the spirit and the letter of the Refugee Convention. The 1951 Refugee Convention was written essentially because and for Europe. and it remains the framework within which a world purporting to be governed by the rule of law must deal with the current refugee crisis in Europe and must also stop turning a blind eye to equally pressing crises elsewhere. This is part of the never again that the world screamed loud and clear after the Holocaust and betrayed on so many occasions since then.

So today should not be one of those. The protection framework that is set in place by the Convention provides that refugees should not be penalized for their illegal entry or stay in a country. And the principle of non-refoulauma precludes returning refugees to countries where they are at risk. This obviously puts a disproportionate demand on countries that are more easily reachable than others, such as in the case of Syria, the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, in which there are currently some 4.5 million Syrian refugees, as well as the countries that are at the external borders of Europe, Greece, Italy, and so on.

So this leads to another fundamental principle which underpins the Refugee Convention that is the need for international cooperation in burden sharing. And I'm cautious here using the word burden. I am aware of the fear that an influx of foreigners will transform our social fabric in an undesirable way. But the reality is that our social fabric

is changing anyway in this increasingly interconnected world. We have a choice. The greatest threat to Western values is not an influx of people who may not share them today. It's the hypocrisy of those claiming to protect these values

and then repudiating them by their actions. So Mark Stein, you're up next. Your six minutes begins now. The great question before us tonight is whether the huddled masses on those teeming shores are really yearning to breathe free or whether they're simply economic migrants who want to avail themselves of the comforts of advanced societies. As we all would, there are 3,000 people here in Roy Thompson Hall, and it would be nice if everyone in Toronto could be in Roy Thompson Hall.

But if everyone in Toronto moves into Roy Thompson Hall, it isn't Roy Thompson Hall anymore. And that's the situation that is faced in Europe today. The people who have entered Europe are not refugees, as that term has traditionally been understood. In 2015, in Europe, men represented 77% of the asylum applications. That's an extraordinary population deformation. What does it mean to breathe free? Under the Taliban, it's illegal for Madame Arbor to feel sunlight on her face.

It's literally a crime for her to, quote, breathe free. She can breathe only through a mask approved by the man who in effect owns her. So what happens when you put a man from that kind of society in, say, a Scandinavian town? Northern Europe has enjoyed a culture of mixed public bathing since the 19th century. But a benign social activity to Germans and Scandinavians is something entirely different to men from a culture where women are chattels. So female patrons of public baths are now routinely assaulted. And in January, Sweden's national swimming arena was forced for the first time to segregate

men and women in the hot tubs. So goodbye to a century-old tradition. Migrant rights trump your culture. Madam Arbor was the first prosecutor ever to charge rape as a crime against humanity. In 2007, she published an important report on the use of rape in Sudan as a weapon of war. It was a distressing report. She documented 15 individual cases of sexual assault. if Madame Arbor were to publish a similar report on Germany today, she'd be able to cite more than 500 cases from just one night in just one town, Cologne on New Year's Eve. Madam Arbor said some things that I agree with. She and I agree that immigration on this scale is transformative.

The only difference is that Madame Arbor thinks it's for the better, and I don't. And I'm genuinely curious to know what aspects of Afghan and Syrian and Sudanese culture that she would like us to be transformed by. Women's rights, fast-track justice whereby gays get thrown off rooftops, polygamy, child brides, clitoridectomies, the bracing commitment to free speech. I would like an answer on that for Madame Arbor tonight.

Thank you very much. Simon Sharma, over to you. Look, those lines are written by Emma Lazarus. She was a safari Jewess. She was a wealthy woman in New York. And she wrote them in 1883 after looking at the victims of Russian pogroms who come to America and having suffered horrendous atrocities committed against them in Kishinov and Odessa and Elizabethto Grad and saw them on Ward's Island.

And she didn't make a distinction between. economic migrants. She did that because actually, when you are fleeing from a place of cruelty and atrocity, your house has been blown up, your whole possibility of livelihoods been taken away from you, your children have no food, no medicine, what are you exactly?

You're terrifyingly running away from catastrophe, and the vast numbers of Syrians who displaced four million, of them internally displaced as those who are escaping the hell of Libya and Somalia and Afghanistan are fleeing exactly the monsters of Islamo-fascism that Mark accurately describes. They are not their friends. They're not their secret co-conspirators. They are horrified.

They're trying to get away from that culture. The answer is not to demonize all of Muslims, but actually to engage. with them. After the attack, both in Paris and Brussels, 150 imams actually in Europe, got up and made a statement of the abhorrence of the act. It can't possibly be true that you can't have a pluralist Muslim adoption of Western norms. In Britain, Nigel, we've lived with that for years and years before jihadism became a monstrosity that it is now. My green rosa is a Kurdish Muslim. You turn on the radio in the morning and you hear Raiza Iqbal for the BBC.

My local newsagents tells me when to look at the Jewish Chronicle, and his name is Ahmed. Nigel. Well, thank you. Good evening, everybody. If we're going to discuss the global refugee crisis, we better use the EU as a case study. But we must start by asking ourselves,

what is a refugee? It's a person with a well-founded fear of persecution because of their race, religion, political opinions or orientation who are outside their own country and fear returning to it. Now look, I know it's tempting to support this motion. It sounds wonderful, but just look where that idea has got the EU in the course of the last year. Jean-Claude Juncker, the unelective, European Commission President has changed the definition of what a refugee is to include people who come from war-torn areas, and given that the UNHCR, say there are currently 59 million people displaced in the world, that's quite a big number, but Juncker's taken it even broader. He said to be qualified as a European refugee if you come from extreme poverty, and that would

mean perhaps three billion people could possibly come to Europe. And there is nobody on this side of the argument trying to say that Islam is bad or all Muslims are bad. But what we are saying is that if you allow a very large number of young males to come to European countries, and if they come from a culture where women are at best second-class citizens, don't be surprised to see the abominations such as that we saw outside Cologne train station on New Year's Eve. But that is as nothing compared to what the boss of Europol said three weeks ago. He said there were now 5,000 jihadi fighters, every one of them, potentially a terrorist, that have got back into Europe through the Greek islands posing as migrants.

When ISIS say they will use the migrant routes to destroy. the civilization of Europe, I suggest we start to take them seriously. We have to oppose this motion. This motion at best is impractical and at worst poses a threat to our entire way of life. I want us to have a proper processing mechanism. I want us to welcome genuine refugees, not the disaster that is engulfing much of Europe today. Thank you. your host and moderator, thank you so much for listening to the Monk Debates podcast. We really appreciate the time you're spending with us. I wanted to ask for your help today. Please consider writing a review of the Monk Debates podcast on the Apple platform or wherever you get your podcast.

We'd really appreciate your feedback and help spreading a word about this program. And thank you for being part of our community, a community dedicated to restoring the art of civil and substantive public debate in our time. Now back to our program. We're now going to go into timed rebuttal so we can get some quick reaction from each team. Ms. Arbor will put two minutes on the clock for you. Give us your reaction to what you've heard from the other side. All right, two issues. First of all, on the definition of refugees, I think in the current climate of armed conflict, in my opinion, virtually every civilian that is not a combatant qualifies for refugee protection, unless he is excluded by the convention as a war criminal.

And the reality of it is that the protection of civilian, currently in armed conflict, is non-existent. They are targeted by all sides, and therefore, I think for the most part, they qualify for refugee protection. Now, the suggestion that what we see these waves of young men coming into Europe are all economic migrants, frankly, it's hard to believe

why these economic migrants would have paid thousands of dollars for the privilege of drowning in the Mediterranean. And I hope we'll have an opportunity to return to the issues raised by these newborn feminists there. I want to hear from the protein back to back. So, Simon, let's have your rebuttal, and then I'll come on to Mark and Nigel. Okay. Yeah, I was just struck by how obsessed with sex these two guys are the way of that, actually. If you really think about actually the places, you know, from Afghanistan, for example, or Libya,

or of course Syria, where most of the migrants are coming from. It's extraordinary to think that they're really just interested in a moment of possible upward social mobility. Those are all desperately brutalized, collapsing states. Most of the people, you know, who are coming over more than half are males in displaced horrible camps like Atma, where there are 58,000 people stuck there in Syria with desperate shortages, no sanitation, shortages of food and medicine. Simon, we're going to have lots of time in the cross-examination

to get into these issues, but I want to come over the other side, and Mark Stein get your quick reaction to what you've heard. I made a decision tonight that I wasn't going to do funny stuff. I was going to be deadly serious. Madam Arbor scoffs at the newfound feminists over. here. Here's a random example from 10 days of German migrant crimes in January.

16 year old boy raped inside Wolfsburg City Hall. 13 year old girls sexually assaulted near a railway station in Elvagen. Three girls sexually assaulted at a swimming pool in Ansbach. I can go on and on. It isn't funny.

It isn't funny. Nigel, you're up next for your rebuttal. Thank you. What Mark has just said is difficult to listen to, and We'd all rather pretend it isn't happening. But sadly, it is happening. Simon, you're in denial. I'll tell you what's sad.

I tell you what's sad. What's sad, and you'd know as an historian, is that 100 years ago, the women went into the factories, earned their first decent pay packets, went to the pub, got the vote. We've lived through 100 years of female liberation and emancipation,

and now we have the mayors of towns in Germany and in Sweden, and in other parts of Northern Europe, telling women not to walk out after dark on their own. And actually, I find the sheer hypocrisy of those of you that have stood up and said you're going to defend female rights

when actually you think migrant rights are more important than female rights in our own community. Frankly, shame on you. Now we're going to move on to our moderated portion of the discussion. We'll get into some the issues that have been raised to date. Certain societies are better at integrating people than others. Traditionally, Canada thinks that it's done a pretty good job. The United States is called

the melting pot. European countries often are not very good at integration. Therefore, is this a different kind of crisis? I think Europe has done a pitiful job at forthrightly defending the virtues and moral decences and political traditions of Western pluris. liberal capitalist democracy. Europe is essentially an organization managing the business cycle and hoping for the best when it comes to shopping for Christmas. And that is an abject surrender.

If we are ever going to make any headway against militant apocalyptic salafism, there has to be something to offer the refugee population wherever they come from. We need to be less defensive less mute, less muffled. They should be reading Locke and Milton and Mill. And making that tradition as passionately important

and a stake in citizenship is as important as screening and putting up walls and having decent counter-terrorist intelligence. I don't know, maybe... I agree with you, completely. We have been abject, pathetic. We've lain prostrate on the floor. We've allowed people to come in,

change large parts of our communities and our cities, and nobody amongst our leadership. And this is not about getting religious in government, but no one's had the guts and the courage to stand up for our Christian culture. No, I don't want to hear Christian. I happen to be Jewish. There was nothing...

Well, we come from. Well, as you well know, as you well know, it is a Judeo-Christian... culture. And that is our culture. There's less than a thing of Judeo-Christian culture. You see, as soon as I believe Jesus is a Messiah or you too. As soon as I start to talk about real values, you shrink into your shell like everybody else, don't you? We have our Judeo-Christian culture. We have been gutless and weak in defending it. But here's the problem. And here's why we're nervous and we're cautious about opening up our doors to unsold millions of people from those countries. It is that

never before have we had to live with the fifth column living inside our own communities and our own country that want to kill us, blow us up and change our way of life. And I'm arguing for having a sensible refugee policy, but we must, must, must be able to screen people before they come to settle in our countries. Surely that's just plain common sense. I'd have to come to Louise on this point and then I'll go to you, Mark. Well, the first thing, again, we have to be very careful not to exaggerate. I think this is exactly the trap, is to exaggerate the sense of danger and fear that this idea of infiltration can generate. A couple of things. If we had assumed that most Italians coming to this country, for instance, would be members of the mafia,

or most Asians would be members of triads. I've said that a million times. We would have closed the door. There is no basis upon which to suggest that the people who are fleeing the atrocious events in Syria, in Libya, to take these two in northern Iraq and so on, that these people are missiles that are being sent to infiltrate our communities. You know what? It's going to be a lot easier, and I really believe that it's part of a very sophisticated strategic plan by those who are intent on destroying our democracies to tease us into an irrational where we will destroy the very values we believe in. We will over-securitize,

and inevitably we will use security measures in discriminatory fashion with carding and racial profiling and so on. Slowly, we will destroy our very values out of the sheer fear that they're coming in to do it for us. Well, we are getting to the meat of it now, and the question is people talk about European values. British values, Canadian values, without ever defining it. But the reality of this situation is

that if you look at what happened with the Charlie Ebdo slaughter in Paris and then look at the polls of the Muslim communities afterwards, they don't want to put a bullet in a cartoonist, they don't want to blow up the Brussels airport, but there is no commitment to traditional Western understanding of free speech and as Simon says, we don't teach them it. We don't assimilate them. And if you don't, you have bicultural societies,

as you dealt with in Bosnia. If you don't assimilate these people coming in in Europe, then you will have bicultural societies and they will tear Europe apart. The point marks making is very interesting. We have actually got now, with in England, the growth of a parallel society. Party. 80% of Muslim marriages in Britain are not recognized under UK law. They're conducted

under Muslim law, which of course gives the women far fewer rights than they would have under UK law. We now have 83 Sharia courts existing in England. We now have tens of thousands of cases of female genital mutilation taking place every single year in England, which we think of as a country, perhaps, not with as bigger problems as some of the others. And yet there's not yet been one prosecution within our system. So Simon and I have got some degree of agreement on this. That the law has to be equal. Applied equally to everybody, we mustn't be scared

of applying the law equally to ethnic minorities. If we are, we're storing up massive problems for the future. But Louise, I'm sorry. You're trying to compare some of the concerns that we've got on this side of the debate with previous migrations. It's not an exaggeration, the word. you used, unless you think the boss of Europol is wrong. Should we be concerned when he tells

us there are 5,000 jihadists, stroke terrorists, that have come into Europe in the last 18 months through the Greek islands posing as refugees? Should we be concerned? You bet your life we should be concerned. Only eight of them killed 130 people in Paris. We have a problem here. Get out of denial, please. Yes, but the deep problem is that jihadi cells exist. But if you're going to do something about homegrown

Salafist jihadism, you have to engage with the Muslim community, not demonize it en masse. Simon's point is right here. When you've got second and third generation Belgians and Frenchmen and Germans and Britons and Canadians going off to join ISIS,

blowing up Paris, blowing up Brussels, that ought to occasion a certain modesty among us that our skills at assimilation at inculcating our values are not as awesome and all-encompassing as they were in the 19th century. And the answer, when second- and third-generation immigrants are blowing up the airport,

that suddenly that's the reason to accelerate, Immigration from the same source is very bizarre. In what sense are these people Belgian? Holding a passport does not make you Canadian and does not make you Belgian and does not make you French. I agree. What? I think what, you know,

what maybe we both want to see is some way, but this is the difference between us, I think, actually. There are those of us who essentially are possibly naively optimistic humanists who think it not impossible to be an Orthodox Muslim and a good Canadian or a good Brit, a good Democrat at the same time. And for that, you need to be involved and engaged to a degree which actually hasn't happened in exercises of civic education, which make it clear that you can indeed go to a mosque on Friday for Friday prayers

and still be a decent democratically participating citizen. If you go to the mosque and the Imam happens to preach the destruction of the society that you're living in, bloody well turn him in. That doesn't happen, unfortunately. I go back to my point, Simon, that you have to have something to assimilate Yes. Most of the history you know, the people in British schools haven't a clue about. They don't teach history in North American schools. My kids are in some school where it's called social studies. I actually have a movement to abolish the term. Yeah, well, good for you. I'll sign

that. Can I sign you up? Yeah. I want to move on to numbers, because that's a big part of this debate. We're seeing countries, not simply in the Middle East, Turkey, 2.7 million, Lebanon, a million. Nigel, if you look at Great Britain, in terms of legally settled Syrian refugees, almost infinitesimal numbers compared to your European counterparts, what does Britain, what does Canada,

what does the United States owe its European allies in terms of trying to take the pressure that you've diagnosed, you and Mark have diagnosed, is so acute within their societies right now? What do we owe them? Well, we have a problem in the United States. Kingdom with this because we, having never had this before, we now have an open door to half a billion people who are European Union citizens. I think in Britain, and actually now in Germany

and Sweden, we're actually becoming very hard-hearted because of free movement of people. I think we have to bring this debate a little bit back into less apocalyptic scale. What we're talking about are people running away from oppression, and frankly, we have to assume when you consider immense risk that they're taking to flee that at least the majority of them are bona fide refugee applicants. And then we have to process it. So we're talking about a very small numbers. When we say millions, it's millions wanting, knocking on the door of a billion people, if you put Europe, North America, all the world's capacity of the wealthy nations together. The key, I believe, is international cooperation. There's no reason Greece, which is,

was having a lot of financial problems itself, should have been stuck with bearing the largest burden. The European partners and the Western countries generally should have stepped up to the plate. And I think Canada should still do so beyond the already generous signal that we have already sent. We have the luxury, actually, in Canada of doing a full pre-screening. They don't row into Canada. They sit in refugee camps where we have months and months through UNHCR. to do pre-selection processes. With the luxury of these processes in place, we should be doing tons more.

But then everybody has to work in that direction and stop the exaggeration, not the non-existence of security risk. I'm not saying there is zero risk, but to blow it up to such an extent that we start talking about erecting walls with barbed wires, I think this will be actually a stain

and a shame on our generation. if that's our response. Okay. Okay. It's time now for closing statements. We're going to proceed in the opposite order of our opening statements. So Nigel, you have the stage.

Thank you. Well, thank you. And thank you for a very civilized debate. I've tried tonight to make the point that I do think it's beholden upon people in the West to open their hearts to genuine refugees,

people who are in fear of direct persecution, imprisonment and death because of their race, their religion, their political beliefs, indeed, their sexual orientation. I've tried to make that point, and I've no doubt that America and Canada could do an awful lot more than they're doing. But it's Europe that has faced the front line of this. And what we have done is we've thrown out of the window our classical definition of what a refugee is, and we broadened it to anybody.

coming from a war-torn area, or frankly anybody coming from a poor country. Just opening up your doors and not being able in a modern world where we do have a genuine terrorist threat, we have to have security checks, we have to process people offshore and make sure they're genuine refugees. This motion, you cannot support this motion. It is idealised nonsense. It doesn't make sense.

Oppose the motion, please. Thank you. So I want to end with the words of a Christian, not mine. Written in 1624, you all know some of them at least and sure. The Dean of St. Paul's, John Dunn. No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,

as well as if a manner of thy friends were. Any man's death diminishes me because I'm involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, Tooth for thee. I confess, I've never liked the Emma Lazarus poem that is stapled to the bottom of the Statue of Liberty. The French gave the Americans a fabulous statue of liberty, and the Americans nailed a third-rate poem to it and turned it into a celebration of mass migration.

Liberty and mass migration have nothing to do with each other. And often, in fact, the latter can imperil the former. And that is where Simon's naively optimistic humanism may take us. We cannot fix failed states by inviting millions of their people to move in with us. All that ensures is more failed states, more failure, and eventually one by one, the nations of the West will join them. And then you'll really be yearning to breathe free, and there'll be nowhere to do it. Please vote against this motion.

Ms. Arbor, you'll have the last word. At the bottom of, I think, today's debate, I think, is showing that what is being portrayed today as unique is, in fact, just another manifestation of the old myths and stereotypes and prejudices that have met virtually every wave of immigration. and it's particularly odious when it targets refugees, not just any other kind of migrants. Many of the things that we hear today about Muslim refugees penetrating our Western societies

with a fifth column intent on destroying it were attributed sometimes in relatively recent parts of our histories to Catholics, for instance, who were said to be backwards, had a loyalty to Rome more than to their home country. Doesn't that sound also like the yellow, low peril, will all end up being of a mixed color if we let in these millions of people coming from all over the world.

The reality is, despite an original knee-jerk at times very hostile reception to newcomers, the history in this country has been a history of immense success of integrating people coming from all kinds of different cultures and religion. And when I talk about integration, it is a two-way street. It has changed us and it will change us in the future. We have to have a very impoverished confidence in our democracy to think that it is so fragile that it cannot sustain the profound differences that will challenge us through our devotion to free speech,

freedom of assembly, and pluralism. Thank you. Well, that wraps up our month debate on migration, which took place at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto, when the world was able to argue. you in person with each other. Well, those times are hopefully returning for us soon again. In fact, after almost a two-year hiatus, the Monk Debates is planning to come back to in-person debates this autumn. We're going to keep all of our monk members up to date on our latest plan. So please consider

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