Amatoritsero Ede<\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u2013 or even nightmares. The fleet-footed\u00a0\u201ctraverse\u201d the earth, \u201cexploring all her wide-flung parts with zest\u201d like Dennis Brutus\u2019es romantic troubadour and \u201cprobing in motion sweeter far than rest\/her secret thickets with an amorous hand.\u201d<\/p>\n Usually the kind of traveller in question arrives loaded down with expectation and energy, trailed by dust and spiced experiences from other places \u2013 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 \u2018Canadian experience.\u2019 Immigrants are denuded of their previous skills and infantilized as being inexperienced on arrival. They become tabula rasa \u2013 dumb-numb, unintelligent and unintelligible walking curiosities. This is the point where the wayfarer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n A certain result of the deprecation of international experience construed as \u2018Canadian inexperience\u2019 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 \u2018trapped\u2019 are like tolerated guests at a citizenship party \u2013 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\u2019s socio-economic utility.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Reverse immigration is a knife that cuts both ways and the bleeding is thick and visible on both sides. Those settlers \u2013 doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, pilots and so on \u2013 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 \u2013 and even Eastern Europe and Russia \u2013 have ageing populations. \u201cGlobal aging\u201d or, more accurately, an aging of the \u2018Western hemisphere,\u2019 is captured by several demographic descriptors such as \u201cthe greying of Europe,\u201d \u201cThe Silver Tsunami\u201d or \u201cBaby Bust\u201d as compared to \u201cBaby Boom,\u201d and so on.\u00a0 An equivalent expression to capture economic aging specific to Canada alone ought to be referred to as \u201cCanadian Experience\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The irrationality of Canadian experience can be better appreciated by considering a usually small and ignored or peripheral group of migrants in such discussions \u2013 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 \u201cOccupations in Art, Culture Recreation and Sports,\u201d 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\u2019s 35,158,304 going by September 2013 census records.<\/p>\n The point is that a creative writer deals in words, which in any language do not change conceptually across borders. Canada\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":238,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1407","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1407"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1598,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1407\/revisions\/1598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}*delivered at the Canada Seminar of Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.<\/span><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"