Canada: The Immigrant Experience

Recent reports from Canada suggest immigrants are having a harder time than they used to integrating into Canadian life in economic terms.

This is odd: first, Canada is admitting much better educated immigrants than she used to. Second, there is much more help for immigrants than there used to be. In my youth, immigrants from Europe had to serve a period of actual indenture, as farm workers or as servants, before getting citizenship. Before that, my own ancestors risked death on cholera ships to get here. Today, the immigrants are generally professional people, and they are bolstered with huge government expenditures on “multiculturalism.” There are now laws against discrimination, or even discriminatory speech.

So what’s the problem?

It might just be that our choice of immigrants is wrong. Should we be taking, in effect, the upper class, instead of, as we used to, the “huddled masses,” of other shores?

First, of course, the upper classes need it less.

But I remember a friend of my first wife who was a graduate student at U of T, an emigrant from Pakistan in adulthood. She went on and on about the discrimination against “people of colour” in Canada. I asked her, did she have any solid evidence of being discriminated against here?

Her response was, “Why aren’t I a member of the Granite Club?”

How many members of the Granite Club are still university students?

Unrealistic expectations, surely.

But, because she was upper upper class in Pakistan, a place where few manage a university education, and getting to study in Canada means you are made for life, she probably really did think she was being treated shabbily. The minute she returned to Pakistan she could expect to be in any social club she chose.

You know the story of the Princess and the Pea? There is a lot of wisdom in it. Those who complain most loudly of discrimination and being treated shabbily are most likely to be those accustomed to privilege, not those who are genuinely discriminated against. Those who are regularly discriminated against tend to get accustomed to it. You are a lot less likely to hear from them.

Moreover, it is improbable that such new immigrants are going to throw their heart and soul into making it in Canada when they can return home at any time to a life of privilege and leisure.