Experience, Inexperience and (Un)Canadian Poetics*
Amatoritsero Ede
The world system has relied on immigrants for its self-regeneration ever since Homo erectus first moved away from the horn of Africa to Eurasia through the levantine corridor about 1.8 million years ago. Individuals or groups migrate in pursuit of an idea, a dream – or even nightmares. The fleet-footed “traverse” the earth, “exploring all her wide-flung parts with zest” like Dennis Brutus’es romantic troubadour and “probing in motion sweeter far than rest/her secret thickets with an amorous hand.”
Usually the kind of traveller in question arrives loaded down with expectation and energy, trailed by dust and spiced experiences from other places – for whatever they are worth; experiences that could flow into host economies and replenish or give them a boost. This is why it is bewildering that Canadian policy makers are slow to harness, assimilate or localise immigrant energy and creativity and insist that, on entering Canada, immigrants should slough off their foreign experiences as a snake sheds its skin. To function effectively, the arriviste is told in business and social circles, that he or she requires this nebulous descriptive referred to as ‘Canadian experience.’ Immigrants are denuded of their previous skills and infantilized as being inexperienced on arrival. They become tabula rasa – dumb-numb, unintelligent and unintelligible walking curiosities. This is the point where the wayfarer’s dream becomes a nightmare for many years after landing. He or she is either unemployed, under-employed or completely blind-sided by being kidnapped into other pre-occupations at odds with initial education, training and skills, which are usually acquired at a very high level.
A certain result of the deprecation of international experience construed as ‘Canadian inexperience’ is the loss of international expertise due to an irrational insistence on a Canadian experience that is unavailable at the point of entry. Stories abound of immigrant specialists like surgeons, teachers, accountants and editors, being forced, in a desperate bid to earn a living, into occupations beneath their skill levels and outside and below their areas of expertise. A consequence is the irony that an immigration system specifically designed to attract the highly skilled into a knowledge economy inadvertently encourages an erosion of knowledge. Immigration becomes a revolving door through which knowledge enters and exits almost immediately. This is nothing other than reverse immigration. It is a situation in which demographic gains in immigration numbers and added skills are lost due to their not being infused into the economic system or because people are forced to return to their countries of origin or immigrate further. Those who stay behind because they are ‘trapped’ are like tolerated guests at a citizenship party – good for numbers but faceless, voiceless, emasculated, and more significantly, economically unproductive. As a matter of fact, and as a first in Canada, the Ontario Human Rights commission has recently couched such exclusions in terms of a violation of the rights of new Canadians to economic agency. What also need to be articulated are the immigration losses to Canada’s socio-economic utility.
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Nice piece Ama. The Canadian experience is a myth and a contradiction that continues to wash away minority experiences in the process.
An insightful piece. For the most part, it’s Canada’s loss, with the exception of the enrichment of our arts and literature. Thank goodness immigrant writers/artists bring their rich and diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences to expand and enrich the Canadian experience. Now, how to extend this valuable resource to other aspects of life in Canada (and other host countries)?
Interesting editorial. Is this really the sum of the immigrant experiene? I wonder if it is more complicated than this. If the West is maltreating immigrants, immgrants have a strange way of showing it. We come here and we stay and prosper through it. Yes, many of us do. We can’t have it both ways; complain about brain drain – and then complain about Canada or the West refusing to acculturate or assimilate us, whatever is the politically correct term these days (the cloying lingo of “multiculturalism, SMH).
Should Canada ensure that her doctors are really doctors? I hope so. Let’s face it, it is in the interest of every nation to ensure that those that claim to be professionals are indeed qualified to do what they claim they can do. If you can’t write, and you have a PhD, then any nation should prevent you from inflicting abuse on students. If you are a glorified butcher with a medical degree, you should only be in a hospital as a patient, etc… In a way, a rigorous certification process might put other nations on notice that they should not be merely diploma mills, especially in today’s world where any dolt with a credit card can bag a degree from the Internet, just like that.
The good news is that many immigrants thrive and become productive in their host countries and useful to their home countries. If Canada is putting in place policies that deliberately discriminate against immigrants, shame on her and she should be called on it, but the editorial does not give specifics about what exactly is making Ede anxious. Short of evidence, the editorial comes across as merely supercilious. And I am a fan of Ede’s editorials, I just didn’t feel this one…
Canadian immigration is based on a point system that insists on at least a first degree. The system makes sure immigrants are highly qualified. The talk here is about unnecessary roadblocks which does not allow these highly qualified people contribute their quota to Canada’s economic wellbeing. The Ontario Human Rights Commission has deemed fit to wade into the matter and declared such obstructions as being against Canada’s Charter of Rights.
Dr Ede, I think what we have to take into recognition is the way race and class travel across different spaces. For example, a white middle class professional who leaves Canada, Britain or the United States for South Africa or Kenya, will most likely maintain his professional and class status as an immigrant in his new place of abode. Whereas, an Indian or a Black South African middle class professional who moves the other way is often unlikely to find himself in the same position.
There are sacrifices those of us from the South have to make when we emigrate that people from the North wouldn’t have to experience. In Canada as in the UK, recruiters often want to employ people they think will fit in culturally and socially with the majority of their workforce.
In the City of London – you can hardly see black or brown faces in most of the companies operating within the Square Mile. The same is true of journalism: There are not many ethnic minorities working for the London Evening Standard, for example, in a city where 40 percent of the population is non-white. And we have less than 50 black professors across British universities.
These examples speak to institutionalized racism as well as to what they refer to in Britain as ‘the old school tie’ – nepotism.