Canada’s generous refugee resettlement policy is unique in its power to engage private sponsors and a wide range of NGOs specialized in refugee talent recruitment. Toronto in particular is a meeting point and rescue hub for people from all over the world who seek peace and a chance to rebuild their lives. They can arrive at a safe haven while keeping one foot back home, as they seek to resolve the conflicts that expelled them. This is, in fact, the most traditional way of developing diaspora networks, based on immigrants who never forget were they came from.           Â
I met Johnny Collins at a Ugandan diaspora protest event in High Park, Toronto, on August 13, 2022. A group of about a hundred people congregated with red t-shirts holding bloody red images of fellow Ugandans who had been tortured or beaten as a means of political suppression. One of the posters read ¨You said we are the leaders of tomorrow, stop the redline murders.¨
Collins is 35, as I later learned in a meeting we had at the Munk School of Global Affairs, which hosts my research with the Global Migration Lab. He arrived in Canada only a month before the protest I witnessed. He is a political runaway, not only from his country but also from his family. After being beaten for asking for democratic elections, he went into hiding to protect himself, his two kids and his pregnant wife. He phoned her to say he was in Canada without ever having a proper goodbye. While here, his new baby boy was born.
Uganda has had the same president for 36 years. ¨We never had democracy in Uganda,¨ said Collins. Nonetheless, he sacrificed his personal safety in a quest for democratic elections, along with other friends and intellectuals who are now here in Canada. He was interviewed by the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) as part of a project to document the impact of the Museveni regime.
It took time for us to set up a meeting and discuss his life story and current state. Even though Collins has applied for refuge and lives in a shelter, his time or availability to talk seem limited. Like many other refugees, Collins suffers from trauma and has difficulty sleeping and generally putting his mind to rest. According to a survey I conducted with refugees and displaced professionals from 12 countries, most of them have suffered depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, digestive problems, arthritis, or high blood pressure, to mention just a few of the most common ailments. As can be imagined, it is not easy for Collins to speak up and tell his story. Like many others who have similar experiences of war and conflict, he appears on the outside to have achieved a sort of equanimity by pretending to be just fine. They do not cry, nor do they seem furious. They try to be objective and identify the actors who are guilty – their own government, the international community that does not exercise the responsibility to protect, or an invading government.
Other displaced professionals I met in Toronto are also accepting the challenge of building a new life with a strong state of mind. For this, finding a job is key not only as occupational therapy, but as a win-win strategy for themselves and their new country, Canada, currently suffering from worker shortages in key industries.
Some refugees are ready to take any survival job despite being overqualified, while others wait for opportunities that better assess past experience. Still others are not in a position to start again, like when age prevents them from taking out education loans to learn new skills, as a Ukrainian medical doctor, aged 58, was telling me. Deskilling (being hired below one’s level of experience) and reskilling (learning a new job) are, according to social workers and other migrants, the great challenge of the Canadian migration system for economic success. While migrants and refugees look for jobs, employers search for a wide range of occupations that do not necessarily fit the ¨best and brightest¨ official attraction policy. In general, the displaced people are a great pool that may resolve some market needs in Canada, along with their own integration.
Camelia Tigau is a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto, Global Migration Lab and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Center for Research on North America. She is also a regional vice-president of GRFDT. She would like to thank the General Department for Academic Support (DGAPA) at the UNAM for the scholarship that made possible the fieldwork for this article.