To Orwell Today,
re: CANADA & ZIMBABWE PEOPLE PROBLEMS

Thank you for replying to my mail.

There is a lot of hardship here in Zimbabwe I agree. It's great to know that there are people outside the country that genuinely care about our situation. Thank you again.

I see your point in that it is wrong for your government to use immigration excesses as a solution to the abortion effect on Canada's population growth. But the fact remains that it is not fair to paint all immigrants with the same brush and singly connect them with the flourish of abortion.

Africa is a good example of the evils of colonialists, immigrants who traveled to our countries and devastaed our people and culture. Yet, today, their descendants are as African as us and though they are not black they have just as much right to live here as we do.

I've lived in and traveled to many countries in Europe and Asia I have learnt so much from these experiences. I'm now permanently back home. I actually almost studied at a Canadian university in Nova Scotia - and researched on the country extensively looking forward to traveling there. It is a beautiful place. I'd hate to be labeled an immigrant in a negative light if I had then elected to work there... or anywhere else for that matter.

Zimbabwe has also had an influx of foreigners who are flourishing in our harsh environment whilst us Zimbabweans continue to bear the brunt of hardship. If we were to attack them, as immigrants as the cause, it would be like treating the symptoms of an illness instead of the illness itself... I believe that is the same way you are connecting abortion with immigration. Say immigrants stopped finding their way to Canada, would that stop abortion?

I'm not looking to win this debate. Maybe I'm just looking at the perspective of those immigrants who genuinely want to do better in their lives... isn't North America built on the rich heritage of immigration in the first place?

Kind regards,
Mandisa

Greetings Mandisa,

The continent of North America, in which Canada and the United States are located, was a comparatively uninhabited wild land when the first colonialists discovered it for their respective homelands, ie Spain, England, France, Sweden, Italy etc.

In those countries of Britain and Europe - the "Old World" - there were many unhappy citizens who had lived in poverty and persecution for one reason or another for centuries - much of it related to religious rivalry and class-structured societies, where the common man was unequal.

They jumped at the chance to leave their landless existence and go to the "New World" where land was available for everyone. This is now North America became populated by British and Europeans and this is how the majority of people who live here became descendents of those original pioneers and settlers, with whom the aboriginal people were assimilated and absorbed, other than those few who chose to live on land reserved for them. For example, in Canada, the number of people who say they are aboriginal totals far less than 1 million people, out of our population of 32 million.

During Abraham Lincoln's time as President of the United States he opened up a "New Frontier" to encourage immigrants from Britain and Europe to continue coming and populating the wild land to the west. After his assassination in 1865 there was a huge influx of people from Britain and Europe which continued into the 1960s.

After that time, and since that time, the population demographics started changing. The British and Europeans stopped having children - due to abortion - and their populations stopped growing, thus this same zero-population growth was going on over there as well.

But there were growing populations in other parts of the world and - as had the British and Europeans before them - immigrants from Asia now started coming to "The Land of the Free" for their opportunity to have a piece of the American pie.

And that is the point at which we are today, wherein the growth in our population is coming mostly from Asians whose political system is anathema to everything North America stands for. That is what is dangerous about the situation and that is how we arrived at it.

I'm not saying that stopping excessive immigration will stop abortion, but it would stop excessive immigration which, along with abortion, is causing demographic problems for North America.

What happened to Africa, where you are writing from, is a completely different history. When you were "discovered" by the same colonialists who discovered North America, you already were a heavily populated continent, although as we know, your people were divided into thousands of different groups. You aren't the descendents of British and Europeans and didn't want to be governed by their descendents.

But we in North America ARE descendents of British and Europeans and that is how we came to have the race, population and culture we have.

I hope that explains how although North America is, as you say, a nation of immigrants, it still has (or USED to have) its own identity as a British and European people evolved into a new, unique North American culture. It is only natural to want to keep this. As a matter of fact, it is a matter of survival.

All the best,
Jackie Jura

15.Life in Oceania and 23.Proles and 6.Super-States and 7.Sytems of Thought