Immigration: Lester Pearson

Immigration Policy Dept: So his immigration policy was also a policy of conquest, in an era of conquest. Yet, approaches differed. In the Spanish West Indies, he’d seen an empire enslave native peoples and work them to death, literally and collectively, then import new slaves from Africa. He also rejected the British route in Virginia or New England, of keeping apart from native peoples while pushing them off their land. His way was to treat prior inhabitants with individual and national respect: Learn from them, trade and live with them, intermarry. “Henceforth we shall be one people,” he said, according to Globe And Mail. I’ve been reading his book this summer up in the region Champlain knew as Huronia, between Georgian Bay and Lake Ontario, where he spent a year and got to know a complex agricultural society with many towns, a political structure and enough surplus corn to export to other native peoples. Mr. Fischer says Champlain’s enlightened openness came from having fought during 40 bloody years of religious war in Europe and feeling there had to be a better way. He calls it a “generational phenomenon,” comparable to the Lester Pearson generation of “wise men.” They lived through two world wars and a global depression; they responded with the UN and the welfare state. They make the Stephen Harper generation look callow, but that may just show that hard experience is a better teacher than stiff ideology and champlain’s immigration policy was unusual, since he and the settlers he brought from France were the immigrants. In a way, it was the native peoples already here who had the first immigration policy; they welcomed newcomers, in the absence of reasons not to, as if good things were likely to arise from new arrivals. Champlain seemed to admire that. It’s a more creative and humane approach than trying to assimilate the “others” to your own values, which are always a mixed bag. It opens future possibilities. The young men Champlain sent to learn native languages often intermarried, as did French families of high rank into similar native families. Eventually, this process led to the Metis nation, “the only ethnic group created indigenous to this continent,” says Champlain biographer David Hackett Fischer. As reported in the news.
@t mr fischer, global depression