Imagine travelling to Japan and informing the Japanese people that their attachment to their history, language and culture has become problematic.
Tell them that Japan is merely an economic zone whose population can be radically transformed according to the labour requirements of corporations. Explain that Japanese customs must continually accommodate every imported cultural practice, while anyone who objects should be investigated for intolerance. Inform them that preserving a recognizably Japanese Japan is an outdated and exclusionary ambition that modern people must overcome.
The international response would be immediate. Commentators would condemn the arrogance of foreigners lecturing the Japanese about their own homeland. Academics would explain the importance of cultural preservation. Politicians would praise Japan’s unique history, while tourism advertisements continued selling precisely the national character these imaginary reformers wanted dismantled.
Now replace Japan with Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Germany or another historic European nation.
The lecture changes immediately.
European people are routinely told that attachment to their inherited culture is suspicious, exclusionary or morally dangerous. The instinct celebrated as cultural pride almost everywhere else becomes an alarming sign of extremism when expressed by Europeans or Christians.
Apparently, Japan may remain Japanese, but Ireland must become an international economic platform with a flag.
Japan is not sealed off from the world, nor has it rejected immigration. The number of foreign residents reached a record 4.1 million by the end of 2025, representing roughly three per cent of the country’s population.[1] Japan is accepting more foreign workers because of labour shortages, an ageing population and a declining domestic workforce.
The important distinction is not that Japan permits no immigration. It plainly does.
Japan still approaches immigration as a policy that must serve Japan.
Its government discusses residency management, integration, public safety and labour requirements without pretending that Japan has no historic population or recognizable national culture. Nobody seriously argues that Japanese customs must become secondary to prove that Japanese people are sufficiently tolerant.
Foreigners who settle in Japan are generally expected to function within Japanese society. Japan is not expected to redesign itself around every person who arrives.
European nations are increasingly denied the same permission.
A Japanese person who wants Japan to remain recognizably Japanese is considered culturally conscious. An Indigenous community protecting its language and traditions is considered courageous. A religious or ethnic minority resisting assimilation is praised for preserving its identity.
An Irish, English, Scottish, French or German person who expresses the same desire is often treated as though he has confessed to something sinister.
Why should the moral standard change according to skin colour?
White people do not lose the right to cultural continuity because they are white. Christians do not lose the right to value their historical inheritance because Christianity helped shape successful societies. European nations do not become ownerless public property because their economies attract people from elsewhere.
Preserving a country’s cultural character does not require racial purity, hostility toward peaceful immigrants or mistreatment of minorities. It requires acknowledging that historic populations have a legitimate interest in the future of the societies their ancestors built.
Every other population appears permitted to understand this without submitting a written apology.
Ireland provides one of the clearest examples.
Its population reached approximately 5.46 million in April 2025. During the preceding twelve months, 125,300 people immigrated into the country, marking the fourth consecutive year in which immigration exceeded 100,000.[2]
The argument is not that every immigrant is harmful or that Ireland should admit nobody. The question concerns scale, pace, capacity and consent.
How quickly can a nation of fewer than six million people absorb sustained migration without materially changing its communities? How much housing, medical capacity, education infrastructure and public spending are required? How many newcomers can be integrated before integration gives way to parallel societies?
Politicians discuss these questions as though Ireland were a spreadsheet rather than a country. More workers are needed, more consumers support economic growth, and more taxpayers may help finance an ageing population. When rents rise, hospitals strain and communities change beyond recognition, citizens are instructed to admire the increased gross domestic product.
The Irish are apparently expected to regard their homeland as an economic asset managed for maximum occupancy.
If Irish culture can no longer be securely preserved in Ireland, where exactly is an Irish person supposed to go to find it?
Perhaps the government will eventually establish an Irish heritage centre where future generations can observe traditional Irish people in a carefully recreated habitat. Visitors could hear the language, examine the customs and read a plaque explaining that the living culture was sacrificed to meet a labour-market projection.
A culture surviving only in museums, festivals and tourism campaigns is no longer a national culture. It has become an exhibit commemorating the people who once occupied the country.
Political leaders increasingly speak about countries as though their primary purpose were to generate economic activity. Citizens become units of labour, immigrants become replacement workers, communities become development opportunities and national identity becomes a public-relations theme used during sporting events.
A nation is more than any of those things.
Countries inherit languages, laws, customs, religious traditions, historical memories, literature, architecture and expectations about public behaviour. Those characteristics develop over generations. They cannot be replaced as casually as a workforce or reconstructed later through a government grant.
Culture is not simply food, clothing and music. Those are its most visible features, which makes them easy for politicians to celebrate while dismantling everything underneath them.
A functioning culture also includes assumptions about trust, family, personal responsibility, freedom of expression, equality before the law, the treatment of women and the obligations citizens owe one another.
Large-scale population change introduces different assumptions about how society should operate. Some differences may enrich a country, while others create genuine conflict. Adults should be capable of acknowledging both possibilities without first proving their moral innocence.
Some countries provide dependable electricity, clean drinking water, functioning courts, enforceable contracts, public order, advanced healthcare and broad economic opportunity. Others struggle with corruption, political violence, weak institutions and chronic poverty.
Millions of migrants understand the distinction perfectly well because they vote with their feet.
Migration generally flows toward countries offering greater safety, opportunity and institutional reliability. People rarely risk everything to move in the opposite direction.
Western countries became desirable because generations built institutions capable of producing prosperity, security and trust. Those societies were shaped by European legal traditions, Christian moral thought, parliamentary government, property rights and the expectation that public institutions should remain subject to law.
Those achievements did not appear naturally in the soil. They were built, defended and passed from one generation to another.
The people who inherited those countries are now frequently told that their civilization’s success creates an unlimited obligation to share it, transform it and eventually surrender control over its future.
Prosperity is not an international confession of guilt. A functioning country is not abandoned property waiting to be claimed by anyone who arrives.
Mass migration is often presented as the humanitarian solution to poverty and instability, but relocating populations does not correct the conditions causing them to leave.
A country suffering from corruption, weak institutions, religious conflict or political violence requires reform, investment and competent leadership. Exporting ambitious and capable people may make those reforms less likely by removing many of the citizens most capable of demanding change.
A failing country cannot become successful by transferring portions of its population into a successful one. The consequences move while the underlying failure remains untouched.
Western governments and corporations benefit from the arrangement. Employers receive additional labour. Universities receive international tuition. Landlords receive additional demand. Governments acquire more taxpayers and postpone difficult conversations about productivity, birth rates and public spending.
Ordinary citizens absorb the housing shortages, infrastructure pressure and cost of unsuccessful integration.
The newcomer becomes an economic unit, the citizen becomes an obstacle, and the country becomes a hotel whose owners have forgotten that people already live there.
Politicians then describe the arrangement as compassion, which is especially convenient when someone else is paying the bill.
Immigration can benefit a country when the number of newcomers remains manageable, selection serves genuine national needs and integration is treated as an obligation.
People who immigrate peacefully, work, obey the law, contribute to their communities and develop loyalty to their new country can become valued members of the national community. Citizenship need not depend exclusively on ancestry.
Belonging, however, cannot operate as a one-way demand.
A newcomer has no moral right to reproduce the society he left inside the country that accepted him. Immigration should not require the receiving population to surrender its language, remove historical symbols, abandon customs or remain silent about practices conflicting with its laws.
People who settle in another nation accept obligations toward the society receiving them. They should respect its laws, understand its history, learn its public language and adapt to its civic expectations.
The host population should not be ordered to accommodate every imported practice while newcomers are assured that expecting adaptation would violate their dignity.
Hospitality does not require giving the guest the title to the house.
Migration from societies with substantially different understandings of law, religion, family and individual freedom creates legitimate policy questions.
Large-scale migration from predominantly Muslim countries, for example, raises concerns about the relationship between religious authority and civil law, equality between men and women, freedom of expression, family structure and the treatment of religious dissent.
Acknowledging those differences does not mean every Muslim immigrant holds identical beliefs. Many integrate successfully, reject extremism and appreciate the freedoms offered by Western countries.
Successful individuals, however, do not eliminate the broader policy question.
Governments must determine whether integration is working, whether parallel legal and cultural expectations are developing and whether national institutions remain willing to defend their own principles.
Citizens have every right to insist that civil law remains supreme, women possess equal legal status, religious intimidation is not tolerated and freedom of expression does not disappear whenever someone claims offence.
A government confident in its immigration policies would answer those concerns directly. A government unable to answer them accuses the person asking of bigotry.
The accusation is politically efficient because officials no longer have to defend immigration levels or explain integration failures. The citizen must instead defend his character before being permitted to discuss the future of his own country.
The deeper problem is not immigration alone. It is permanent national transformation without meaningful democratic consent.
Citizens are entitled to decide how many people enter their country, how quickly the population grows, which qualifications newcomers should possess and what standards must be met before citizenship is granted.
Those decisions affect housing, healthcare, education, infrastructure, wages, public order and the cultural character of communities. They should not be settled privately among politicians, corporations, universities, consultants and advocacy organizations.
When did Irish citizens consent to population transformation at the current pace? When did British citizens approve migration levels reaching historic highs? When did Canadians vote to make rapid population growth a permanent substitute for productivity and infrastructure planning?
Which election offered a clear choice supported by honest numbers, housing projections, integration costs and long-term demographic consequences?
Politicians campaign using vague language about growth, compassion and diversity. Once elected, they treat an “X” beside a candidate’s name as unlimited authorization to transform the country.
Officials insist that the public supports their policies, yet they appear strangely reluctant to ask the public directly.
If citizens genuinely support current immigration levels, a referendum should pose no danger.
The refusal to hold one suggests that the political class may already know the answer.
Diversity may bring new ideas, skills and experiences. It may also create tension when people do not share a common language, historical memory, legal tradition or understanding of citizenship.
A stable country requires more than people occupying the same territory. Citizens must share enough identity to sacrifice for strangers, support common institutions and accept political decisions they dislike.
Even the welfare state depends upon social trust. People are more willing to contribute when they believe their neighbours share basic obligations and that the system will be administered fairly.
Governments weaken that trust when they encourage permanent cultural separation, apply different standards according to identity or tell the historic population that attachment to its inheritance represents a threat.
A country cannot be held together indefinitely through economic transactions and anti-discrimination seminars.
Eventually, people must share something more substantial than a postal code.
European people are not uniquely disqualified from having homelands.
Irish people have a right to want Ireland to remain Irish. Scottish people have a right to want Scotland to remain Scottish. English people have a right to value England, while French, German, Dutch and Scandinavian people possess the same legitimate interest in preserving their national inheritance.
People of European descent in Canada also have a right to acknowledge the British, French and Christian traditions that shaped this country without treating their ancestry as an embarrassing historical condition.
The double standard is obvious once stated plainly. Every population is encouraged to preserve its identity except the populations of Europe, who are told that self-preservation resembles supremacy.
Every homeland is considered sacred except the European homeland, which is treated as an international public accommodation.
Every culture deserves respect except Western culture, which must continually prove its tolerance by surrendering more of itself.
No people is morally required to consent to its disappearance as a distinct historical culture.
Japan faces enormous demographic challenges. Its population is ageing and declining, its workforce is shrinking and its foreign-resident population is rising. It will have to make difficult decisions about immigration and integration.
Japan nevertheless begins from a premise Western governments increasingly refuse to grant their own citizens: Japan exists primarily for the Japanese people, and its policies should preserve the continuity, stability and interests of Japan.
Why should Ireland not begin from the interests of the Irish? Why should Scotland not preserve Scottish culture, England protect its inheritance or Canada defend the civic traditions that allowed it to become safe, stable and prosperous?
The usual answer is that European attachment to homeland carries a uniquely dangerous history.
History should teach prudence, but it should not impose permanent cultural disarmament upon an entire civilization. Every region has experienced conquest, slavery, discrimination, religious conflict and war. Europeans are not the only people with historical sins, although they may be the only people expected to organize their future around an endless confession of them.
A mature nation can acknowledge past wrongdoing without concluding that its historic population has forfeited any claim to the future.
Immigration policy should begin with a simple principle: a government’s first obligation is to the citizens whose country it administers.
Those citizens have a right to control their borders, determine immigration levels, demand integration and preserve the culture they inherited. They are not morally defective for wanting their children and grandchildren to recognize the country in which they were born.
Japan is entitled to remain Japan. Ireland is entitled to remain Ireland. Scotland is entitled to remain Scotland. England is entitled to remain England, just as France, Germany and every other historic nation possesses a legitimate interest in maintaining its cultural continuity.
A country may treat immigrants fairly without relinquishing its identity. It may respect other cultures without making its historic culture secondary. It may grant citizenship to newcomers while insisting that citizenship carries obligations toward the nation granting it.
The Japanese are permitted to understand this.
Europeans should stop asking permission to understand it too.
A Note About My Book
If this article raised questions about national identity, government authority and the obligations political leaders owe their own citizens, I explore many of those same themes in The People’s Emergency Act: Freedom Convoy 2022. The book is my firsthand account of the convoy, the government’s response and what happens when ordinary Canadians refuse to remain silent while their rights and dignity are pushed aside.
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