The question of whether it is a good thing when new refugees or newcomers from one ethnic group live close to each other is a hotly debated topic. I personally feel it is important to enable people to live close to supports from within their own cultural community when they first arrive, if they so choose. As a refugee who has come to a resettlement country after surviving displacement and persecution, being close to the familiarity of one’s own community can be an important source of both practical and emotional support.
But I also
recognize that after a period of time this can sometimes lead to isolation from
the broader community. That is why the work I have been doing over the past few
years is targeting people who have been in Australia for some time and providing
them with alternative options.
The Maritimes in Canada is world famous for its lobsters, harvested in the cold pristine waters along the north Atlantic coast. What’s the connection? I’ll let a team member from the Multicultural Association of Fredericton explain it in her own words:
“Do you know much about lobsters? It’s a known fact that if you take a box, and you put a lobster in it by himself, the lobster’s gonna get out. But if you put two lobsters or more in a box, they’ll never get out. Do you know why? Because as soon as one gets over the edge, the other one pulls him back.
That’s what happens when people go to big centres and you put them in big groups of thousands of people, their community is always pulling them back. But when you put them into a smaller community they can get out of that box easier, right? That’s the richness of spreading settlement throughout your country instead of keeping it in one place. To stop people from getting stuck in those places and pulling each other back.
It’s challenging because it’s hard for these smaller communities to support people without the monstrous amount of money that’s being poured into the bigger centres to deliver services. But in my opinion, people thrive better in the long run.”
For me it’s all about choice and empowering people to make decisions about their own lives. Let’s think about how we can help people get out of the box, when they are ready, by connecting them with alternative opportunities in other places.
Suddenly finding yourself in a big city can be a daunting experience for someone who has lived their whole life in the country as a farmer. I recently met a man in the suburbs of western Sydney who had been a successful farm owner in northern Iraq when the war tore through and forced him and his family to flee. He’s been in Australia for just over a year and is becoming more and more frustrated at not being able to find work. His dream is to start his own farm in Australia but he doesn’t even know where to start.
This
doesn’t make sense for the settlement outcomes of refugees but it also doesn’t
make economic sense when we have rural towns crying out for labour and needing
to diversify their economies.
How can we harness all of the skills brought by refugees to not only contribute to existing jobs and businesses, but potentially enhance regional growth through new agribusiness and innovation?
In Belleville, Canada, Quinte Immigration Services came up with a great idea. They got together with the Canadian Red Cross and the Ontario Government to establish the Farmers Feed the World project. By engaging with farmers across the region, they identified a range of agricultural employment opportunities and then marketed these to Syrian farmers living in Toronto.
A key part
of the project was hosting a series of video webinars with Arabic translation
which enabled refugees in Toronto and other parts of Canada to tune in and
receive information about Canadian agricultural practices and connect with employment
opportunities in the region.
New
Brunswick holds the title for the province with the fastest declining
population in Canada. In 2016, the province’s population dropped to 747,101
from 751,171 in 2011 – a decrease of 0.5% in five years.
This unprecedented demographic shift is down to an ageing population (approximately 20% over 65 years old), the increasing rate of young people leaving for bigger cities and a low birth rate.
New
Brunswick is also the poorest province in Canada – currently recording the
nation’s lowest median household income.
A sense of
foreboding looms heavy in the air, dominating the topic of conversation of the
couple next to me in a local café.
People in the capital of Fredericton are worried about very serious things – the health system is struggling to cope under a stretched budget and will continue to heave under the costly strain of servicing an ageing population. Government
attempts to address a shrinking tax base by increasing taxes will push vulnerable
people further to the margins.
When the
Syrian war broke out, the province put its hand up to settle an unprecedented
number of refugees. In 2015 the first Syrian refugees started to arrive and by
2017 Fredericton claimed a title they are proud of – the city that has settled
the largest number of refugees per capita in Canada. 500 refugees arrived in a
city of around 55,000 within the space of a year.
Our schools
are often the first places to notice the impacts of big community and societal
changes. They are also well placed to respond as established and trusted institutions.
Sometimes this happens before policy has a chance to catch up. But in Anglophone
West School District, which includes 69 schools and 23,000 students, the influx
of Syrian refugees became the catalyst for being proactive with a new policy
approach.
“We wanted our policy to be best practice and searched long and hard for examples across Canada and overseas” the school district team told me.
Where they
landed – a policy of inclusion, which has been adapted by the province and is
now at the core of everything the schools do.
Providing
inclusive public education means taking a student-centred approach to ensure
that each and every student’s experience at school takes into account their
individual strengths and needs. It also means being respectful of diversity and
removing any barriers to learning – which includes ensuring that educational staff
have the knowledge, skills and resources needed to provide effective
instruction to a diverse student population.
Inclusion at Fredericton High School
An example
of this is the Newcomer Support Centre. All newcomers who wish to register
their children for school in the Greater Fredericton area are first invited
into the centre for a one-on-one appointment to answer questions about the
Canadian school system and undertake an individualized assessment of their
child’s level of English as well as their social history. This enables any
required supports to be linked in from early on, but also provides families
with a point of connection to other useful services and information to ensure
every success for their child’s educational outcomes.
Shifting our way of thinking to centre around inclusion through intentional policy setting can be a powerful means of driving social change.
In the case
of the Anglophone West School District, they hope that cultivating a mindset of
inclusion that starts with the students, parents and teachers in their schools
will help to reinforce broader community acceptance of diversity.
Fredericton Newcomer Partnership Council
This is but one of a range of intentional measures being taken in Fredericton to grow and retain a new population. I met some of the town’s key champions at a meeting of the Fredericton Newcomer Partnership Council. The Council oversees the Fredericton Local Immigration Partnership (LIP), a local multi-level governance collaboration which aims to create a welcoming and inclusive environment for newcomers. Over the past five years, the LIP has been at the forefront of driving community support for newcomers, establishing a range of working groups to implement initiatives and galvanize whole-of-community efforts. It is coordinated by Ignite Fredericton, the local economic development agency and includes members from a range of sectors including government, business, education, training services, colleges, library and health.
Such planned, coordinated and intentional measures pay off. According to an elected Councillor from the City of Fredericton I spoke with, community attitudes have come a long way in the past 5 years. Acceptance of cultural diversity is now the norm. While some of this has happened spontaneously as more and more newcomers arrive, to a large extent it is the incremental actions aligned across sectors that seem to have made the biggest difference. This has enabled change to come from within.
Syrian refugees are choosing to stay in Fredericton, and they are fetching family members from other parts of Canada to come and join them.
Halifax is a regional city that’s doing immigration differently. With a population of around 420,000 the harbour-side shipping hub located on the central part of the Canadian Atlantic has transformed itself into a thriving global city.
For a long time Halifax was struggling to keep young people and attract and retain newcomers. But this has all changed with 8400 new immigrants and refugees moving to the city in the last two years, the highest number ever.
The unemployment
rate is at its lowest since 1976.
The municipality is now processing more building permits than
ever before. In 2011, the city issued permits for 96 new residential units. In
2017, that number soared to 1,040 units.
Halifax’s
tech talent pool has grown by 28% over the past five years, adding 2500 tech
jobs.
Halifax seems to have found the sweet spot in making
themselves attractive as an immigration destination and wrapping their arms
around people when they arrive to keep them there.
When you hear Mayor Mike Savage speak, it’s hard not to catch
on to his infectious vision and can-do approach. Much of Halifax’s success as a
city of new immigrants seems to be down to the leadership he has shown over his
six years in office.
The large numbers of newcomers flocking to the town are not
only now the norm, but something which the city holds up and celebrates. An integral
part of Halifax’s identity.
Talent, location, cost and innovation.
This is the unique values proposition Halifax uses to set itself apart when attracting people from overseas and other parts of the country.
But if you ask me, it’s the smaller gestures that are equally, if not more significant to Halifax’s success.
Like the free public transport passes provided to all refugees.
Or the Mayor’s Welcome Party, a big annual reception to
welcome new international students, help connect them to local organisations
and build social connections.
Or the Connector Program which matches newcomers trying to enter the labor market with established business people and community leaders. The program has been scaled up across other parts of Canada and exported to Sweden and Switzerland.
In the words of Mayor Savage, “It all comes down to all
orders of government, plus civil society and organisations working together, to
not only bring people here but to really make them feel comfortable here, because
we want them to stay”.
Halifax highlights
the critical role that local government plays in shaping a positive narrative
around diversity and mobilising local people to come together and make it
happen.
In 2016, Halifax Regional Municipality passed a landmark motion
to enable permanent residents to vote in municipal elections. The rationale –
those who contribute to the life and economy of the city should have a say in
local government. While Provincial approval is still being sought to enable
this to happen, this move further reflects the incredible support for
immigration in the town.
Today on my way to the airport, I asked my taxi driver – a born and bred Halifax local in his late 50s, for his honest opinion. I was trying to see if I could scratch beneath the glossy surface. I’d heard of a disapproving term used by some locals to refer to newcomers as “CFAs” (Come From Aways). He thought about it carefully.. “Oh no, we only use that for people that come from other parts of Canada. Immigrants and refugees are fine!”.
Over the past few years I’ve travelled throughout my state
of New South Wales and met with towns of all shapes and sizes. Towns that can’t
find employees to grow their businesses, towns that are struggling to keep
their schools open due to a lack of enrolments, towns with ambitions to grow into
vibrant and thriving communities.
I talk to Councils, employers and community groups about the opportunity to attract people from refugee backgrounds, who are living in cities in Australia, to build their region. It is easy to make the case that the skills, qualifications, resilience and entrepreneurial drive refugees bring with them, can be beneficial for their town.
Through these discussions a common theme emerges, an overwhelming interest in initiating an attraction strategy and a hunger for examples and ideas from other towns that have done it before.
I recently joined a group of refugees on a bus visit to Walla
Walla, a small rural town in Southern NSW. I was with about 30 refugees from
the Assyrian community considering relocating away from Sydney. The 5 hour trip
gave me a chance to hear what it had been like for people to settle in a big
city like Sydney.
I heard a sense of feeling ‘suspended’ in their new environment – eager to build a new life, but unable to move forward because of financial pressures, trouble finding work and few social connections.
Like Ramin*, his wife Deena and their 6 year old daughter who arrived in Australia after escaping the war in Iraq. They moved straight into a house in a suburb of western Sydney with a large Assyrian community, close to settlement supports, English classes and health care.
But now two years on, the benefits of this proximity to cultural community and initial supports have now been outweighed by the very high cost of housing, competition to find work and sense of social isolation from the broader Australian community. Ramin and his family are at a stage in their settlement journey where they are ready to consider what’s next. For them, a sense of belonging, meaningful work and a quality education for their daughter is of top priority.
So how can we best connect families like Ramin’s with the opportunities
that regional and rural towns have to offer? And what steps can towns take to prepare
themselves and build a welcoming and inclusive community, so that there is the
best chance of success once people have relocated?
These questions are what spurred me on to apply for a
Churchill Fellowship in the first place. They are at the heart of what I hope
to discover during my visits to towns in Canada, USA, Germany, Norway and
Sweden.
I hope you will come along with me on this journey through this website.
I want the City to Country Project to be a useful space to share insights and ideas which can inspire other towns, spark new ideas and generate awareness of the enormous potential that regional towns have to offer refugees.
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