Immigration, National Identity, and Populism Explained by Eric Kaufmann | Blendr Report EP145
The immigration debate is usually framed around economics. The real tension is culture, trust, and national identity.
Canada’s immigration debate is often framed as a spreadsheet problem. Housing shortages. Hospital wait times. Wage pressure. Infrastructure strain. These are the safe arguments—the ones politicians, economists, and polite dinner guests are allowed to have.
But they are not the real argument.
The deeper tension, increasingly obvious to anyone paying attention, is cultural. It is about identity, social trust, and whether a country can absorb rapid demographic change without dissolving the bonds that make it feel like a shared home rather than a collection of parallel lives.
That was the core theme of our recent conversation with political scientist Eric Kaufmann, whose work has shaped global discussions on nationalism, immigration, and social cohesion. What emerged was not a moral lecture or partisan script, but a sober diagnosis of why so many Western societies—Canada included—feel unsettled.
One of Kaufmann’s central observations is that modern populism is not primarily driven by separatism or old-style nationalism. It is defensive rather than expansionist. People are not demanding new borders or ethnic purity. They are reacting to the speed and scale of cultural change.
Assimilation, historically, has always taken time. Language adoption may happen quickly. Employment follows. But deeper integration—intermarriage, shared norms, trust between neighbours—unfolds across generations. When immigration levels outpace those slower processes, societies don’t collapse. They thin.
Trust weakens, social attachment erodes, and communities become more transactional, less rooted.
This is where much of the public conversation goes wrong. Critics often assume that concern over immigration must be driven by racial hostility or economic anxiety. Yet survey data across Europe and North America consistently shows something else: voters who want lower immigration are most likely to say their country is “losing its culture” or becoming unrecognizable—not that immigrants are inherently inferior or unwelcome.
That distinction matters.
Attachment to a familiar social fabric is not the same thing as hatred of outsiders. The two are routinely conflated, often deliberately. When every expression of cultural concern is labelled racist, meaningful discussion becomes impossible. People don’t abandon their instincts—they retreat from public speech and grow resentful.
Canada presents a particularly sharp case. For decades, its political class has promoted an asymmetrical version of multiculturalism—one that encourages strong ethnic identity for minorities while treating majority identity as something suspect, embarrassing, or morally dangerous. The result is a vacuum. Ask new arrivals what it means to be Canadian, and many receive no clear answer. Ask long-time citizens, and many hesitate to answer at all.
This is not accidental. It reflects a broader project that redefined national pride as moral superiority rather than shared inheritance: Canada as post-national, post-cultural, post-majority. The flag still comes out when convenient, but the underlying story is thin.
The problem with thin stories is that they don’t hold under pressure.
High immigration, rapid urban transformation, and institutional culture wars have collided to produce something new: not chaos or civil conflict, but a low-trust society. People live beside one another rather than with one another. Social life fragments. Political polarization intensifies, not because everyone disagrees, but because no common reference point remains.
Kaufmann is careful here. This is not a prophecy of collapse. Diverse societies can function. Many do. The question is what kind of society people actually want to live in—and whether they are allowed to say so without moral sanction.
That question now sits at the centre of Western politics. It explains the rise of populist parties across Europe. It explains why immigration has become the defining issue even when economic arguments are weak. And it explains why attempts to suppress the conversation have failed.
Canada has delayed that conversation longer than most. The cost of that delay is now visible—not in riots or breakdown, but in confusion, detachment, and a growing sense that something essential has been mislaid.
What happens next depends on whether the country is willing to talk honestly about identity before resentment hardens into something less manageable.
That is the discussion many are trying to avoid—and precisely the one we need to have.
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