Reverse immigration is a knife that cuts both ways and the bleeding is thick and visible on both sides. Those settlers – doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, pilots and so on – whose foreign training and professional experiences are negated by an unofficial but ubiquitous statute of exclusion called Canadian experience, cannot, in turn, bring their creativity, skills and vision to bear on the building of a young nation that actually requires urgent and regular renewal in numbers, in the trades, the professions and in business. It is a matter of fact that due to falling birth rates, increased life expectancies and lower mortality, Canada and most Western democracies including the USA – and even Eastern Europe and Russia – have ageing populations. “Global aging” or, more accurately, an aging of the ‘Western hemisphere,’ is captured by several demographic descriptors such as “the greying of Europe,” “The Silver Tsunami” or “Baby Bust” as compared to “Baby Boom,” and so on. An equivalent expression to capture economic aging specific to Canada alone ought to be referred to as “Canadian Experience” because that phrase is synonymous with and leads to all the negative socio-economic attributes and results of global aging. Moreover, a large demographic of Canada’s meagre 35-million-strong population who possess Canadian experience are either already ageing, aged or they are not yet born. The result is that by 2016 Canada will have a skilled labour shortage of about 300,000 workers; that could rise to a nightmarish 1.7 million by 2031.
The irrationality of Canadian experience can be better appreciated by considering a usually small and ignored or peripheral group of migrants in such discussions – artists, be they visual or performing artists, poets, actors, novelists or dramatists. Here focus is on the creative writer. First, while writing falls under the skills category of “Occupations in Art, Culture Recreation and Sports,” it is an open secret that the Canadian immigration point system does not rate creative writing high on its list of professions. However the culture industry is a viable economic unit like any other industry, requiring expansion and numbers in a country whose small population is a tiny pinhead on its astronomically sized map. Second only to Russia in size, Canada is 1.24 times larger than the USA in total area even though the latter has a nonuple population at 316,756,000 compared to Canada’s 35,158,304 going by September 2013 census records.
The point is that a creative writer deals in words, which in any language do not change conceptually across borders. Canada’s store of cultural capital has been greatly enlarged by the appearance of immigrant writers who are comparable to any other writers of world literature. Examples are M.J Vasanji, Rohintin Mistry, Austin Clarke, Emma Donoghue, Matha Blum or Bharati Mukherjee, the last of whom has immigrated further and is now a celebrated American writer and scholar. How shall we define the experience that goes into the literary works produced by the immigrant writer? Certainly it is not just Canadian experience that shapes their creativity. A writer writes from lived experience, be it Canadian, American German and so forth. The immigrant writer is rich in the sense that he is a cosmopolitan and his experiences are larger than just one small Canadian window. In how far has the poet, T. S. Elliot, who was born in Missouri, USA and immigrated to the UK in 1914, improved British literature? Should he have been shut out of opportunities for literary praxis because he was first and foremost an American and forced to become for example, a banker as he was, or a cobbler? What a loss that would have been for British culture! Coming from America as he did, I am sure no one asked him for a British experience before he could write. So what is this obsession with Canadian experience in the face of globalisation?
An ageing global (or Western Hemispheric) economy relies on a random, if regulated and systematic, cross-border movement of people, goods, ideas and images in order to remain a self-sustaining system. Nowhere should that fact be more urgently acknowledged than in a sparsely populated and ageing Canada, which needs a constant influx of immigrants for self-renewal. Since movement is inherent in our nature considering our hunter-gatherer ancestral beginnings, it falls upon host communities to harness and integrate the productivity, energy and rich diversity which immigrants bring with them. Canada’s Ode to local experience marginalises the immigrant while provincialising Canadian industry.
*delivered at the Canada Seminar of Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
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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…
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.
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.