What it feels like to be a migrant

I've never been a refugee but I've met many. Charles 'Newman' (a self-conferred surname) crept out the back door of his Budapest apartment in 1956 as the secret police were breaking in the front door, with barely enough time to grab his wallet and passport. He'd been in Australia about 4 years when I met him, was still traumatized by the collapse of his comfortable world when the Soviet army moved into Hungary to 'save' it (it was never clear from what). A Vietnamese couple who looked so fragile a puff of wind would blow them away were tougher than the steel cables supporting the Lion's Gate bridge, below which I met them and heard their harrowing story of piracy, rape, being stripped of all they possessed, and worst of all, the pettifoggery of bureaucracy that impeded their resettlement and led them onward from Los Angeles to Vancouver. I empathize strongly with them and many others I've been privileged and honoured to know, but I can't share their experiences.

But I know what it feels like to be a migrant. I've migrated intercontinentally, from one culture to another, three times, uprooting from a neighbourhood friendship network and culture to begin life anew in a strange new world with unfamiliar culture and customs, bringing my willing supportive Wendy and three rather unwilling little children with me. 

Our first migration in January-February 1964, from Sydney, Australia to Burlington, Vermont, USA was a comfortable 7-week affair, a luxurious sea voyage across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Kingston, Jamaica, then up the Eastern seaboard of USA. Our first impression of the USA was a vista of miles of squalid shanty-town slums where underclass blacks lived, as our ship crept up river to a berth within walking range of gracious antebellum homes and lovely downtown Charleston, South Carolina. It was a different planet from our first sight of those miles of shantytown slums.  Another first impression was gunshops with displays of ugly automatic pistols and rifles with magazines holding enough bullets to shred the first unlucky deer, wild pig, or newspaper delivery boy to cross the path of a proud owner of such lethal weapons. A newspaper delivery boy was slaughtered by mistake in exactly this way soon after our landfall in the USA. An Op-Ed comment in the Burlington Free Press after that commonplace tragedy twisted facts and distorted logic to imply that getting shot and killed was the boy's own fault. 

Before we left Sydney on that migration from Australia to the USA, I had begun to study socio-demographic and psychological factors associated with migration, so I had some insight into what was happening to me and my family.  I knew an essential determinant of successful migration is a slowly acquired sense of belonging to the migrant's host country. On our very first day in the USA impressions began to accumulate, a little more on the negative than the positive side of the ledger. Reasons not to identify with, not to seek a sense of belonging to American culture, grew more numerous in the months that followed.  

Throughout our 14 months in Burlington, Vermont in 1964-65, Wendy and I tried hard to acquire the sense of belonging that we knew was an essential prerequisite to successful assimilation. I was very fortunate: Kerr White, my host, mentor, guide on the path to assimilation, gave me many opportunities to travel. I went to New York, Washington, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor, Chicago and sundry other centres of scholarly life. At weekends and on a short late summer holiday we explored Vermont and the neighbouring states. Wendy and I found much to admire and like about life in the lovely little university city of Burlington, Vermont. But we also found aspects of the American way of life that felt alien - that inhibited us from acquiring a sense of belonging. 

We were disgusted by the profligacy and waste, appalled by casual acceptance of corruption as an integral component of politics, horrified and alarmed by the gun culture, apprehensive about the rising tide of strident militarism all around us. The war was heating up in Vietnam in 1964, and universally there was total misunderstanding of what that war was really about: Americans saw it not as the struggle for national liberation from colonial rule that it really was, but as a conflict between good capitalism and evil communism. 

I'd been reading the New Yorker avidly for about 15 years, but apart from that we searched in vain for local, regional and national evidence of the sort of cultural richness and historical traditions that permeate the lives of people in Britain or France or Italy. It was difficult to detect evidence that the values of Mark Twain, Louisa May Allcott, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, or a dozen other American writers I admired and loved, had penetrated the souls of any of the Americans we met, nice though they all were. The overriding impression was of a shallow, superficial culture hardly deserving to be called a culture - certainly not a culture to which we wanted to belong. 

Wendy and I felt that we were saved from a fate worse than death when Stuart Morrison invited me to join his team at the Usher Institute of Public Health in the University of Edinburgh. The salary was 40% below what I'd been offered to accompany Kerr White to the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene in Baltimore; even so it took no more than a nanosecond to decide between the two invitations. I achieved brief fame as an example of 'reverse brain drain' - even a short paragraph in the Lancet.

The process of migrating from New England to Scotland lasted overnight, a red-eye flight from Montreal to Prestwick, and an hour on the train to Waverley Station in Edinburgh. Wendy and I thought our adjustment to life in Scotland would be equally brief. She'd lived in Edinburgh before, for 2-3 years; I'd lived there for about 5 months. I was disconcerted to find that it took 2 years or more to acquire a sense of belonging. Probably this was because I'd lived in London for 4-5 years and had acquired aspects of Englishness that were subtly different from Scottishness.  It was easier and faster for Wendy, perhaps partly because of a little Scots blood in her veins. But it happened: our whole family acquired not so much a veneer as a sturdy sub-surface layer of Scottishness, strongly reinforced in our children by lovely lilting Edinburgh accents. (To my sorrow they lost these accents within weeks of settling in Ottawa, but Rebecca assures me she can retrieve hers if the need arises).  

After 5 years we all felt Scottish and would happily have spent the rest of our lives there. Several factors impelled us to move again. After 5 years I'd become professionally well known.  I began to get invitations to attractive professorial positions elsewhere in the UK, in Canada, USA. None from Australia, alas, and I was turned down for two positions I applied for in my homeland: both went to men who were well-connected rather than well qualified. I couldn't refuse an invitation from Harvard, however, despite misgivings about the politics of a cross appointment between the medical school and the school of public health, doubts about returning to a country and culture we'd found flawed, and painfully long commutes I'd be forced to make. After provisionally accepting the position at Harvard, I flew to Ottawa, arriving late on a balmy summer afternoon. I walked up to Parliament Hill, then around the Canal to somewhere in the Glebe where as dusk gathered, Mums and Dads sat on their front steps sipping wine while their kids played street hockey. I had an epiphany: this was the place to raise our kids, not some distant outer suburb of greater Boston with all the turbulence and racial tensions that afflicted the USA in the late 1960s!

The decision to leave Edinburgh, which we had come to love, and where we felt that we truly belonged, and move to yet another new country and culture was agonizing and drawn out over as many weeks as we could delay saying yea or nay. When we finally made up our minds it was after prolonged consideration of many pros and cons. Better chances for our children to get a good start in life was of over-riding importance.

We found to our surprise and delight that adjustment to Canadian life and culture was easy, fast and painless (but not to the climate! That's a whole other story). The policy and reality of multiculturalism smoothed the way: newcomers to Canada are accepted for who they are. Nobody tried to change us, to force us into a mould that would have us conform,  become like everyone else.  Canada's not like that! It draws its greatest strength from its pervasive diversity. Now after 46 years here I feel deep-rooted; and if my ancestors are all in another country, that just makes me more Canadian, not less, like close to a third of all of us who live in Canada.  The sense of belonging took hold soon after we arrived in Ottawa, and has grown stronger, richer, deeper with each passing year. 

Entering my 90th year

Any honest old wrinkly will admit that despite the sense of accomplishment in surviving this long, its annoying limitations, disabilities, aches and pains, et cetera, make old age a mixed blessing. As I've said before and will doubtless say again - old people being by nature repetitious - being alive at 89 is infinitely preferable to being dead, no matter how tiresome the accompanying ailments of old age may be. I continue to get great pleasure from just being alive.  This year I've had an unusually large number of greetings and good wishes on this, my 89th birthday. I treasure them all. I was especially chuffed to receive greetings from my very good friend and colleague for 40 years, Rama Nair. As I said to him in a Facebook message,  I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in having brought him to Ottawa, recruited him to our medical school, and watched with approval as he and his lovely wife Sarala put down roots and established a dynasty here. They are a vibrant local symbol of the success of Canada's policy of multiculturalism, the mosaic of cultures that have joined forces here to form a beautiful pattern. There's a good deal of merging and mingling at the margins, but the mosaic is still a mosaic, a model to the rest of the world in how cultures can live together side by side in friendship and harmony. It's a better model and more durable too, than the American (and Australian) policy of assimilation - the melting pot, in which every immigrant becomes an American (or an Australian). When Wendy and I were weighing the pros and cons of staying in the USA or moving on to Scotland, the melting-pot metaphor was firmly in the 'con' column. Later, when we left Scotland and came to Canada, the metaphor of the mosaic was a powerful encouragement  to stay here and become part of the mosaic.  

Migrations - Some official statistics

The Harper government is so secretive with facts that might prove politically awkward or embarrassing if disclosed, that we must turn to official UN agencies to find the truth. 

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is a useful source. I learnt from IOM that I am one of 21 thousand Australians who has migrated to Canada. Almost 11 thousand have migrated to Canada from New Zealand, Wendy's homeland. According to IOM, as of 30 June 2015, i.e. in the first six months of 2015, Italy, including Sicily and the tiny island of Lampadusa, had received 114 thousand migrants who have arrived by sea across the Mediterranean; several thousand died trying, mostly by drowning, some asphyxiated after being locked in confined spaces, e.g. refrigerated trucks, sealed ships' holds. The land route into western Europe runs through Greece and the Balkans. More than 235 thousand migrants used the land route through Greece in the first six months of 2015. Greece's task has not been made easier by the German bankers who demand repayment in full of loans to Greece.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) is another useful resource. I've been observing UNHCR's work and using their statistics for many years (I've contributed to UNHCR as a charitable cause for more than 30 years). One UNHCR statistic I've often quoted is the rapidly rising number of environmental refugees. The number rose from 5 million to 47 million between 2005 and 2010; it has risen more sharply since 2010. Late in 2015 there are more than 60 million refugees but I can't find a table that dissects them into refugees from conflict, habitat loss, etc. The appalling carnage of the Syrian civil war was sparked initially by habitat loss after an unprecedented prolonged drought attributable to climate change. This led directly to a rural-to-urban migration of about 1.5 million Syrian farm families whose formerly fertile land had turned to desert.

The present Canadian government has been obstructive and secretive, delaying action on specific requests from families and church-based groups, refusing to disclose the actual numbers, releasing figures that are misleading, inconsistent or both. Harper boasts that no country is doing as much as Canada, a blatant falsehood. A spokesman for one of the charitable organizations said that as far as he could determine, fewer than 500 claims for refugee status are being processed (painfully slowly) and the number actually brought to Canada under direct government sponsorship or in process of being brought here, is 59. Germany has received over 100,000 refugees from Iraq and Syria, and Sweden, with a population of less than a quarter of Canada's, has taken in 60,000. When our present political leaders lie to us so shamefully I wonder why they expect us to vote them back into office. The Harper government's contribution to the Middle East crisis is 6 fighter-bombers and a campaign of obstruction and lies. Recent news also included information that a Canadian air strike earlier this year led to a record number of civilian deaths. The actions of the Harper government contrast very sharply with the response of Joe Clark's PC Government to the refugee crisis of the 'Boat People' after the fall (or liberation) of Vietnam. Some 60,000 or more were brought to Canada in the space of a few weeks.

Why do people migrate? Stated at the most simplistic, they are either pulled or pushed.  The incentive to leave a familiar homeland, to uproot, is absence of opportunities for advancement, promotion, or even survival in the homeland.  Habitat loss is becoming a 'push' factor in a world of rising sea levels, desertification, shrinking resources. This set of problems often leads to social unrest, political instability, persecution of minorities. The dustbowl years of the 1930s caused habitat loss in some marginal  agricultural regions of USA, leading to some population redistribution. I think we are beginning to see evidence of another trend, a larger region of habitat loss, drought in California which shows signs of a longterm or permanent climatic shift. By the middle decades of the 21st century the south-west corner of USA will probably be unable to sustain even half its current population. California is richer in all resources needed for prosperity except the one essential ingredient, fresh water for drinking and irrigation. Perhaps desalination technology will develop in time to replace depleted freshwater. If it doesn't, millions will be forced to emigrate from California as it transforms into a waterless desert.

Viewed as a biological phenomenon, the turbulent movement of people around the world, often accompanied by violence and armed conflict, is a collective response to the need for resources essential for survival. Currently humanity is living in ecological deficit. Every year the deficit between numbers of people and available resources of drinking water and food grows larger. Many of the world's most intractable conflicts are ultimately attributable to this deficit. The relentlessly increasing size of this deficit is a reliable predictor of future unrest and conflict. 

A sociobiological perspective on migrations

The terms used to describe migrants can reveal much about those who use the terms. In the early 1930s, the period of my earliest conscious memories, cartoons in the gutter press in Australia conveyed frightening images of sinister slant-eyed men, the mythical 'Yellow Peril' who threatened to overwhelm the sturdy but sparsely distributed blue-eyed, fair-complexioned Australians of British stock who were sprinkled across the south-east corner of the desert continent with denser clusters in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and other cities on that long coast facing the South-West Pacific Ocean. The journalists and the owners of the gutter press were deliberately vague about the nationality of those they described as the yellow peril. Were they Chinese? Japanese? Burmese? Indonesian? (Not this: In the 1930s Indonesia didn't exist: it emerged in 1947, the outcome of a colonial war of liberation of the Dutch East Indies that was watched nervously by press, politicians and the public in Australia). 

There were massive and often bloodstained regional population realignments in and after  wars of liberation from colonial status, for instance after the partition of British colonial India into India and Pakistan.  A consequence of the liberation wars in south and south-east Asia were large migrations into Western Europe: Dutch-speaking Indonesians into Holland, French-speaking Vietnamese into France, English-speaking Indians and Pakistanis into Britain.  In 1961-62 I walked every day across the north-east corner of what had previously been Cockney east end City of London with a long history of receiving migrants -- Huguenots, Jewish refugees from Russia and the Baltic States, more Jews escaping from Hitler, then the influx I observed from East Pakistan, which 10 years later became Bangladesh. I suggested to Jerry Morris that the Social Medicine Research Unit should keep an eye on the population redistribution going on around Brick Lane which was becoming a little enclave of East Pakistan.  But I couldn't articulate a relevant research question clearly enough, though doubtless there were some well within the scope of one of the MRC Research Units. Walking past Brick Lane one day in the winter of 1961-62 I first heard the pejorative term 'Paki' applied venomously to these slender and beautiful sari-clad young women from the deltas of the Ganges and the Bramaputra Rivers.   Not long after then there were race riots in Bradford and other cities in the north of England, sparked partly by insulting language used to describe immigrants from South Asia.    

In Australia in the 1950s,the acronym DP (displaced persons) was applied blanket fashion to all immigrants, even those like our friends Dodie and Harald Ziemer who paid their own way to Australia. Sometimes it stigmatized, like the current Oz term 'asylum seekers' - implying that they are somehow inferior, but really just the 21st century way to express xenophobia I don't think we are as bigoted in Canada but I haven't seen an opinion survey and it's hard to read the tea leaves.

The Canadian policy and practice of multiculturalism were powerful attractions to Wendy and me, and we saw many examples of the successful application of multiculturalism. I saw it close-up in the successive 'families' of 84 medical students who passed through my first-year class every year. They were truly rainbow classes in which all variations of skin pigmentation, hair texture, and on special occasions, ethnic costumes, were displayed. I was privileged to have many contact hours exposure to those first year students, watched as they bonded into a single large 'family' and observed assortative mating occurring, often across ethnic and cultural 'boundaries' that these nubile youngsters ignored. I've stayed in contact with enough of these ethnically diverse couples to observe some flourish and others fail for reasons tht had nothing to do with their diversity. At longer range I've observed Canadian multiculturalism being nurtured at grade school level, at the French Immersion First Avenue School at the other end of the block I live on. In the playground the little children play and lark about - in English, spoken with widely diverse accents - with complete disregard for irrelevancies like skin pigmentation and hair texture. 

Canada, this easy-going tolerant multicultural nation could very easily absorb tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. All that stands in the way is the bigotry and intolerance of our current  government. I hope they are resoundingly swept from office next month!       

Migrations, 2: Syria: Dissolution and Diaspora

The nearest I got to Syria was in 1998, a car trip from Beirut almost to the Beckaar Valley in Eastern Lebanon near the border with Syria, haven of Hezbollah and a target for random aerial attacks by the Israeli air force. We wanted to see the ancient ruins, the remains of temples dating back 3 thousand years or more.We had a vaguely defined plan to continue across the border to Damascus, where I had a friend, Ibrahim Abdelnour, one of my correspondents who helped to compile the Dictionary of Epidemiology, an authority on the epidemiology of malaria. Everything seemed aligned in our favour as we left Beirut on a heavily overcast morning but halfway to the Beckaar Valley the clouds blew away, leaving all on the ground in sparkling sunshine, perfect targets for the Israeli air force. We had a phone call from our minders in Beirut: Do not proceed; turn back. Two years later I met my Syrian friend at the IEA Congress in Los Angeles, but it wasn't the same as a meeting in Damascus would have been. He was an urbane scholar who loved his ancient city and had been eagerly looking forward to showing it to me. I've flown over Damascus a few times, en route to or from Kuwait. From the air it looks a fascinating city. I wish I'd been able to stroll its twisting lanes, browse its souk, see its mosques, meet more of its scholars than that witty old man, Ibrahim Abdelnour and one of his bright young proteges. 

After almost 5 years of vicious warfare among a confusing array of adversaries, Syria has disintegrated. Late in 2015 this once cohesive nation, a regional power that the IDF took very seriously, is in an advanced stage of dissolution. More than 11 million Syrians are homeless refugees. Until very recently they were prosperous, well educated, secure in homes where the same families had lived for generations. That drowned toddler whose body at the edge of the sea on a Turkish beach appeared in newspaper photos all over the world, was from such a family. The fanatics of the Islamic State have moved in, taken over large swaths of the country, diligently obliterating ancient artifacts to conform with the perverse brand of Islam propagated by their mentors in Saudi Arabia. 

Germany, to its credit, has welcomed the mass of refugees who have escaped, has promised homes for 800,000. Typically, Harper's government has been evasive, misleading and inconsistent. If they have their druthers, they'll adopt the same policy as the xenophobic Canadian government of the 1930s, for whom "None is too many" was the watchword. I think Germany is getting an excellent bargain by opening its doors and its homes to 800,000 or more Syrian refugees. Would that Canada was led by a similar wise and farsighted statesman! Instead we have a rigid, narrow-minded rightwing Islamophobe ideologue who lacks vision and imagination, can't visualize how immensely such an influx of well educated, highly motivated young people would benefit Canada. Either the NDP, or even the Liberal Party if it could be trusted to honour its promises, would be a paradigm shift and a vast improvement over this visionless conservative government.

Migrations

In 1954-59 I had a front-line perspective of migrants entering and settling in Adelaide. Some assimilated and others became hyphenated Australians,  adjusting while preserving their original ethnic and cultural identity. I saw the impact of migration on the health of migrants and occasionally, subtle effects of migrants on the health of those who were already there. My first 'scientific' article in the Medical Journal of Australia (1960) was an anecdotal description of a few health problems associated with migration. It was neither epidemiology nor social demography but since 1960, my interest in the application of social demography and epidemiology to studies of migration and my grasp of the issues, have grown considerably. Several of my published papers focus on social demography, e.g. on the migrations out of the UK of British-trained medical doctors in and before the late 1960s, and into the UK after 1945 of doctors and nurses trained in South Asia, Africa and the West Indies. 

In the second half of the 1950s my family doctor role meant close contact with individuals and families.  I brushed up the German I'd learnt at school, and took Italian lessons for a couple of years - a delightful experience - so I could speak in their own language with immigrants in these large linguistic groups.  I never really mastered either language but the fact that I tried, that I reached out a helping hand in this way, made me warmly welcome in immigrants' homes, more so than any of my colleagues, none of whom made comparable efforts. Two of my colleagues were covertly xenophobic. I began as a salaried assistant in that 10-doctor group practice, the lowest man on the totem pole, doing all the scut work nobody else wanted, including all the out of hours calls to see sick immigrants in the hostel where thousands stayed when they first arrived. In that way I met several families who not only became my loyal patients, but in a few instances, notably Dodie and Harald Ziemer, became personal friends. Dodie and Harald became among our closest friends in Australia: we stayed with them when we returned on several visits after we left Australia, and they stayed with us when they made a world tour after Harald retired from his post as registrar of the Lutheran boys' college in Melbourne.  

I've long been interested in the social demography of the great migrations of recorded history, especially those of the past few hundred years: the European migrations into the Americas and Australasia, the transportation of some 20-30 million black African slaves into South, Central and North America, and the rearrangement of populations according to ethnic and cultural characteristics as colonialism ended, and rearrangement of borders and populations in Europe after the 1939-45 World War. Some mass migrations have been peaceful and orderly; others have not.

The great migration of 2015 is chaotic and bloody. For 5 years Syria has been engulfed in a catastrophic war in which at least 3 major factions and several lesser groups have been slaughtering each other with unprecedented ferocity. At least 11 million Syrians have been displaced and the entire nation has been laid waste. Syria is at the epicentre of a massive migration of Syrians into Turkey, Lebanon and further afield, across the Mediterranean by sea mainly via Libya, and by land via Turkey, Greece and Serbia, entering the European Union in Hungary, whence the preferred destinations are Germany and Scandinavia. Today Hungarian security staff blocked the tsunami of refugees that previously had flowed unobstructed beyond Hungary into western Europe.  Germany has taken tens of thousands of refugees. Britain has taken a few hundred. Canada undertook to accept 10,000, but the Harper government has done its utmost to obstruct the flow.  It's very difficult to get facts from the Harper government. Harper says Canada has accepted 11,000 Syrian refugees. The xenophobic minister in charge of the file says 1100. A United Church spokesman responsible for placing Syrian refugees who manage to get to Canada knows of 29 families, just over 100 people. That's better than Australia  which intercepts 'asylum seekers' and incarcerates them in off-shore concentration camps. Among the reasons I hope to see Harper consigned to the dustbin of history after the next election is that whoever follows him will assuredly adopt a more humane and compassionate refugee policy.  

One Syrian who didn't make it: drowned child on a Mediterranean beach

Syria's descent into the barbarism of its civil war was precipitated by unrest that followed several years of failed harvests: climate change was at the root of it. It's a chilling thought that climate related collapse of social order and the flight of multitudes of refugees is certain to become quite commonplace in the near future. What will be the next hot spot? North China? The American Midwest? Southern California? Eastern Europe and Ukraine?  We live in interesting times...