A Syrian arrives in Toronto as a new immigrant to Canada. He stops the first person he sees walking down the street and says, “Thank you, Mr. Canadian, for letting me come into this country, giving me housing, income support, free medical care, free housing and a free education!”

The passer-by says, “You are mistaken, I am Egyptian.”

The man goes on and encounters another passer-by. “Thank you for having such a beautiful country here in Canada.”

The person says, “I not Canadian, I am Pakistani.”

The new arrival walks further, and the next person he sees he stops, shakes his hand, and says, “Thank you for wonderful country Canada.”

That person puts up his hand and says, “I am from Afghanistan. I am not Canadian.”

He finally sees a nice lady and asks, “Are you a Canadian woman?”

She says, “No, I am from Africa.” Puzzled, he asks her, “Where are all the Canadians?”

The African lady checks her watch and says, “Probably at work.”

You got the joke’s punch line wrong.

The real punch line is the lady looked at the Syrian and said, “This is Canada, we are all immigrants here.”

See I understand why the joke will be seen as horrific to some people, stereotyping immigrants as being out of work, lazy and living off the taxpayer. Immigration in economic terms is source of new blood and new business to any community.  But why get into that boring economic argument.

Let me instead tell you about a few of “those” people that I have met.

A nice man from Zimbabwe: he was working hard to send his family 25$ a week. It seems small to us here but it was all he could afford to send. For his family it meant literally life or death. They used the money to keep themselves in food.

A very beautiful lady and I mean she could have been a model, she was that pretty. Except across her check was a straight line, well healed scar.  It was hardly noticeable, she covered it in makeup. She never would talk about it much. I never earned her trust enough to ask, but she did not last at the company very long. She has a drinking problem. Post tramatic stress. See her problem; she was a survivor of the Rwandan Genocide. That scar on her beauty that she tried to cover? This is how the killers marked their victims. It meant they had raped her, and considering how pretty she was, more than few took their turn.

How about this young couple: he was a hard worker and keen. His wife was pregnant with a new child. He was a political refugee. If he returned to Venezuela, the hit squad that had attacked his home with machine gun fire would surely find him.

Or better the Iranian. He was in the market when a man walked up and shot him point blank range. He was a doctor. His friends removed the bullet and before the blood from the surgery could be cleaned he was in a car driving for the border. It was a long drive. No pain killers so he had to stay quiet all the way for fear they might attract attention driving down a road with a man crying out in pain. See his mistake; he was part of the underground that wants to bring western style freedoms back to Iran. However in Canada, even though he was a fully qualified doctor, he could not get any information from Iran. He could not get a job without qualifications and Iran had already stripped him of any such thing as even being a citizen of their country.

One of his fellow countrymen was luckier. He had been an intern in Moscow before Iran had blacklisted him. His transcripts could still be obtained from the Russians. He became a doctor here in Canada but instead left to run a free clinic in Pakistan. Seems he felt so grateful for what we had given him in allowing him to come here and be a citizen, and earn his completed MD, he wanted to give something back. So with the help of the Canadian Government he set up a free medical clinic in Pakistan to help the poor and downtrodden with some of the skills we had provided to him.

All of these people have immigration in common. They came here for a better life, a safer life. Just like my family did. See, my forebear, he got off the boat with Samuel Du Champlain. He had 17 kids that one. One of them was a grandfather Coureur des bois, who left for Alberta where he met an Indian lady from the Blackfoot tribe. They married and had kids. One of them joined the fledgling Canadian Army to help with the Riel Rebellion. He served out his time then settled outside the fort in Kingston. A few generations after came my grandfather. In the “Dirty Thirties” he moved to Montreal where the jobs were and met my grandmother. Depression, 1929, and she was another off the boat immigrant from Scotland. They had two kids, one being my father and were married all their lives to each other. My father married my mother; she was half English from England and the other half Irish. Make me what? French, aboriginal, Scottish, Irish, English? Which is why, in the census a few years ago, I and a few thousand other Canadians, all broke the law and refused to call ourselves as “Hyphen Canadian.” We all clicked other, and wrote in Canadian. So much so, that Stats Canada changed the census so that forever more, Canadians can just say we are “Canadians” and no need to be some form of hyphen in front of it.

We all got off the boat. Calling the latest people coming off that same boat anything derogatory would be the same as calling all my family names too. It was not that long ago when there were signs in shop windows, “Help Wanted, No Irish need apply.” McGill would only let in so many Jews and then they would reject the rest, no matter how qualified they were. Today, Blacks are racially profiled by police. Do I even need to go on? Let me conclude with this question; when does the racism stop, if not here with us, right now? The joke was not funny.