Schools must adapt to immigrants’ needs
The Gazette
Francophones no longer constitute a majority in Montreal’s French-language public schools, new statistics confirm.
This seems to have come as a real surprise to many Montrealers, but in fact it’s just the extension of a long-term trend.
At 20 per cent, Canada has, after Australia, the world’s highest proportion of immigrants. Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto are the three centres in Canada that attract most of these newcomers, from all over the world.
Ghetto walls around immigrant theatre crumbling
Toronto Star
This time, the ghetto walls that close off immigrant theatre may finally be coming down.
Nina Lee Aquino, who cut her artistic director’s teeth on the in-your-face theatre of the Asian-Canadian company fu-GEN, is moving up to the bigger, more diverse, older Cahoots Theatre.
Marilo Nunez is premiering the Latin-American Canadian Alameda Theatre’s Refugee Hotel on the main stage as the first show of Theatre Passe Muraille’s fall season.
And perhaps the most audacious of all is Impact ‘09, the “international multicultural platform for alternative contemporary theatre” that rounds up top professional talent from around the world for 10 days, 20 programs and 70 productions in Waterloo Region at the end of September.
Immigrants and the job market
Globe and Mail
In a special weekend report on the two sides of Canada’s economic recovery, Tavia Grant
and Jennifer Yang chronicled the plight of immigrants in the work force .
New Canadians are driving force in real estate, says report
CBC.Ca
Canadian immigrants are narrowing the homeownership gap with their Canadian-born counterparts, according to a new report Thursday by Scotia Economics.
The report compared census data from Statistics Canada from 2001 and 2006, when the housing boom was near its peak and unemployment was low.
The report indicates that in 2006, 72 per cent of immigrants lived in an owned home. That’s compared with 68 per cent in 2001, an increase of four percentage points.
At the same time, the percentage of Canadian-born people choosing home ownership over renting rose by only two percentage points to 75 per cent, up from 73 per cent.
PM names immigrant as Manitoba’s lieutenant governor
Winnipeg Free Press
OTTAWA – Manitoba’s new lieutenant-governor will be a Chinese immigrant to Canada and longtime City of Winnipeg employee.
Philip Lee was named by the Prime Minister’s Office Friday.
Lee was born in Hong Kong but came to Canada in 1962 to study at the University of Manitoba.
He graduated with bachelor of science in 1966 and a public administration diploma in 1977.
What Immigrant Parents Can Teach Us About Raising Good Kids
by NANCY SHUTE
U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT
Culture has a big effect on how parents raise children, and since 20 percent of children in the United States were born to immigrant parents,with that number expected to rise to 30 percent by 2015, those families have a big impact on American culture, too.
As a member of an immigrant family (my husband grew up in Russia), I’m intensely curious about how parents use their native culture for better or worse in raising children. The current issue of the Journal of Family Psychology, which is all about immigrant families, gives clues as to how culture affects child rearing. For instance, immigrant Chinese-American moms and dads are much better at being on the same page in their expectations for children than are European-American mothers and fathers, who vary much more in their parenting style and behavioral standards, according to research by Carol Huntsinger and Paul Jose. The Chinese-American parents present much more of a united front.
“Chinese parents have a more similar idea of how children need to be guided,” Huntsinger, a professor of education at Northern Illinois University, told me. “The European-American parents tend to have much more individual ideas and do their own thing. That’s what we emphasize in this country.” That’s for sure, I thought, thinking of my husband’s and my very different ideas on discipline, which I think comes more from American culture than from his Russian heritage.
US government opening immigration files
United Press International
WASHINGTON, June 4 (UPI) — An official says the U.S. government’s opening of millions of individuals’ immigration files will give an insight into the country’s immigration history.Gregory Smith of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service said genealogists and historians alike will benefit from the government’s release of the immigration papers from the first half of the 20th century, USA Today reported Thursday.
Building bridges
Bill Joe recalls a succession of Chinese men — strangers, mostly — coming through his parents’ home at Slater and
O’Connor streets when he was growing up.
Newcomers to Canada and Ottawa, many of these immigrants had nowhere to turn for a meal or a place to sleep. Joe’s parents were sympathetic; his father had arrived in Ottawa from China in 1911, while his mother came in 1923, on the last boat to dock in Canada before the federal government’s racist Chinese Exclusion Act became law.
“Anybody who came to the city and didn’t have a place for dinner, they came to our house,” recalls Joe, who turned 80 last month. “No place to sleep? OK, we’ll put a bunk there for you.”
Italians protest ‘fascistic’ immigration laws
PRESS TV
Thousands of Italians have taken to the streets in a show of solidarity with migrants and in a move to defy government policies in the midst of the G-8 meeting.
People in the capital Rome walked out on Saturday toward the secured assembly venue of the group of eight richest countries in order to show their objection to the government’s latest anti-immigrants initiatives.
The demonstrators chanted anti-government slogans and toted banners denouncing both the G-8 ministerial summit on security, immigration and terrorism and recent Italian government’s bid to incarcerate and heavily fine illegal immigrants and their aides.
“We are against the security package, and we will try to dismantle and destroy it even after the 30th of May and after the G8 summit,” a protestor said.
City University of New York program plumbs for elites among immigrants
May 31, 2009
“Oh, come on, Anita, you know you’re not going to be a doctor,” Jeff Maskovsky, an urban studies professor at Queens College, told her, hoping to challenge the idea that the only way to succeed in America was to practice medicine.
No, she was not destined to be a doctor, she later realized. “Whenever I started talking, I couldn’t help myself, politics just came into the discussion,” says Sonawane, 18, a budding community activist and economics major.
Six years ago Sonawane arrived here from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, with her Indian parents and nowhere to live. They ended up moving in briefly with the taxi driver who picked them up at the airport. The family has since bought an apartment in Queens, and her father has found work.
