The Globe has developed fictional profiles of prospective immigrants. We asked two experts to assess the candidates. Who would you choose?
AISHA
Aisha is a 15-year-old girl from Pakistan who wants to move to Surrey, B.C. She didn't finish secondary school and doesn't speak English, but hopes to take an ESL class. She is being sponsored by her father, who moved to Canada a decade ago and sent for her after her mother died. Aisha is excited about the idea of living in the West and wants to make friends and see American movies. But she's a bit apprehensive about living with her father, who works as a line cook. He's become more pious since leaving Pakistan and she knows he'll want her to wear the hijab and shield her from Western cultural influences.
Sharryn Aiken: She's young and she wants to come to Canada to live with her father. First of all, family sponsorship of a dependent child is a right. But on the other hand, we can see there's going to be a lot of problems here. Many Diaspora communities in Canada are actually more conservative than communities in the countries of origin. Diaspora communities have a way of becoming kind of frozen in time and resisting change. It looks like this may be a person who's going to need a lot of support when she gets to Canada. We have settlement programs to provide that. We have schools with ESL programs. There's no reason to suspect that she wouldn't do well. She'll learn English and she'll adapt. But it looks like she's going to have some problems at home. It's sort of the clash of our multiculturalist values on the one hand and on the other hand wanting to promote standards of equality that permeate the entire country.
Martin Collacott: There is certainly a problematic case. She sounds like a very appealing young person, she's ambitious, she values Canadian things and so on. But ... she's probably going to have to live with her father. And there's obviously major conflicts. You feel sympathetic to her in terms of her wishes and so on, but I would say that's a recipe for disaster. The main conflict would be that people like her father come to Canada wanting the economic opportunities but thinking somehow they can live as they did back in their old country in terms of their family traditions. And it just doesn't work in many cases. She wants to come here for all freedom western society has to offer and her father will see it just the opposite way.
Jill Mahoney