Urban Renaissance Institute

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
February 7, 2004

New immigrants take a good city and make it better. They take a dull or derelict district and make it lively. They take a struggling economy and make it boom. They help explain why a Toronto thrives while others dive.

After the Second World War, a wave of Greek immigrants came to Canada, most of them settling in Montreal and, especially, Toronto. The Toronto immigrants settled in the Danforth, a lower-middle class area that was being abandoned by English, Irish and Scots who had first come generations earlier. These Anglos were now leaving their run-down homes for a better life in the suburbs.

Because the Greeks came in force and could sponsor friends and family members from their villages in the old country, they attained the critical mass needed to maintain their customs and reestablish their churches and other social institutions. They created a “Little Greece” that became the largest Greek neighbourhood in North America. The Danforth’s Greek fruit markets, Greek coffee shops, Greek restaurants, Greek bakeries and other establishments – some 600 businesses in all catering to a Greek clientele – soon also became a magnet for visitors from across the city. This little economic enclave also established trade and tourism ties with Greece that helped it withstand recessions while other neighbourhoods declined.

As street life infused the Danforth, the children of the Anglo-Saxons who had left for the suburbs became interested in what had been their parents’ haunts. First, these children – many of them affluent professionals – came back to visit; then, they came back to live. With their gentrification of the area, property values climbed. Greek families – the great majority of whom had arrived as unskilled labourers, to work in maintenance, in restaurants, in factories and as domestics – often cashed out, buying larger homes in the suburbs with the killing they made on their homes.

Yet although many Greeks moved out, their businesses remained and so did the magic of the neighbourhood, which remains one of Toronto’s liveliest. The Greeks left the area better than they found it, as immigrants generally do.

With Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, the cast of characters may be different but the plot line varies little. Until Italian, Chinese and East European immigrants moved in after the First World War, this Anglo slum – the home of Vancouver’s Skid Row – appeared doomed. With the end of the Second World War and another influx of immigrants – more Italians, then Chinese, then East Indians – the area took off. The new immigrants spruced up the homes and opened new shops, making “The Drive” prosperous and one of Vancouver’s liveliest areas.

So, too, with Montreal’s St. Lawrence Boulevard – the north-south corridor that marked the dividing line between the city’s French and English populations. Russian Jews transformed “The Main,” as the street is known, into a densely packed strip of factories, shops, restaurants, synagogues and housing in the 1920s. After they moved out, Greeks, Hungarians, Portuguese, and very recently, Latin Americans moved in. Each new immigrant group refreshed the district and kept it alive. Without new waves of immigrants, it would have slowly decayed and become derelict.

Winnipeg, until the First World War a great city that aspired to surpass Chicago as a gateway to the West, has long been in decline. Once Canada’s third-largest city with a booming population of immigrants seeking to make a new life, the city’s inability to attract immigrants has seen it slip to 8th in population. Whether Winnipeg slides further, or regains its former glory, depends entirely on the city’s ability to make itself once again worthy of immigrants.

One city that won’t supplant Winnipeg is Regina, a city that never much succeeded in attracting immigrants and that never became lively and cosmopolitan. The number of immigrants residing in Regina and their share of the population has steadily declined, giving Regina a declining population and a precarious economy.

Immigrants don’t always integrate well, or quickly, and immigration alone doesn’t guarantee prosperity – ill-advised economic policies can partly or entirely negate the benefits of immigration. But almost any local economy will function a bit better with a few immigrants. And a lot better with a lot of immigrants.

Fourth in a series.; Next: Poor v. rich immigrants; Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Toronto-based Urban Renaissance Institute, a division of Energy Probe Research Foundation. www.urban.probeinternational.org E-mail: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com. Next: Poor v. rich immigrants

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Lawrence Solomon
National Post
January 31, 2004

Immigration profoundly affects the global environment, particularly when it involves the movement of people from backward, rural areas to advanced industrialized countries.

But the effect is not harmful, as most environmental organizations believe. Nothing better protects the global environment – and in particular the rich country environments – than immigrants seeking a better life for themselves and their families.

Most environmentalists argue that Westerners, and especially Americans, consume too many resources. The U.S. represents less than 5% of the world’s population, they note, yet it consumes an estimated 20% of the world’s resources. More immigrants adopting a U.S. lifestyle, they believe, would outstrip the globe’s already perilous capacity to maintain itself.

The facts are right but the conclusion is wanting. Yes, this 5% of the world’s population does consume 25% of the world’s energy production, 14% of its water, 19% of its wood, 15% of its grains and a disproportionate share of other raw resources. Yes, when you add it all up, it’s reasonable to estimate that the United States consumes 20% of the world’s total.

But that 20% of the world’s resources, in American hands, produces 30% of the world’s goods and services. The rest of the world, meanwhile, requires the remaining 80% of the world’s resources to produce just 70% of its output. If the rest of the world were as efficient in its use of resources as the U.S., it would have produced its 70% using just 47% of the world’s resources. The globe would be saving an astounding 33% of the world’s resources.

New immigrants to America and other advanced countries contribute to the global welfare. When people leave a society that makes poor use of the resources at its disposal, and arrive at one that uses resources less wastefully and more fully, the resources they use can both last longer and contribute to more wealth. The greatest gains occur when the immigrant travels from a highly inefficient country to an advanced country, but gains also occur when people immigrate from one advanced country to another, in pursuit of a superior opportunity. Whether the immigrant is a blue-collar worker crossing a border to help keep a construction project on schedule or an academic switching to a university that provides research facilities better suited to his needs, the immigrant more efficiently uses his talents while simultaneously aiding the project’s fulfillment. The relentless drive of U.S. entrepreneurs to become more efficient by using their human and natural resources more efficiently has created a country that produces ever more wealth from ever fewer resources, leading to ever less pollution. Simply put by energy guru Amory Lovins: “Energy savings since 1973 have cut America’s energy bill by US$150-billion to $200-billion a year and carbon emissions by one-fourth.”

The United States, along with Canada and other developed nations, cut the energy required to produce a dollar of GDP by about one-third. The rest of the world, meanwhile, most of it run by top-down dictatorships that quash their peoples’ innate drive to innovate, has largely gone backwards: On the whole, the poor countries consume more energy, and create more pollution, to produce a dollar of GDP today. So, too, with other pollutants: Per dollar of GDP, affluent countries produce fewer nitrous and sulphur oxide emissions, and generally enjoy cleaner air, safer water and a healthier environment.

Many believe the rich countries achieve their wealth by consuming an unfair share of the poor countries’ resources. Poor countries, in fact, have become all but irrelevant to the rich countries’ economies – the rich countries’ share of raw materials that comes from poor countries has been declining for decades. The World Resources Institute, a UN-funded environmental think-tank, explained this most starkly. “With a few exceptions (notably petroleum), most of the natural resources consumed in the United States are from domestic sources,” making the United States “largely self-sufficient in natural resources. . . . its material flows are almost entirely internal.”

Even in oil, the U.S. meets half of its needs domestically and will be receiving much of the rest from Canada, which is emerging as America’s largest supplier. The only important resource that these North American countries need from the Third World, and can’t get enough of, are its people. North America’s immigrants have historically outperformed the native-born, raising the continent’s productivity and conserving its resources out of all proportion to their numbers. For such reasons, the U.S. recently announced measures designed to increase the number of immigrants that it will accept, and Canada has been striving to attract more immigrants than it has been getting.

And because the immigrants know that they’re wanted, and that here they will acquire the freedom to pursue their dreams, the immigrants will come, particularly to North America’s cities, whose governments have been competing among themselves for immigrants. With more immigrants, infrastructure tends to be better used: Public transit becomes more viable, water and waste water systems obtain the additional customers needed to finance upgrades, energy distributors and telephone companies run at lower cost. With more immigrants, urban neighbourhoods acquire the population densities and pedestrian traffic needed to support local merchants. With more immigrants, farmers in the agricultural belt surrounding cities acquire new markets for the many niche crops that ethnic communities demand. With more immigrants, all the environmental amenities improve, and then, so do we.

Third in a series; Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Toronto-based Urban Renaissance Institute, a division of Energy Probe Research Foundation. www.urban.probeinternational.org; LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com;

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By Larry Solomon, published by the National Post on January 24, 2004

After the Romans left Britain in 410 AD, following 400 years of rule over the Celtic tribes, the Angles and the Saxons swept in to settle the lands, along with the Jutes. The conquering Vikings would soon establish their British settlements, and Danes would briefly rule the lands before the great Norman invasion of 1066.

The mongrel race that came of this extraordinary melding of Celtic, Roman, Germanic, Nordic and French cultures – the English – gave birth to a bottom-up system of common law and the longest standing parliamentary democracy in the world. The Jews that the Normans welcomed in the 12th century would help create the world’s greatest financial centre; the Huguenots that arrived in the 16th century the world’s greatest textile industry. This Mongrel Nation would launch the Industrial Revolution and command the world’s most important economy. It would defeat the Spanish Armada, then Napoleon and the French at Waterloo, to become the world’s greatest military power. Its Anglo-Saxon-Latino-Franco-Nordic language – the world’s most adaptable – would become the lingua franca of the world. Reinvigorated by immigrants from India, Pakistan, the West Indies, Hong Kong and others from the far-flung Commonwealth, Great Britain remains a major military, economic and cultural powerhouse to this day.

The only nation in modern times with a history of achievement to rival Great Britain is the United States, England’s greatest offspring, with an even more pronounced mongrel pedigree. Immigrants came seeking the freedom to practice their own religions and they came seeking the freedom to strike it rich. American openness then allowed the blossoming of the most technologically advanced, artistically innovative country on earth, revolutionizing society through inventions such as the automobile, airplane, motion pictures, and the computer.

Immigrants, particularly the non-English, share disproportionately in America’s wealth. One in five Americans of Russian and Scottish ancestry, and one in seven Hungarians, live in a millionaire household, while Americans of English origin, who became complacent, have only one chance in 14 of living in a millionaire household. Not only do minorities prosper in this Mongrel Nation, the smaller the minority, the more it prospers. Of the 15 smallest minority groups, all have at least twice their share of millionaires. Twelve per cent of America’s top 500 business entrepreneurs are first generation Americans.

Today, as has been the case for more than 200 years, America remains the destination of choice for those in the world who seek a better life elsewhere. Those who do not become American by coming to its shores nevertheless embrace its culture. They drink Coca-Cola, smoke Marlboros, watch American sitcoms and read American books. In the last half-century, the decline of European culture has been especially pronounced. The French, who once had an extraordinary film industry, are today more than twice as likely to go to the cinema to watch an American film as a French film.

It wasn’t always so. Italy once produced supermen the likes of Michelangelo and Da Vinci; France produced Voltaire and Cézanne, Germany Bach and Beethoven, the Netherlands Rembrandt and Vermeer. These once great trading nations, expansive, optimistic, and open to the world – have become inward looking, defeatist, and a shadow of their former selves. A recent survey asked Germans to identify their country’s greatest sons. They included no one born after 1900 who didn’t emigrate, apart from politicians such as Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, domestic entertainers unknown on this side of the Atlantic, and others with local reputations. Cool Britannia, meanwhile, has retained genius throughout the ages: in the arts with Shakespeare, Dickens, and the Beatles; in the sciences with Darwin and Newton, and Crick, who along with the American, Watson, discovered the double-helix of DNA.

The greats of European descent this century were more readily found on this side of the ocean. Albert Einstein fled Nazi Germany in 1933 for the United States; Enrico Fermi fled Mussolini’s Italy in 1938 and built the first nuclear reactor in the U.S. Igor Sikorsky fled Communist Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1919 and invented the first helicopter in the U.S.

In their adopted land, immigrants great and small can shuck the strictures of prejudice, cross fertilize with cultures across the globe, succeed on their merits rather than their inherited privilege, and inspire native-born Americans to keep up. This melting pot now dominates the ranks of Nobel Prize winners, dominates art and theatre, dominates the great institutions of higher learning, and dominates industry. The U.S. accounts for about 30% of the world’s production. Its top five companies – Walmart, General Electric, Pfizer, Microsoft and Exxon/Mobil – have a market capitalization that exceeds US$1-trillion, rivalling that of all the companies listed on either the Paris or German bourses.

Next to the U.K. and the U.S., Canada stands third as a Mongrel Nation. Because it remains open to new people and new ideas, Canada is increasing its population and wealth and, sometime this century, could overtake most if not all continental European countries in both categories. Canada has built its success, as has the U.S., by welcoming more immigrants than just about any other country in the world. Canada tries, in fact, to settle even more immigrants than it does.

To find the mettle to succeed in this quest, Canada need only look at Europe, which has so tragically lost its way. By 2050, Europe’s population is slated to decline by 80-million people because it has closed its doors. Forgetting their own histories of assimilating foreign peoples and foreign influences, the French somehow reason they would no longer be French, the Germans that they would no longer be German, if their cultures absorbed the best of other lands. They see themselves as museum pieces, rather than creative works in progress, rather than Mongrel Nations.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Toronto-based Urban Renaissance Institute. www.urban.probeinternational.org, E-mail: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

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Lawrence Solomon
National Post
January 17, 2004

First in a series

Most Canadians see Canada in the middle ranks of nations, without a military or the large economy of a France, Germany or United Kingdom, let alone a United States or Japan. Our children will see Canada differently: as an economic and perhaps military powerhouse that joins the first rank of Western nations.

Power and population go hand in hand. The Western world’s most powerful country, the United States, is also its most populous, at 290 million people. The Great Powers of the early 20th century – Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Italy and the United Kingdom – were also the most populous countries in Europe.

The birth rate of continental Europe is now in steep decline and, because it does not welcome immigrants, its population growth is turning negative. The case of Italy is the most dramatic. By 2050, the UN projects, Italy’s current population of 56 million could drop by 28% to 40 million. But Germany’s population will also be dropping, as will France’s. Fortress Europe – the Europeans’ term for their defenses against immigrants – may produce a European Union of 300 million people at mid-century, down from today’s 380 million, and its population will be rapidly dropping. Japan’s population will diminish for similar reasons, to perhaps 90 million by 2050 and as little as 50 million by 2100.

Among the Western nations, only the English-speaking peoples, with their traditions of democracy and respect for individual rights, are receptive to immigrants, and only they are strong and ascendant. Australia, with its growing population and robust economy, has assumed a broad military role in the South Pacific. The U.K., whose population growth has just propelled its GDP past France’s, giving it the world’s fourth-largest economy, is also willing to exercise its military might.

No one will pass the U.S. economy, which already commands almost one-third of the world’s GDP. Just the opposite, thanks to a population that would be increasing even without immigration, and is exploding with it. The U.S. population will reach at least 400 million by mid-century, the U.S. Census Bureau projects, and possibly 550 million, a near doubling of its current size. By 2100, the U.S. population could top one billion.

Canada’s population will not grow at the heady U.S. rates this century. But because our population will keep climbing while that of most Western nations decline, we may well emerge as the developed world’s second-largest economy, and one of its most populous. By mid-century, with a population that will exceed that of most European nations and be gaining on the rest, our ascendancy will be clear to all, raising our prestige and influence in the world and changing our own world view. We will increasingly see ourselves as a nation with global interests, and with a corresponding need to develop the military capacity needed to defend those interests and ourselves.

No projections decades out are reliable, of course, including current ones by the United Nations and national governments, which simply project the status quo into the future. The history of immigration, in contrast, shows great swings. In Canada during the last century, we had periods of great openness, during economic expansions, and periods of retrenchment, such as in the Great Depression. But one factor has remained constant in the history of immigration: Booming economies import people, stagnant economies export them. When Europeans came to North America in the tens of millions, North America was offering the highest real wages in the world while Europe was bereft of opportunity.

With Europe’s much-vaunted social safety net in tatters, we may well see this scenario repeated. The UN estimates, for example, that Germany would need to accept an 18-fold increase in immigrants if it is to have the workers needed to support its ageing population. France would need to accept 256 times its number of immigrants and Italy 378 times. These Fortress Europe countries show no sign of letting large numbers of immigrants in. Instead, Europe’s ageing electorate propagandizes its youth, to convince it to do its duty to its elders – the school system even teaches the young to lower their expectations. If the electorate continues on this path, the young inside the walls of Fortress Europe will flee, as earlier generations fled other forms of coercion. As with those earlier generations, many will come to Canada, simultaneously depleting their country of birth and enriching us.

One hundred years ago, Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier predicted that Canada would be 60 million strong by mid-century. He anticipated a 10-fold increase in population. In fact, Canada would only increase three-fold, not because we became timid but because the First World War and then the Great Depression and Second World War stopped immigration dead in its tracks. In the next half century, our population doubled again as we all attained unprecedented prosperity.

Another doubling in the next half century, and another doubling to close out this century, would again bring us unprecedented prosperity, and for the time, unprecedented might – along with the United States, we would be a preeminent power, able to turn our accomplishment to the good of mankind. In so doing, we would be true to ourselves as well as to others, and also fulfill Laurier’s ambition: “For the next 75 years, nay the next 100 years,” he said, “Canada shall be the star towards which all men who love progress and freedom shall come.”

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Toronto-based Urban Renaissance Institute. www.urban.probeinternational.org LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com; Next Saturday: More benefits

Readers respond

Lawrence Solomon’s column on Canada as the next great power assumes that expansion to a population of 120 million by the year 2100 can be accomplished merely by opening the floodgates and letting the immigrants pour in. However, I question whether Canada, as a nation, is strong enough to accept such an expansion without coming apart at the seams.

Adding massive numbers of immigrants is likely to lead under current conditions to the balkanization of Canada into a series of mutually exclusive ethnic and cultural groups. When pressures become too great – as they surely will if the population quadruples – there will be little to stop them flying apart.The only nation in recent times to have grown massively by immigration in a relatively short period is the United States. But there is a crucial difference between it and Canada. The United States, as a nation, has a strong sense of identity and quickly absorbs new immigrants into this identity. Canada, in contrast, has a much weaker sense of identity: Our only common point of agreement nowadays appears to be that we are not Americans. Indeed, our multicultural policies almost seem to be crafted to suppress any common sense of identity.Multiculturalism is not a nation-building policy. The idea that we can piece a nation together by encouraging immigrants to place more emphasis on their origins rather than their future is the kind of absurdity that could only have come from professional bureaucrats divorced from the realities of life. By all means, let us have immigrants. But let us first adopt policies that will give them an identity as Canadians when they get here.
Roger Graves, Norther Gower, Ont.

There are so many conditions that have to be all together, in place, all at the same time, to create a great power – population being only one of them. If a large population creates wealth, why aren’t Brazil, Mexico and India great powers? The creation of a great power requires, among other things, the creation of great wealth. That means having all the requisites such as competitive taxation and regulation, an educated workforce, etc.

Mr. Solomon doesn’t appear to be connected to the immigration industry, but he beats the same drum as they do, this time with the misguided connection between it and wealth creation.
Patrick Doyle, Edmonton

The historical pattern of immigrant settlement during the last 50 years has been almost exclusively to the five largest Canadian cities, with Toronto taking the largest proportion. If 90 million more people were added to our numbers, Toronto would grow tenfold to more than 20 million people. Our largest city is already burdened by traffic congestion, poor air quality and problems with garbage disposal. The environmental degradation and decrease in the standard of living in our large cities with the expansion that Mr. Solomon envisions, even if the energy to support that expansion were available, is unimaginable.
Peter Salonius, Scientists for Population Reduction, Durham Bridge, N.B.

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