The Chinese Problem

An article in the Globe yesterday highlighted an apparent growing trend amongst out-of-luck Chinese immigrants in Toronto who are sending their babies back to mainland China because they can not afford child care. Advocates confusingly have blamed these cases of familial separation on Immigration Canada. The logic is twisted: Immigration Canada promotes this country as the best place on earth to live, and because these immigrants can't find well-paying jobs and are forced to work minimum wage jobs to get by, the state is somehow responsible.

Immigrants are people. People are commodities in the job market. It's a free world based on speculation and if you don't have what the market wants you're not going to make money. Of course, there are language and credential barriers between pretty much every two countries in the world. But why would anyone think Canada would be any different? The days of the Gold Mountain are long gone.

Some critics point to a recent steep decline in immigration applications from China as evidence that these returned babies are stopping other Chinese from wanting to come here. But has anyone thought about the possibility that the promise of a nascent free market economy in China itself could be responsible for luring Chinese into staying at home and toughing it out in the wild, wild East? Naw, couldn't be anything that macro.

Of course, no one wants to point out either that these parents could just as easily choose to return WITH their kids to China and that there may be issues of personal responsibility and accountability involved here. No, of course not. We can just chalk the trend up to the enigmatic cultural character of those mysterious Chinese, while Chinese community advocates manipulate the pathos for all its worth.

And let's face it: Doesn't it make cold, hard economic sense to birth a child in Canada so that child instantly becomes a Canadian citizen, then send him/her away for a much cheaper upbringing in another country where trusted relatives will maximize the money you send home to care for that child? I don't want to sound too cynical, but this sounds a lot like the sojourners of old who constituted the Chinese diaspora in the late 1800s. Those men worked horribly difficult labourers jobs here only to remit most of what they earned to their family or village association back in China. The immigrants of today are more educated than the coolies were, but nevertheless make similar economic choices for the sake of family above their own emotional needs.

In another way, this resembles the wave of affluent Hong Kong immigrants in the late 1980s and early 90s who bought real estate, returned to HK and conversely left their children behind in Canada to maintain immigration status before the takeover of HK by China in 1997 - just in case things went bad.

Look, I am not without sympathy for any mother or child who are separated. I'm a father and could not imagine ever doing such a thing for any reason. But saying this is happening because of unfair conditions in the host country, or simply because Chinese immigrants are more desperate than any other visible minority immigrant group is ridiculous. Doing so only perpetuates negative stereotypes of powerlessness and otherness that I would hope most Chinese would be seeking to rid themselves of after all these years.

Chinese are not powerless, stupid or naive. They are as industrious, culturally vibrant and intelligent as the rest of us.

*The title of this post refers to a book called The Chinese Problem published in 1876 by American L.T. Townsend, which discussed the merits of excluding Chinese from immigrating to the US, and specifically California. You can view PDFs of the original text HERE.