Mark Steyn writes:
British politicians now say “We’ve always been a nation of immigrants” – even though, as Douglas Murray points out in his new book The Strange Death of Europe, previous “waves” of immigration were so small and rare (the Huegenots) that people talked about them as singular events for centuries afterwards. The Yanks started this shtick, and it isn’t really true even for them: There was a poll in the early Nineties showing that half the people in the country were descendants of guys who’d got here before 1776. Presumably, after another quarter-century of the 1965 Immigration Act, that would not be the case today.
But the drab reality is that the English Crown and the French Crown conquered parts of North America, and the Anglo-Celts did a rather better job at settling the territory, which is one reason they were able eventually to throw the Bourbon kings out of what is now Canada. The provinces that emerged in “British North America” were not “based on immigration” but on internal settlement by people moving from one part of the British Empire to another part of the British Empire.
Those are what we used to call “facts”.
