Patrick Keeney: National Sovereignty in the Age of Mass Migration

For decades, Canada’s elites saw immigration as a kind of secular virtue, and any criticism of it as racist or xenophobic. But as Patrick Keeney writes in this provocative essay, that belief misunderstands what a nation truly is. The liberal globalist vision that drives blind faith in immigration sees people as bearers of rights and consumers of things, detached from place, history or culture. The conservative-communitarian tradition, Keeney explains, counters that love and obligation flow outward, and that a nation is a moral community bound by shared history, culture and mutual obligations. To love one’s own is not a moral failing, Keeney argues, but a legitimate reflection of human affairs, one that Canada must rediscover if it is to regain its cohesion and build a future.