Submission to The Social Lens: A Social Work Action Blog by Kristi Pinderi, 3rd Year BSW Student
The Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies at UBC asked me last week to share my experience as a refugee in Canada in an event that was meant to be an open discussion about the concept of radical diversity. This was an opportunity for me to reflect on my experience of being new in Canada from the perspective of a social worker. It was one of those amazing opportunities to reflect about our experience or, in other words, to bring our own self into a discussion that is not necessarily about us. What follows is that reflection.
My life as an LGBTQ+ refugee in Canada, coming from Albania, has been primarily shaped by two distinguished stages. World Bank considers Albania a developing upper-middle-income country that has not recently been in any war or in any internal or international conflict – all reasonable situations that can result in many people fleeing their homes. But in Canada we have refugees even from countries who are members of the European Union (like Slovenia, Hungary or Poland, etc.) so I invite you not to focus on the country itself or any ideal-type feature about geography but rather on individual situations. The reason why I came to Canada was a combination of personal factors that made it impossible for me and my partner to build our family life in our home country. So, what are those “distinguished stages”?
The first stage is what I call the stage of suspicion.
There is one familiar scene about LGBTQ+ people who seek refuge in Canada, a scene we might have seen in the media. It unfolds like this: a queer person is struggling in their home country because of their sexual orientation or gender identity or gender expression, or both. The person is then contacted by some well-intentioned people in Canada who come together and file some papers to make it possible to bring them to Canada. The scene most probably ends with people holding flowers and waiting at the arrival hall of an airport. The person who has been saved accepts the flowers, visibly emotional, probably overwhelmed by tears of joy and it all ends there. Now this is absolutely realistic, and I have absolutely no reason to argue about it. I even think that when it comes to private sponsorships in Canada, this is precisely what happens. But this is the narrative of a tiny fraction of the experiences of newcomers in Canada. What follows is usually something we either don’t talk about, or we talk about very little.
I remember the day when I landed to Canada, and I remember one early morning in June 2017, when I submitted my refugee claim. I replaced my passport and all the other IDs with a temporary governmental document. There is a border at the airport, which I used to cross with my multiple visas, but there is another more sophisticated border at 1148 Hornby Street in Vancouver, where the IRCC office is located. The new border was now a systemic one, one that would accompany me every single day in the form of a piece of paper that labelled me a claimant. It determined my journey, my life, my status, and my ability to access any service and any other meaningful interaction. It is a journey of someone who is treated with suspicion. A general sense of suspicion that defines you, which starts with the status printed in your document (the strangest document that can exist in the world): “Refugee Claimant”! This “claimant” used to have a passport, and this is important, because when you have a passport, you are a citizen. When you give away that passport, you become a claimant! When you are a claimant, you are invisible. And when you are invisible, you are disposable. Thus, the border is not only at our entry points. It is not only at Hornby Street. It is in demands like these: Do you have Canadian experience? Can you show me a reference from your previous landlord? Do you have a Canadian education? Not even a certificate? Can I see your Credit History? Do you know what “Excessive demands on health or social services” means? Are you aware that living in Canada is a privilege?
The stage when people expect you to be resilient and to succeed is what follows
In 2018, an Immigration Board Member vested on me a different status: a protected refugee. When you are a claimant, you have been stripped away of any political power and you have been forced to enter a bureaucratic process. One of the most efficient ways to politically incapacitate citizens is to throw them into a bureaucratic process. By the end of that process, you come out with some of your rights restored. But this new status is suddenly attached on you for forever. While you have arguably more rights and while you can access some services that remain unreachable by many other people (like a permanent residency status, the right to education and domestic fees, no requirement to have a work permit, etc.), you feel different because you have come out of that bureaucratic process as a more vulnerable person. When you live under a suspicion you are too busy to fight because you see the injustice of how the system is treating you. When the system has finally restored your credibility, you are thrown into the reality of a new situation: you are now officially a refugee. To me, that meant living my life as in a bifurcated way of being. I will explain what that means.
On the 4th anniversary of coming to Canada I wanted to write a post about it on my Facebook page. But it became impossible to write a meaningful clear thought, as I struggled with these questions: will you celebrate? Or will you mourn what you have lost? Depending on how you see it, it can either be a day to celebrate or a day to look back on what you have lost. My partner and I have achieved a lot in these 4-5 years, I would say. That is something to celebrate – “and to be thankful for” my partner would add. Yet, there is a lot more that we still miss from Albania. We miss that sense of recklessness, the spontaneous mindset, the instability of chaos with all its risks, the constant struggle to reinvent yourself, to reset everything into a dreaming mode, the intense way of failing-dreaming-trying again. People should not be forced to compare two different chapters of their lives, as that implies one of them is less worthy. Every light has its own shadows, right?
But one question remained with me: where does this binary thinking come from? Why are we forced to compare, and think in an “either/or” mode? Idealizing what we have lost might be a countereffect of exclusion in Canada, or of that enormous pressure to succeed, perpetuated by public discourses and narratives that fail to capture the full reality of newcomers and especially of refugees. This pressure to succeed forces you to think of your past as a grey reality and to imagine your life in Canada as a colourful future.
Thus, you are stuck in a past that does not exist anymore, while you are required or expected to anchor yourself by reinventing it in a new reality. In a country that devalues all your previous experiences you are required to start everything from the beginning. The binary condition of your existence is either/or, almost never both. This binary condition – the grey life you escaped from vs. the bright future you will have to reach – is legitimized through many stories told about refugees and newcomers. I will use a concept that I read in one of the essays written by Max Czollek, a scholar from Germany, a poet and an advocate of radical diversity, when describing this set of narratives about newcomers and integration. He talks about “the theatre of integration” that labels people as either good actors, those who get integrated, or bad actors, those who fail to get integrated.
In my experience I was able to see the demand for a new “type of actor.” The most desired type of “actor” is the complexed one, the resilient one, the one who triumphs. Last year I was notified that I was chosen as a finalist in a competition for a national prize called Top 25 Canadian Immigrant. I found myself in a list of people whose stories had a similar underlying message: they were genius in their country of origin, lived a hell of a life during their first years in Canada, but eventually reinvented themselves! One of them founded a new app that helps refugees, for instance, another one started a business that employed hundreds of refugees, another one who was born outside of Canada was even able to become a Supreme Court judge! There is nothing wrong to celebrate inspiring stories of people who are undeniably resilient. My problem is that this does not capture the lived experiences of those who are left – or pushed – in the margins. I will contextualize this perspective with a real-life story that does not fit any of the narratives we hear so often.
A refugee who comes from a country where being gay is a crime punished by the penal code (not Albania, nor Hungary) comes to Canada to save their life, finding themselves in a country that has given them a promise (the Canadian promise). Packed with this is also a narrative of what is a successful outcome, usually embedded in the discussion about integration, perpetuated by the language, the rhetoric used, enforced by the media, celebrated by national “Top Immigrant” prizes, etc. None has prepared this refugee about the systemic racism, about the fact that for the first time in their life they are being exposed to racism (never felt that in their country where most of the people around them had the same colour); or about the system that favours any newcomer who has education; has some family or social connections; has no language barriers; does not have any disability; or any disease that requires extensive amount of resources from the health system (that is explicitly written in the Canadian law); possibly has some savings; and who is able to jump into the “adventure” of the integration. The latter means to be able to find a stable job, to save the down payment for a house mortgage, to pass a mortgage stress test, to eventually buy a house, to start saving money which is then invested in tax free savings accounts, to build and maintain a good credit history, possibly go to school to have a Canadian education, and more.
The person in my story ends up with a health crisis that causes them a chronic and permanent health condition, struggling to keep the Canadian promise alive by trying to figure out how to survive. This is only one of my dozens of clients at the settlement organization where I work as an LGBTQ+ support worker. The other stories are very similar. My question is this: why don’t we hear about these stories in the broad public discourse? We definitely hear less about them than we hear about other stories like “refugees bring expertise,” “refugees are resilient (so that means they will have to integrate within the Canadian dominant culture says this message – because otherwise what is the point of being resilient), etc.
We hear more about those who are chosen as Top 25 immigrants of the year, or other kind of prizes that are meant to not celebrate resilience, but I think are meant to define what is a success and what it is not. By doing that, they are enabling another thinking, because the message they bring is this: if you are resilient and if you work hard, you will succeed in a country like Canada, where you can even be a “top immigrant of the year,” but if you don’t all the fault is yours! In other words, the “success” is Canadian, the “failure” is personal! Whatever “success” and/or “failure” means. I did not become one of the 25 top Canadian immigrants this year, whose names were read by the Prime Minister, although I was part of the 75 finalists whose stories were published in a website so that people could vote for them. But – oh the irony – I was told to be proud because…I competed with “the best”! Tell me, isn’t that the highest form of theatre?
THE SOCIAL LENS: A SOCIAL WORK ACTION BLOG - The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the original author(s) and do not express the views of the UBC School of Social Work and/or the other contributors to the blog. The blog aims to uphold the School's values and mission.
