Tories to shake up immigration

In this article, Nicholas Keung reports on recent news that the Conservative government will be taking action with regards to Canadian immigration policy, both as concerns how potential new immigrants will be evaluated (i.e. accepted or rejected), and how the party will deal with the Liberal Party’s backlog of immigration cases. 800,000 cases are left to be dealt with from the last administration, according to Diane Finley, the new Immigration Minister.

What is startling about this article, from the perspective of issues of media literacy, is the way it approaches the issue. It doesn’t concern itself with dissecting the big questions that are at the root of this topic. Some of these would be: how should Canada pick its immigrants? What are the genuine needs of the Canadian workforce? And what kinds of prejudices are in play with immigration policies?

One must seriously consider why a more polemical tack isn’t taken in this article – why the author seems to approach the issues as if there are no moral questions involved. The topic of immigration is a loaded one, after all, and the policies that are put into place will have very concrete impacts on individual lives.

One hypothesis we can make about this issue of amorality is that the author of the article is in fact writing to a community that is itself unaffected by immigration policies. Why should a university professor care about immigration policies, if he himself is not an immigrant, and has no desire to bring in anyone from a foreign country? Signs that this article is in fact addressed to a specific community can be found in the way that it’s written. It’s disengaged and employs a fairly high level of vocabulary. (‘Opt’ is used instead of ‘choose’ for example.)

This article is therefore a good example of the amorality and ambiguity of media (as described by Silverstone). It also demonstrates how media may use this amorality to preserve a community (i.e. Canadians) that may risk falling apart because of its responsibilities for the Other (i.e. prospective immigrants).

From the Globe and Mail, March 14, 2008