A pathetic story of immigration to Canada....omo I dey fear o
Dilshod Marupov’s Canadian dream died in a pile of rubble and the broken bodies of four friends.
Like generations of immigrants before him, the young man left his impoverished, authoritarian country behind last year to build himself a new life in Canada.
But a year ago this Christmas Eve — a scant three days after he began a job repairing balconies — Mr. Marupov and his friends heard a dreadful snap in the faulty scaffolding supporting them while pouring concrete 13 storeys above the earth. They skidded, tumbling and hurtling to the cold ground.
“Every day is pain in my leg,” he says in an interview, his only sentence spoken in English.
He won’t dare utter his hopes for the future.
For hundreds of years, the immigrant dream has always been: come to Canada, work hard and eventually establish a decent life for your family, and especially your children.
But over the past 30 years, newcomers have found it more and more difficult to make ends meet. Poverty among immigrants is rising sharply. Employment is precarious. More recently, the numbers of undocumented and underground workers seem to be growing.
The dream, for many, is now a nightmare.
Mr. Marupov, now 22, was first inspired when his buddies in Uzbekistan showed him a website with stunning photos of the sea-side town of Comox, B.C.
He bought himself a plane ticket to Canada, left his sisters and parents behind and set off to get an education, make some money and build himself a new life.
He ran out of money when he reached Toronto, so decided to stay and work awhile before making his way to the coast. Tapping into the Uzbek community, he eventually found a job pouring concrete to repair balconies.
In the dusky late-afternoon hours of last Christmas Eve, as Mr. Marupov packed up his gear for a long weekend, the scaffolding supporting him and four others fractured.
None of them was safely attached to the structure and they all fell precipitously. Three company officials are facing criminal charges.
Mr. Marupov landed feet-first, destroying his back, spine, legs and damaging his head.
He spent four months in hospital, and is still in intense rehabilitation. He has struggled with addiction to painkillers and has been told he will never regain more than 25 per cent of his former mobility.
Instead of exploring the coastal mountains of British Columbia, “I feel like I am sitting inside four walls, like in a cage. And I feel myself very dull, very blue,” the former wrestler added through an interpreter.
Canada is not Europe, where marginalization of immigrants has led to race-based rioting and violence in some cities. But as people like Mr. Marupov find themselves with questionable immigration status, stuck in low-paid, unsafe jobs facing a dim future, keen observers of Canada’s immigration system are asking out loud whether we’re headed in that direction.
“I think we’re at a cusp of creating a divide in social cohesion,” says Don Drummond, former chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank, who has been tracking the welfare of newcomers with concern.
Mr. Marupov did not enter Canada’s workforce the traditional way. He came on a visitor’s visa and just started working, making a refugee claim along the way. He’s still waiting in a grey zone of status.
It’s people like him who are in the most precarious situation when it comes to making ends meet. They’re driven to take any job without complaint.
But even those who take the traditional route – who formally apply and are officially accepted to come to Canada as immigrants – are finding life more and more difficult here.
Studies of immigrants’ economic outcomes over the years show that newcomers have always had a tough time when they first arrive.
“Every one of us whose ancestors came to this country, our ancestors went through a period of economic struggle. But what’s important is that the sky is the limit,” commented Immigration Minister Jason Kenney in a recent interview.
But over the past 30 years, newcomers have been getting off to shakier starts, and it’s taking them longer and longer to catch up to Canadian-born workers.
