by Klaus Rohrich
Tuesday, august 1, 2006
an article in last Saturday's Toronto Star caught my eye in that it detailed the struggles new immigrants to Canada are facing and how municipalities are chronically under funded and thus unable to help the newcomers in a significant fashion. Let me start by confessing that I am an immigrant to Canada and that English is not my mother tongue. I immigrated to this country as an adult and was granted landed immigrant status on the basis of my being able to contribute to Canada without becoming an economic burden to my fellow Canadians. as I recall, I was assessed on the basis of a point-system, which granted me points for language, education, job skills, etc. and a minimum of 50 points were needed for me to qualify.
It seems all that has changed. according to the Star article, the influx of immigrants into the Greater Toronto area (GTa) is putting a tremendous strain on the various regions' social services. Councillors are complaining that the federal government and the Province of Ontario are providing insufficient funding to the municipalities to help them service the newcomers.
York Region Councilor Joyce Frustaglio is quoted as saying that up until five years ago, none of Vaughn's municipal literature was translated into other languages. What's the use of government notices that can't be read or understood by their residents?
But here's the kicker: "as much as we need the social infrastructure to integrate newcomers into our community, we need to recognize the need to reach out to them in order to build a healthy and strong community. You just don't want to see what happened in Paris happen here," she said. She was referring to last fall's rioting instigated by Muslim youth in the suburbs of Paris.
The story detailed the per capita spending on immigrants by the various municipalities in the GTa, which averages about $506 per immigrant per year per municipality. Or put another way, a total of approximately $70 million annually, the lion's share of which is borne by the City of Toronto.
The story also talks about the fact that many if not most immigrants to the GTa tend to be low-income families with high needs, meaning that the newcomers actually impose a financial burden on their communities, rather than contribute in any meaningful way, other than add to a community's "ethnocultural diversity".
a number of assumptions in the story are troubling. The basic assumption of the story is that the status quo is not acceptable. I agree but for different reasons. The Star implies it's okay to bring large numbers of unskilled and difficult to assimilate immigrants to Canada and that the government needs to increase funding to this sector. I happen to think this is a mistake that will eventually end in just the type of result that Councillor Frustaglio wishes to avoid. She may not be aware that France has similar programs for immigrants to those she wants to provide.
Immigrants coming to Canada need to be encouraged to assimmilate. We do not need to print our municipal literature in twelve different languages, as it discourages new arrivals from learning French or English. If we are to spend any money on immigrants it should be to help them learn English, sharpen their job skills, thus making them more easily employable and learn to function within the framework of our mainstream.
To balkanize our immigrants into so-called ethnic communities (I like to think of them as ghettos) is to actively exclude them from our culture, our economy and ultimately our country. The assumptions the current liberal wisdom is laboring under are wrong, not to mention costly. In a country where people have to wait two years for cardiac bypass surgery, spending tax money to print municipal leaflets in Urdu, Farsi or Mandarin is not only wrong, it's criminal.
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