Here is what Toronto is not: Toronto is not dirty, dangerous, or poor. Toronto is not a hell of lost liberties or a babble of cultural incoherence or a ruin of failed institutions. Yet a popular argument against high levels of immigration suggests it should be.

In his 2004 book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity, the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warned that "the United States of America will suffer the fate of Sparta and Rome," should its founding Anglo-Protestant culture continue to wane. Commenting sympathetically on Huntington's argument, conservative writer John O'Sullivan asserts that if traditional patterns of national life are "removed or destroyed, then anomie, despair, and disintegration tend to be among the consequences." So we must take care to protect our precious cultural patrimony from the acid of "denationalizing" economic and cultural globalization. We must keep outsiders out.

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Will Wilkinson is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of Cato Unbound. He writes on topics ranging from Social Security reform, happiness and public policy, economic inequality, and the political implications of new research in psychology and economics. He is a regular commentator on public radio's Marketplace and his writing has appeared in The Economist, Reason, Forbes, Slate, Policy, Prospect, and many other publications.