Book Reviews

Posted on August 5, 2004 by Other News Sources

The Next City
August 5, 2004

The Millionaire Next Door:
The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy

by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
(Longstreet Press, 1996. 258 pages) US$22

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO SUCCEED in America these days? For starters, it helps to have parents who never made it rich. Over 80 per cent of millionaires receive no money from a trust fund or an estate, and their inheritance, if they got one at all, accounts in over 80 per cent of cases for 10 per cent or less of their wealth. Over half didn’t receive a penny in inheritance, and over 90 per cent believe they won’t receive an inheritance in future. Over 90 per cent didn’t get, as a gift, a penny of their family’s business.

But family stock does matter. If your ancestry or ethnic origin is from Russia or Scotland, chances are a whopping 1 in 5 that you’re in a millionaire household; Hungarian backgrounds aren’t far behind the scale of privilege, at 1 in 7. Americans of English origin, at 1 in 14, don’t fare poorly — they’re twice as likely to be millionaires as the general population — but their success generally had little to do with their origins on the Mayflower. The fortunes built up by rich Americans are typically dissipated by the second or third generation.

Not only do minorities do well, the smaller the minority, the better it tends to do. All of the 15 small-population ancestry groups that the authors surveyed have at least twice their share of millionaires given their percentage of U.S. households. Large ancestry groups contain smaller proportions of millionaires on average than smaller groups. The largest ancestry group in the United States — Germans, who form almost 20 per cent of the population — are underrepresented in the ranks of millionaires.

The longer that an ancestry group has been in America, the less likely it is to produce a disproportionately large number of millionaires. According to the authors, descendants of immigrants become increasingly socialized to the high-consumption American lifestyle and to working for others instead of themselves, leading to their financial decline. Nothing is likelier to lead to success than self-employment. Twelve per cent of Inc. magazine’s top 500 business entrepreneurs are first generation Americans. Their children, encumbered by success, will fare less well than they.

The Millionaire Next Door isn’t put out by a think tank engaged in the politically correct wars of this generation — its authors seem more interested in being millionaires themselves and showing others how to do it through a wholly uninspiring how-to book. But their book will undermine the arguments of those urging class war by painting a picture of the blue-collar millionaire. The phonies in this saga are high flyers who live beyond their means and often get caught — the stock promoters, gold-chained lawyers, and other wheeler-dealers who wear $5,000 watches, drive Porsches and live in the tony mansions in the ritziest part of town. The hero is the guy next door: He’s a paving contractor or the owner of a trailer park. He drives a used car and buys clothes from cut-rate clothiers. His wife either doesn’t work outside the home or is a teacher if she does. Unknown to his neighbors, this 57-year-old lump of a guy who has lived in the same house in the same middle-class district for 20 years, who’s been married to the same girl for most of his adult life, who has an undergraduate degree from a lowly local college and who orders a Bud and a club sandwich when he eats out, is the typical American millionaire.

WHILE SMARTS DON’T NECESSARILY LEAD to financial security, having the discipline to save does: What these average joes do best is put aside money — they average 15 per cent of their income — bringing millionairehood within the reach of almost any simple soul willing to forgo flashy cars. A 20-year-old waiter who sets aside $2,000 and each year increases the previous year’s amount by $200, investing it all at an unremarkable six per cent, will be worth a million dollars by age 65.

How many of us would never pay $100 for a pair of shoes, at least once in our lifetime? Twenty-five per cent of millionaires, it turns out, have never spent that much. Ten per cent of millionaires have never even spent $50 on a wrist watch, and another 15 per cent have splurged for one with a price tag between $47 and $100. Ten per cent of millionaires spent less than $13,500 for their last car; your average millionaire spent under $25,000.

Put another way, many if not most middle-class people live better than most millionaires. Being a millionaire is a lifestyle choice that’s well within our reach, but that most of us reject. We claim “life’s too short” to pass up pleasure today for security tomorrow. We rationalize that “you can’t take it with you” to explain why we indulge ourselves with a sleek car, or a trendy vacation, or a big tip to impress a date.

THAT FORTUNES ARE EARNED and not inherited has always been so in American society. In 1892, the U.S. boasted 4,047 millionaires, and, of these, 84 per cent were nouveau riche, having reached the top without the benefit of inherited wealth. A major study completed last year by economists for the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank shows that American society continues to churn out rags-to-riches stories.

Using data of some 50,000 Americans compiled by the University of Michigan, the economists tracked people who, in 1975, inhabited the bottom rungs — the lowest fifth of American society as measured by income. By 1991, most had made it to the middle class and 29 per cent had made it to the very highest quintile. Only five per cent of those poor in 1975 stayed poor.

The moral of this story, in the end, isn’t all that new. The Millionaire Next Door is but a sequel, with numbers, to Aesop’s The Ant and The Grasshopper. Dress the ant in a polyester suit and the grasshopper in pinstripes, and you’ve recreated Aesop’s for the 1990s. Only today much of society sides with the grasshopper when the lean times come and his storehouse is empty.

Larry Solomon

Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline

by Robert H. Bork
(ReganBooks, 1996. 382 pages) $35.50

SLOUCHING TOWARDS GOMORRAH by Robert Bork is not a pleasant read. Bork has a pompous, braying tone, and his prose is too ornate. The merits of his ideas and argument do not, on the whole, compensate for these failings. Bork’s ideas for saving society from itself are familiar conservative prescriptions. Reading Bork feels the same as reading gender feminist tracts; the author’s bias makes every paragraph an insidious trick.

Bork’s target is “modern liberalism,” the dissolute but inevitable offspring of classical liberalism. While reiterating telling criticisms of the left such as increased bureaucracy, excesses of political correctness and divisive features of multiculturalism, Slouching Towards Gomorrah is deficient in four respects.

First, there are inconsistencies of reasoning. Bork wants to save America, but he also says its problems were built-in at its inception, making it difficult to see what America he wants to save. Moreover, he claims that “modern liberal” cultural and intellectual elites suppress a great conservative populism, but nevertheless he dismisses society as generally and pervasively decadent.

Second, Bork denounces long lists of perceived social ills including animal rights, homosexuality, vulgar entertainment and erotic expression, without bothering to explain why they are bad. Maybe they are, but if so, Bork should justify his assertions. An amusing passage occurs when Bork, inveighing against “obscenity,” describes encountering sexually explicit material on television in a New York hotel: “I watched for some time — riveted by the sociological significance of it all.”

Third, Bork makes numerous unsupported assertions, such as: When “Nixon came to office, the opportunity to win [the Vietnam War] was gone,” and “Fascism and Nazism were faith systems of the Left.” He offers bizarre characterizations such as: First World War soldiers were “capable of admiring courage,” while Second World War soldiers were not. Neither does he hesitate to offer begged questions, “Is abortion always the killing of a human being? . . . there can be no doubt that the answer is yes,” twists of logic, “Why there is a right for adults to enjoy pornography remains unexplained and unexplainable,” and gratuitous slurs, “Some professors were radicals themselves, a few were emotionally unstable.”

Fourth and most disappointingly, Bork fails to refute any of the left’s sometimes persuasive criticisms against the traditional society he espouses. While he laments the diminished importance of religion, for example, those failings of religion that left it susceptible to marginalization go unaddressed. Thus, when Bork prescribes a return to “the better aspects of the 1950s,” he gives the reader no reason to believe that all the worst aspects won’t come along as well. Bork suggests that society discarded valuable institutions on pure whim. He makes no counterargument to the possibility that some were flawed and proper candidates for reform.

These four failings typify the lack of reasoned discourse society labors under. While Bork is quick (and accurate) in puncturing leftist obfuscation, he employs the same tactics in blaming the left for problems that are clearly related to polarization, rather than to one of the poles. He has chosen rhetoric over proof, and so Slouching Towards Gomorrah does not stand up as a useful contribution to social thought.

Nils R. Connor

Zero Tolerance: Hot Button Politics in Canada’s Universities

by Peter C. Emberley
(Penguin Books, 1996. 313 pages) $19.99

THE RIPPLES OF the “Framework Regarding Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination in Ontario Universities,” issued in 1993 by the Ontario NDP government, are felt well beyond Ontario and perhaps even beyond Canada. This document, immediately nicknamed Zero Tolerance Policy, is Ontario’s best contribution to social engineering. For Peter Emberley, Professor of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, zero tolerance is only one of many phantoms haunting the university. They include the corporate right of the privileged Old Boys network and the cultural and feminist left; the demands of “all-inclusivity,” accessibility and financial self-sufficiency; the hyperbolized notions of excellence, performance indicators and total quality management — and this is only the short list. Emberley concludes that the university as a social institution is on the verge of spiritual, political and financial collapse and recommends a return to scholarship to salvage the university from complete demise.

Alexander A. Berezin

Canada from Afar: The Daily Telegraph Book of Canadian Obituaries

Edited by David Twiston Davies
(Dundurn Press, 1996. 270 pages) $16.99

CANADA FROM AFAR: THE DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF CANADIAN OBITUARIES reminds Canadians of our ties to Britain, the mother country. As Conrad Black, publisher of the Daily Telegraph, writes in this odd book’s foreword, “this volume will make a modest contribution to the valued and historic cause of close and good Anglo-Canadian relations.” Black’s Anglo patrician background suggests a natural bond with the United Kingdom. Of 100 obits, this London paper manages approximately 12 on non-Anglos. The obituaries are more biographical sketches than mere announcements and cover a broad spectrum, from political figures like Roland Michener, Joey Smallwood and René Lévesque to Victoria Cross winners such as Charlie Rutherford, Reverend John Foote and Colonel Fred Tilston.

Basil Stevens

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The revolutionary myth that won’t die

Posted on July 9, 2004 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
July 9, 2004

Yes, Cubans do face shortages of fuel, and yes, Cubans do suffer from shortages in medicine, supporters of Fidel Castro’s regime concede. Yes, some will also acknowledge, the island nation – once the most prosperous by far in the Caribbean – has become one of the region’s most impoverished since Castro took over.

But don’t overlook the impressive gains that Cuba has made in eradicating hunger and redistributing wealth, in health, education, literacy and social justice, Castro’s supporters retort. And don’t forget that the U.S. embargo is at the root of Cuba’s economic hardships. If the embargo hadn’t crushed Cuba’s economy, Cuba would be an economic as well as a social exemplar.

In fact, the Cuban embargo did hurt the Cuban economy but only marginally – by an estimated US$84-million to US$167-million in lost annual exports, according to the best economic estimates. The U.S. embargo has had such a modest effect because Cuba has still been able to trade with Canada, the European Union, Mexico, Japan, Russia, China and others, as well as receiving in excess of US$3-billion a year in foreign aid from the U.S.S.R. (during the Cold War) – and lesser amounts from other nations. Only a true believer could attribute Cuba’s economic collapse to an inability to trade with the U.S. In fact, Cuba’s economic collapse preceded the U.S. embargo of 1962. Shortly after Castro seized power in 1959, an immense number of talented managers and professionals fled the country, crippling Cuba’s ability to perform efficiently. To complete the job, Castro brought in his central economic plan – the ruinous First Economic and Social Plan of a Socialist Nature of 1962. With its market system in shambles, the country was forced to introduce food rationing that same year, and has never been able to restore its pre-revolution levels of production.

This once-important rice producer now produces less than it did half a century ago, its rice fields being half as productive as those of neighbouring Dominican Republic.

Similarly, Cuba now produces less sugar than before the Revolution – in fact, less than at any time since the Great Depression. Castro’s economic miracle was always a hoax, his rhetoric never succeeding to either exhort or inspire Cubans to produce for the cause of socialism.

Castro’s sham economy became evident after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, costing his economy his chief underwriter. Within three years, the Cuban economy shrank by one-third, never to recover. With Cuba refusing to make interest payments on its massive US$12-billion in foreign debts, its legions of once-supportive creditors have been cutting it off. In 2002, Moody’s debt-rating service reduced Cuba’s rating to Caa1 – “speculative grade, very poor.”

The U.S. embargo did not eviscerate the Cuban economy, Castro’s policies did. Cubans now consume less food than before the Revolution, and less food than citizens of any other Latin American country. With real wages down about 50% since 1989, leaving workers with an average pay of 50 cents per day, one person in eight is now clinically undernourished. Cuba’s food rations meet less than half of the recipients’ nutritional needs. Items the state deems to be non-essential, such as fresh milk for children, have been cut out.

To make ends meet, almost everyone in Cuba has become an operator – “making business,” as they put it. Pensioners, whose monthly stipend has been slashed to $4, often sell sweets on street corners. Young girls often sell themselves.

As for the Revolution’s great gains in health and literacy, those, too, are public-relations shams. Castro declared illiteracy to be eradicated in 1961, after a one-year Great Campaign that ended “four centuries of ignorance.” Health care is good in Cuba, but only for tourists and the government elite, who want for nothing. The poor do not have access to good hospitals, or to almost any drug – unless they carry dollars.

Cuba has consistently excelled only in the number of people it has imprisoned for political crimes. An estimated 100,000 are now imprisoned – 500,000 in all since 1959, with thousands executed, according to human rights agencies. Earlier this summer, Cuban courts convicted three activists on charges of “contempt of authority, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest” after they had been caught studying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They were treated leniently: a three-year sentence. The organizer of the study session, a physician and civil rights leader, had earlier received a 25-year prison term.

In Cuba, a crime is whatever Castro wants it to be. He has criminalized not only the discussion of human rights but also the discussion of the economy; not only letters of complaint to the international press but letters of complaint to the Cuban government. It is a crime to visit a friend or relative in a neighbouring jurisdiction without government permission. To give the Cuban criminal code flexibility, Castro has amended it to provide for the arrest of Cubans for their “dangerousness” and “other acts against state security.”

Sadly, none of this matters to Castro’s supporters. For them, no amount of suffering by the Cuban people can wipe away the romantic myth of the Cuban Revolution.

Readers’ responses

Re: The Revolutionary Myth, July 9.

It seems odd that any time these types of articles are produced to argue both sides of a political difference of opinion, the writer of the left always seems to use hysteria and fear-mongering and very little fact to support his side, whilst the writer from the right always has facts and figures to back up his argument.

Witness Nino Pagliccia’s points: “The Bush administration has proven to have lied about weapons of mass destruction and been unable to deliver a peaceful transition to democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan.” None of this, of course has been proven one way or another yet and likely won’t be for quite a few years.

And then there’s this, condemning U.S. foreign policy as little more than a plan to take over every country on this continent: “Will Canada with a government that may now depend on the NDP be on the list?” Well this of course is too ludicrous to lend itself to any rational response.

On the other side Lawrence Solomon quotes provable facts and official figures to support his arguments and his condemnation of human rights violations in Cuba are well documented by every human rights organization, including that of the UN.

Charles Reid, Nanaimo, B.C.

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Propping up a tropical tyranny

Posted on July 9, 2004 by Other News Sources

National Post
July 9, 2004

For those Canadians who cling to the conceit that Cuba’s socialist system presents a humane and economically viable alternative to Western capitalism, this week’s Post series on Fidel Castro’s tropical tyranny should be required reading.

As reporter Isabel Vincent has shown, universal access to quality health care may be official policy in Cuba. And indeed foreigners flashing around U.S. dollars can fly to Havana and obtain prompt, first-class treatment. But Cuba has a “two-tier” system – the kind most of Cuba’s Canadian supporters would angrily decry if it were implemented here at home. Those Cubans who lack connections to high-ranking government officials must endure long waiting lists and indifferent treatment in poorly equipped hospitals.

Moreover, Cuba is hardly a workers’ paradise: Even middle-class Cubans and professionals find it difficult to get ahead without working second and third jobs selling trinkets to tourists or driving taxis. When foreign investors set up shop, the Cuban government converts their local workers into de facto slaves. Friends of the ruling party siphon off the bulk of their foreign-source wages, and bureaucrats tax away most of the rest.

All of these facts are well known to even a casual observer of Cuban affairs. But this being Canada, it is useful to point them out all the same. Since the Trudeau era, elites in this country have been eager to cozy up to Fidel Castro’s regime. Even today, as the dictatorial Mr. Castro continues to stifle dissent and imprison his political enemies, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) remains actively engaged in projects aimed at bolstering Cuba’s infrastructure.

The reason mostly boils down to national hubris. For decades, the United States has pursued a hard-line policy of diplomatic and economic sanctions against Cuba. Canadian nationalism, inevitably defined in reflex opposition to what Washington does, therefore argues for Canadian-Cuban rapprochement.

We are not arguing that Canada should join the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba – which, to our minds, has been counterproductive because it allows Mr. Castro to blame his country’s many problems on the United States. But that doesn’t mean our government should be actively helping Cuba, either. CIDA has a limited amount of funds at its disposal, and can help only a small fraction of the world’s impoverished billions. Given the unmet humanitarian needs of such struggling democracies as, say, Afghanistan, Nigeria and India, why on earth would we divert any funds to prop up a dictatorship?

This is hardly the first time such a question has been put to CIDA. And in response to its critics, the agency has posted a document on its Web site entitled “Why is CIDA involved in Cuba?”

“Considerable progress has been made in improving the social conditions of the Cuban people, as reflected in the country’s high literacy levels and low infant mortality rates,” the document states. “In 1989, Cuba lost its main trade partner and major source of financial subsidy, the Soviet Union. The break-up of its former ally, combined with the ongoing U.S. trade embargo, led to a deep recession . . . CIDA can assist Cuba through an exchange of technology and expertise to encourage economic reforms that will both help preserve the significant investments that Cuba has made in its people and assist in Cuba’s efforts to stimulate economic growth.”

In regard to the improving “social conditions” that so impress CIDA, we refer the agency’s officials to Lawrence Solomon‘s fine essay . . . As for “Cuba’s efforts to stimulate economic growth and activity,” we would be interested to see CIDA expand on what fate befell Cuba’s “former ally,” Soviet Russia. Having cast off dictatorship and embraced democracy, recall, the Russians went through a lean decade. But the country is now booming in a way that the average Cuban could scarcely comprehend. So is China, another nation that – economically at least – has cast off the dogmas of communism.

The lesson is plain: Prosperity is impossible without freedom. And in the long term, all of CIDA’s band-aids will do little to “stimulate economic growth and activity” until Mr. Castro’s Soviet-style dictatorship is overthrown.

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Here comes the sun

Posted on June 24, 2004 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
June 24, 2004

Go to YouTube and you can see a corporate video of a printing press running at 100 feet per minute, applying a nanoparticle ink to foil and producing solar cells. This machine is owned by Nanosolar Inc., which in turn is partly owned by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google. This one printing machine, Nanosolar claims, can produce solar cells with a capacity of 1,000 MW per year, the equivalent of a nuclear reactor at Indian Point outside Manhattan or two nuclear reactors at Pickering outside Toronto.

Unlike nuclear reactors, which take a decade to build and billions of dollars in capital costs before delivering a single kilowatt-hour to a home or business, Nanosolar’s breakthrough technology can help meet society’s power needs soon after its ink has dried, and the press’s capital costs amount to a mere $1.65-million. Put another way, we can wait 10 years to get nuclear power up and running. Or, by relying on a single Nanosolar press, we can have the solar equivalent of a major nuclear plant in one year, and the equivalent of 10 major plants in a decade. Soon, says Nanosolar, its printing presses will be operating much faster — perhaps 20 times faster. Should this prove feasible, a single Nanosolar press would pump out in a single decade the equivalent of 200 nuclear plants — far more than now exist in all of North America.

To add to the slam-dunk superiority of Nanosolar-type technology over nuclear, solar cells produce power when we especially need it — when people are awake and industries are humming. During the low-value off-peak hours when power is in great surplus, the solar cells sleep, too. Nuclear reactors, by contrast, can’t ratchet down or turn off when their output isn’t needed. Off-peak nuclear power, in fact, is sometimes produced at a loss because its operating costs exceeds the pittance earned at, say, 3 a.m.

To get bang for the buck, and obtain the power that a growing economy needs, nuclear and solar are as different as night and day. Nuclear power, a half-century after the launch of the first generation of nuclear reactors, remains an immature technology, each successive generation proving to be not only unreliable but also subject to ever-higher costs. Solar technology, in contrast, becomes ever more reliable and ever less costly, and is only immature in the same way that computer technology is immature — there is no end in sight yet to how far and fast it can go.

Nanosolar, founded in 2002 by two Stanford PhD candidates applying Silicon Valley smarts, is a case in point. By the end of 2003, it had obtained 60 patents, By 2004, it had developed its printing method. By 2006, it had published its results in a peer-reviewed journal and, within months, raised $100-million. By the end of 2007 it had made its first commercial shipment. Now Nanosolar can’t keep up with the demand — its factory’s output for the next 12-months is pre-sold.

Nanosolar’s solar panels could go on rooftops but the company recommends against this — at least until building codes become flexible enough to accommodate panels without the need to battle municipal bureaucracies. Besides, it says, it is developing a residential product sure to wow the homeowner.

In the meantime, it touts small municipal solar power plants that can be up and running in one year on the outskirts of cities and towns, where land is readily available. Each would be between 2 MW and 10 MW in size — enough to power 1,000 to 5,000 homes. Put one of these in several hundred cities and a nuclear plant’s worth of power would be delivered, locally and in a decentralized manner, and without the expensive and unsightly transmission towers that accompany large nuclear plants.

As impressive as Nanosolar is, here’s something more impressive still: This company is but one of several with solar breakthroughs that stand to revolutionize the energy world. Some of the competing solar technologies are designed for large-scale applications, some small. In this dynamic new energy marketplace, some will prosper and, doubtless, some will fail, just as many of the computer pioneers in the 1970s and 1980s failed for one reason or another. But large or small, well capitalized or not, the solar technologies are working more impressively than anyone could have dreamed a decade ago and seem certain to overtake nuclear as a provider of additional power to our electricity systems. If the projections from Nanosolar and others prove accurate, in fact, they will become the most economic power source of all, besting even coal.

Clean, limitless power is now within grasp, courtesy of those who have reached for the sun.

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The key to rural immigration in New Brunswick

Posted on June 24, 2004 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
Keynote address to the Rendez-vous 2004 Immigration Conference, New Brunswick
June 24, 2004

As many of you know, most western countries are facing serious population decline because they have a low birth rate and are unable to attract immigrants. For example, demographers predict that Italy’s population may drop by 28% by the middle of this century, leading to great fears there of a declining economy and an inability to maintain social services. Germany and France and other European countries are also set for declines. The European Union’s population could drop by 80 million due to what Europeans call Fortress Europe – their bias against immigrants.

Europeans are not alone in being unable to come to grips with these fundamental economic and social dangers facing them. Japan’s population faces a similar decline because of its inability to accept immigrants. These countries not only face an uncertain future, they also suffer today because of their stagnant or declining population, as can be seen in their stagnant economies.

New Brunswick’s government has recognized this danger. It doesn’t want this province to be a Fortress New Brunswick, and it is taking steps to head it off. Hats off to New Brunswick’s government, and to the organizers of this wonderful gathering!

And hats off to all the participants in this room. You understand better than most the challenges awaiting us.

We have all learned in our history books that Canada’s openness to immigration has made us a great nation, and that without immigration we would not have developed as we have, into one of the most prosperous citizenries in the world, and into one of the world’s largest economies.

Everyone in this room has learned of the importance of immigration to our nation’s development, but we forget the type of immigrant that has made Canada great, the type of immigrant to whom, above all, we owe our prosperity.

It is the poor immigrant. Poor and mostly unskilled immigrants from the British Isles; poor and mostly unskilled immigrants from Continental Europe, poor and mostly unskilled immigrants from Russia and eastern European countries, from China, Japan, India and other Asian countries.

Poor and mostly unskilled immigrants came to this country in the millions in the late decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. Accepting so many people led to numerous upsets, yet in hindsight it has become clear that we absorbed these waves of poor immigrants with remarkable ease, and in short periods of time, although they sometimes came into this country at an astounding rate, in numbers that today would seem to be overwhelming.

The immigrants came to our cities and they came to our rural areas, and they were settled without the benefit of the major government programs that are now available.

How were so many so successfully settled? Here is one account from almost a century ago, 1907, from Dr. Peter H. Bryce, Chief Medical Officer of the Department of the Interior in Ottawa. As students of Canadian history in this audience might know, Dr. Bryce would go on to become one of Canada’s most celebrated citizens. Here, in a speech to the Empire Club of Canada, he described what happened to newcomers whose skills were in great demand – these were artisans such as mechanics and wood workers – and he described what happened to others, who had little but strong backs to offer the new country. Here is how he explained it:

. . . the British who were not artisans have been sent to the farmers of the country, the artisans have been found work here [in the city] and in many other places, and the community is constantly crying out for more help. The Italian has almost wholly gone out on to railway work. We have then left 2,000 Hebrews, and some of these have gone into the [northern forested] Temiskaming district and begun settlements there. The balance have, we assume, remained in this or other cities.

The short answer for where the immigrants went – those with fewer skills were streamed to the rural areas, as farm hands or manual labourers; those with more skills, found city jobs. Immigrant communities largely stayed together.

In part, this division of immigrant by skills as well as ethnicity suited the needs of society – the skilled artisans were needed in cities and could find ready work there while the unskilled would have had more difficulty.

But this division of labour also made a virtue of necessity, because most of the skilled people wouldn’t have remained on the farm – most of them wanted to be in the cities. Even the unskilled immigrants sent to the farms often left the farms, on pain of deportation if they couldn’t find work elsewhere. And, of course, many Canadian-born farmers also were migrating to the cities.

That was, in fact, one reason that new immigrants were sent to the farm. Rural depopulation was then underway, even more than we see today. The authorities reasoned, quite correctly, that poor unskilled immigrants, grateful to be in a country that offered them opportunities, could find work in the rural areas, and might actually stay there.

This lesson from history holds the key to understanding immigration to New Brunswick’s rural areas today, especially when we remember that immigrants are not passive inputs to an economy but active, thinking human beings – in fact, they are unusually independent human beings, because unlike most of their countrymen, they had the gumption to leave behind the familiar surroundings of their upbringing – their friends and families, their possessions – all to cross an ocean in the hopes of finding a better life.

When the great waves of immigrants came to North America a century and more ago, most weren’t coming to escape religious persecution, and they didn’t choose North America randomly. They were coming to a continent that paid the highest real wages in the world. That is why they came here. Europe was stagnant, Asia was stagnant, North America was booming.

Immigrants came here on fairly reliable information. Yes, we did recruit Europeans to come to Canada, yes, we did send lecturers across the ocean to speak of our virtues, we did advertise “Free Homes for the Millions” for those who would come.

But the best advertisements were the immigrants themselves, immigrants that had already settled in Canada and wrote home saying that this truly was a promised land, and that anyone who wasn’t afraid of work could prosper here. Those in Europe who were considering crossing the ocean trusted the reports that they were getting and they came here in the knowledge that they could prosper. They traveled, then as now, from poor region to rich region to prosper.

Today, those poor people mostly have nowhere to go. The few affluent countries that remain open to immigration – and these are mostly the English-speaking democracies, Canada, the U.S., Australia, the U.K. – all discriminate against the poor and unskilled. Everyone wants rich immigrants, or investor-immigrants or business immigrants or well-educated immigrants or highly skilled immigrants – we call them economic immigrants, as if those who work as labourers or farmers or domestics don’t contribute to the economy.

We have forgotten that it was the poor and unskilled immigrant, more than all others, that made our country great through their back-breaking work, through their entrepreneurial talents, and through the dreams they instilled in their children. The mass markets that immigrants created gave our industries a growing market, and created a self-sufficient economy. The poor and unskilled immigrant played a defining role in our nation’s development.

For Canada as a whole today, discriminating against poor immigrants limits our potential. By shutting out the majority of potential newcomers – many if not most people in this room would not be worthy enough to satisfy Ottawa’s point system – we have made it difficult for ourselves to attract immigrants – in fact, Canada has difficulty meeting our immigration quotas because we discriminate against the poor.

As bad as this is for Canada as a whole, for New Brunswick, this policy is much worse. For New Brunswick, the policy of discriminating against poor immigrants not only makes it difficult to attract immigrants in any numbers, it makes it all-but impossible. As it is, the affluent or skilled people who do come overwhelmingly settle in cities, chiefly in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, and with Alberta’s growing wealth, also in the Calgary-Edmonton corridor.

Under current immigration policy, the less affluent cities of New Brunswick are more or less shut out, and New Brunswick’s rural areas fare even worse. All told, New Brunswick attracts about one-third of one percent of Canada’s immigrants. The rich and the skilled haven’t been making New Brunswick their destination – such immigrants tend to go to places that are more affluent, or that have large markets for their skills. Under current immigration policy, New Brunswick is slated for eventual population decline, just like European countries, because New Brunswick also has a low birth rate.

One reason for this conference is to improve the economy of New Brunswick. As we have heard this afternoon, New Brunswick faces a serious shortage of skilled workers, a shortage that is expected to grow worse in future as the population ages and retires. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business estimates 15,000 jobs are going begging in the small business sector alone. New Brunswick’s youths, who traditionally provided new entrants to the labour force, are declining in numbers. Young workers are especially hard to find in rural areas, because young people in rural areas are doing what young people have always done – gone to the cities looking for better opportunities. This is one reason that New Brunswick farms have had difficulty getting the help they need.

We have also heard this afternoon that skilled immigrants can help meet our demand for skilled workers, if we can only devise programs to bring skilled immigrants here, and in this I agree.

But unskilled immigrants can also ease the problem of too-few-skilled workers, and much more easily and quickly, by freeing up the time of existing New Brunswickers who have skills but are out of the workforce for one reason or another: These already skilled New Brunswickers may have children or ailing parents to look after, and no one to turn to for help. They may be tradespeople who can’t find low-cost assistants to do their heavy work, and so are themselves unemployed or underemployed. They may be talented youngsters who are staying on the family farm until their parents can get the help they need. Increasingly, they will be retired people in their sixties and seventies, who with a personal assistant could return to the workforce.

All these problems in the workforce can be eased today by allowing low-skilled immigrants to come to New Brunswick, in the same the way that low-skilled immigrants have historically eased labour shortages elsewhere.

Let immigrants come as house cleaners, as nannies, as cooks, as gardeners, as personal servants, as caregivers – immigrants have long played domestic roles, looking after households while releasing a family member to do higher value jobs that require more skill, or that require familiarity with the culture, as might be the case in a retail position that requires dealing with the public.

Let immigrants come in as farm hands, freeing youths and others from the rural areas. Let immigrants come in as labourers, to work in construction, or as blue collar workers on assembly lines.

Let poor and uneducated immigrants come in and make a new life for themselves, and most will do what most poor and uneducated immigrants have always done – they will upgrade their own skills, and also scrimp and save to put their children through school, producing the next generation of skilled workers.

This is what happened a century ago, and this is what happened a half century ago, after World War II, when Canada welcomed large numbers of unskilled immigrants from poor European countries such as Portugal, Greece and Italy. Seventy-five percent of these immigrants filled low-income jobs – the women became seamstresses and domestics, the men worked in construction or in maintenance. This generation was uneducated, often agricultural workers and other rural folk from small villages. Today these immigrants have become affluent, more affluent than Canadian-born citizens, and their children have university educations in the same proportion as the rest of society.

The knock against poor and unskilled immigrants is that they might get sick, or go on welfare, or otherwise not generate the revenue to justify the social services that they might require. This is a familiar concern – in fact, when Dr. Peter Bryce in 1907 described how recent immigrants were being settled, he was answering those who objected to immigrants on similar grounds. Immigrants often had tuberculosis and other ailments, immigrants often required relief, immigrants often lived in crowded conditions, and couldn’t speak the language and came with strange customs. “Those foreigners . . . have proved themselves very good citizens,” Dr. Bryce found, “and have come up very largely to our ideals of thinking and doing. . . . We have absorbed, perfectly I think, the thousands [of foreigners who have come here.]”

What Canada could do perfectly then, when it absorbed huge numbers, it can certainly do perfectly today, when the challenges are far less daunting. For New Brunswick, this is not an option but a necessity – without immigrants, New Brunswick’s population will surely shrink and its prospects in future will surely diminish. Without large-scale immigration in the past, in fact, New Brunswick has had a tougher time than other provinces. New Brunswick’s last large wave of immigrants came before Confederation, and after Confederation, well into the 20th century, the federal government programs that provided free land and otherwise encouraged people to come here focused on settling central and western Canada, depriving Eastern Canada of the economic activity that accompanies immigrants and putting Eastern Canada at a disadvantage relative to other regions in Canada.

It is time that New Brunswick got its share of immigrants, so important to making an economy grow. But it won’t happen if New Brunswick limits its sights to high-skilled immigrants. Today, the whole world is competing for high-skilled immigrants. Getting them to come to New Brunswick, especially to rural New Brunswick, is easier said than done.

But none of the affluent countries competing against us for immigrants want the low-skilled immigrant as a citizen. Canada, and New Brunswick, would have the field to themselves by opening the doors to poor immigrants.

The benefits to New Brunswick would be many. Economic growth would be spurred, not only because labour shortages would be met but also because the immigrants come with wants that need to be met. International trade will also be enhanced – study after study shows that immigrants use their contacts in their home country to establish trading relations.

The rural sector would especially benefit, as farmers start producing for a larger local population, and as they start producing the niche crops that immigrants need for their traditional dishes. To give you an idea of how big an economic factor those niche crops can become, consider this: The farms in the Greater Toronto Area produce 80% more agricultural produce than does all of New Brunswick. Those small farms don’t export commodity crops, they mostly produce for niche markets, none of which is more important than the immigrant market. The farmers in the Greater Toronto Area grow wheat, but not the kind seen on the Prairies. The Toronto area farmers grow varieties that Toronto’s Ethiopians and Somalis can’t get in the local supermarkets. The farmers near Toronto grow cabbages, a variety that Romanians and other eastern European immigrants were accustomed to in their homeland. Products such as these, which start off selling only in ethnic stores, then find their way into ethnic restaurants and specialty shops, creating new markets for local farmers.

Family farms do well where immigrants congregate. Family farms are on the increase in Alberta near Edmonton, Calgary and Red Deer because of the immigrants who have been coming to Alberta. Family farms have been on the increase in British Columbia, thanks largely to Chinese and Punjabi farmers who settled near Vancouver in the fertile Lower Mainland. Chinese-speaking farmers own more than half of the province’s mushroom farms and more than one-quarter of its vegetable farms.

Farmers need large markets. Rich immigrants, by themselves, can’t provide them. We need poor immigrants too, and poor immigrants, unlike the rich variety, are available in great supply. They will help our rural areas prosper and they will help our urban areas prosper.

And they will help our country prosper.

Thank you.

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