The couple at the table next to mine converses, naturally, in French, the official language of Quebec.
The people at the table behind me speak happily in, I’m guessing, Hindi-Urdu. (They appear to be from India.)
A couple of tables over, a family of four chatters in Mandarin.
I’m enjoying a leisurely lunch at an outdoor café in downtown Montreal, munching on some sweet potato fries and eavesdropping shamelessly. The fact that I don’t understand anything of what’s being said around me doesn’t diminish the pleasure of the experience.
Part of the joy comes from seeing that this is possible. People who come from different places, speak different languages and believe different things not only can live together in peace but can help each other toward prosperity.
We in the United States debate whether we should build walls to keep foreigners out. We Americans also are doing our best to ignore a looming labor shortage, one that will grow deeper every year between now and the year 2030, when it will peak. The costs of our determined ignorance will be continued supply-line hiccups, longer and longer delays in service and periodic surges of inflation.
This will happen regardless of who is president, unless we change course and realize that pretending a problem doesn’t exist isn’t a way to solve it.
Our neighbors to the north have taken a different tack.
They seem to realize that the first step to meeting a challenge involves acknowledging that it exists.
Not long before I sat down for lunch, Canada crossed a threshold. Its national population reached the 40-million mark.
Just 20 years ago, that number was slightly over 30 million. So, the nation’s population has grown by more than 30 percent in the space of a generation.
Much of that growth has come from immigration.
Canada now seeks to add 500,000 immigrants to its population every year. The country’s leaders are in the midst of a discussion about how to do this — what systems of support need to be in place to help newcomers make the transition, how can the country help those who already live here understand and show respect for different cultures, in what ways can the process of getting people from varied backgrounds to exist alongside each other and labor productively be encouraged.
The Canadians aren’t doing this for altruistic reasons.
They’re acting out of self-interest. They’re doing it because it makes sense. They know that countries all over the world — including the mighty United States — are going to need people to do the work necessary to make both the private and public sectors function.
As this decade progresses, the competition for labor among countries and communities will intensify to Darwinian levels.
Bigotry and xenophobia will become poisonous luxuries no one will be able to afford.
As I savor my sweet potato fries, I contemplate the roots of prejudice. Almost always, a fear born of insecurity brings the racist, the sexist or the chauvinist into being — a quivering sense of dread that one’s status can be threatened, eroded or destroyed by opening doors, opportunity and the world to everyone.
That anxiety springs from a belief that ours is a zero-sum existence — that for someone else to gain, we must lose.
But that’s not the way things work.
When an enterprise — a company, a cause or a country — works, it becomes something that expands through a process of multiplication rather than addition. It becomes larger than the sum of its parts.
And when a country or culture indulges in division, the result can be subtraction at an astronomical rate.
Canada is opening itself to the world — building bridges rather than roads.
As I sit eating my lunch, I realize this is what the future will look like for forward-thinking prosperous countries and communities. The conversation will be a savory stew of varied dialects and tongues.
And the sweet potato fries will continue to be great.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students
