Gates & Walls: Stories of Migration in Modern Times

By Elie Mikhael Nasrallah

In 1979, a teenaged Elie Mikhael Nasrallah left his parents' house and walked across the public square to the bus stop, beginning the long journey to Canada. He was not the first of his village - nor even his family - to take this step, nor would be the last. Civil war had gripped his homeland of Lebanon, offering its youth a bleak future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burnstown Publishing House
• Release date: Feb 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781772573602

Elie Mikhael Nasrallah

Elie Mikhael Nasrallah who, since 1998, is a certified and authorized immigration consultant, with an active international practice in Ottawa, Canada. He holds an Honours BA in Political Science from Carleton University and a post-graduate certificate in Regulatory Law Administration from Algonquin College.Mr. Nasrallah has received several honours for his work as an immigration consultant: one of the TOP 25 people in Ottawa (Ottawa Life magazine 2016); top immigration consultant in Ottawa (Consumer Choice Award 2018, 2019); and one of the top three immigration consultants in Ottawa (2018,2019).He contributes regularly to major newspapers in North America and the Middle East, and appears frequently as public speaker and media personality in Canada and the Middle East.In addition to Gates and Walls, Elie Mikhael Nasrallah is the author and co-author of three other books: My Arab Spring, My Canada; None of the Above - How the Unaffiliated are Redefining Religion and Keeping Faith; and Hostage to History - The Cultural Collapse of the 21st Century Arab World.Born in Lebanon, he lives in Ottawa with his family.

Book preview

Introduction

Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.

—Joseph Fort Newton (1880–1950),

noted author and U.S. clergyman

DIVERSITY IS HERE to stay.

For better or worse, immigration is one of the most consequential issues facing our political, economic, social, and cultural structures in North America, Europe, Asia—everywhere. Here in Canada, nearly a quarter of our population was born elsewhere. Including me.

It is a well-documented fact that immigrants enrich Canada both economically and culturally, yet each newcomer’s journey is marked with gates and walls.

Humans have always migrated, for as many reasons as there are grains of sand in the sea. These have included famine, natural disasters, climate change, and conflict, but most of all, they are looking for a better place for themselves and their children. However, while migration is not new, the intensity and sheer numbers of people on the move in recent years is unprecedented.

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), there were approximately 300 million international migrants on the move in 2022. While that equals less than five per cent of the world population, it is triple the number of people living in a country other than their birthplace fifty years ago. Events of the past couple of years have only intensified the situation.

The WEF also reports that:

•The number of Indian-born people living outside of India and the number of Chinese-born people living outside China doubled between 1990 and 2013.

•The U.S. is the primary destination for migrants, though as a proportion of its population, the United Arab Emirates has the largest migrant contingent.

•With the highest total number of refugees on record, Turkey was the biggest host nation for the fifth consecutive year, taking in millions of refugees, particularly from Syria.

•The Mediterranean Sea remains the deadliest migrant route, claiming the lives of nearly 18,000 people between 2013–18.

•Since 2014, approximately 2,000 deaths have been recorded along the border between the United States and Mexico.

•The U.K. is home to the most diverse immigrant community in the world.

•Mexico–U.S. is the world’s most travelled bilateral migration path.

While Canada has always been a country of immigrants, cultural co-existence among different social groups is relatively new in human history. Consequently, the scale of migration and immigration in modern times has strained the resources of the state and our social institutions to cope with and sustain national cohesion.

In my work as an authorized immigration consultant and specialist in Ottawa, Canada, I meet people from all over the world. Over the past twenty years I have seen how immigration laws and rules have changed with each new government, and how immigrants are at the mercy of ever-shifting political and economic winds. Family separation, detentions, bureaucracy, and endless filing of forms are as normal as the changing of the seasons. As observed in Locking the Borders: Exclusion in the Theory and Practice of Immigration in America, an article by U.S. scholar Amy Buzby: Viewed with suspicion, immigrants are often placed in the position of tacitly consenting to the state, which trains them to submission.

Immigrants, however, are much more than just names on forms, shuffled from one desk to another. They are mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, sons, and daughters. Their situations and reasons for coming to Canada are as individual as the colour of their eyes and the decisions they make. I have listened as they shared their stories of love and despair, sorrow and joy, hope and rejection, all the time yearning for peace and security as they struggle to find a sense of belonging in a new land that is both welcoming and alienating.

It is my privilege to share some of their stories with you, along with some of the insights I have gained as an immigration consultant and specialist. These are stories of frustration and expediency, persistence and negligence, hope and fear, success and failure. Above all, they are stories about humans who have encountered walls and opened gates in their quest to live in what I consider to be the greatest country in the world—Canada.

The most certain prediction that we can make about almost any modern society is that it will be more diverse a generation from now than it is today.

—Robert D. Putnam (1941–), U.S. political scientist,

The New York Times, June 12, 2012.

Part I

People Gotta Move

In the old days, you lived in one neighborhood, you knew all your neighbors and your daughter married the guy next door. That was social and economic progress. That model is gone now. We also had a world order that was fraught but fairly stable.

—Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1950–)

American literary critic, professor, historian,

filmmaker, and public intellectual

IMMIGRANTS ARE PROBABLY the most alienated people on earth.

Their uprooting results in a caravan of issues trundling across the landscape in their wake: identity, dignity, way of life, religion, social norms, culture, community, class, race, status, prejudice, and loyalties. Yet, as the Pew Research Institute in the United States observed in a 2014 study, Since humans first left Africa 60,000 years ago, they have been migrating around the planet in great numbers—and the advent of international borders certainly did not stop global migration. The rise of affordable, modern transportation also means that the sheer number of international migrants has never been higher.

This sense of separation and alienation has been eloquently captured by renowned Lebanese author and women’s activist Emily Nasrallah (1931–2018). In her award-winning book, Birds of September, she crafts a saga about her home village where the people witness their loved ones pull up roots for more promising lands, just as they see birds depart each September. Years later, she followed up with Flight Against Time, where she further explored the immigrant experience, but this time from the opposite perspective. An elderly couple leaves their village in Lebanon to visit their children and grandchildren now living in Canada. They find a world of peace and great comfort, but despite the civil war raging back home, the old man longs for his small village and their way of life.

Although not a relative of mine, Emily Nasrallah was born and raised in a small village similar to mine. Her descriptions of the landscape, culture, and farming community of Kfair immediately brought to mind images of my own village of Kfar Mishki.

I can also relate to the passage in Flight Against Time, where the old man compared his life to an olive tree. It would be impossible to re-plant successfully elsewhere, he observed, as it could only live in its native soil. Yet Maggie, another character, counters with the argument that new scientific ways make it possible to do just that: All trees, Abu Nabeel … All trees are capable of being uprooted and planted again.

Elie’s Story

Give me a copper nickel and I will tell you a golden story.

—Roman saying

LET ME BEGIN by telling you my story and what prompted me to leave Lebanon and immigrate to Canada.

It was 1977, and the Lebanese Civil War had been raging for two years. (It would wage for thirteen more.) I was a teenager, and one Friday afternoon, I foolishly decided to hitchhike from the town where I attended school to a nearby city. A tough-looking man stopped. He asked me where I was going. Zahle, I answered awkwardly. He nodded, indicating that I should get into his car.

Where are you from? he asked as we got underway. In Lebanon, that is a coded question for determining one’s religion, family background, and possibly political affiliation. When I answered that I was from Kfar Mishki, he knew immediately that I was a Christian. We were in a Muslim area.

On our way to Zahle, a Christian city, he stopped at a roadside café, telling me that he would be back in a minute. That minute eventually stretched to an hour. Meanwhile, sitting there in that stranger’s car, I had lots of time to think about the fact that I was alone, in an unfamiliar place, while my country was at war with itself, its political system, its history, and its neighbours. What should I do? Escape? Hide? My destination was still many kilometres away, and I didn’t know the area well.

I could see men around the café glancing at me as if they were assessing my usefulness as a possible hostage. Inside, even more men paced back and forth, taking deep drags on their cigarettes as they waved their arms and talked amongst themselves.

Twice, a tall young man approached, reaching out to open the car door, but each time an elderly gentleman pulled him back. There was, it appeared to me, a power struggle of some sort, or a generational divide, playing out in the café.

Suddenly, the driver came out of the café and told me to get out of his car and find my own way to Zahle. I felt as if I’d been given a reprieve. And because I didn’t think luck would strike me twice, I began to reconsider my future.

I had been planning to study and practise law in Lebanon. Instead, I