Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [162]
Aliweiwi points out the paradox of gateway cities like Thorncliffe Park: The more successful they are, the higher their apparent poverty rate. If people are able to leave within a generation for more prosperous middle-class homeowner districts, the neighborhood will be constantly refilled with new migrants from poor rural regions. It appears unchangingly poor and segregated only if you fail to observe the trajectory of each resident. And, for half a century, those trajectories have generally been upward. Almost as soon as its soldiers’ bungalows were replaced with high-rise apartment towers in the 1960s, Thorncliffe Park became a pure arrival city. First came Greeks and Macedonians, spending a generation living here, building Orthodox churches (some of which still stand), then buying houses in the inner-city Greek districts or in outer suburbia and moving on. Then came Gujarati Indians and Ismaili East Africans, the latter building the neighborhood’s first mosques in the late 1970s. They were joined by Colombians and Chileans, who lived here in the 1970s and 1980s before buying houses downtown. Today, there is a sizable Filipino community and several large groups from the Indian subcontinent. The most recent arrivals are Afghanis, products of Canada’s intense military involvement there, beginning in 2006.
“Everyone in Thorncliffe, all are beginners, all are struggling,” says Seema Khatri, 42, who recently moved out of the neighborhood to rent a low-rise apartment in nearby suburban Don Mills, closer to a more desirable secondary school for her children. She came from a village in Haryana, in northern India, urbanized herself, and got a university education in India before moving to Canada. She spent several years in Thorncliffe Park working at rudimentary jobs in a cosmetics factory while trying to get her credentials recognized. The neighborhood’s networks, she says, helped her to do this. “In Thorncliffe, when you go out, you meet with people who are also struggling. You talk to your neighbors at the deli. They exchange information.”
What makes immigrants settle here (and, despite Canada’s efforts to limit immigration to educated elites, a significant proportion of people here are village-born) is not its isolation but rather its very accessible pathways to the city around it. It is well served by public-transit routes, it has a large primary school within its borders, and there are good jobs and places to launch small businesses with low rental and start-up costs—though not so good that people want to stay here for more than a generation before moving on. The Neighborhood Office run by Jehad Aliweiwi offers language, acculturation, tax and small-business assistance in many languages, aimed at making the transition to urban success work. This is an arrival city that understands itself.
Thorncliffe Park did not become a successful arrival city by accident. It works, while other high-rise, suburban immigrant enclaves don’t, because it has been the subject of significant investment and attention by the state. One major survey of Thorncliffe Park residents by U.S. and Canadian geographers found an almost unanimous high degree of satisfaction among its residents. Other Canadian immigrant gateways, especially those in the farther-flung outer suburbs with poor transportation and economic links to the main city, reported far more pessimistic responses. In Thorncliffe Park, though, there was evidence of “the good segregation of the urban village,” the survey found: “[A] spirit of hope provided a basis for building local social capital. Immigrant careers were launched, integration trajectories bore promise, and the sense of citizenship and belonging became more hopeful.” The geographers concluded that the ethnic clustering (some would say segregation) gave the arrivals the benefit of “differential citizenship,