I’m a pretty typical and untypical Sydneysider – I was born overseas (31% of Sydneysiders were) but I have lived here since I was 4 (many Sydneysiders, if they were born in Australia, came here from somewhere else).
I think of myself as Australian, but my parents think of themselves as New Zealanders, even though they’ve both lived here for longer than they’ve lived in New Zealand. That’s probably about as easy as immigration gets to Australia – Australians, being sport mad, are willing to forgive New Zealanders continuing support of the All Blacks, and don’t usually realise how culturally different from Australia New Zealand is these days (there is a very strong Pacific Island influence, which doesn’t really exist here in Sydney).
Still, I think there is a pang, watching your children growing up feeling a part of a culture that you yourself don’t belong to. My brothers and I are staunchly Australian. New Zealand has a place in our heart, but it’s second place.
So how much harder it must be for the many immigrants in Sydney who haven’t come because the jobs are just a bit better in Australia. A friend of mine came here at the age of 7 from Vietnam. She and her sisters are a classic refugee success story. Her parents worked hard at low skilled jobs, but the children all got degrees and have successful careers. But even though they have bought a safer and probably more prosperous life for their children, it is at the cost of their children losing a part of their culture. My friend is Australian, and thinks of herself that way. Her children will be too.
Multiculturalism (mouthful that it is) has been a mostly successful attempt to help our immigrants hang on to the parts of their culture that is meaningful for them. But there has always been resistance from the mainstream.
The more I talk to english speaking immigrants from first world countries (who are the ones I encounter at work - my close work colleagues birthplaces include South Africa, Russia, the US, the UK, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China) about their experience of immigration and how Australian they feel these days, the more I realise how hard it is for the immigrants who have moved from a seriously foreign (to Australia) culture. And I wish people would think a bit harder about the enormous leap it is for anyone to move into a foreign culture before complaining about lack of assimilation.
Identity and culture is such a personal thing. If you come to a country, you come knowing that you are adopting that culture, particularly for your children (if you have them). But our world is so much richer for sharing .
This post was partly inspired by Charlotte, who writes about her mixed feelings about living as an expat in Germany. She is South African, and fiercely loves her country, but, nevertheless, is bringing up her children somewhere else. Any immigrant faces and deals with that complexity of belonging. The least the rest of us can do is empathise.
Lovely post, and thanks for your kind words on my blog. I’m lucky in Germany because I look like a local and have more-or-less mastered the language, so assimilation has been easier for me. If I were black or wore a headscarf, then I’d really stand out. I decided to commit to Germany for the sake of my children (never express my negative feelings about the country, embrace the language and as many of the customs as I could tolerate), and as a result they feel this is their home. Me, I could leave tomorrow. Not because I’m not settled or don’t have friends here – I am and I do – but it’s just not home. Nowhere is, I guess, except South Africa. Maybe one day I’ll stop running from that truth and go back.
Thanks for making me think more broadly about my immigrant experience.
I really enjoyed reading that (and Charlotte’s). You’ve made me think about my own status as something of an emmigrant from a fairly specific UK sub-culture. Maybe I’ll get around to reflecting a little more calmly on that at some point.
I’d have to say that in the UK, there’s a lot of talk about how the multiculturalist project has failed. Not so much failed (in my view) as opportunistically colonised by politics and with that politicisation has come a tendency to for the left to duck awkward cultural issues (not all elements of immigrant culture are welcome) and so weaken their position on the important ones (fighting racism, supporting refugees, ensuring equality of access and opportunity).
When I describe myself as an immigrant, I get weird looks and comments like: “But you’re different, of course.” I take it that means that I’m white and I came to Australia with English as my first language. That did make life easier on the surface. My husband and I arrived here having studied the same number of years at university, both speaking fluent English and both having skilled occupations that were in demand here. I got a job with decent pay as soon as I stepped off the plane. Over six months of unemployment, my husband applied for two hundred jobs, was offered five interviews and in the one interview where they talked about offering him the job, they said they would pay him less than the other employees. Eventually he ended up stacking shelves in a shop at $11 an hour. Hmmmmm. Could the difference in the way we were be treated have anything to do with our difference in skin colour? In the end he went back to university, found a job in his field and is doing really well now. But he had to put at least a hundred times more effort in than I did. It took years for both of us to adjust to life in Australia. When we were going through those tough times, I thought I would never be able to settle down here. Weirdly, though, a sense of belonging gradually crept up on me and I feel really positive that Kiko is going to be a born and bred Australian. I don’t feel sad that he’s going to grow up outside UK, maybe because I’ve never had a strong sense of home.
Unrelaxeddad, we have the same talk here in Australia. And probably similar issues with both the left and the right, even though the immigrants being complained about are from quite different places (Lebanon is our latest group of “unassimilated” immigrants, although in my 20 years of paying attention to politics, Vietnam and Yugoslavia have taken turns).
Helen, I’ve complained at work about the way in which people who look Asian, have english as a first language, but an accent (e.g. from Singapore) are treated as if they don’t communicate well in the workplace – someone from Scotland or Ireland with a similar thick accent would not get the same treatment.
I’ve probably got another, more political post, in me about this topic, but I think I need to think about it some more to get my thoughts straight.
I’m actually unfamiliar with the talk in Autralia or the UK (and frankly even in the US, where the talk of “not assimilating” goes on outside my identifiably minority presence). My fear is not a lack of assimilation (I truly believe that in a free society it will happen, forced upon the elder’s by their half-brown half-white half-whatever children if necessary. Freedom is necessary, though not quite sufficient, but no one should underplay what’s happening in the world. I used to think of the “hyphenated-american” as being an essentially american inventions (i.e. we are all imigrants in America, except the native americans, and there aren’t very many of them). I’ve even had conversations with people about what it’s like to live in a “young” land, unweighted by the heaviness of the past culture (you Australians have that, too, but compare that to India, or China, or Italy, or Pesia). So, I was bemused, to find that Paris was a truly and completely multicultural society (down to the Tex Mex resteraunts — Tex Mex??). Sure, lots of growing pains, but the world is a changing place.
I thought I’d share this beginning of a piece from Pico Iyer:
“The Global Village Finally Arrives
by Pico Iyer
This is the typical day of a relatively typical soul in today’s diversified world. I wake up to the sound of my Japanese clock radio, put on a T-shirt sent to me by an uncle in Nigeria and walk out into the street, past German cars, to my office. Around me are English-language students from Korea, Switzerland, and Argentina – all on this Spanish-named road in this Mediterranean-style town. On TV, I find, the news is in Mandarin; today’s baseball game is being broadcast in Korean. For lunch I can walk to a sushi bar, a tandoori palace, a Thai café or the newest burrito joint (run by an old Japanese lady. Who am I, I sometimes wonder, the son of Indian parents and a British citizen who spends much of his time in Japan (and is therefore – what else? – an American permanent resident)? And where am I?
I am, as it happens in Southern California, in a quiet, relatively uninternational town, but I could as easily be in Vancouver or Sydney or London or Hong Kong. All the world’s a rainbow coalition, more and more; the whole planet you might say, is going global. When I fly to Toronto, or Paris, or Singapore, I disembark in a world as hyphenated as the one I left. More and more of the globe looks like America, but an America that is itself looking more and more like the rest of the globe. Los Angeles famously teaches 82 different languages in its schools. In this respect, the city seems only to bear out the old adage that what is in California today is in America tomorrow, and next week, around the globe . . .”
[...] but some will, without ever seeing themselves as part of that country. I’ve posted before about the emotional side of migration – it’s hard even if you are wholly committed to it. And [...]
Blogger Helen (see her post on on Feb. 07) hit the nail on the head with this-”Could the difference in the way we were treated have anything to do with our difference in skin colour? In the end he went back to university, found a job in his field and is doing really well now. But he had to put at least a hundred times more effort in than I did..”!
Although I am far removed from Sydney (I live in the US and am of Asian ancestry, proud to be Brown-skinned!) I can echo that exact thought- it is very true over here in the US that skin colour DOES play a big role.
Despite the fact that the nations was built out of immigration, the vast majority of people, employers included, are yet not colour-blind. Besides the ability to speak English (accented or not), skin colour does play an important role in the degree and rapidity of assimilation (actual as well as perceived). Interestingly, when this was studied, skin colour and physical height it seemed to also have an impact on wages earned by immigrants!
The ultimate conclusion for me is that immigrants with non-white skin colour cannot expect to enter a level playing field when they immigrate to predominantly white-skin coloured societies! Id love to hear the thoughts/experiences of others this!
Hi. Im from Pakistan and am contemplating immigrating to Australia. Though well-settled in Pakistan and in a very good-paying job, i feel that i need a better future for my two toddlers. Im 40 and my wife 36. I have been surfing the net to gauge immigrant experiences and what @archana gupta & @Helen have said, is exactly what i was afraid of. Though both of us, my wife and i were born in Pakistan, ethnically we are not from here. My ancestors are Afghan, hence im very fair-skinned with ginger-coloured hair while my wife is of Irish descent. Both my toddlers are redheads! But if fair-skin determines an immigrants ready acceptance into a decent workplace, then im afraid the so-called ‘assimilation’ process is totally flawed. And makes me think, is it really worth it?
Australia definitely has some racism, but it isn’t necessarily a reason not to come. Not everyone is racist, and many workplaces are trying very hard to be inclusive (for example my own had a diversity day last year which I expected to be quite a token effort, but ended up in many cases being a great way for people to share the culture they were from in the workplace). I think the more I talk to immigrants, the more I realise that it has to be a wrench to leave your own culture, but sometimes the wrench is worth it anyway, if the culture you are going to has some benefits also.
I also ended up here by googling “australia immigrant experience”. I am an immigrant to Australia. Integration into Australian culture should be easier for me than almost anyone else in the world; I am Canadian. I am an experienced traveler. I am educated. I moved here because I was offered a job. Australia seemed like the land of opportunity on paper. The salary is much higher than I would make in North America. Everything I loved to do in my spare time is here. I live in a small city that is easily accessible to Melbourne. But I still find this to be the most alienating foreign country experience I have ever had.
Australians are at least superficially friendly, but don’t seem interested in integrating a newcomer into their social circles. I think people who have arrived with partners and children feel less alienated, but arriving as a single person has proven exceedingly lonely. Despite my best efforts to be inclusive and proactive, my Australian friends rarely think to call to chat or invite me out. Nearly all of my new friends in Australia are also foreigners.
Needless to say, the experience has been a bad one. I moved here with the intention of staying and building a life for myself here. Now I am looking for jobs elsewhere.
My experience has not been a good one. PLEASE, do not reply to my post with the typical comments of, “If you don’t like it, go back home… well… you are not up to the standards…” Such uneducated and ignorant, comments, dear lord.
My situation is similar to Bri. I find this place too alienating for foreigners in order for them to integrate fully to the society. It gets annoying the volume of rejections and/or assumptions that one is here as a “truck loader.” And it is interesting such the dodgy way of doing business in here. The vibe is weird in here. It is so surprising to me that the “racism or discrimination”, say, the Japanese portray, is nothing compared to what I have experienced in here.
Although my native background is from a non-English speaking country, I did live in the US for half of my life. I did live there legally, I did pay my taxes. I felt part of the country, the community, and the culture. Never did I feel nor was I labeled as a “truck loader.” I did have two cars and a home and I was able to eat every day. I first arrived in Australia in 2008 having been sold the “land of opportunity.” I did come here well educated, with strong US working experience, with solid financial status, engaged. My life in here after 3 years has gone to the opposite side: breakdown of relationship, near bankruptcy, cannot get a job in any industry, in my field, nor in low skilled paid job (including walking dogs, cleaning jobs, dishwasher, factory jobs, anything…).Today, I am lucky if I can have a meal a day.
I am positive, please do not JUDGE me wrong. : D I do my best every day. I wake up early, go to school, and apply for my jobs implementing the given approaches to land a job.
I have contemplated suicide, too. But, I guess “studying” which surprisingly education is seen as a “uncool” in here, has given some sort of meaning to my life now. It is such the level of wariness and mistrust this society and system have in the individual.
As Bri, I moved here with the intention of staying and building a life for myself and my ex-fiance, but at this moment, I feel trapped and do not know what to do.
Hope my post is not “too negative” But this has been my experience.
God Bless,