My family immigrated to Canada from Italy just months before I was born. So, to be clear, my life wasn’t sunshine and lollipops. We were extremely poor. We often relied on food banks for meals and the church for clothing. This changed for me when I was 18 years old and got a student loan to go to school. My parents are still in a bad place.

I had to fight for my student loan because I owned a crappy car that they insisted I sell first but I needed to get from home to the school. It was a car that cost me $2000 that I saved for two and a half years of washing dishes three days a week in a diner because I knew that I would need it if I wanted to go to university. In the end, I had to sell it for $600 so that I could get the loan and I spent 3 hours a day on various public transport systems and vessels that cost me thousands of dollars a year to take.

After graduating with a PhD from the University of Toronto at 26 years old, I have been working the last 15 years from contract to contract in Canada with the Canadian Government and several universities.

I have never won any competitions mostly because the posting stated preference would be given to visible minorities. Only twice was I booted from a competition because I did not have the experience or sufficient expertise to satisfy the position requirement. I speak English and French fluently, I did everything that was ever expected of me and still less qualified, visible minorities were selected over me.

I grew up being very tolerant and knowing that racism is wrong, however, now that the city in which I live is nearly 50% Chinese with another good 20% Islamic, I am a minority in the city in which I was born and raised. Minority is being used to describe my skin colour, not my culture.

In the last five years I have grown very tired of being treated as a second-class citizen because I am Caucasian. I am not sure of what I am more concerned the fact that we can’t have a mature and sincere conversation about the topic of race and the future of western civilization because a) people consider it politically incorrect, b) that this honest and mature conversation will be seen as hate speech instead of intellectual debate, or c) that the world is run by economists who only care about continue population growth be it domestic or imported.

I get that immigrants tend to be poorer and subscribe to lower standards of living than a native person. I experienced this. As I mentioned, my family immigrated to Canada and we were dirt poor. I was picked on and abused drastically because I was often wearing hand-me-downs, ill fitting clothes or clothes riddled with holes. But we integrated into to society and adopted the national culture because we came to Canada and were happy that Canada would have us. My parents struggled to learn English and are still not good at it, but they try and keep on trying.

But it remains that while some Italian habits persist, my parents, aunts and uncles have done their best to adopt the culture and language of their host country. However, I feel that since we are considered “white” this was expected of us while clearly non-Caucasian people are given greater leeway and social programming, which again, is fine to an extent.

I am an Anthropologist and I can’t help but remember how the fall of most civilizations is attributed to lack of a common language and culture begetting the need for a unity. In countries that have adopted “Multiculturalism” like Canada and Great Britain, the risk of subpopulations being unable to communicate with another is exceptionally high. Already, in Toronto, there are entire sections of the city in which I could not communicate at all. These areas seem to be all-Chinese communities.

I used to pride myself in calling myself Canadian, but what does that mean anymore? My love of nature, hockey and beer? The fact that I celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving?

I have a Chinese coworker who moved to Canada 23 years ago when she was 4 years old. I wished her a Happy Thanksgiving and her reply was solely “My family doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving” which I suppose is fine if you base that on the historical significance of Thanksgiving (which I most certainly do not). And I would have been fine with the statement as it was.

Then another coworker said, “That’s pretty much the only Canadian Holiday I do not celebrate, out of principle.” To which my Chinese coworker proceeded to rant that “My family is Canadian and we do not celebrate Thanksgiving. “ Seemingly harmless as well, but on the greater scheme of things, it is nationally destructive if such little aspects of society already cause this friction.

This is the same coworker who gets mad at me when I do not pronounce Chinese last names correctly in the office because I naturally apply English phonetics. I tried to express to her that English phonetics makes it hard for me to pronounce certain words and my deepest apologies for focusing my second language efforts on French (not even Italian), which is the second official language of Canada, for now anyways. I suspect it will be Chinese in the near future.

To further consider national identity and unity, in the last 10 years, Canada has seen a number of honour killings within our large Islamic community, some of which were high profile and some just local for things such as women or adolescents not wearing a hijab or keeping male friends or wanting to adopt Canadian culture or even having a boyfriend, or a wife who left an abuse husband. A gay friend of mine was murdered by his family, and I’ve seen other gay Islamic students who have been forced to marry women out of fear and are very unhappy now.

What is perhaps most irksome and blatantly insulting is when a new Canadian complains about Canada and how their country is better (and this happens in other Western countries). Really? Then why did you come here? I have read some blogs on this matter and I particularly enjoy commenters who like to say that our Western society laws make it unbearable for new comers. Many have even suggested a need to accommodate new comers even more than they already are. I am sorry, but I do not support the battery of women or homosexuals or any other such accommodations that would make new comers more comfortable in our civilized society.

I was greatly amused by a Canadian-born, male Muslim acquaintance who complained about Canada and decided to move back to Iran only to come back to Canada within the year because it was too unbearable for him. He didn’t go into detail, but certainly had his tail between his legs.

The same Chinese coworker I spoke of praises how great China is and how she doesn’t like aspects of Canadian life. I have to bite my tongue to prevent myself from mentioning the totalitarian regime, the treatment of the female gender, how rude most Chinese are, sanitary conditions, environmental protection laws, human rights laws, the list, frankly, goes on and on. And I get that it is a defensive matter, as I will get into later, I recently moved to Italy and I am deeply missing the safety of known.

Given my background in Anthropology, I can’t help but ask where this is all heading? What will happen to Western Civilization as immigration continues? Will be become has native North Americans? Or like the Etruscans and Latins and eventually the original Spanish and French languages all of which were replaced by the Roman language and culture?

Sharia law is already permissible in the courts of the U.K. and some U.S. States are trying to enact laws that ensure only state or national laws can be used in court. Two Islamic men who were caught trying to plant bombs in Quebec tried to have the Koran be the law the Canadian court tried him against.

This past year at York University (Toronto, Canada), a male Islamic student nearly made a successful case for not having any women in this class, as his religion was a human right. The matter received national attention because the professor teaching the course refused the request and was penalized by the school. The student eventually conceded to be in the class with what he considers to be the lesser gender. The scary thing is that it if he continued to press the matter, he would have won because the school administration was on his side.

Many brave news outlets posed the question: “If religion and gender equality are considered equal under the laws of human rights, does conceding to (a frighteningly outdated) religion on this matter mean that religion has paramountcy?” This should be especially concerning for western societies that tend toward rationalism instead of religion.
Further, the national demographers of the Netherlands have predicted Islamic majority within the next 100-150 years. Imagine that, the world’s most liberal and open-minded people replaced with the world’s most conservative and close-minded and, frankly, primitive people? It is medieval versus 21st Century mentality but all Westerners are dangerously considering it all the same.

Similar, but potentially not as dramatic predictions exist for many Western countries, largely attributed to low or reverse birthrates of native inhabitants versus the incredible birthrates of incoming cultures; this is for reasons such as cost of living, both partners needing to or wanting to work (career first) or desire to be free from the burden of children.

I can’t even try to contain my fears for the future of civil society in these instances. There is a reason the rest of the world has hundreds of countries, all formerly belonging to various larger empires but eventually breaking down into language and customs into indistinct countries. North Americans are foolish to think that this would not eventually happen in Canada and the United States, and Europe for that matter.

A couple of years ago I sat for lunch with an exceptionally bright anthropology PhD student of mine who was born and raised in Argentina prior to her family moving to Toronto when she was 8 years old. Over the course of our lunch, the topic of the risks of immigration came up. Understandably, she was very sympathetic to immigrants and supportive of immigration, as I am to an extent so long as national cohesion is considered and no undue burden is placed on society. I posed the question of the threats to human rights with certain incoming cultures. These threatened human rights were namely women, aboriginal, gay and environmental. These are purely products of Maslovian theory.

I posed the question “At what point will traditional Canadian values as reflected in our laws be replaced by the values of incoming cultures?”

I was expecting an intelligent answer from her. Instead, what I got was “Well, that’s why we have laws.” I was stunned by the naivety of someone who has so intelligent and achieved. I was actually so taken of guard by her response that I couldn’t even recompose myself to complete the conversation.

In our currently democratic society, laws are developed by politicians and passed by government. As seen in Canada in 2012, with two sweeping Omnibus bills something like 10 Canadian laws were amended by the majority-held, active government. Within these amendments, laws associated with environmental protection took the brunt of the amendments but also more subversive laws related to privacy and consumer protection. It was that easy.

Laws and cultural values are products of the majority population. When you change culture of the majority, the laws will also follow. It is that simple. Laws are simply fickle and abstract things that are by no means static.

Now, in constitutional democracies such as Canada, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands (and including the Democratic Republic of the United States of America), the constitution and human rights were largely protected because, generally, they need the consent from all Provinces or States to make amendments. What happens when the majority becomes the minority and the new majorities want to ban women from schools, murder homosexuals and other cultural or religious minorities? As history tells us, we would be foolish to not expect this to happen eventually.

The traditional thought on this matter is that immigration is slow and by the third or forth generation, the incoming culture will have assumed the dominant culture. And this argument has had good results in our “recent” history. However, recent studies in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and France has shown that this trend is no longer the case as decedents of immigrant cultures are now tending to revert to more orthodox or extreme practices of their ancestor’s former cultural heritage. Indeed, Canada has seen an incredible surge in Islamic extremist exports in the last 5 years.

What Caucasians need to understand is that we share a common guilt over what our ancestors did in the world, from slavery or violence based on race. And rightly so, it was horrible what our great, great grandfathers did, but we now know that the world is round and that enslaving anyone is wrong.

On this matter, Galileo was murdered for insisting that the world was round and Caucasian Europeans were slaves of the Roman Republic then Empire for nearly 1000 years (for the eventual Eastern Empire) and nearly 2000 years in the Western Empire where they were used as servants, free labour and s** slaves, often all three. As I know that my ancestors were Roman, perhaps it was Karma that Italians were one of the greatest marginalized communities in the New World.

I have recently taken a position now in an Italian university and I am dismayed by similar trends seen here. Indeed, most if not all of Europe is experiencing the same situation of cultural replacement, reversed population growth and overly accommodating incoming cultures and races. There are Italian families who cannot afford to pay rent, eat and have children but there are few social programs to assist these families.

I am embarrassed by my increasingly close-minded position on this matter, but it continues to be reinforced the longer I live (and I am only 42 now).

I struggled with what to call myself for the last 5 years since I can’t call myself Canadian anymore because it no longer means anything. All those Christmases, Thanksgivings and camping trips mean nothing to Canada’s current national identity. Even the English and French I learned will eventually mean nothing in Canada.

I also can’t quite call myself Italian because I was born and raised in Canada, although I hold Italian citizenship through my parents, but I am weak at both the spoken and physical the language. So what am I? I am identity-less.

The Europeans took the Americas away from the native people there, perhaps Canada was destined to belong to many cultures through its continuing history, at least until it breaks apart into smaller countries. It seems only fair, really. This could somehow make sense in “the New World”. But certainly the old world would be secure? Only that isn’t the case. Immigration is also at an all time high in Europe.

And, perhaps being a formerly Proud Canadian or newly proud Italian, but I have a hard time calling a clearly Chinese man “Italian”. Quite frankly, Italians have a look and culture about them and tend to have, forgive me, ample equipment below the belt. This cannot be said for my new Chinese “Italian” neighbour.

Western countries have bent themselves out of shape making up for the atrocities of our ancestors on the ancestors of living people. But at what point do we lose our culture and ourselves?