One enjoys talking to friends who are planning to visit for the first time places that are on one's own "been there, done that" list. Two such folk told me this week that they were soon heading, but not together, for Halifax, N.S. and New York, N.Y. My mind entertained the not entirely relevant thought that both those east coast ports are named for places in Yorkshire, as are Ontario's Scarborough, Whitby, Pickering, Malton and, of course, the Humber River. Would that we had a Robin Hood's Bay.

The Nova Scotia and New York ports of entry into North America are not equally exciting. One might, perhaps, "make it" in Halifax but nowhere else. The Neptune Theatre School there could comment further on that. But as an arrival point for millions now living on this continent, Halifax's Pier 21 was, like Ellis Island, an emotional landfall and a new beginning.

Aseasoned New Yorker, once a colleague of mine, recently sent me a post card bearing the picture of a well-known landmark. He said "I've been here so long that some people think I arrived with the Statue of Liberty". It (she?) has been there, fully assembled, since 1886. Surely Pier 21 needs some such iconic colossus to commemorate the more than a million immigrants, hundreds of thousands of Canadian service personnel and the 50,000 war brides who passed that way. Just what it should be is a challenge to the sculptors among us and to those who could finance such a project.

New York's "Lady Liberty" had, like Gotham's other newcomers from over the sea, a difficult past. Some of the facts are as follows. The Suez Canal between the Nile delta and the Red Sea was opened in 1869. The strapped Turkish viceroy in Egypt sold his shares in the canal to Britain in 1875. A huge statue of an Egyptian woman holding aloft a torch to enlighten Asia had been commissioned from Alsatian sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi to stand at the southern entry to the waterway. By the time the statue was being cast by Gustave Eiffel ['Ay-FELL', please, not 'EYE-full'] the viceroy was bankrupt. The colossus had to be mothballed. Bartholdi took off for a vacation in New York.

Perhaps there was money there. About to sail up the Hudson River, he passed Bedloe's Island and saw it as the perfect site for his as yet unassembled 300 copper sections. The lady could be given an appropriate new head. If the French government could be persuaded to donate the statue, USAnians might be willing to pay for an appropriate pedestal.

A campaign began to give "Liberty Enlightening the World" a place to stand. Art works and publishable literary pieces were offered for sale in the fund-raising effort. Among the latter submissions was a prose poem by Emma Lazarus, the U.S. born daughter of a well-off, well integrated, Sephardic (Spanish/Portuguese) immigrant Jewish family. Her poem is now enshrined in bronze:

Send me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse

of your teaming shores. Send these, the homeless,

tempest-tossed to me.

I lift my lamp

beside the open door.

Millions of indigenous black people might have asked "What about us?". They were still poor and wretched. They would be all but homeless in their native land for the better part of another century.

What Miss Lazarus wrote challenges us, as did Pierre Elliot Trudeau's multicultural vision of Canada, to get beyond our traditional bicultural frame of mind. Since very few immigrants from either France or Britain now arrive here, our national profile is changing. To lift a verse from the Scriptures, "It does not yet appear what we shall be". Since we can expect further variegated immigration, we must be prepared for the social and cultural adjustments that will be necessary. Can we do it with grace? That is the question.

With that in mind, one thinks of the flood of immigrants that demographers see as necessary to replace our greying population and provide the 'worker class' that old stock Canadians will not be able to fill because of their faze-ourselves-out birthrate. Those of us who have been here a long time seem no longer to have the will to replace ourselves. Others, then, must fill the gap. We cannot blame those who wish to come here to live and work if we ourselves will not populate the country adequately. Like global warming, it is a critical situation that we are not facing. We no longer either conserve our resources or give "hostages to fortune". Leave future problems to somebody else's children and grandchildren.

For the most part our current immigrants are not exactly the wretched refuse from some teaming shore. They are carefully selected newcomers even though some bring an unacceptable mindset to Canada. Who here, even among the most dogmatic of us, plots the mutilation or death of those who think differently? What civilised Canadian would issue a 'fatwah' on an unbeliever? There are few problems with Buddhists, Hindus or Sikhs. If Islam is to be accepted here its moderates must publicly reject its brutal, tribal aspects. All Canadians must live and let live. Meanwhile, the prophetic insights of Muhammad to 6th Century desert dwellers, like those of the old prophets of Israel, need not be discounted. They should be infused, not forced, into our still new and neither fully understood nor appreciated multicultural context.

People from around the world fled to the United States, when possible, not to become "Americans" but to be free from Old World poverty and persecution. They soon found themselves caught up in a new nationalism whose slogan became "America: love it or leave it". They had neither the will nor the means to flee elsewhere. Their children became part of a new nationalism and aggressive imperialism.

Nor have others come to Canada primarily to assume a traditional Canadian cultural identity, although future generations may do that. They came to share the freedom under the law, the equal justice and the respect for peace, order and good government for which Canada has had a worldwide reputation. Like previous and future immigrants, they should find them.