Canadian Conservatives Resort to Anti-Immigrant Propaganda

This is a commercial for the Conservative party that is being run in Quebec. I found it on Canukistani's blog. The commercial is, obviously, in French but there are English subtitles.

I thought the commercial was bad but then I read some of the comments that people left to this video on YouTube and realized that things were much worse than I could have ever imagined based just on the ad. Here are some highlights:

You really have the wrong idea about foreigners. Wish them well but encourage them to make something of their OWN country. If they don't show the Pioneer Initiative OUR ANCESTORS did, they are not worthwhile as people here.

The illegal immigration problem is so blatant. There was a ship from Fujian full of nothing but teen girls. B.C. had to spend money to make them wards of the state and pay 11x more a month per head than they pay a native for welfare. But the intention is for those girls to become WHORES; their families can be threatened by gangs in China. They phone up a girl (who by now has perfect English diction and education) and say, "Start whoring or we cut your mom's fingers off."

 I'm sure oil-executives want to screw over the environment because it's going to create "a better life" and a fatter stock portfolio for their children. Forget the "better life" rap, it's just greed.  No one comes to Canada to work harder and earn LESS, it's always for more. Crime is so easy in Canada with the fat, helpless pigeons we have here, eager to answer telephone scammers with bad accents calling from a boiler-room. 20% of immigrants come here for crime.

I tired of immigrants walking into Canadian asking for money, a house and medicare and we give it to them and they do SHIT ALL! "Don't ask what Canada can do for you, but ask what you can do for Canada".

their family members who (without a proper background check by the government) possibly will come here without the proper necessary skills to contribute economically and a culture that will make them refuse to integrate. All creating a heavy economic and social burden on Canadian society. *Sigh*

The problem with Canada back then (and even now) is that it accepted a huge amounts of refugees and asylum seekers without identifying who these people are, how they can contribute to the country, and how they can settle them probably. These failures resulted in increasing crime, decrease in personal safety, and quality of life in refugee infested neighborhoods in my case. Canada as a prosperous, free, and democratic country has a humanitarian obligation to accept refugees and asylum seekers....

this commercial is not such a bad thing. It is true that criminals and immigrants take advantage of our weakness. It is funny though that people call harper a racist because he wants to crack down on illegal immigration. People who come here on a boat dont just get the tright to stay, its not fair, they should apply for immigration and not just be able to stay here and waste millions our tax payer dollar because they come over in a boat.

And there is a lot more in the same vein. I really didn't expect such blatant hypocrisy, bigotry and sheer unadulterated stupidity from Canadians. Is this what just a few years of Conservative rule do to people?

On Deportations

Almost immediate deportations of people who are in the country on work visas and lose their jobs don't just hurt these people and their families. I mean, if it were just them, who cares, right? They are immigrants which means that they are not fully human anyways. To hell with those losers.

However, actual real American citizens get hurt by these deportations, too. Even worse than that, businesses get hurt, which is the real tragedy. Let's say a person has lived in the country for several years. Dr. Calvo, for example, has been in the US for ten years. Within that period of time, people put down roots, which is kind of unavoidable. A person gets to have either a mortgage or a rental agreement. It is highly probably that s/he leases a car and has a credit card, which probably carries a balance. There are people (once again, actual citizens) who depend on that person for professional or any other kind of services, favors, support, etc. Maybe this person volunteers, is active in a church, participates in a book club, has a timeshare, has been asked to be a best man or a bridesmaid at a wedding, is in the midst of directing an Honors thesis or a Senior Essay, promised to review a book for somebody, is scheduled to speak at a conference or is even organizing that conference, is collaborating on a project, co-authoring an article - I could obviously continue this list to the point where this would be my longest post ever. So if such a person has to pack up and leave within a month, all of these individuals, companies and institutions that depend on him or her will be screwed. 

If a person were given a reasonable amount of time (let's say, six months at a minimum), they could try to find another job or at least get their affairs in order, pack without a hurry, make sure that things are taken care of. So whose interests do these immediate deportations serve? If a person has been in the country for years, what will an extra year change?

P.S. I want to warn everybody in advance that this is a touchy subject with me. So unless you are an immigrant who lost your work visa in the past 2-3 years, don't come here telling me that such things don't happen. You'll just make a fool out of yourself.

Illegal Immigrants Stealing Jobs

I just read a third final essay in a row arguing that illegal immigrants are detrimental to the US economy because they "steal jobs" from citizens and don't pay taxes on their earnings. I'm shocked that so many of my students are brainwashed by racist propaganda that they fail completely to see the fallacy of this argument. Is anybody preventing employers from paying a decent wage and attracting citizens to their jobs? If unscrupulous employers didn't choose to hire people they can underpay and exploit, this problem would not exist.

The students who wrote about illegal immigrants "stealing" jobs recognize that these "stolen" jobs do not have citizens queuing up for them because they pay less than minimal wage and obviously carry no protections and benefits attached to them. Still, these students can't make the next step in their reasoning and see that dishonest and exploitative employers should be blamed for breaking the law and hiring people to work in these horrible conditions.

Immigration Questions

So I'm filling out a permanent residency questionnaire, and after the expected questions of whether I plan to practice polygamy or engage in acts of terrorism I encounter the following question:

"Have you EVER been a member of, or in any way affiliated with, the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party?"


That sounds kind of weird. Juan Goytisolo, the greatest Spanish writer of the XXth century, was a member of the Communist party. So were Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Theodore Dreiser, Dashiell Hammett, Slavoj Žižek, the list can go on forever. 


I wonder if Immigration services are planning to do away with this remnant of the Cold War era any time soon.

Pseudo-Liberals' Hatred of Immigrants

Since this post disappeared, the discussion that initially inspired it has been continuing. As I said in the original post, in case you haven't been following, I wanted to share this debate because it demonstrates perfectly how terrified some people are that immigrants (with their linguistic, intellectual, feminist, philosophical, and cultural sophistication) will displace them with their imited, parochial values. Feel free to participate in the debate.

Here are some highlights of the discussion. (For the entire debate, see comments to the following post.)

This time, I will only give you the words of the hypocritical, immigrant-hating pseudo-liberal reader greenconsciousness. I believe they speak for themselves and demonstrate just how much such pseudo-liberals in reality mimic the hateful Conservative fundamentalists.

• Do you think it is in the interest of US citizens to have this immigrant flooding doubling and tripling our population every five years? Or is it in your interest as opposed to my interests? Citizens especially the working class have a right to defend ourself, our culture and our jobs. You can say we blame the immigrants but it is not blame; it is identification. Immigrants, especially illegals and those who come with work visas are a tool of the corporate interests that are destroying us. But this is my last word on the subject because I like you and do not want to hurt you. We have different economic interests which will never be reconciled. I do want you to know that the other half of my position is for the US to uphold its belief in freedom and human rights by working with people in their own countries using foreign aid programs to improve their life instead of bringing everyone here to degrade our own for the sake of profits.
• Immigrants are the tools the elites use to degrade us and immigrants are happy to be so used. They use guilt to silence us, call us racist for defending our rights. Tell us we are imagining and blaming. But we don't buy it anymore. We marched in Selma and suffered in the civil rights movement you were never a part of anywhere. We do not have to defend against charges of racism. We understand that we will fight or die. You should ask why you are so necessary to your bosses who are part of the US elites?
• Stick to your class and kind who have always oppressed mine. Try to turn this country into a densely packed, unsustainable, overpopulated, desert of cement populated by those who feel superior to the people they walk over - kill everything green and beautiful. I won't be back.
• Sorry for the drama. I really cannot keep up this conversation. Open your eyes. You never even saw the women in your own country who are not of your class; you don't know us here. But you do have an excellent mind and I believe if you start to try to understand you could.
• You know "dislike" is not the root of my opposition, nor do I think all other cultures are devoid of anything of value. But they are mostly too reverent of class and males who have the narcissism to believe that their work is universal when it is only male. In Russia it is practically an oligarchy.
• A wealthy family does not mean the majority of women are liberated. When Russian women were admitted to the professions they were called liberated but the wages in those professions plummeted. You know rape and DV are not addressed in any meaningful way for the women who are not wealthy enough to buy justice. When women try to organize they are told they are already liberated. Some day, gather all the stats which are lies but a start, and see if they match your experience.

Then this reader goes into a weird rant that I still have trouble understanding. For some reason, s/he chooses to believe that I am a Russian rape victim. I guess that makes it easier for him/her to dismiss my suggestion that only somebody who is 100% Native American can be justified in hating immigrants so much. So here is the rant, brace yourselves:

• I assume you will after your graduate work return to that pinacle of civilization and eqality, mother Russia. Maybe you will do a few studies yourself. How much domestic violence - did you report - what happened - why didn't you report -- raped? what age - what happened -- similarly as to women politicians -- what did you accomplish - or were you a helper to others -- to the female judges -- well there are many questions. How was it for you at work - From your studies you may find the courage to do a documentary on Russian women where they, rather than the state or the party, talk about the reality of their lives.
  If you ever need inspiration -- call on me and I will tell you the questions that expose the big lie of liberation achieved. I have done that and been there. I also wish you well on your journey. We do not have to agree - being honest is more important -- most important.

This is it for now but I have no doubt that more is to come. Since I wrote about this discussion yesterday, I realized that not only does this reader hate all immigrants, s/he is also tortured by the idea that other cultures might have some important achievements that the US culture does not have. What's at play here is obviously a huge inferiority complex that makes even the mere presence of anybody or anything different painful to greenconsciousness. The reason for this weird reaction is that even a slight glimpse of a different reality makes such people realize that - oh, horror - the silly swill about their superiority they have been fed on TV since early childhood is just stupid propaganda.

Lacking any actual achievements of their own, people like greenconsciousness, Real American Woman (that some of my long-term readers surely remember) and the troll that has been bugging this blog for a while keep harping on about their American passports. For them, these silly pieces of paper signify their superiority over absolutely everybody else. They can't understand why some people have no interest whatsoever in acquiring it for themselves. When they realize that they are losing in a discussion (which their huge intellectual limitations make unavoidable), they bring out what they see as their strongest argument: "You are not even an American!" Like this statement is supposed to have some intellectual value.

I feel sorry for people who are so terrified of having to be an indvidual that they hide from this "terrible burden" in a set of nasty, angry, mean and venomous collective identifications.

Culture Shock

This post first appeared as a guest post on www.ktravula.com. Check it out and pay special attention to the nice things the author of the blog, my kind colleague Kola, says about me. :-)

When I was 22, I emigrated from Ukraine to Canada. I was fully prepared to experience a massive culture shock but none came. Sure, it took some time to get used to the idea of a credit card and a check-book, realize that a bus driver doesn’t give out change and there is no need to negotiate the price of a ride with the cab-driver before getting into the cab, and figure out why maple syrup can be poured on bacon and eggs. The process of learning these small things was really fun and caused me no shock whatsoever.

Five years later I decided to go to graduate school in the United States. Having lived in North America for a while, watching American TV and reading American books and newspapers, I expected even less of a culture shock on this change of residence. I was only moving to Connecticut, where the climate and the way of life were supposed to be pretty similar to what I had gotten used to in Canada.

Boy, was I ever wrong. A massive culture shock hit me immediately after crossing the US border and remained with me for years to come. It took time and effort to understand this new reality, learn to like, and eventually even love it.

I the US I discovered a deeply divided society. Glaring class inequalities, the likes of which I never saw back in Canada, racism, religious fanaticism, gender inequalities, economically devastated areas with the kind of poverty I never saw even back in Ukraine, crime, violence, inept governmental structures. All this was very different from the US I had seen in movies and TV shows.

But soon I also discovered that yet another US exists. The country of intellectuals, thinkers, artists. The country of hard-working, kind, generous people, who have not abandoned the struggle for the perfect society they inherited from their founders. The country of intellectually curious people. The country of people who hate injustice and inequality. The country that deserves better than the corrupt structures governing them.

When people read the very critical things I write about the US on my blog, they sometimes ask me, “Why do you live in this country if you dislike it so much?” But I ask, does hating injustice and inequality mean hating America? Or is it just the opposite?

Can We Have More Immigrants, Please?

The Christmas Day proved to me once again that some areas of this country are in desperate need of immigrants.


As people who do not celebrate Christmas (for cultural, non-religious reasons), we were looking for ways to entertain ourselves on December 25. So we decided to go to the movies. I had been looking forward to the opening night of Sherlock Holmes with the extremely talented Robert Downey Jr. for a while. But even though we arrived at the movie theater half an hour in advance, we discovered it packed and our show sold out.

The reason for this sudden popularity of cinematographic art became very clear soon enough. Since we could not see a movie, we decided to go to a reastaurant or to a bar and discovered that absolutely every single place in our town was closed. Except, thankfully, the gas station.

Now, if this area were more ethnically diverse, we would have local businesses run by people who do not celebrate Christmas and hence do no close down on December 24 and 25. We could go to a Russian bakery, a Jewish deli, a Muslim restaurant and have ourselves a merry little something.

Immigrants bring a variety of customs and traditions with them and consequently allow the locals to have more choices in their own lives. Those who keep screeching against the advent of immigrants do not realize that they are robbing themselves of choices, expeiences, opportunities. Uniformity always tends towards the mediocre. After experiencing the results of the sore lack of diversity in Southern Illinois, I can say that this area is in desperate need of some people who are different.

CNN Dumped Lou Dobbs!

How could I have possibly missed this?? It seems that CNN finally dumped the immigrant-hating jerk Lou Dobbs. This is absolutely fantastic news.

For years, it made absolutely no sense to watch Lou Dobbs on CNN. The only topic he was interested in addressing was his hatred of "illegal immigrants" from Mexico. Even though he made it abundantly clear a very long time ago that he hated immigrants with a vengeance, he still felt that it was somehow necessary to keep driving the point home over and over again. For a while, his anti-immigrant show was kind of fun to watch because it allowed the viewers to observe someone who would go into a self-induced psychotic break right on the air. But over the years, it got really and truly redundant.

Thank God, CNN finally caved to pressure from progressive organizations and booted this parody of a journalist off the air!

Do the US Need Smart People?

When you enter a good PhD program in the US, your university waives your tuition and pays you a stipend on top of that. Often, you also get financial support for travel to conferences and research-related activities. So basically, the US supports graduate students from other countries financially while they are getting their PhDs in the United States. Then, many years later, these people graduate and can finally start making good money. This, in turn, enables them to pay very high taxes to the country that made their great education and high professional credentials possible in the first place. And this is precisely the moment when the US decide that they do not need these people to stay any longer. If these PhD graduates do not have any employer willing to sponsor them lined up before or immediately after they get their degree, they are not given more time to look for a job. They are just asked to leave and take their US-acquired knowledge and their prospective high taxes elsewhere.

It is next to impossible for an Ivy League PhD graduate (like me, for example) to get a green card, irrespective of who might be willing to employ me. If, however, I were a mail-order bride, or managed to win a green card in a lottery, I would not have the visa-related headaches that I keep experiencing now**. Can anybody explain to me how this is possible? People who got their MBAs and PhDs in the US obviously speak English extremely well, are good, law-abiding, productive members of society, will pay very high taxes, and have been integrated in to the American society. How come we are less valuable than some person who auctioned his or her body on an Internet site, will probably never learn to speak much English and is obviously not going to bring in any taxes? How come we are less valuable than some individual who has won a green card in a lottery and can have any kind of a criminal history behind them?

My indignation has less to do with myself, since as a citizen of Canada I enter the US fairly easily (except for the stack of documents that I have to drag with mee on my every short visit.) But my colleagues with less fortunate citizenships have to undergo constant visa-related aggravations. The American universities that employ us as professors suffer as well. My university, for example, hires a whole group of dedicated individuals, whose only job is to tend to the visa needs of the university faculty.

I wonder if the US welcomes lottery winners and mail-order spouses instead of us because this country sees having too many educated, intelligent, articulate people around as inherently dangerous.

** Like a sheaf of papers I had to bring in with me for a week-long family visit to Canada.

Home

My talented colleague Kola just published a tender and lyrical account of his recent trip to an African restaurant in St. Louis. When I read about how much Kola enjoys being in a place that reminds him of home, I feel profoundly jealous. I wish I could feel this way sometimes.

For some reason, however, my relationship with my place of origin is very different. Whenever I hear people in the street or in a store speak Russian, I go out of my way to avoid being recognized as a Russian-speaker. When there is no way out and I am confronted with a necessity to exchange a few remarks with my former compatriots, I always feel completely at a loss. It often seems to me that Russian-speaking people are only capable of comments that are either mean, sarcastic and aggressive, or that are completely incomprehensible to me. Like Alice in Wonderland, I often understand the meaning of each word they say, but fail completely to grasp the general meaning of a sentence.

Even though I love my native food, I am often reluctant to go to the restaurants that serve it. It's hard to digest even the best food in the world when you are surrounded by people whose behavior makes you ashamed of being part of the same culture. When I was in graduate school, I made several attempts to hang out with people from my former country but it was an unmitigated disaster. Somewhere in the first five minutes of the encounter, my former compatriots would manage to make some sexist, racist, xenophobic, or homophobic remark that would make my anger flare up and that would be the end of that cultural rapprochement**.

My sister is about to have a baby and she decided not to make any efforts to teach the baby Russian. It is with a great sadness that I confess that I really understand that decision.

** Here I want to note that these are not necessarily the characteristics of Russian-speaking people per se. This type of behavior has more to do with being a Russian-speaking immigrant. As I explained here and here, immigrants from the former Soviet Union find it particularly hard to adapt to their new countries. As a result, they compensate for their profound discomfort by lashing out in these aggressive ways.

Illegal Immigrants

So I've been thinking how silly it is for many people to be opposed to offering all of the so-called illegal immigrants green cards.

I recently moved to a small town in Southern Illinois. It's really tiny but it's spread out in a very unproductive way (that is, unproductive for the residents, but very profitable for automakers). There is downtown (where bars and restaurants are located), there is the college campus, the high school, the day care, the shopping center, and some residential areas. All of these places are really spread out. There are vast stretches of uncultivated, uninhabited land that just sits there unoccupied. This makes for a very depressing landscape. It also makes it hard and expensive to get from one of the inhabited places to another.

Bringing in immigrants and letting them populate these areas would be great for everybody. There would be more shops, more houses, more activity. Infrastructures such as public transportation, more day care centers, etc. will have to develop. Right now, there is so much space that could be utilised for something useful. The money and resources that now go into hunting down immigrants, erecting protective walls on the borders and deporting these poor people could be invested into helping them adapt more easily. The area such as  Southern Illinois suffers greatly from a  lack of cultural diversity. Immigrants would acquaint the natives with different customs, traditions, foods, music styles, ways of life. This could be an amazing thing for everybody involved.

Russian Speaking Immigrants, Part II

Epigraph: There is a joke that goes as follows: Two former party members are speaking and one of them says: "You know, my friend, the saddest thing is that all we have been told about the Soviet Union was a lie." The other one responds: "No, comrade, the saddest thing is that everything we were told about America was true."

In my opinion, the difference between an immigrant from the former USSR and, say, a Spanish-speaker is that while a Latino/a immigrates to Canada, US, or any other concrete country, my compatriots usually emigrate to heaven, to paradise, to the Kingdom of God. Years of Soviet propaganda (which in the last decades of the regime nobody believed any more) created a curious set of expectations: we thought that everything that we were told had to be analyzed as if the exact opposite were true. They say America is hell, then the truth must be it's paradise.

I can't tell you how many times I have heard my compatriots complain about North America not being as close to heaven as they had been led to expect. People feel genuinely cheated when they discover that there are, indeed, problems in American society. The following conversation, for example, is a staple in the Russian-speaking immigrant community: "Can you imagine that somebody was rude to me today in a store? This is unbelievable!" "What's unbelievable about somebody being rude?" "Well, weren't we told that nobody is rude in other countries?" Some people might think that I'm exaggerating, but what I'm quoting is a real conversation I've had several times over the years.

The same reaction of being personally offended and cheated out of one's long-held beliefs accompanies the realization that you can sometimes see garbage in American streets ("Weren't we told that they wash their streets with shampoo every day?"), that not everybody can afford a new house and a new car as soon as they arrive ("Weren't we told that everybody is very rich in America?"), that microwaves and coffee-makers sometimes break ("Didn't they tell us that American goods are the best? I've had this coffee-maker for only 5 years, and it broke down on me already"), that you sometimes have to wait for hours for the electrician to arrive - as I'm doing right now ("How is this even possible in America?"), that there are thieves who can steal your wallet ("I could understand if it happened to me back in Russia, can you believe that I was robbed in America of all places!"), and so on.

I wish my compatriots had a more realistic understanding of America. If they knew what North America is like, if they could evaluate how easy or how difficult it would be for them to adapt not to a heavenly place where nobody has any problems but to real countries that have many unresolved issues and that are populated by real people who are sometimes (believe it or not) dishonest and rude, I have no doubt that many people would never decide to emigrate.

Russian Speaking Immigrants, Part I

Tom Carter from Opinion Forum says: "Clarissa, I lived in Moscow for three years (92-93 and 95-96). The first time I was there, I was working in the American Embassy. I was constantly implored to help people get visas to the U.S. When I explained that I had nothing to do with visas and couldn't help, they still kept asking. The second time, when I was with a private company, same thing--most people I met wanted to know how to get a visa and if I could help." Tom's comment reminded me that I've been planning to write about Russian-speaking immigrants for a while. This is a community that I know very well for obvious reasons.

Tom is absolutely right when he says that literally crowds of Russian-speaking people were obssessed with the idea of emigrating (pretty much anywhere, but especially to America) in the years when he was there. Now, people are less desperate to emigrate but there are still quite a lot of former USSR citizens who want to leave.

Nevertheless, Russian-speaking immigrants find it a lot more difficult to adapt to their new countries than other immigrant communities. I'm especially familiar with the Spanish-speaking community (again, for obvious reasons), and I have to say that the difference is striking. Russian-speaking immigrants are often deeply unhappy in North America. Many of them dream about making enough money to be able to go back home, some of them eventually manage to do that. With very few exceptions, they feel best in Russian-speaking anclaves you can find in any big North-American cities. I know people who have lived in North America for years and have only been outside of the Russian quarter a couple of times. Very few Russian-speaking immigrants manage to develop a circle of friends that goes outside the immigrant community. The highlight of such an immigrant's life is going back home once every couple of years to brag about his or her beautiful life in America. This, of course, means that their peer group is still back home.

This is not a generational thing. I know people who were brought to North America very young and still have a lot of trouble adapting. When I was teaching in Montreal, I was once approached by a daughter of a family friend who thought that, since we knew each other socially, I would give her the answers to the final exam I was administering. She honestly failed to understand why I refused, or why I was angry about the request.

So why do Russian-speaking immigrants have so much trouble adapting to life in their new country?

My answer to this question is coming in the next post. :-)