Immigration is an issue that recent events have thrust into the public eye. The arrival of 492 potential migrants on the Sun Sea has made it inevitable that we who ARE Canadians confront the issues that are raised by this sudden influx of those who would like to be. Many of the views that have been expressed on the subject, however, go beyond this one fairly unusual event; they reflect much broader views on the subject of immigration as a whole. And on this subject, unfortunately, I find that much of the public shares the views reflected in the following comment, which was posted at the bottom of a column published in the Toronto Sun (and which was recently echoed by Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford): “Stop the immigration and start looking after our own.”
As a patriotic Canadian myself, I recognize and understand the desire of Canadians to have their needs met and their rights protected; what I fail to see is how this is necessarily antithetical to the idea of immigration. To me, comments like the one above reflect a certain ignorance of the realities of our nation and of the nature of immigration itself. They reflect an outdated and prejudicial view of those who come from elsewhere to make our nation their home, a view that these new Canadians will somehow be a “drain” on our nation’s time and resources, that, like children, they will require “baby-sitting,” financial and otherwise, at the expense of “real” Canadians as they acclimate to their new surroundings – the nation that we are so quick to claim as our own with every breath that we are not using to criticize its policies, its policy-makers and what we see as its fundamental flaws.
Recent experience has made me at least somewhat familiar with the realities of the Canadian immigration system. One of these realities, which I think many Canadians fail to understand, is the stringency of the immigration process itself. The requirements of this process are such that, of those applying under the skilled worker category, only the best-educated and most qualified candidates are accepted: the doctors, the lawyers and the engineers who have been trained at other countries’ expense and who now form an integral part of Canada’s economy. In other countries, this is referred to as “the brain drain.”
What Canadians fail to understand is that other countries’ “drain” is Canada’s gain. These Canadians are not going to be draining the pocketbooks of those who happen to have been here for a few more generations; on the contrary, these Canadians are the ones who are going to be performing our surgeries, designing our homes, developing the technologies that will change the way we work and live, and driving the growth of business across our nation. In my personal experience, the new Canadian families and individuals that I have known are some of the hardest-working, most honourable, most community and family-oriented people that I have ever had the pleasure to meet. They are the ones who have not yet forgotten what a privilege it is to be Canadian.
-- Heather
Good post, Heather. And very true. We need immigration to simply maintain proper levels of employment. What you didn't mention, and what is so heart breaking, is that many people are lied to overseas, and qualified professionals come here and end up working as taxi drivers and in gas stations (like a cardiologist friend of mine from Pakistan) because the canadian government is ridiculously slow on assigning "equality tests", for lack of a better term. People like Rob Ford reveal themselves to be wholly ignorant, and the fact that he is the probable selection for Toronto's next mayor says something about us, and what it says, isn't good.
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