Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [161]
Maryam thanks them and heads out for an afternoon working at New Circles, a strip-mall storefront containing several rooms full of used clothing organized by size, sex, and season, a popular spot with immigrants from the Indian subcontinent struggling to prepare themselves for the Canadian winter. The real function of New Circles, though, is to train people like Maryam in small-business practices: bookkeeping and inventory, retail-space rental and licensing, incorporation and taxes. Run on government subsidies, it employs dozens of immigrants at a time in its business-training programs. For Maryam, it is the first link into the city’s core economy. Like most of the 25,000 people who live here, she hopes to learn a trade or start a business, buy a house, and get out.
For now, though, she has no desire to leave Thorncliffe Park, not even to make the bus-and-subway trip to visit Toronto’s core. Though she is fluent in English and is educated, she agrees with the far less urbanized Adinah that this is not the time to venture beyond the oval boulevard. “When we are in Thorncliffe, we feel like we are in Pakistan or Afghanistan, but when we go downtown, we are in Canada,” Maryam says, uttering the last phrase with a tone of awe and mystery. “For now, people are very kind to us here, and I prefer to have immigrants around me—if there are problems, they can help.”
What kind of place is Thorncliffe Park? It is, depending how you view it, either a successful antechamber to urban life or a place of dangerous isolation and poverty. It is certainly a poor neighborhood, one of the poorest in the largely wealthy city of Toronto. One study reports family incomes averaging around $20,000 a year; another, a poverty rate of 44 percent. Virtually all of its high-rise apartments are private-sector rental units, with no possibility of being purchased by their occupants, and, at around $1,100 a month each, they aren’t cheap to rent. It is also ethnically segregated, with as much as 51 percent of its population speaking an Asian language at home and only a small minority of white-skinned Euro-Canadians in its buildings.14 Based on static observation, then, Thorncliffe Park can only be described as an impoverished ethnic ghetto.
For governments in Europe, North America, and Australasia, this is the central question of the arrival city: Why pour money and support into districts that seem to function as places of perpetual poverty and ethnic isolation? If integration and prosperity are the goals, then arrival cities, these kingdoms of the marginal, would seem to produce the opposite result. Yet Thorncliffe Park is not seen that way at all, not by its residents, not by the agencies and government officials within its circumference, and not by the city beyond its borders. It remains a popular place, with vacancy rates close to zero and long waiting lists for apartments; the people who enter, often from village backgrounds, have an amazingly consistent record of entering the middle-class urban mainstream within a generation. Like many other successful arrival cities, Thorncliffe Park seems to benefit from its tight clustering of poor, rural, foreign residents: This helps it function as an instrument of integration, a platform for urban inclusion.
Thorncliffe Park is the place where networks are developed, where the transition to middle-class city life is made—but the success often leads elsewhere. Jehad Aliweiwi is the Palestinian-born Canadian who runs the Thorncliffe Neighborhood Office, which is this arrival city’s de facto self-government institution, a busy facility that provides a wide range of services for poor migrants. “Historically,” he says, “Thorncliffe has been a springboard or gateway community, where people settle for a couple years while they get a job, and then they move on. They go to another area where they can buy a house or larger apartment. Now people are