In 1985, my dad as a migrant took the journey across the world to a small place called Vancouver, which is located in British Columbia, Canada. Little did I know growing up that I was born into a family with a profound history. As a child, I thought my dad was a world class traveller but later found out that this was not luxury but an unfortunate circumstance where he had no choice but to leave his hometown. Now I define this story as the double life of my immigrant father who once was a migrant but now a citizen of Canada.
Rationale:
As a daughter of two racialized immigrant parents, I have grown up with multiple perspectives of what immigration means to me from an immigrant and as a non-immigrant perspective. This blog post is meant to reiterate the complications that many children of migrants face on a daily basis. I am part of the second generation of my family where it is a challenge for myself to comprehend the hardships that my dad has faced as a refugee, especially being a man of color. When I had asked him about his journey to Canada, he seems to give me a vague description of his past as I could tell by his face reaction that he does not want to ever talk about it. Thus, my dad’s situation explains that refugees are in need of protection. We need to look into changing the policies to stop this unfair injustice and mental suffering refugees face due to immigration policies in Canada.
URL/Link: https://humanrightsinasean.info/campaign/migration-working-group-turning-boats-away-not-option.html
Keywords: immigrant, policies, Canadian citizen
Author: Border Crossing Feminist
Thank you for sharing your dads story. I believe it is so important for stories such as yours to be shared because it educates people and especially families who have not migrated how complex the process and journey of migration is. I have been lucky enough to hear the stories of multiple peers discuss their mother or father or grandparent’s experiences with migration and I now see migration in a new light. I thought of migration through a surface level lens; the process of moving one place to another, but I now know how intense the process is. I cannot even begin to imagine how hard it must be for your father and other people who have migrated to bring…