Living With Trauma: The Healers, 14

I am going to address here an elephant in the room.  I will call this entity the poor-bashing immigrant.  This is not an easy topic.  Immigration is part of the lifeblood of the Canadian economy and is essential to the still-evolving Canadian culture.  No one is allowed to badmouth immigrants.  The politically-correct thought police will be down your throat faster than a wad of undigested kale.  For the record, I am pro-immigration.  I am also against bigotry.  Against any class of people.  Including the poor.  But how does one respond when the poor-bashers are themselves immigrant Canadians who have done well in this country?  When I was homeless and had just arrived again in this city where I grew up after almost a year of couch-surfing between my father's rented cabin on the Sunshine Coast and with various friends here in Vancouver, I felt like a refugee.  In my own city.   I had to struggle to find shelter every night, and I also had to struggle to simply get a long term roof over my head.  I had the good fortune of friends helping me out but many others also turned their backs on me.  I felt like a foreigner in my own city.  An unwelcome foreigner.  This was during the late nineties when the poor had already turned into the new coloured folk, targets for the new poor-bashing culture of apartheid.  Yes, there is still racism, and it is still ugly, but now we have an even easier target and no one bats an eye when invective is unleashed on us.  I have heard one new Canadian after another disparage our local poor as lazy, parasitic losers who don't want to work for a living, that we are simply a burden to the taxpayer.  And those kinds of immigrants, who themselves have benefited grandly from the largess of the Canadian taxpayers, are among the first to baulk about paying taxes and if they become well-heeled business entrepreneurs, will exploit ever loophole in the book to avoid paying their share.  And they are also more likely to vote for rightwing politicians. This class of immigrant usually comes to Canada expecting that it is going to be the land of milk and honey and that all hard work will be justly rewarded with a nice house, two cars in the garage and children in university.  This happens often enough for new Canadians.  No one, apparently, verses them on their arrival that this is a country of growing social and economic inequality, that there is no guarantee that they are going to do particularly well, nor that should they prosper that perhaps they might accept an implicit expectation that they might also do their part to help the less fortunate in this country, through volunteer work, by being good neighbours, or at least by paying their share of taxes and not saying unkind things about individuals who were born and raised in this country and somehow end up having to sleep on sidewalks or in shop doorways and beg for change or collect empties in order to survive.  These same immigrants often come from countries with little or no social safety net and a culture of absolute zero compassion towards the less fortunate.  Is it any wonder that so many of them turn into poor bashers?  And local folk aren't really much help.  A friend who is here from another country, while on a student university program in business administration, was told by one of his professors (himself likely not native born) that people in this country are homeless because they don't want to work.  With our own citizens believing and spreading this kind of defamatory nonsense, is it any wonder that newcomers are going to be even less inclined to be kind and respectful to their marginalized neighbours here?  No one talks about the fifty percent of newcomers who actually return to their country of origin within a year, nor about the others who somehow don't make it, fall through the cracks and become themselves, poor, homeless, addicted, suffering from a mental illness, or all of the above,  Most recently we have been courting the controversy over the modular housing for street homeless adults that is about to be constructed near a school in Marpole, which is one of Vancouver's last affordable neighbourhoods.  All the NIMBY's in that area have been out in force, champing at the bit and frothing at the mouth, worried about their precious young progeny being traumatized or worse by this near presence of addicts, criminals, mentally ill and other vulnerable folk.  I noticed in the videos that the majority of the protestors appeared to be recently arrived immigrants, principally Asian and South Asian, though there were also a few local born poor bashing bigots in their number.  One obviously Chinese woman who seemed fresh off the boat was caught yelling that the homeless people should all go live in Stanley Park. Now as part of this culture of poor-bashing we have in mixed housing developments special poor doors for the government subsidized tenants to keep them apart from the well-healed house flippers and yuppies who actually bought to live in the same building.  Living in BC Housing myself, I certainly wouldn't want to be sharing facilities with yuppies, but their lives are so shallow and their life experience so limited, would it really be fair to deprive them of a chance to get to know and mingle with folk who are different from them?  They might even gain a sense and appreciation of their own humanity.  They might even grow a bit!  I find it sad that with our government's obsession with money, wealth and the economy, that would-be immigrants are screened out for all kinds of reasons, especially for lack of funds or resources or skills and connections that will make them competitive in the job market and not end up as burdens to society.  No one has ever been denied access to this country for their lack of compassion or empathy, or for being greedy, ruthless and ambitious.  No wonder they poor-bash.