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Originally Posted by Acajack
I was actually going to add "of certain origins"... which of course leads us back to the same can of worms as before.
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We shouldn't be afraid to recognize that different communities have faced different hurdles when integrating into Canadian life. However, we have to look bigger picture here, recognizing that integration is a two-way street.
Take the Somali community, for example, which has faced unique challenges when integrating here. While it's tempting to write those challenges off as a failure on the community's part, we have to recognize the immense barriers our government imposed on their integration into the country through the 1990s (which, IIRC, was when immigration from that country peaked); namely, permanent residency and its attendant benefits (the ability to find stable employment, access to certain social and educational programs, &c.) were withheld from that group (and from those from Afghanistan). This was the result of a requirement for refugee claimants to produce valid government-issued documents from their country of origin, which was next to impossible for most immigrants from Somalia due to the collapse of that country's government. This requirement was not in place when Vietnamese and Tamil refugees arrived in the previous decades and no longer exists due to the recognized harm it caused the affected communities.
And immigration policy is only one part of the picture. We also have to look at, for example, how child and family services treats specific communities (i.e, Black and Aboriginal children are more frequently removed from their parents than children in other groups, even where identical conditions exist), among many other considerations.
We have to take some responsibility here.