Invisible Immigrants

This is a very difficult piece for me to write.

My name is Tom. I’m 48 years old, 6 feet tall, bearded, large white male. And I’m an immigrant. But I don’t look or sound like one. I am one of the 8.3 million people who immigrated to Canada and make up about 23 per cent of the population, according to Statistics Canada’s 2021 census result.

I moved to Canada in 1980, at six years old, to Richmond, BC, 7294 kilometres away from my birthplace of Ormskirk, England, just outside of the port city of Liverpool. My family only had a few work friends for support. Little Tom, sounding like an English version of Mickey Mouse, began navigating a new country and culture that has brought me, 42 years later, to writing this article or open letter to you.

I am what I’ve started calling an “Invisible Immigrant.” A few years ago, when I was teaching at the Calgary Immigrant Women’s Association (CIWA), I realized that the invisible immigrant was a demographic that needed attention. The ladies in my class hailed from all over the world, from East Asia to the Middle East to Eastern Europe. One of them made a comment about me that stirred emotions I didn’t know I had. They assumed that I was a Canadian-born straight Christian. To those ladies, that was what a tall, white, male-looking person was. But I am none of those things. According to Statistics Canada, from “2016 to 2021, Canada’s population living in private households grew by 5.4%, and new, or recent, immigrants accounted for 71.1% of that growth.” This translates to approximately 1.3 million immigrants “admitted from January 1, 2016 to May 11, 2021.” While some may have been People of Colour, a huge number were likely not.

Before you take out your pitchforks, slings, and arrows, let me explain. When people talk publicly about immigrants, they refer to non-white people who move to the country. Not one person in my life over the last 20 years has asked, “where are you from?” based on nothing but my skin colour. Only occasionally, when I get excited or angry, do people notice my slight English accent. When I told the ladies in my class that, no, I was neither born here, nor a Christian, nor straight, I shifted things for them, hopefully in a good way.

There are many places in the world where most of the population is Caucasian and English is the primary or at least a common language. But if you’re white, and you speak English fluently, you don’t tend to fall into the category of “immigrant” in the same way that the term is used in most public discourse. People simply assume that your transition will be smooth and you won’t need much help.

For the most part, this is the case. When you move to a country where you physically resemble the dominant demographic and can communicate fluently in the official language, you have already won half the battle of settling in. But you will still run up against some other challenges. For instance, even though you were educated at an institution that teaches primarily in English, your foreign qualifications may not be accepted in another country, just like many non-White immigrant professionals. You still require some aid and support in a new country.

A dear friend once told me about the difficulties his stepfather experienced when he first moved to Canada from the Netherlands. The father was a tall white man with a decent command of English, though far from fluent. One of his stumbling blocks was the word ‘drag’, which means to pull something that is likely resisting the pull. Imagine his reaction when he heard this sentence: “A drag queen dragged me outside and offered me a drag of her cigarette. What a drag!” Given the numerous ways ‘drag’ is used, my friend’s stepfather was very confused when offered a “drag of a cigarette.”

Similarly, my mother, a small, white, English woman, told me that there was an expectation that she shouldn’t need to ask questions about how things worked because, well, she was white and spoke English, so surely moving from England to Canada wasn’t such a hardship. However, 40 years ago in England, you only had to submit tax returns after major life events such as marriage or a new birth. My parents had no idea that it was a yearly practice in Canada. And if I were to say the words “lorry,” “boot,” “flat,” or “chips,” they’d have very different meanings to someone from England versus someone from Canada. Indeed, the word “lorry” (meaning dump truck) doesn’t even exist in Canada, and you get a few raised eyebrows when you use it.

I am certainly not equating the difficulties that People of Colour have when immigrating with those that White immigrants have. We sadly still live in a world where skin colour can lead to detrimental treatment, especially when you’re a newly arrived immigrant. There is a whole other level of visible difficulties that POC have to deal with, one that White immigrants, for the most part, avoid. This is not fair or right, but it is how things currently are. All we can do is try to change the environment.

Immigrants from the United States, Poland, or England, may not have language challenges. They may fit into the dominant demographic in Canada. But there are stumbling blocks that these invisible immigrants are expected to either know about or know how to deal with without any help, solely because of their skin colour.

When I was teaching at CIWA, one White lady from Eastern Europe was in my class. I wish I had had the foresight to ask about her experience. I wish I had engaged the whole class in this kind of dialogue, but it was well outside the purview of the course I was teaching.

Immigrant Muse’s goal is to offer information and assistance to those just beginning their lives in Canada. Indeed, that is the mandate of every immigrant assistance association, fund, or website. But there is an unvoiced expectation that if you are White, you’re somehow implicitly equipped to function in a completely different culture where the skin colour is predominantly White. The cultures of Canada and Norway are quite different. Assuming that a Norwegian immigrant will fit in fine and fluidly into the Canadian culture simply by dint of their skin tone is a sure way to guarantee a difficult and stressful transition to a new country.