In the 1981 film “Chariots of Fire,” two seasoned masters at a Cambridge University college, both members of the establishment, snobbishly refer to one of their students, Harold Abrahams, son of a rich Jewish family in London, as a bright, ambitious young man, who, in their minds, was determined to win at all costs, including hiring a professional coach to train him for the upcoming Olympics in preference to the “way of the amateur” preferred by the college masters.

To them he was yet “another semite, who worshipped another god” and decidedly not one of them, the English elite.

It was a stark reminder of the anti-Jewish prejudice throughout Europe for hundreds of years and certainly the English establishment and elite of the 1920s, and universities such as Cambridge and Oxford.

That and other racial prejudices exploded in Nazi Germany and the Far East in the Second World War with terrible consequences and remains a simmering, sometimes boiling problem south of the border and even Canada to this day.

What was once mostly white immigration from Europe to the Americas has changed and is evident to anyone who lives in any medium-to-large-sized city in Canada.

Most immigrants to Canada come not from Europe these days, but from virtually every country in the world. Pleasant Manor, where my wife is in long-term care for dementia, is a small window into the transformation.

Pre-COVID, the great majority of the staff and residents at Pleasant manor in Virgil were Mennonites — Christian, one God, one book, one culture, one common understanding. COVID and the post-covid staffing challenges changed all that.

Now, the great majority of the residents remain Christian and white, but the staff reflects what’s been happening in Europe, the U.K. and Canada for decades: immigration from a broad spectrum of countries from all points in Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India to Southeast Asia and beyond, which has changed the look and feel of the staff and communities to which they now belong and reflect their beliefs, cultures and experiences.

In no time, what looked familiar for many decades, worshipped the same way, from the same book and shared the same culture, changed overnight.

And thank goodness. Canada needs immigrants to grow and prosper — to fill jobs from service industries to scientists, physicians, engineers, technologists of all sorts, entrepreneurs, business leaders, educators and yes, even politicians. 

Without them, Canada, like so many European countries, Russia, China and other countries, was aging — too few babies and young adults to fill the needs of a developing and evolving nation. 

Of course, there has been resistance — much as we hear from politicians in the United States and some European countries. Why would we expect less? 

Humans are tribalistic by nature, suspicious of others who look different, worship another God or perhaps no God at all, dress differently, behave differently and whose stories differ from ours.

But surely looked at the other way around, our ways, stories and affiliations must seem peculiar to many immigrants. 

Tribalism has deep evolutionary roots. Most species, or bands within species, are wary of one another. Chimpanzees are very territorial: other bands are likely to be attacked if they intrude on another band’s territory.

But not always — there are examples of different bands coming together peaceably and learning from one another. 

From a larger perspective, trying to stem the immigration tide seems hopeless to me: the numbers are so huge and the need so great for immigrants that Canadians, Americans and Europeans must surely realize that time and numbers are not on their side. China and India are on course to hit the two to three billion mark by this mid-century.

By comparison, growth in the original colonizing countries, mostly European, will be far less, making it harder to maintain any edge, technological or otherwise, the West had for much of the 20th century and before. 

The answer is collaboration: immigrants need safety and opportunity, and Western countries need their talents and energy to secure the country. It’s that simple.

We need them and they need us and hopefully in due course there won’t be any “them” and “us.”

Returning to Pleasant Manor and the Niagara region as a whole, my observations have been that the changing mix of long-term care workers and other jobs has been a big plus.

The only question should be whether applicants can do the job, not what or who they believe in or how they dress.

What counts is performance on the job — for the rest, I welcome new workers, whatever their stories and origins, precisely because they bring diversity and interest. 

And on the matter of God, any God worth the name is surely God of all.

Dr. William Brown is a professor of neurology at McMaster University and co-founder of the InfoHealth series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library.