...Wow, so casual, lol.

I'm not sure if you mean the immigrants of today or the immigrants of the last couple of decades, but the reason my mother most gives for leaving Pakistan and coming to Canada in the late 70's, and the reason that most of my friends' immigrant parents give, is to provide opportunities for their children that they never had for themselves. The hope of giving their children a better life. Which is a pretty large sacrifice if you think about it - having to leave the comfort and familiarity of your homeland (no matter how bad you may think it to be) - take up roots in a new country where you can't really speak the language, where you percieve people to be hostile towards you because of your inability to understand the nuances of your new culture, all so that your children can grow up with guaranteed healthcare, guaranteed education, and a lot of other benefits we take for granted. However, a lot of the immigrants (my parents included) have difficulty letting go of their old culture, because it's something so familiar to them and a significant part of their identy, that the sometimes begin to resent seeing their children grow up as different people. And different in the sense that there is this huge culture gap because for the children, all they know is this north american culture, and at home (for some of these families anyway, I'm speaking from my own experience) they are bombarded with the parents' attempts at trying to instill a seperate identity - the identity that they've brought from whatever country they immigrated from - that it creates a lot of problems with communication and tolerance in the family.

This is not to say that goes for all families. My friend Hyder is a first-generation Indo-Canadian like me. He is much more receptive to the indian culture than I am, though. He had an arranged marriage last year and he was really happy with it; I on the other hand would never accept an arranged marriage and it has become a real problem between me and my mother because she will not accept any other sort of marriage other than one she arranges. So yeah, building a better future for their families is what I suspect is the motivation for most immigrants but potential culture rifts as a result of the children growning up here pose a significant problem to family stability.

Victor

Well clearly, wanting to give opportunities for their children is probably the main motivation that immigrants have in mind. And to some extent, you're right, Canada has offered tons of opportunities for first-generation canadians like yourself who probably would not have had those opportunities had you, for example, grown up in Pakistan. But as far as opportunities for people who are fresh off the boat, this is where I have my doubts. Of course if someone arrives from a war-ridden country, I would assume that Canada is a lot better than where they were. But for an upper middle-class family (the social status of most immigrants) from Mexico, India, South Korea or whatever, I really doubt that Canada has to offer that many immediate opportunities. You just end up with a bunch of people with PhD's driving cabs and working behind the counter at Subway. And that's mostly what pisses me off about our society because we don't stop to think about the fact that the lady cleaning our hotel room used to be a schoolteacher in Iran, or that the Jamaican janitor was once a lab technician back in his country.

Last summer, I worked for my neighbor who had come from South Korea a couple years ago. He had a moving truck, and that's what we would do, spend 12 hours a day moving people's furniture. He told me that before he came to Canada he was the vice president of a software company in South Korea, making lots of money and living very comfortably. Of course, when he came here, his difficulty with the English language and the fact that many employers in this country do not recognize degrees taken in universities and other schools from most other nations, meant that he could not have the same job opportunities as he did back in South Korea, so he is breaking his back lifting people's furniture. This story is so very familiar amongst others that I know - my friend Emad's mother was CFO of a petrochemical company in Pakistan, and when she lived here for a couple of years while her son was going to university, she was selling shoes. She left Canada because she didn't think it was worth the change in lifestyle. Her situation and my mothers' situation is different in the sense that her son, also a Pakistani immigrant, was already in school on a student visa when she came over to this country and thus had no reason to stay.

I guess it doesn't bother me as much because I'm surrounded by it, but it's true... it's like that Amanda Marshall song.

Victor