Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)
Community, Culture and Global Studies, Department of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Abuhamed, Amer
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
The settlement of Syrian refugees in Canada has attended a conversation around the politics of multiculturalism and informed a body of scholarly works on immigrant and refugee integration. With the regionalization of immigrants and refugees, settlement in small and mid-sized cities has attracted further attention. Successive federal governments implemented neoliberal policies that off-loaded much of its responsibility for refugee settlement on local communities, voluntary actors, and private organizations. The federal government adopted social capital as a public policy tool in 2004 to foreground the discourses of self-reliance and communal responsibility. Simultaneously, multicultural federal policies have been amended and continually repurposed from being a framework for a pan-Canadian conversation to a set of expectations and procedures termed the settlement of immigrants and refugees. This thesis is based on a qualitative case study at the intersection of multiculturalism and social capital in refugee settlement which employ the narrative meanings of Syrian refugees who resettled in Kelowna, BC, between 2015 and 2020. Through 20 unstructured and semi-structured interviews with Syrian refugees and private sponsors and service providers, I employ abductive and thematic analyses and present results through an ethnographic description and interpretation. While much of the literature employs evaluative frameworks and accentuates settlement outcomes, I hypothesize that settlement acquires different meanings across refugees and their host community, and that social capital and neoliberal policies, in part, serve to saddle under-resourced communities with the responsibilities of refugee settlement, and task refugees with self-care and cultural benevolence. I conclude that refugee settlement exposes multicultural policies as assimilation policies, and I provide insights into the theories of social capital and multiculturalism and their employment in neoliberal policies. This thesis is the first scholarly inquiry into the settlement and life of Syrian refugees in Kelowna, BC
“Eat to Your Taste, Dress for Others:” A Critical Ethnographic Inquiry into Multiculturalism and Social Capital in the Resettlement and Integration of Syrian Refugee in a Mid-sized City in Western Canada by Amer Abuhamed B.Sc., American University of Beirut, 2016 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) October 2020 © Amer Abuhamed, 2020ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: “Eat to Your Taste, Dress for Others:” A Critical Ethnographic Inquiry into Multiculturalism and Social Capital in the Resettlement and Integration of Syrian Refugee in a Mid-sized City in Western Canada submitted by Amer Younes Abuhamed in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies . Dr. David Geary, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies, Univeristy of British Columbia. Supervisor Dr. Natalie Kouri-Towe, The Faculty of Arts and Science, The Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University. Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Jessica Stites-Mor, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Department of History and Sociology, University of British Columbia. Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Luis Aguiar, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Department of History and Sociology, University of British Columbia. University Examiner iii Abstract The settlement of Syrian refugees in Canada has attended a conversation around the politics of multiculturalism and informed a body of scholarly works on immigrant and refugee integration. With the regionalization of immigrants and refugees, settlement in small and mid-sized cities has attracted further attention. Successive federal governments implemented neoliberal policies that off-loaded much of its responsibility for refugee settlement on local communities, voluntary actors, and private organizations. The federal government adopted social capital as a public policy tool in 2004 to foreground the discourses of self-reliance and communal responsibility. Simultaneously, multicultural federal policies have been amended and continually repurposed from being a framework for a pan-Canadian conversation to a set of expectations and procedures termed the settlement of immigrants and refugees. This thesis is based on a qualitative case study at the intersection of multiculturalism and social capital in refugee settlement which employ the narrative meanings of Syrian refugees who resettled in Kelowna, BC, between 2015 and 2020. Through 20 unstructured and semi-structured interviews with Syrian refugees and private sponsors and service providers, I employ abductive and thematic analyses and present results through an ethnographic description and interpretation. While much of the literature employs evaluative frameworks and accentuates settlement outcomes, I hypothesize that settlement acquires different meanings across refugees and their host community, and that social capital and neoliberal policies, in part, serve to saddle under-resourced communities with the responsibilities of refugee settlement, and task refugees with self-care and cultural benevolence. I conclude that refugee settlement exposes multicultural policies as assimilation policies, and I provide insights into the theories of social capital and multiculturalism and their employment in neoliberal policies. This thesis is the first scholarly inquiry into the settlement and life of Syrian refugees in Kelowna, BC iv Lay Summary In this case study, I introduce a description of the lived experiences of Syrian refugees throughout their settlement in Kelowna, BC, between 2015 and 2020. Within the refugee stories and worlds, I examine the politics and practices of diversity in Canada and critique the increasing government reliance on community networks to carry on the state’s social responsibilities. In Kelowna, the community was enthusiastic about sponsoring Syrian refugees; however, the inexperience with diversity politics and the lack of proper government support have resulted in humanitarian fatigue and exposed prejudice and social segregation in Kelowna. I find in this research that Canadian diversity politics play a limited role in settlement of refugees in a mid-sized town. Instead, narratives of self-reliance and economic outcomes shape a great deal of settlement practices. Refugees understand settlement not as an integrative plan but a strategy for negotiating living with poverty-level government support and a host community experiencing “humanitarian fatigue.” This work is crucial since it is the first case study on Syrian refugees in Kelowna and one of the few studies that address refugee settlement in BC. v Preface This dissertation is original unpublished work by Amer Younes. This research has received the ethics approval from the University of British Columbia Research Ethics Board on April 15, 2020, code H19-00357, under the original title, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Critical Inquiry into Multiculturalism and Integration of Refugees in a Mid-sized Canadian City. vi Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................ iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................................... iv Preface .......................................................................................................................................................... v List of Figures ............................................................................................................................................ viii Glossary ....................................................................................................................................................... ix Chapter 1: Introduction and Literature Review ............................................................................................ 1 1.1 Overview and Research Scope ...................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 4 1.3 Trends in Immigration and Settlement .......................................................................................... 6 1.4 Refugee Settlement and Integration in Canada ........................................................................... 10 1.5 Settlement via Social Capital ...................................................................................................... 12 1.6 Immigration and Settlement in Small and Mid-sized Cities ....................................................... 14 1.7 The Political Context of Syrian Refugee Resettlement ............................................................... 16 1.8 The Literature on Syrian Refugee Settlement in Canada ............................................................ 18 1.9 Theoretical Context ..................................................................................................................... 23 Chapter 2: Methodology ............................................................................................................................. 26 2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 26 2.2 Research Objectives .................................................................................................................... 29 2.3 Case Study: Literature and Method Rationale ............................................................................ 31 2.4 Research Site ............................................................................................................................... 32 2.5 Participant Recruitment............................................................................................................... 33 2.6 Semi-Quantitative Profile of Research Participants .................................................................... 34 2.7 Data and Data Collection ............................................................................................................ 36 2.8 Data Analysis .............................................................................................................................. 38 2.9 Positionality ................................................................................................................................ 39 2.10 Notes on Limitations, Anonymity, and Rigor ............................................................................. 41 Chapter 3: Integration Indicators ................................................................................................................ 44 3.1 Language and Education ............................................................................................................. 44 3.2 Healthcare ................................................................................................................................... 47 3.3 Employment and Financial Support ............................................................................................ 51 3.3.1 Credentials and Barriers ...................................................................................................... 51 3.3.2 Discrimination and Success ................................................................................................ 54 3.3.3 Expectations, Responsibility, and Negotiation ................................................................... 55 vii 3.4 Housing ....................................................................................................................................... 57 Chapter 4: Community Relationships and Cultural Integration .................................................................. 62 4.1 Community Relationships ........................................................................................................... 62 4.1.1 Syrian Community and Social Spaces ................................................................................ 62 4.1.2 Syrians Discussing Community .......................................................................................... 64 4.1.3 Relationships with the Settlement Community ................................................................... 68 4.1.4 Relationship with Kelowna Residents ................................................................................ 73 4.2 Culture, Family, and Integration ................................................................................................. 79 4.2.1 Children and Gender: Pride and Honor ............................................................................... 79 4.2.2 Gender Dynamics ................................................................................................................ 83 Chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 87 5.1 Discussion ............................................................................................................................... 87 5.2 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 96 5.3 Epilogue .................................................................................................................................. 99 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 100 viii List of Figures Figure 2.1 A conceptual framework defining core domains of integration……………………………… 26 Figure 2.2 Holistic integration model….………………………………...………………………………. 27ix Glossary BVOR: Blended Visa Officed-Referred CCR: Canadian Council for Refugees CIC: Canada Immigration and Citizenship GAR: Government-Sponsored refugees IRCC: Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada ISAP: Immigration Settlement and Adaptation Program LINC: Language Instructions for Newcomers in Canada LIP: Local Immigration Partnership OCASI: Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants COEDC: Central Okanagan Economic Development Commission PRI: Policy Research Initiative Providers: Service Providers PSR: Private Sponsorship of Refugees PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder RAP: Refugee Assistance Program SPO: Service Provider Organization Sponsors: Private Sponsors The settlement community: Sponsors and service providers UN: United Nations UNHCR: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees1 Chapter 1: Introduction and Literature Review Different than European countries and the United States, where mass human movements and border politics dictate much of immigration policies, immigration, refugee sponsorship, and asylum-seeking in Canada are deliberative and policy-driven processes. Immigration patterns in Canada have shifted several times over the past century; however, immigration has maintained its functionality as a nation-building strategy that continuously acquires new meanings and attends partisan and national politics. In refugee sponsorship and settlement, Canada leads the world, with more than 30,000 refugees resettled every year. The recent intake of a large number of Syrian refugees has reinvigorated debates and conversations in policy and scholarship around diversity, equality, and settlement practices. The readiness of the Canadian state and host communities were brought into question, particularly with the dispersal of immigrants and refugee to less diverse small and mid-sized cities. To that end, multiculturalism policies have been repurposed to serve a prescriptive, at time assimilative, vision of refugee integration. Moreover, social capital, as a social service policy tool, has dominated the narratives on settlement charging under-resourced local communities and voluntary actors with the responsibility of refugee integration. In this chapter, I provide the background for the research problem and define the research scope. I first review the trends in immigration and settlement policies in Canada. Then I expand the literature review to cover refugee settlement, social capital, and immigration to secondary urban centers. Next, I demonstrate the political context of the settlement of Syrian refugees in Canada and comprehensively review the data on Syrian refugees over the past five years. Finally, I present a theoretical context for the case study. 1.1 Overview and Research Scope In this thesis, I describe the experience of settlement and integration of 14 Syrian refugees who resettled between 2015 and 2020 in Kelowna, a mid-sized city in the Thompson-Okanagan region of interior British Columbia (BC). I draw on a recent body of scholarly works on the settlement of refugees in urban centers against the backdrop of continuing debates around multiculturalism in Canada, five years after Trudeau’s Liberal government decided to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees. Scholarship on immigration and diversity in the Okanagan district is scarce, and what exists is inadequate. Only a handful of studies have concentrated on immigrant communities in Kelowna. This thesis is the first qualitative scholarly inquiry into the Syrian refugee settlement in Kelowna and the Okanagan Valley. Through the lens of the subjective experience of Syrian refugees and their sponsors and service providers, I analyze social capital and multiculturalism’s theories and practices within the paradigm of neoliberalism. Multiculturalism is the political and intellectual framework for diversity in Canada. Social 2 capital is a theoretical model for social formation and intergroup and intragroup relations and networks, and it is also a policy tool for community building and social service delivery. Finally, neoliberalism represents the free-market capitalism adopted in Western countries in the second half of the 20th century. In this case study, I unpack the implications of multicultural policies in refugee settlement and engage multiculturism’s theoretical propositions and critiques in immigration contexts. I focus in particular on the contested aspects of the Canadian multicultural theory, such as recognition, power dynamics, cultural expression and association, ethnic clustering and exclusion, as well as the liberal roots of diversity politics and its neoliberal manifestations. Similarly, I analyze how the Canadian government implements policies of social capital in delivering social services, and I engage with the scholarly debates around the efficiency and soundness of those policies. Ultimately, I offer a grounded perspective on the intersection of multiculturalism and social capital in refugee integration or assimilation and the ways neoliberalism moderate and shape the relationship between social capital and multicultural policies. Therefore, I ask the following questions: (1) Where and how do Syrian refugees, in a mid-sized city, experience settlement, and how is their integration contested, negotiated, and perceived? (2) How do intergroup and intra-group interactions inform the settlement? (3) How is the settlement of refugees positioned within neoliberal discourses on diversity, social capital policies, and the politics of multiculturalism? The first question stems from the lack of refugee-specific literature in mid-sized cities and the persistent scholarly challenges to the politics of multiculturalism in secondary urban centers. Kelowna shares many of the mid-sized city qualities presented in the literature review, especially in receiving large numbers of immigrants and refugees through regionalization policies. However, its demographic composition, Indigenous land status, and neoliberal developmental economy, in addition to other factors, rendered Kelowna unique geography that exhibits different patterns in refugee settlement than its neighboring city of Kamloops, for example. Therefore, answering the first question will be specific to how refugees perceive and negotiate their settlement in local contexts. Although I do not include extensive comparative analysis, the findings can be informative in reflecting the regional politics of refugee settlement in the context of mid-sized towns in the Okanagan Valley, BC, and Canada. This question informs the descriptive component of this case study. The second question explores the social dimension of settlement in two domains. First, I analyze how refugees interact with their ethnic group, the settlement community, and broader society. From this analysis, I describe the social worlds of refugees and highlight the importance and complications of social interactions in the contexts of diversity politics. Second, I address the increased critical reliance on community networks by both settlement policies and scholarly evaluative frameworks concerning integration. I analyze the role of social capital and its proposed forms (bonding and bridging) in meeting 3 the settlement needs of refugees, and I uncover the challenges resulting from offloading settlement responsibilities on refugees and the host community through social capital policies. This question informs the analysis of social capital and multiculturalism in policy implications and the lived experience of refugees. The third question explores the relationship between social capital and multiculturalism as mid-range theories of social formation and minority rights, respectively. I draw on the findings of data analysis and the debates around the two theories to introduce propositions and conclusions about the nature of settlement and whether multiculturalism coupled with social capital in neoliberal conditions produces integration or assimilation of refugees. This question informs the theoretical discussion and the positioning of this thesis within the broader context of refugee settlement in Canada. To answer these questions, I adopt a qualitative case study as a research design and draw on a body of work that advises a refugee-centered and grounded approach to knowledge-making scholarship (Malkki 1997, 1995, 1992; Haraway 1988), a focus on the affective nature of diversity politics in plural societies (Fortier 2008; Ahmed 2014), and critical engagement with multicultural principles and settlement practices (Hansen 2016; Kyriakides et al. 2018). I employ descriptive and abductive analyses to account for the subjective refugee narratives on settling in Kelowna. The descriptive analysis grounds the knowledge production in the lived experience of refugees, while the abductive analysis oscillates between observation and theory, as I explain in the methodology chapter. Over six themes, constructively, I demonstrate the Syrian refugees’ lived experience in two chapters. Chapter three accounts for settlement indicators proposed by the literature, such as learning English, employment, healthcare, and housing. Chapter four explores intragroup and intergroup relationships, family, culture, and integration. I present the challenges in refugee settlement not as impediments to desired outcomes, but as acts of negotiation, which are situated in the refugee understanding of settlement as “life.” Through my findings, I highlight the normative component of refugee settlement and position the lived experiences within the greater context of social capital and multicultural policies. In the discussion, I demonstrate how the findings represent the various meanings of settlement and integration across different subjectivities, and I explain how refugees negotiate values and culture within living in Kelowna. I conclude by highlighting the affective nature of settlement and diversity politics, proposing how demoted multiculturism and glorified social capital can render integration an assimilative process, and introducing recommendations for further research. I end this thesis with an epilogue. 4 1.2 Introduction Over the past half a century or so, many Western countries have witnessed a shift in immigration patterns and policies, particularly with North America and Europe becoming the recipients of immigrants and refugees from previous colonies after the second world war. More immigrants and refugees are moving across international borders feeding ethnic and cultural diversity and unsettling the politics of citizenship and multiculturalism within nation-states. The forced movement of people continues to shape a great deal of international and domestic politics, as well as discourses on diversity and inclusivity in a global age of integrated economies, increased military and foreign intervention, and the rise of fundamentalism (Akbari and MacDonald 2014). Canada has positioned its national biography and historical discourse as a country of immigrants and immigration. The flow of people and ideas from around the world has undeniably shaped Canada in complex and unique ways (Knowles 2007). The so-called Canadian nation-building project has yet to be completed, let alone reconciling with its violent colonial past. More left-leaning and postmodernist views, rightly, emphasize the settler-colonial nature of the country, including its immigration system, and its predication on land theft and the violent replacement and assimilation of Indigenous peoples (Phung 2011; Dhamoon 2016). Further, the exclusion and disenfranchisement of women, the exploitation of immigrants, and the persistent overrepresentation of white men in almost all powerful political and corporate positions have resulted in racial and gender hierarchies and structural inequalities that still burden the daily lives of many groups and individuals (Strauss and McGrath 2017). To be fair, Canada has taken a different trajectory from its southern neighbor, the United States, and the European countries (Spain, Portugal, France, and England) that launched its first colonizers. Achieving legislative autonomy from the British Parliament in 1926 and the return of economic prosperity in the post-depression and post-war era, successive Canadian governments engaged in an immense reformation of the state and national identity. Universal healthcare, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, immigration and multicultural policies, reconciliation, and social welfare programs are among the achievements that front Canada as a progressive modern “post-nationalist” archetype (Clément 2014; Martinico et al. 2017). Certainly, many of these accomplishments are still up for debate and contestation, especially issues concerning the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination (Day 2000; Abu-Laban 2019; Chatterjee 2019). Nonetheless, more immigrants and refugees are landing in Canada to partake in, and perhaps sustain, its settler project and benefit from prosperity and human rights. Immigration maintains its place as a discursive process that continues to shape and reshape “the Great White North.” Amidst the Liberals’ bid for the 2015 elections, a campaign promise was made to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees. The arrival of these refugees as of February 2018 is the largest intake since the so-called 5 Indochinese movement in the 1980s (Friesen and Sherrell 2018; Wilkinson et al. 2018). Local communities were tasked to prepare and plan for the reception, settlement, and integration of Syrian refugees (Hyndman, Payne, and Jimenez 2016; Dam and Wayland 2019). Indeed, building on their experience with the refugees from far and southeast Asia, many citizens and community-based organizations (religious congregations, not-for-profit organizations, and ethnic associations) expressed a commitment to sponsor, resettle, and help refugees integrate into local communities (Macklin et al. 2018). A national campaign, “Welcome Refugees Initiative,” echoed across Canadian media and political discourse upon and after the Liberals’ return to power (#Welcome Refugees 2015). However, recent polls, political rhetoric, and policy amendments indicate a yet-to-be-examined shift in the political and public discourses towards less hospitable attitudes, while the challenges to an intelligible and non-assimilative integration of refugees within a multicultural framework persists beyond its celebratory or condemnatory attitudes (Proctor 2016; Gallant et al. 2019). The approval of diversity politics, in the Canadian case, is argued to be the result of the dormant state of multiculturalism, in other words, when multicultural policies are not making trouble (Helbling, Reeskens, and Stolle 2015; Scott and Safdar 2017). On the other hand, the pledge to accept thousands of Syrian refugees is rationalized in collective awareness through its tight association with liberal Christian values and the Canadian self-image that champions the ethics of rescue. This last point is evident in the news coverage of Syrian refugees, the extensive involvement of religious congregations in refugee settlement, and the accounts of private sponsors in qualitative literature (Hynie 2018; Wallace 2018). Many recent works (Bauder 2011; Tuck and Yang 2012; Abu-Laban 2019; Chatterjee 2019) suggest that multiculturalism in Canada requires a new framework that begins with the comprehensive inclusion of Indigenous rights to land and self-determination while substituting the equality agenda with one of redress. At the same time, other scholars cast doubt over multiculturalism’s ability to provoke change (Triadafilopoulos 1997; Day 2000; Day and Sadik 2002; Hansen 2016), maintain social cohesion and national unity (Bissoondath 1994; Fleras and Elliot 2002; Granatstein 2007), and avoid cultural essentialism and racialization (Abu-Laban 2002; Haque 2010; Kyriakides et al. 2019) that are still relevant today. The resettlement of refugees is one of the most urgent concerns voiced by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations (UNHCR 2020). With the adoption of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act in 2001, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was reconciled with the UNHCR’s 1951 refugee convention in admitting refugees on humanitarian and protection bases (Goodman 2013). In 2016, Canada was the fifth largest donner to UNHCR globally (UNHCR 2017). In one of the most recent joint projects that reflects the neoliberal refugee policies, Canada and UNHCR explored “complementary pathways” for refugee admission based on economic 6 factors and human capital (UNHCR and Government of Canada 2019). The UNHCR registers refugees in their asylum countries (Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan in the Syrian case) and nominates them to third countries (e.g., Canada) for resettlement; however, this process is bureaucratic, and most refugees end up on waiting lists for years before being selected for resettlement. While Canada accepts 30,000 refugees annually (IRCC 2020a), the settlement of these people in Canadian cities and towns forms an impasse to the relationship between multiculturalism and integration in neoliberal conditions. It has been argued that settlement is troubled by sub-multicultural processes of essentialism and homogenization in an otherwise polarized political environment (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2000; Hansen 2016; Winter 2015). One way the conditioning of multiculturalism is evident in refugee settlement is the regionalization of immigrant and refugee affairs coupled with the offloading of social services on local communities and the exploitation of voluntary local networks and community resources to transform the refugee object into a self-reliant subject (Arneil 2006; Silvius 2016; Kyriakides et al. 2018). Thus, talking about settlement and integration necessitates engaging with the debates around multiculturalism and social capital as policies and discourses, and the way they interact in the practices of settlement and integration. 1.3 Trends in Immigration and Settlement Akbari and MacDonald identify several contemporary trends in immigration policies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Some have translated into the prioritization of economic and skilled migration, increased reliance on temporary migrant workers, the retention of international students, and the regionalization of immigration policies and affairs (2014, 819). The latter trend is attributed to yet another shift in social policies and political discourse concerning the settlement of immigrants and refugees in small and mid-sized cities and localizing their affairs in communities and private service provisions (Malkki 1995a; Gilbert 2005; Tibe Bonifacio and Drolet 2016; Drolet and Teixeira 2020). Numerous scholars (Sherrell, Hyndman, and Preniqi 2005; Zetter, Griffith, and Sigona 2005; Poteet and Nourpanah 2016) argue that in Western governments, immigrant and diversity matters have been relegated to provincial, municipal, and private levels by a deliberate embrace of “community empowerment, open access to public services, and a pledge to more actively encourage [community] engagement” (Ferragina and Alessandro 2017, 360). To that end, Gilbert maintains that social service privatization has turned the welfare state into an “enabling state,” one that utilizes public funds “to contract with voluntary and for-profit organizations for the production and delivery of social services” (2005, 10). Successive Canadian governments have instituted similar policies since the 1990s (Abu-Laban 2004). Johnston et al. attest that prior to the 1990s, the Canadian welfare state had “[a] robust set of 7 institutions for the integration of immigrants and the validation of cultural diversity, including federal multiculturalism policy…[a] combination of a redistributive welfare state and multicultural citizenship” (2019, 2). Through the 1990s and onward, neoliberal policies, particularly the privatization and decentralization of social services, were further intensified through Conservative rule under former Primer Minister Stephen Harper (2006–2015). Immigrant and refugee settlement outcomes became widely perceived as the gauge for multiculturalism’s salience, validity, and national self-image projections (Hansen 2016, Macklin et al. 2018). The Harper–Kenny1 conservative era took a tremendous toll on the policies and politics of immigration and multiculturalism that persisted through Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government (Winter 2015; Abu-Laban 2014; Dobrowolsky 2017; Carlaw 2018). Harper’s Conservative government, using Abu-Laban’s (2014) words, “reformed by stealth” immigration policies by repurposing multiculturalism from a framework for diversity into a function of the Canadian Department of Citizenship and Immigration, particularly the branch that “deals with the short-term aspects of immigration, settlement, and citizenship acquisition” (Winter 2015, 647, emphasis added). The current and previous liberal governments have managed to reverse some earlier policies, such as reinstating healthcare for refugees (Antonipillai et al. 2017). In 2015, multiculturalism was once again2 transferred back to the Department of Canadian Heritage with a little budget of CA$8.5 million, lapsing between 2011 and 2017. “The program demand was lower than expected,” its evaluation report explains (Canadian Heritage 2018, 55). The political shape-shifting of multicultural policies may have demoted multiculturalism to a symbolic grade. Therefore, multicultural spending happens not through multiculturism as part of the heritage department. Mainly, other policy areas have a multicultural budget that is designated to promote equality and diversity through the various government programs (Morneau 2019). Hansen (2016) establishes that this limited influence of multiculturalism on integration should not be surprising since it was never considered in the first place. Conversely, Berry (2013) maintains that integration through settlement programs is multiculturalism itself since it is the distinguishing feature from the melting pot model. Settlement, in turn, is all about networking and utilization of social capital in its different forms (Wood, McGrath, and Young 2011; IRCC 2017). Under those policies, multiculturalism and the welfare state have been replaced by reinvigorated laissez-faire binary discourses, such as “hardworking/idle,” “liberal/illiberal,” and “self-reliant/burdensome” immigrants (Tanasescu and Smart 2010; Abu-Laban 2014; Huot et al. 2016; Carlaw 1 Stephen Harper and Jason Kenny. 2 Initially multiculturalism was the responsibility of the Department of Multiculturalism and Citizenship, which was created in 1991 but dismantled after two years (Dewing and Leman 2006). 8 2018; Kaida, Hou, and Stick 2020; Karimi 2020). The binary discourse, as old as liberal thought, correlates in this context to an emphasis on the economic output of newcomers and an exaggerated focus on upward mobility that is linked to human and social capital. In the words of Jenson and Paquet, “the labour market now acts as the central institution of inclusion” (2019, 183). The state and provinces “now see immigrants as resources, and they see labour markets—employers rather than public servants—as the agents of integration” (Johnston et al. 2019, 11). Similarly, the “social cohesion/disintegration” binary correlates to citizenship—rights and responsibilities, or trust and engagement—and family and national values (Putnam 1995). This discussion became urgent in Canada with the Quebec secession referendum in 1995 (Arneil 2006) and the growing concern that immigrants and refugees, hence multiculturism, are undermining the unity of liberal societies and draining the welfare state (Johnston et al. 2010; Ward 2016). Remarkably, the rise of multiculturalism (Multiculturalism Act 1988) and social capital (Policy Research Initiative 2005) as policies for diversity politics and social services in Canada has been closely associated with debates around national identity in the wake of Quebec’s separatist movement and the shift towards neoliberalism. In their extensive work on multiculturalism, Kymlicka (1995) and Taylor and Gutmann (1994) imply that the fear of Quebec’s secession urged the government to fetch an overarching inclusive framework, one that federalized the bilingual/bicultural debate, i.e., multiculturalism (Winter 2015). As an ideology, multiculturalism is a political and a national framework for diversity within the boundaries of liberal democracy, as I further explain in chapter two. Its adoption sparked a conversation about the shape of pluralistic societies and quality in the nation-building project against the backdrop of increasing demands for justice and redress from historically disenfranchised groups. As a policy, since the 1980s, multiculturalism has taken various shapes and undergone many reformations to the extent that it has been rendered unintelligible on its own—always dictated by political contexts and contingent upon the public sentiment towards diversity. One thing for sure, multicultural policies and debates moved away from the diversity politics of materialized human conditions and lingered at the polarized narratives about its characteristics, expression, and existence, or lack thereof (Joppke 2004; Hansen 2016). To some, multiculturalism is a measurement of the degree to which Canada is successful at integrating its newcomers into productive neoliberal subjectivities (Wilkinson and Garcea 2017; Kaida, Hou, and Stick 2020), or alternatively, the degree to which newcomers, or ethnic minorities, can drop some of their “illiberal” cultural “baggage” while keeping the right of association in a paradigm of majority fairness 9 (Kukathas 1997; Biles et al. 2005; Kymlicka 20053; Sardoc 2016; Sánchez-Flores 2018), a process elsewhere referred to as assimilation (Hansen 2016). On the other hand, considering social capital, Arneil (2006) argues that the rise of Quebec separatism coupled with the economic recession fostered a “cohesive” social policy predicated on the political utility of social capital in the late 1990s—“ironically served through devolution of power in the social arena to provinces [which] is a general orientation of multiculturalism with respect to both national minorities and new immigrants” (45, emphasis added). Bourdieu defines social capital as “membership in a group which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word” (1986, 248). The Policy Research Initiative (PRI), to formalize social capital as a public policy tool for delivering social services, grappled with a multiculturalism’s unity/diversity paradox (Arneil 2006). Mainly, Putnam’s propositions that pluralism weakens social cohesion (1995) is antithetical to multiculturalism as a panoply of differentiated groups and subjectivities that share a “common horizon” and not a national norm (Kymlicka 1995; Taylor and Gutmann 1994). Even so, Arneil maintains that Canada has managed to avoid such paradox by drawing on a network-based approach instead of Putnam’s normative model, hence rediscovering the work of French sociologist Bourdieu (1986) and eliminating “the need for ‘shared norms’ and the challenges this poses for a nation-state rooted in multiculturalism” (2006, 46). While Arneil’s proposition is correct in regards to the deliberation phase of social capital policies (OECD), the final PRI report completely abandoned Bourdieu’s historically entrenched framework of class, conflict, and power (Franklin, Holland, and Edwards 2006), and embraced Putnam’s conception of social capital preconditioned by “shared norms” and “trust” and restrained in a functional bonding/bridging model (Public Research Initiative 2005; Arneil 2006). On the subjects of immigration and diversity, the report suggests that “brokering” social capital helps newcomers integrate faster through bonding with their ethnic communities and subsequently bridging from there to broader society, drawing on the assets and networks collectively accumulated in those communities to acquire social support (Public Research Initiative 2005,15). The third type of capital, linking capital, adopted by the report, was introduced by World Bank scholars to couple the two previous forms of capital “across explicit, formal or institutionalized power or authority gradients in society” (Szreter and Woolcock 2004, 655). 3 Kymlicka here maintains that, unlike Europe, multiculturalism is “low-risk” in Canada in part due to the absence of large Muslim minority that would pose a “moral risk” to liberal values. Elsewhere, Kymlicka (2010) reformulates his defense of multiculturalism to prove it was only compromised with Muslim inclusivity. 10 Many have argued that the government’s decision to employ social capital as an integration tool reinforces the neoliberal rhetoric of self-help and self-reliance. It off-loads the responsibilities—settlement and integration in this case—on an already overextended community of service providers,4 private actors, and refugees themselves (Nakhaie, Lin, and Guan 2009; Johnston et al. 2019; Arneil 2006; Silvius 2016; Karimi 2020). This has compounded and complemented the incline in integration and multicultural policies towards a short-term dispersed and market-based sphere of community networks, dubbed the settlement program (Winter 2015; Jenson and Paquet 2019). 1.4 Refugee Settlement and Integration in Canada Canada’s refugee resettlement program is run by Immigration, Refugee, and Citizenship of Canada (IRCC) and structured in three streams: the government-assisted refugee program (GAR), private sponsorship of refugee program (PSR), and the blended visa office-referred (BVOR). While the government selects and funds its GARs, it approves, vets, and decides the quotas for the PSRs and selects BVORs who are sponsored through a private-public partnership (IRCC 2017). The Canadian Settlement Program is defined as “a short period of mutual adaptation between newcomers and the host society, during which the government provides support and services to newcomers” (IRCC 2017, 29). In effect, when it comes down to settlement, it is not clear in the definition that the government only funds the delivery of support and services to newcomers as opposed to directly implementing services through government programs (IRCC 2017, 30). Beyond citing attacks on neoliberal devolution policies, it is essential to acknowledge that the privatization of refugee sponsorship, namely the program PSR, is regarded by many as a precursor for a comprehensive refugee policy that challenges the monopoly of nation-states over refugee affairs and lends power to people and non-state actors (Bradford 2005; Burr 2011). This sort of opinion is prevalent in the international migration literature that emphasizes the locality of refugee affairs in Derrida’s imagined “ville refuge.” Isayev (2017) argues that localized, yet globally interconnected, acts of humanitarianism and hospitality should form the grounds for refugee settlement rather than federal policy. The Derridean notion of unconditional hospitality is often cited in these contexts to propose that the “host” accepts the “guest” without, or prior to, making any decisions or enforcing conditions on a person’s entry (Isayev 2017). Moreover, Macklin et al. (2018) contend that private sponsorship fosters a sense of active citizenship that places the settlement of refugees in the frame of collective and public work. Nonetheless, the privatization and marketization of settlement have been cautioned against by the 4 Settlement workers are tasked with a massive load of responsibilities (P.B. Wood, McGrath, and Young 2011). 11 Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR 2017) and many authors (Tanasescu and Smart 2010; Silvius 2016; Labman 2016; Labman and Pearlman 2018) as presented in the critique of social capital. The utility of social capital in remote management becomes clear when one examines settlement policy initiatives (Kunz 2005) and the most recent government’s “modernized approach” to settlement, adopted in 2008 (CIC 2009). The approach is an outcome-based policy through which the government contracts and funds Service Provider Organizations (SPOs) and community-based organizations and actors, encourages community partnerships, and implements specific programs for immigrant settlement and integration (OCASI 2010). Settlement agencies and local sponsorship groups run those programs, and they include Language Instructions for Newcomers in Canada (LINC), Immigrant Settlement and Adaptation Program (ISAP), Community Connections,5 Let’s Talk,6 Resettlement Assistance Program (RAP), and Local Immigration Partnership (LIP) (CIC 2009). The bridging, bonding, and linking capitals are implied in the language of most of those programs; for instance, the PRI report cites community connections as a model for social capital properly employed to serve specific objectives (2005, 16). It states that the host program “promotes the creation of bridging networks for newly landed immigrants to facilitate their integration into the receiving community” (Public Research Initiative 2005, 18, emphasis added). The collective of hundreds of programs and local partnership initiatives is called the settlement sector, which is heavily evaluated by the government and scholarship for its application and production of the phenomenon and the “end goal”—integration. Unlike assimilation, integration—as a concept and a set of practices and conditions—is highly ambiguous in the literature (Castles et al. 2002; Hyndman 2011; Hynie, Korn, and Tao 2016; Good Gingrich and Enns 2019). Defined by the government, integration is a two-way process for immigrants to adapt to life in Canada and for Canada to welcome and adapt to the newcomers…ultimately, the goal of integration is to encourage newcomers to be fully engaged in the economic, social, political, and cultural life of Canada (IRCC 2017, 2). While this definition is not specific to refugees, it is analogous to the UNHCR definition of refugee integration, which adds that it “requires a willingness for communities to be welcoming and responsive to refugees and for public institutions to meet the needs of a diverse population” (UNHCR 2013, 2). In refugee scholarship, integration is often measured and assessed more than discussed and problematized as a concept (Hynie, Korn, and Tao 2016). Integration is frequently equated with settlement (Berry 2013) or rationalized as cultural adaptation (Vedder et al. 2006; Nguyen and Benet-Martínez 2013) and is discussed broadly in the literature on multiculturalism. What makes integration 5 Prior to the development of the modernized approach, this was called the Host Program. 6 Language Interpretation services, which are also privately run. 12 different from assimilation, according to many, is that it does not require people to forfeit their cultural, ethnic, transnational, and religious beliefs and bonds (Kymlicka 1995). Hansen contends that the distinction between integration and assimilation is thin since only forced assimilation requires newcomers to become entirely homogenized (2016). After all, ethnic communities and cultural expression exist in almost all liberal democracies (Berry 2013; Hansen 2016). Berry regards integration, as intended in Canadian multicultural policies, as an intercultural process that promotes cultural expression and intergroup contact (2013, 38). So, to safeguard against ethnic segregation, integration is an obligation of a two-way dialogue where newcomers, in the end, “engage with, and become constituents, of the larger society” (Berry 2013, 43). Hence, the integration hypothesis proposed by Berry is predicated on a “doubly engagement” and “cultural competence,” whereas “the social capital afforded by these multiple social and cultural engagements may well offer the route to success in plural societies” (2013, 45, emphasis added). A “good” integration, for Berry, is measured by the level of cultural adaptation and the quality and magnitude of intergroup contact (2013). The “doubly engagement” does not go far from the bonding/bridging dynamics of social capital when scholars deploy it to assess settlement or explain its workings (Hynie, Korn, and Tao 2016). 1.5 Settlement via Social Capital Despite the confusion around refugee settlement and integration noted above, one thing is certain: refugees are regularly and extensively evaluated in quantitative literature (Vedder et al. 2006) and remodeled (reimagined) in mixed and qualitative literature (Good Gingrich and Enns 2019). As I explain in the next chapter, research on refugee settlement and integration in Canada is motivated and driven by policy and often funded by the government (Hansen 2016). In their lengthy policy review, Hyndman notes that policy research tends to overlook unquantifiable matters such as gender, diversity, and youth (2011). Social capital, represented by social relations and inter and intra-ethnic networks, has been incorporated into the UNHCR’s (2009) “integration indicators” scheme through Ager and Strang (2008) and Hynie, Korn, and Tao’s (2016) conceptual models for refugee integration. As I discuss in chapter two, these models plot indicators in an interrelated framework, which is widely deployed by scholars to evaluate settlement outcomes (MacLaren, McGrath, and Smith 2016; Drolet and Moorthi 2018; Good Gingrich and Enns 2019; Mohamed and Bastug 2020). Integration indicators, according to these models, include employment, housing, language, health, and social relations. Integration is also characterized by challenges, success, type of sponsorship, coping mechanisms, discrimination, and refugee agency. 13 More specifically, in an analysis of refugee housing in Manitoba, Silvius finds that social capital not only was inadequate for refugees to secure housing, but the reliance on social networks charged refugees with the responsibility of “demonstrating ‘competitiveness’ and attributes of neoliberal citizenship…by relying on community-based, and ultimately voluntarily provided self-help (as opposed to state mandate supports) and private initiative” (2016, 35). Conversely, other scholars have claimed that social capital mitigates absolute homelessness in newcomer settlement and mediates their integration into society. Lamba and Krahn (2003) identify three forms of social capital: familial networks, ethnic networks, and sponsor networks. They conclude that social capital portrays refugees as “highly active agents in their own resettlement,” and that “the maintenance and reconstruction of an extensive social capital base is essential for successful resettlement” (Lamba and Krahn 2003, 337). In another study, D’Addario, Hiebert, and Sherrell (2007) challenge the assumption that social capital is equally accessible to all newcomers and demonstrate that resourceful networks are not readily available to be utilized by refugees. The authors question the logical order of the bonding/bridging/linking model when one or more of those forms was lacking. Refugees, who rely on government assistance in their first year of resettlement, frequently fall under the poverty line when they cannot access support networks. Even so, the authors find that refugees and immigrants navigate social capital options and utilize available networks and support systems to mitigate absolute homelessness. Regarding employment, Nakhaie, Lin, and Guan (2009) analyze data from the 2001 Ethnic Diversity Survey to examine and prove quantitatively that the self-employment of minorities is a “myth” in Canada, especially when socioeconomic structural inequalities are not considered. They conclude that social capital policies could contribute to economic segregation in self-employment “such that those with resource-rich networks benefit from their social relations while those whose networks are resource-poor fail to take advantage of self-employment opportunities” (Nakhaie, Lin, and Guan 2009, 641). The same results have been demonstrated by Stewart et al., who note that immigration itself had already compromised newcomers’ social networks, which restricted their capacity to create and utilize social capital in the new country (2008, 152). For example, Somali refugees relied less on social networks for support than Chinese immigrants, who enjoyed wealthier and more established social networks amongst each other and across ethnic groups (151). By the same token, Tanasescu and Smart (2010) find that social capital played a lesser role in immigrant housing in Calgary than assumed by the literature. They maintain that social capital reinforces “the importance of individual enterprise as a means of mitigating the failure of the market and government to provide affordable housing and support social integration” (Tanasescu and Smart 2010, 115). In more recent work, Karimi (2020) examines the role of social capital in the integration of Iranian 14 LGBTQ male refugees in Canada. The author suggests that social capital policies fail—at the conjunction of sexuality, race, gender, and class—to assist LGBTQ refugees in integration. On the contrary, the un-embeddedness of LGBTQ refugees in conventional social structures renders social capital not only inert, but the inability to access it contributes to the racialization, exploitation, and devaluation of refugees across the domains of housing, employment, education, and mental health (Karimi 2020). Finally, Hynie, Crooks, and Barragan (2011) contend that migrant women in Toronto preferred to rely on close ethnic ties when seeking social support. All in all, social capital as a settlement strategy is contested in the literature, and its prospects are in part determined by the objective and scope of the inquiries into its affairs. 1.6 Immigration and Settlement in Small and Mid-sized Cities There is a growing body of literature on immigration and resettlement to small and mid-sized cities and a consensus that knowledge on secondary urban centers is lacking, while major cities continue to receive more attention and research funding (Sherrel, Hyndman, and Prenigi 2005; Teixeira and Drolet. 2018; Hulko 2018; Kading, Walmsley, and Murphy 2018). What many geographers and migration scholars are not sure about is the degree to which small towns can be proper social spheres for newcomer settlement and integration, and many have noted that further research is needed (Chareka 2016; Reitmanova and Gustafson 2016; Haugen 2019; Drolet and Teixeira 2020). It has been suggested that small and mid-sized locales can provide a “warmer” and more “communal settlement experience” than bigger cities (Wachtel 2008; Agrawal and Zeitouny 2017; Drolet and Moorthi 2018). Nevertheless, secondary urban centers are the conveyors of neoliberal development and the regionalization of immigration as the Canadian government aims to support the growth of small cities, populate regions of low fertility rates, secure labor force outside metropolitan areas, and reduce ethnic culturing (Hyndman and Schuurman 2004; Johnston et al. 2019). A widely employed definition of small cities lists the following attributes: 1) A discernable downtown core; 2) an authentic, locally celebrated history in a place physically separate from major metropolitan centres; 3) a measurable level of cultural participation, including a tradition of volunteerism, growth coalitions, and leadership; and 4) a creative cultural policy that links the city’s centre and heritage to its outlying areas and communities. (Drolet et al. 2008, 23) Recently, the government launched a new pilot for the dispersal of skilled workers to “rural” areas (IRCC 2020b). A news release from the office of the former IRCC minister explains the pilot’s project: “The equation is quite simple. Attracting and retaining newcomers with the needed skills equals a recipe for success for Canada’s rural and northern communities” (Harris 2020). Scholars have pointed out the limited capacity of small cities to attract and retain immigrants and refugees (Teixeira and Drolet 2018). 15 Non-metropolitan and “rural” regions are not only understudied but are frequently described as challenging settler geographies—unwelcoming, discriminatory, lacking ethnic diversity, and predominantly white—that require special attention due to the absence of metropolitan features (Aguiar, McKinnon, and Sookraj 2010; Tedesco and Bagelman 2017; Lo and Teixeira 2015). For the most part, much of the work on immigration to non-metropolitan centers focuses on regional and developmental governance (Gibson et al. 2016) and local partnerships and civic engagement (Chareka 2016; Tibe Bonifacio and Drolet 2016; Kading, Walmsley, and Murphy 2018). Outside BC’s Lower Mainland, only a few studies have examined immigrant and refugee settlement and integration. In the Thompson-Okanagan region, there is a split in the current literature on the interpretation of the settlement experience of immigrants and refugees, particularly among the largest two cities: Kelowna and Kamloops. For instance, Aguiar, McKinnon, and Sookraj (2010) demonstrate that, in Kelowna, Jamaican workers were stigmatized and stereotyped through local debates even before their arrival. After they landed in Kelowna, local news articles and letters to the editor framed their settlement as the Jamaican “problem” (Aguiar, McKinnon, and Sookraj 2010, 73). To that extent, the Jamaican Liaison Office imposed a curfew on Jamaican men, suggesting that black men are “unpredictable…especially after dark” (71–2). The authors conclude that, as it has done historically, “whiteness” in Kelowna emplaced its presumed superiority and settler hegemony in the bodies of those whom it invited, in the first place, to exploit, while it continually presumed “color-blindness” (75). To the same end, Tedesco and Bagelman (2017) contend that Kelowna is a violent settler colony masquerading as benevolent urban geography, and it is the unmarked “whiteness,” coupled with a long history of violent settler colonialism, that underpins the absence of non-white peoples at the nexus of neoliberal urbanization. Both Aguiar, McKinnon, and Sookraj (2010) and Tedesco and Bagelman (2017) stress that, initially, Kelowna was founded on the violent replacement and assimilation of Indigenous bodies and the unlawful appropriation of their land (see also Grinnell 2014). This was followed by the spatial and temporal process of making racialized non-white bodies invisible that is, in part, somewhat ironically essential to Kelowna’s branded identity as “safe, prosperous, homogenous, welcoming, and white” (Tedesco and Bagelman 2017, 381). Alternatively, the authors’ qualitative portion of the research demonstrates that immigrants negotiate their agentive positions in time and space through acts of micro-resistance and solidarity. Finally, Lo and Teixeira (2015) have examined the immigrant business experience in Kelowna, marking the “ethnic factor” as a challenge for immigrant workers. The authors describe Kelowna as “a very ‘white’ city,” where an immigrant owner’s ability to hire co-ethnic workers is limited unless they are of European origin (641). 16 On the other hand, more empirically grounded works on immigrant settlement in Kamloops have concluded that, despite its small size, the city fostered robust networks and local partnerships to establish a welcoming and supportive environment for newcomers (Drolet and Robertson 2011; Sánchez-Flores 2018). What is embraced explicitly by scholars who have focused on Kamloops is the effectiveness of regional governance and civic responsibility; nonetheless, challenges arise from the limited administrative infrastructure and cutbacks in social programs. Notwithstanding, when Murphy (2018) has examined the experience of women parolees, and when Zhang (2016) has reviewed the settlement experience of Chinese immigrants, both have uncovered discrimination, exclusion, and stereotyping to be prevalent in Kamloops. As a final point, Sánchez-Flores (2018) condemns multiculturalism for the often unexamined and sedentary assumption that small cities are localities of exclusion and prejudice. When multiculturism lends itself to a superficial understanding of culture and identity, it not only fails to capture the complexity of diversity but, in effect, it suppresses knowledge about small cities. According to Sánchez-Flores, multiculturalism imagines diversity as it is supposed to be and not what it corresponds to in an otherwise non-metropolitan condition (222). Therefore, Sánchez-Flores dismisses Aguiar, Tomic, and Trumper’s (2005) characterization of Kelowna as a “white space” sold to Canadians from bigger cities as unfounded (233), contending: [s]uch representations of smaller population centres as more racist and prejudiced rests on urban/“rural” dichotomy that may obtain at the far ends of the spectrum but that ignores the grey areas in between the space in which small cities exist. I argue that small cities do not exhibit the same dynamics of demographic composition as the small “rural” areas with which they are so often grouped. (Sánchez-Flores 2018, 234) To sum, the literature reviewed indicates that the settlement of immigrants and refugees in small and mid-sized cities is contingent upon the capacity of local communities to foster networks of support and collaboration between its members and organizations. However, the experience of settlement in secondary urban centers seems to vary across different geographies, and further research is needed. 1.7 The Political Context of Syrian Refugee Resettlement Similar to the 2015 elections (Besco and Tolley 2019), the 2019 federal elections proved that multiculturalism is politically and publicly contested (Johnston 2019). It has been argued that in the first two years, the government targeted the most vulnerable subpopulations amongst Syrian refugees, lowering its vetting for adaptability and resettling what a professor in political science described to Maclean’s as a group of “semi-skilled and mostly uneducated people [and] some were also injured” (Taylor 2019). The 2016 census report on Syrian refugees states that Canada asked UNHCR and the Turkish government to “prioritize vulnerable refugees who are a low-security risk, such as women at risk 17 and complete families” (Statistics Canada 2016, emphasis added). According to the Syrian Outcome Report, only 2% of GARs and BVOR had more than secondary education, compared to 15% of PSR refugees (IRCC 2019). In an interview with Global News, the director of the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR) stated: when they [the government] finished that commitment to the Syrian refugees, the number of government-assisted [refugees] went right down again, which was very disappointing to us. And they put more of the focus on private sponsorship…We have seen much more of a politicization of the question of who is being resettled. We’ve seen that under the Conservatives previously and then to some extent under the Liberals . (Browne 2019) The claim that the significant influx of need-based and low-skilled Syrian refugees has burdened the Canadian welcoming response and caused “humanitarian fatigue” (Gallant et al. 2019) is premised on a series of national polls and legislation that revealed a diminishing desire to accept more immigrants and refugees amongst Canadians. Also, there is evidence of the failure of some left-alone local communities to accommodate many Syrian refugees (Dam and Wayland 2019). One recent poll showed that Canadian public opinion was shifting against accepting more refugees and in favor of limiting the number of new immigrants (Johnston 2019). Another poll showed that “68 percent of Canadian respondents said minorities should be doing more to fit in with mainstream society instead of keeping their own customs and languages” (Proctor 2016). This change in public discourse contrasts with polls before the intake of Syrian refugees that exhibited how 84% of Canadians had satisfactory views on multiculturalism (Canadian Heritage 2018). In similar policy developments, Ontario’s provincial government cut the budget for legal aid to refugees by 30%, and earlier in the same year, the Liberal government introduced new measures in asylum claims processing through the US border to prevent so-called “asylum shopping” (BBC 2019). Further, after rising tensions in Quebec against the backdrop of a deadly terrorist attack that targeted Muslims, as well as the introduction of Bill-62, which targeted minority religious freedom, the province reduced immigration by 21% (El-Assal and Miekus 2020). Finally, the Liberal government has been criticized for turning its back on Yemeni refugees to avoid compromising $3 billion worth of trade—including weaponry—with Saudi Arabia, who is engaged in a proxy war in Yemen (Al-Solaylee 2018). Hyndman (2019) contends that the inclusion of Syrian refugee resettlement as a campaign promise exposed the state-centric approach to human rights and skewed the demographics of the refugee population, exacerbating the waiting time for other refugees. This change in public discourse was compounded by a surge in anti-immigrant attitudes and the polarized political environment surrounding the 2019 federal elections, which fostered civic anxiety around immigration issues and gave rise to growing fundamentalist rhetoric. For example, the words of 18 the leader of the far-right People’s Party of Canada, Maxime Bernier, capture this sentiment clearly. During his 2019 election campaign, he tweeted, Trudeau’s extreme multiculturalism and cult of diversity will divide us into little tribes that have less and less in common, apart from their dependence on government in Ottawa. These tribes become political clienteles to be bought with taxpayers [money] and special privileges” (Wright 2018). Given the noted variances between GAR, PSR, and BVOR refugees (Kaida, Hou, and Stick 2020), there are conflicting claims as to whether the Liberal government (2016–2024) increased private quotas—hence offloading its responsibility—or decreased them to encumber PSR’s privilege in selecting refugees, and hence have more authority in vetting refugees for adaptability. This confusion is more complicated with the federal government’s decision to increase immigration quotas for 2019 and 2020 (IRCC 2018), despite the rising anti-immigrant public sentiment. Immigration seems to transcend the politics of multiculturism. As Global News columnist Matt Gurney put it: this isn’t good…I’m not making an emotional appeal here. This isn’t a “diversity is our strength” moment. It’s just math…Our entire social welfare framework depends on a growing population. If we shrink…we end up where Japan has: abandoned towns and home-care robots (2018). The political context of the Syrian refugee settlement in Canada is important because it situates their affairs within the current discussions on diversity, humanitarianism, and electoral politics. Specifically, the recent Canadian state politics and public attitudes reveal a good deal of ambivalence with regards to refugee settlement policies and the place of resettled refugees in the national discourse. The literature on the settlement of Syrian refugees represents some of the previous tendencies to perceive refugees through an economic lens and perhaps emphasize their benevolence and adaptability against prevailing anti-refugee rhetoric. However, the literature also highlights the gaps in refugee settlement policies, as I demonstrate below. 1.8 The Literature on Syrian Refugee Settlement in Canada Hyndman, Payne, and Jimenez (2017), Tyyskä, et al. (2018), Hyine (2018), and Wallace (2018) agree that the release of a photo of the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on the shores of Turkey in September 2015 shifted the narrative on Syrian refugees in Canada and set in motion a significant humanitarian response to the crisis. The response has been, according to Tyyskä et al. (2018), framed in the public discourse in three ways. First, Canadian values—humanitarianism and generosity—were juxtaposed with the second frame—the image of Syrian refugees as vulnerable people who lack agency. Third, a gendered representation of Syrian males as a security threat and a total disregard for Syrian women appeared. The result was projected in “neo-colonial, orientalist, neoliberal, anti-Islamic and patriarchal perspectives to both the refugees and the Canadian government and public” (Tyyskä et al. 19 2018, 62). Simultaneously, “humanizing representations of refugees, safety, family life, and integration” (Wallace 2018, 220) have emerged, alongside a growing body of academic literature. For example, a special issue of Canadian Ethnic Studies addressed Syrian refugee settlement with a focus entirely on social capital (Hynie 2018b). A growing amount of literature on Syrian refugees highlights multifaceted, structural, and subjective challenges to their settlement and integration. Language seems to be the most urgent challenge and often complicates other areas of settlement: the hurdles to its acquisition render access to knowledge and social interaction difficult, and sometimes impossible (Roy 2016; Fang, Sapeha, and Neil 2018). Employment and credential recognition (Agrawal and Zeitouny 2017; Wilkinson et al. 2018; Senthanar et al. 2020); healthcare and family support (Guruge et al. 2018; Ahmed, Brown, and Feng 2017; Bin Yameen et al. 2019; Tuck et al. 2019); housing (Silvius 2017; Oudshoorn, Benbow, and Meyer 2019; Rose 2019); social interactions, networks, and social capital (Drolet and Moorthi 2018; Hanely et al. 2018; Kyriakides et al. 2018); settlement in small cities (Godin et al. 2017; Haugen 2019); Syrian youth (Godin et al. 2017; Guo, Maitra, and Guo 2019); and types of sponsorship (Agrawal 2019; Hynie et al. 2019) are all domains that have been addressed in the literature through qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method inquiries. One of the most cited works on Syrian refugees is Hanley et al.’s 2018 article, “The Social Networks, Social Support, and Social Capital of Syrian Refugees Privately Sponsored to Settle in Montreal: Indications for Employment and Housing during their Early Experiences of Integration.” The authors find that the historically well-established Syrian immigrant community in Montreal provided newcomer refugees with substantial bonding capital. Syrian social events, French classes, and religious gatherings established the necessary “trust” to bridge family networks with the larger society, which unexpectedly had a lesser effect on finding employment. Finally, the linking capital, which links refugees with institutions, was assessed as minimal. The authors confirm Stewart et al.’s (2008) findings in their conclusion: the forming of social capital is a cultural practice, shown by refugees who reported that asking for external help was not part of their cultural habits. Instead, an extended mistrust in strangers and authority figures was carried over from the pre-arrival context of Syrian refugees—community groups outside family and relatives are not part of the Syrian socio-political past, but family connections are considered sufficient and safe. Nonetheless, many Syrian refugees realize the importance of extra-familial social networks in Canada to find employment, housing, and social opportunities. Finally, the authors recommend that community leaders become “knowledge brokers,” tethering refugees with service providers and other networks of support. 20 For a different perspective on the Syrian refugee settlement, Haugen (2019) argues that social capital and social networks within and outside the ethnic group are vital to “successful resettlement.” The author conducts interviews in five small “rural” communities across Canada and finds that “rural” communities have “enhanced social capital”—relationships built on trust and reciprocity—which can be utilized to address settlement challenges and foster a welcoming environment for refugees. The positive experience of Syrian refugees challenges the dominant discourses on “rural” settlement. For example, underfunded rural settlement programs incentivized local communities to pool local resources and develop “creative solutions,” e.g., community-led English schools. Unlike settlements in big cities, rural community networks and personal relationships—more centralized than cities—can be more efficient in providing economic opportunities and affordable housing for refugee newcomers. The conclusion of the author supports McMorrow and Caufield’s news report (2016) that policies should capitalize on the “rich” social capital of small cities and direct more refugees to rural areas where they can “feel at home” (Haugen 2019, 54). In the suburban context, Kyriakides et al. (2018) look at how refugee settlement was complicated in the sparsely populated suburbs of Ontario by the challenges of the refugee agency and refugee–host interaction. The authors find that Syrian refugees are unsatisfied with the level of their involvement during the first year of sponsorship. Occasionally, fed up with the paternalistic and patronizing behavior of their sponsors, Syrian refugees decided to prematurely terminate their sponsorship and live on their own. The power dynamics that characterize the sponsor–sponsored relationship are informed by expectations and the statist definition of successful integration, which entails that refugees integrate into the market and secure housing and employment akin to Canadian-born citizens. Insufficient government support pushes refugees down the path of self-help and competitive economic participation, yet, until they become self-reliant neoliberal subjects, they are perceived as non-persons: “the objects of humanitarian rescue who lack…the integrative competence required for resettlement” (17). However, Kyriakides et al. (2018) suggest that refugees reject being objects of rescue and humanitarian aid. Instead, they reassert their agency through drawing “on pre-conflict social roles to demand normative authority as persons of self-rescue with prior lives, who now desire a life beyond refuge” (17). The authors conclude that refugees perceived resettlement as a set of “status transitions and contingencies” rather than a program for integration and transformation (19). In a further study in Ontario, conducted in a mid-sized city, Oudshoorn, Benbow, and Meyer (2019) examine the subjective settlement experience of Syrian refugees in housing. The authors highlight tensions between gratitude and frustration, and belonging and isolation, as characteristic of the housing experience of refugees. Discriminatory practices, language and social barriers, insufficient social 21 assistance, and the inability to assert housing rights compounded inadequate housing conditions. In their conclusion, the authors confirm Silvius’s (2016) findings that affordable housing and more tailored government intervention are needed for adequate refugee housing. Moving from housing to the broader economic context, Senthanar et al. (2019) examine the integration experience of Syrian women in southern Ontario through 20 semi-structured interviews. The findings of this article suggest that GAR women struggle the most amongst the three streams of refugee sponsorship. Mental health and a lack of language skills and work credentials are among the factors that hinder Syrian women’s employment through GAR sponsorship. Conversely, with access to social support networks, BVOR and PSR women refugees were able to secure employment. The authors note that, in all cases, gender roles and deep-rooted inequalities pushed women into lower-skilled jobs as they had to balance home and childcare with employment. The difference between GARs and PSRs, the authors explain, could be attributed to the selection criteria followed by the government and private sponsors. Notably, Syrian refugee women reported having better work and living conditions in pre-war Syria than in Canada. The authors conclude that their study illustrates the ways women inside the sponsorship and settlement systems “are positioned as income earners who must reconcile challenges and opportunities in order to adjust and secure work” (18). Regarding youth, Guo, Maitra, and Guo (2019) observe the challenges faced by Syrian refugee children in their integration into the Canadian education system in a city in Western Canada. Conducting focus groups, the authors demonstrate how Syrian children were subjected to racism, bullying, and unfair treatment at schools, which affected their sense of belonging and social relationships. When bullied, Syrian students’ voices were not heard by the school. “I belong to nowhere” is what one Syrian child reported (89). The authors conclude that there is a need for more specific diversity knowledge and training in Canadian schools to accommodate the social and cultural needs of refugee students. The literature on Syrian refugees in Canada highlights the outcomes of settlement programs and the challenges that refugees face within the settlement plan. There are positive experiences of Syrian refugees in major urban centers where ethnic networks and resources are abundant. On the other hand, challenges may still arise due to prejudice, lack of information, and inaccessibility of support. In smaller cities, Syrian refugees rely more on settlement agencies and their sponsors than ethnic networks. This, in turn, can create conflict or misunderstanding, mainly when refugees felt isolated from public life and treated as subjects of rescue. The literature relies on integration indicators to draw conclusions about the successfulness of the settlement. However, the refugee life and experience outside enumerated and normative categories of integration seem to escape the methodologies and frameworks of current 22 scholarship. In general, the literature seems to be one continuous scholarly project that aims to gather data on Syrian refugees and inform settlement policies. Throughout this thesis, I point to the meta-landscape of refugee studies, which entails various political agendas, disciplinary frameworks, and funding conditions under which refugee knowledge production is nested. For example, probing the discrepancy between Syrian women reporting not having depression in a small sample study (Ahmed, Brown, and Feng 2017), and the conclusion driven from screening methods that states “maternal depression is an important feature in Syrian refugee women” (9, emphasis added), can be instructive as to how power and scientific gaze construct the “refugee anomaly” category (Malkki 1997), as I detail in the theoretical context and chapter two. A better quantitative reading into Syrian refugee health is found in Tuck et al.’s (2019) cross-sectional survey, which situated the statistical analysis in the structural conditions of sponsorship and settlement that produce unmet health needs. While I did not design the methodology of this project to engage critically with the literature consulted, I will juxtapose my observations and analysis with some of the relevant publications in subsequent chapters. As noted earlier, the most significant gap in the literature reviewed in preparation for this thesis was the absence of qualitative studies on Syrian refugees in BC. In reviewing the literature on Syrian refugees, I identified two streams in scholarly works: macro and micro. Macro studies tend to focus broadly on the settlement processes and the projected outcomes and cater to policy (e.g., Hanley et al. 2018). Micro approaches build on the findings of broader (macro) studies to focus on specific aspects of settlement, such as intergroup relationships, economic integration, and sponsorship programs (e.g., Oudshoorn, Benbow, and Meyer 2019), that still fall within the framework of evaluating the successfulness of the settlement program. In this thesis, I take into consideration the established indicators of integration and align my findings with some of the previous frameworks. Nonetheless, for the most part, I depart from evaluation and settlement outcomes and focus on the lived experience of refugees, group and family dynamics, and the perceived meanings and the employed strategies of settlement and integration. I believe if the scholarship on refugees allows for less structured methods of inquiry and more refugee-centered scholarship, this will uncover grounded data that can inform various research agendas. The work of Kyriakides et al. (2018) stands out in the literature not only for tackling nuanced subjects such as the refugee agency but mainly because the authors ground their findings in the theoretical debates around host-guest, refugeeness, and diversity politics. Other works have avoided placing the settlement of refugees within the broader contexts that generate refugeeness and conceptualize resettlement and settlement within the nation-state. Further, multiculturalism seems to be absent and untroubled in the literature on Syrian refugees. I follow Kyriakides et al. (2018) in grounding my findings 23 and discussion in a conceptual framework that accounts for refugees in their localities and in relation to greater contexts of multiculturalism, social capital, and neoliberalism, as I detail in the next section and more in chapter two. 1.9 Theoretical Context “Observations are impossible without theory,” as Malinowski (1935) states, “theories must be formed before you start to observe, but readily dropped or at least remoulded in the course of observation and construction” (cited in Cerwonka and Malkki 2007, 172). With that in mind, the following theoretical propositions and debates constitute a tentative framework that has informed my interest in this topic, my research question, and engaged my analysis and discussion. Malkki’s interdisciplinary critique of the territorial nation-state as a producer of both displacement and emplacement resituates refugees, and their affairs, in the historical conjunctures of the national order of things (Malkki 1992). Malkki describes this as the “normal” order that founds national identities on passing nations as fixed in place and recognizable on a map: “the world of nations is thus conceived as a discrete spatial partitioning of territory” (26). As a result, a territorialized concept of identity prevails to assume natural rootedness for people inside borders and anomalous uprootedness for those outside them (27). Scholars, Malkki maintains, have been complicit in the substantiation and reproduction of the national order of things in two ways: first, through the standard linking of people to place, and nation to territory; and second, through the positivist approach that essentializes identity in the image of “roots, trees, origins, ancestries, racial lines, autochthonism, evolution, development” (28). While rootedness in space is a premise for identity and belonging, the uprootedness of refugees becomes pathological, which in the national order of things entails the loss of identity, culture, and moral bearings (32). In turn, intervention is needed, and functionalist models are employed to place the uprooted individual in a normative milieu dubbed the “refugee experience” (Malkki 1995a, 508). In our context, the national order of things is the normative paradigm of refugee integration (or assimilation) into a multicultural society. Settlement, in turn, represents the rooting of refugees neoliberally, where they can be incorporated into the Canadian nation-building as racialized citizens. Canadian multiculturism’s propositions and praxis have been accused of essentialism and homogenization. Still, many scholars maintain that multiculturalism, as a theory of minority rights, is premised on utilizing the Rawlian (1971) theory of justice to make a diversity-accommodation appeal to liberalism (Cooke 1997; Walker 1997; Winter 2015). The logic of this appeal is entrenched in two theoretical propositions. First, since individual human identity is formed dialogically and through the (mis)recognition of others, what forms that identity, i.e., groups and cultures, should be recognized and cherished as having equal worth to “others” (Taylor 1994). Second, since individual freedom is linked to 24 membership in a cultural or national group, group-specific rights should operate in tandem with liberal democracy and citizenship (Kymlicka 1995). Definitions of multiculturalism are contradictory, often conflate theory with policy, and draw on country-specific experiences with ethnic diversity (Joppke 2004; Kymlicka 2010). In Canada, Sánchez-Flores identifies five interrelated phenomena of multiculturalism: the existence of ethnic and racial diversity in the same society or community, a state policy complete with educational and public avowal strategies, a liberal political theory, an ideology that supports the status quo, and an emblem of the Canadian identity. (2018, 217) Multiculturalism as a theory has been appropriately critiqued for forging a Eurocentric vision of diversity, one that channels recognition from the “entitled” to the “deserving” and necessitates the ethnicization and racialization of non-white groups and the segregation of identities into solid cultural forms, instead of undermining the structures that produce subordination in the national order (Winter 2015; Day 2000; J. Sánchez-Flores 2018). Multiculturalism, as a policy for minority rights, also has been criticized as nothing more than a “feel-good celebration of ethnocultural diversity” (Kymlicka 2010, 134). Alibhai-Brown (2000) proposes a “3-Ss” model for multiculturalism in England: Samosas, steel drums, and Saris, which appropriates material culture and ignores structural issues of economic and racial inequalities (cited in Kymlicka 2010). In Canada, recent scholarship has highlighted the ways multiculturalism was reduced from an ideological identity for all Canadians to a tool for managing diversity, correctly, through immigration policies (Joppke 2004; Abu-Laban 2002, Winter 2015). In other words, the devaluation of multiculturalism, as these authors suggest, implies a return to liberalism in its “neo” form, with its emphasis on economic growth and the corporate-driven rearrangement of social structures. As multiculturalism becomes an affair of integration, then by the virtues of neoliberalism, integration equates to regional settlement—a statist and functionalist plan for refugee integration through offloading integration onto local communities (Silvius 2016, 35). I find Ahmed’s (2014) and Fortier’s (2008) insights on intimacy and multiculturalism useful in contextualizing refugee integration. The authors maintain that integration is to be understood within the national project of forming the national body, one that places immigrants in a “would be/could be” injunction that they must embody the desired diversity of the reinvented national “we,” or an “imperative to mix.” In Ahmed’s words, integration is a national ideal where: difference becomes an elevated or sublimated form of likeness: you must like us – and be like us – by valuing or even loving differences (though clearly, this is only about the differences that can be taken on and in by the nation, those that will not breach the ideal image of the nation). (2014, 138) The national epitome, predicated on monocultural productions—law, liberty, tolerance, democracy, modernity, diversity, and equality—as Fortier explains, is exemplified in the accompanying need for 25 community cohesion “in localized, personalized relationships…conceived in terms of how people have to make decisions and choices around the control over their feelings and their relationships, and about their identities/identifications” (Fortier 2007, 71). Therefore, the relationship between integration, social cohesion, and national identity is instructive. Integration in a diverse society becomes a communal process by necessity, one that requires individuals and groups to figure out their position in the national order through “modes of living together that draw on languages of intimacy, closeness, and feelings for the nation as a panacea to social conflict” (Fortier 2007, 8). Wood, McGrath, and Young (2011) accurately document the emotional component of refugee settlement in neoliberal geography. In their words, settlement is “an emotional process of negotiating the logistics of the city in a way that enables belonging” in neoliberal emotional geography where refugees’ emotional connection with settlement workers not only fills in for the state welfare infrastructure but reproduces an alternative emotional infrastructure that “creates and sustains a city in which successful settlement can occur” (34). Social care, nonetheless, is privatized. Silvius argues that “the marketized refugee represents a profound departure from a paradigm in which the social care of/for refugees is a collective, and, presumably, national social responsibility” (2016, 32). The regionalization of refugee affairs is evident today in the many social capital-informed policies designed for the management of social affairs. As discussed in chapter one, social capital is part of a middle-range theory introduced by Bourdieu (1986) to account for social formation. It is defined by the existence of assets in the form of capital inside social groups and the ability of individuals to acquire social and material “‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word” (Bourdieu 1986, 248). The term social capital became a buzzword in North America in the late 1990s, especially with the work of Harvard’s public policy professor Robert Putnam and his discussion of the crisis of individualism facing American society (1995). Putnam proposes that the workings of social capital can “glue” society back together and restore the lost community spirit, namely to bind people inside the group through bonding capital and tether them with other groups through bridging capital. As I illustrated earlier, this model of social formation and interaction is widely deployed in refugee settlement studies. Conversely, Kiryakides et al. (2018) echo Malkki (1996) to suggest that migration scholars should depart from the statist definition of integration in terms of “transformation,” “safety,” and “charity,” and start tackling the distinctions between (re)settlement and integration focusing on actor-dependent, situated, and emergent meanings of settlement. The authors propose that questioning the competing and converging meanings of settlement “centralizes power ‘a definitional, enacted phenomenon’… negotiated in the sponsor–sponsored relationship in which participants are expected to achieve resettlement through the congruence of perspectives” (17). 26 Chapter 2: Methodology In this chapter, I outline my research design and the methods I used to conduct my research. I first provide an introduction that addresses some of the conceptual and methodological challenges around refugee studies. Next, I present an overview of my research objectives, followed by a summary of the literature and rationale for using a case study as a research design. I describe the research site and detail the procedures and methods for participant recruitment, data collection, and data analysis. I further provide a semi-quantitative profile of the research participants. Finally, I highlight my positionality and relevant experience, and I conclude with some ethical considerations and a note on limitations and rigor. 2.1 Introduction The interdisciplinary nature of refugee studies poses some challenges to designing an inquiry into refugee affairs. This field of research is often volatile, for it is continuously shaped by the different disciplines that generate its inquiries in response to policy and sudden mass refugee movements (Malkki 1992, 1996; Hayden 2006; Voutira and Giorgia 2007). Many scholars argue that attention to refugee vulnerability, agency, and well-being should be central to any research design and objectives (Hynes 2003; Ellen 2007; Clark-Kazak 2017). However, since refugees are only distinguishable from other social groups by their legal status, some argue that much of the scholarly work on refugees, particularly state-funded research, reframes and reproduces the phenomenon it seeks to understand in the first place (Malkki 1996; Zetter 2007; Chimni 2009; Ward 2016). Since its emergence in the 1980s, the field of refugee studies has been associated with policymaking and international development (Chimni 1998; Turton 2003). The scholarly interest in the legal status of refugees and the policy measures around it construct a category of refugees “as both the primary focus and the boundary for its research” (Scalttaris 2007, 37). The fact that refugee studies are bound to alternating policy-driven definitions, Malkki (1995a) contests, makes it difficult to map out the intellectual agenda of its scholars. Malkki argues that the lack of a distinctive body of theory for refugee studies places the qualitative findings on refugees in a pre-existing body of work, e.g., development, often in an “ad hoc” theoretical fashion (Malkki 1995a, 507). Development, having qualities of linearity and evolution, privileges a functionalist and normative understanding the world, one that seeks a generalizable phenomenon and to forge a stage-wise ontology for it (508). From a functionalist perspective, refugees are a “categorical anomaly” vis a vis “a whole stable sedentary society” (508). Elsewhere, as Malkki further explains: they are not ordinary people, but represent, rather, an anomaly requiring specialized correctives and therapeutic interventions. It is striking how often the abundant literature claiming refugees as 27 its object of study locates “the problem” not in the political conditions or processes that produce massive territorial displacements of people, but, rather, within the bodies and minds (and even souls) of people categorized as refugees. (1992, 33) While Malkki maintains that refugees are framed as cultureless and undifferentiated people inside the national order of things (1992, 1995a, 1996), recently scholars have argued that in pluralistic societies, older liberal ideologies continue to essentialize refugees in fixed culture categories, and their integration into receiving communities is framed as a matter of cultural adaptation or ethnic isolation (Abu Laban 2002; Winter 2015; Arrese Igor 2019). The last point is another attempt to repurpose the definition of refugees according to the nation-state’s policies. In contemporary multicultural and neoliberal societies, refugees are framed as “deserving victims” (Kyriakides 2018; Wallace 2018) and the recipient of humanitarian intervention (Nourpanah 2016; Ward 2016; Tyyska et al. 2017). More profoundly, the policy-driven functionalist model is central to refugee studies and policies, particularly in the reduction of refugee affairs to settlement practices (Silvius 2016; Carlaw 2018). For instance, stemming from a commission by the Home Office in England, Ager and Strang (2008) develop one of the most influential frameworks to approach resettled refugees. This model classifies refugees into an outcome-based inverted pyramid of “indicators” of integration. The framework, showed in figure 2.1, can be read in light of the recent shifts in policies and political discourses around immigration. From the top, employment, housing, education, and health represent the increasing neoliberalization of refugee affairs, with an emphasis on human capital and economic integration, and benchmarking refugees with immigrants and other refugees (Huot et al. 2016; Kaida, Hou, and Stick 2020). The middle part of the pyramid, social bonds, bridges, and links, is suggestive of the increased reliance on social capital as a public policy tool for refugee settlement (Poteet and Nourpanah 2016), and the relegation of refugee integration to local communities and regional processes (Tanasescu and Smart 2010; Silvius 2016). The tip of the pyramid, rights and citizenship, exemplifies naturalization as a normative, economic, and hierarchal culmination of refugee integration (Walsh 2011; Dobrowolsky 2017). In the Canadian context, Hynie, Korn, and Tao (2016) have built on Ager and Strang’s (2008) framework to create a holistic model for refugee integration that advocates for certain subjective variables such as “feelings of belonging and feelings of being home” (4). This way, the model rearranges the previous framework into three interactive spheres of integration: social, interactional, and subjective, and eliminates rights and citizenship from the scheme (figure 2.2). All scholars, Ager and Strang (2008) and Hynie, Korn, and Tao (2016) acknowledge the limitations of structuring refugee integration into a normative scheme but also highlight the importance of systemic knowledge in informing policies of immigration. As these two models suggest, there is no limit to the number of caveats one can introduce 28 into the body of knowledge and methodologies on refugee studies. Perhaps unlike other countries, Canada’s immigration history has been shaped by policy, and hence, it is not surprising that policy produces the structures for refugee resettlement, settlement, and integration in a tangible way (Oxman-Martinez et al. 2005; Hanley and Shragge 2009). Therefore, I pay attention in this thesis to the implications of refugee settlement policies, and I examine the integration indicators in chapter three. However, in chapter four, I focus on the social, cultural, and integrative components of settlement, and I describe community relations and analyze their connection with social capital and multiculturalism in Kelowna, a mid-sized city in interior BC. Figure 2.1 A conceptual framework defining core domains of integration (Ager and Strang 2008, 170) 29 Figure 2.2 Holistic integration model (Hanley et al. 2016, 38) 2.2 Research Objectives The overall objective of this case study is to provide a descriptive critical account of the settlement experience of Syrian refugees in Kelowna between 2015 and 2020. The main research questions guiding the thesis are: (1) Where and how do Syrian refugees, in a mid-sized city, experience settlement, and how is their integration contested, negotiated, and perceived? (2) How do intergroup and intra-group interactions inform the settlement? (3) How is the settlement of refugees positioned within neoliberal discourses on diversity, social capital policies, and the politics of multiculturalism? To address the research questions, I employ an ethnographic analysis of semi-structured interviews to report results categorized into six themes. In the analysis, I construct a descriptive account that critically demonstrates the correlational relationships between observations, the theoretical framework, the literature, and various processes and experiences that encompass the settlement of refugees. In the discussion, I tease the body of theory and literature surrounding the topic of refugee 30 settlement in Canada and, more specifically, in secondary urban centers. Finally, I introduce theoretical critiques and arguments that locate the intersections and disparities between multiculturalism and social capital as theories and instruments of government policies for settlement and integration. To gain insight into the settlement of Syrian refugees in Kelowna, prior to commencing this research, I embedded myself in the local settlement community of refugee sponsorship. I volunteered with a settlement agency as a refugee mentor, where my duty entailed helping newcomer refugees familiarize themselves with the city and life in Canada. Through this volunteer experience, I discovered that the complex affairs of refugee settlement—government policies, city size, culture and identity, and relational dynamics—shape a great deal of the experience of refugees and their host community. More specifically, I realized that the outcome-based approach, as described in the literature review, would not be adequate for descriptive research design for numerous reasons. As a reminder, refugees take distinct pathways in rationalizing integration (Kyriakides et al. 2018). The evaluation of refugee affairs often overlooks its bearing on the populations being evaluated. I assume that refugees understand the interest of institutions and researchers in their affairs. For that, an evaluative inquiry is likely to generate confirmation bias over time, as refugees circulate the type of knowledge to be shared with external authorities inside their communities to safeguard against stereotypes and protect their image. I found the literature on refugee integration, settlement policies, and the theories of multiculturalism and social capital to be very informative and useful. Therefore, I decided to use a case study research design that lends itself to an ethnographic approach to data collection and a mixed approach for data analysis. In other words, part of this research is grounded in the experiences and personal accounts of refugees, who discussed their settlement in Kelowna, addressing the first two research questions. The other part addresses the third question by using the case study as an instrument to provide insights into theory and literature. The following quotation by Liisa Malkki exemplifies a great deal of the design and orientation of my work: I would emphasize in all of this, the success of the fieldwork hinged not so much on a determination to ferret out the facts as on a willingness to leave some stones unturned, to listen to what my informants deemed important, and to demonstrate my trustworthiness by not prying where I was not wanted…It may be precisely by giving up the scientific detective’s urge to know “everything” that we gain access to those very partial vistas that our informants may desire or think to share with us. (Malkki 1995b, 51) 31 2.3 Case Study: Literature and Method Rationale A case study is phenomenological by nature, analyzing “the things themselves” (Eberle 2014, 3). Although the frameworks for it vary today, they span many disciplines and converge with other methods and approaches (Baxter and Jack 2008). Some classifications can be attributed to the type of inquiry (explanatory, descriptive, intrinsic, and instrumental) (Stake 1995; Yin and Campbell 2018). Others pertain to the design (single, multiple, holistic, embedded) or data analysis strategies (ethnographic, narrative, content analysis, comparative, analytic induction) (Stake 1995; Merriam 1998). Although cultural anthropologists were likely the first social scientists to employ case studies in their ethnographic work (Harrison et al. 2017, 3), for half a century, the case study has been incorporated into quantitative inquiries as a descriptive method. During this time, it has also been criticized as a research design because it does not necessarily address positivist concerns regarding validity and generalizability (Edwards 1998; Harrison et al. 2017). However, with the introduction of phenomenology as a research method (Husserl [1936] 1970; Schütz [1932] 1967), and with Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) grounded theory frameworks, the case study approach was revived as a rigorous qualitative method capable of generating structural data analysis and systemized forms of knowledge (Harrison et al. 2017). Yin and Campbell suggest three rationales for using a case study as a qualitative research method: first, when the main research questions are “how” and “why” questions; second, when the researcher has little or no control over the “behavioral events”; third, when the focus of the research is contemporary (2018, 32). Generally speaking, a case study is both a form of research design and a method for in-depth inquiry. Stake defines a case study by its ability to capture the complexity of “a single case. A single leaf, even a single toothpick,” that has a particularity to be understood “within important circumstances” (1995, xi). According to Stake, a case study could be a person, a group, a program, a policy, a relationship, or a theme. It is not a problem per se but has problems and complex relationships within it (Stake 1995, 133). Over the past few decades, Yin (1994) and Merriam (1998) have developed a definition that bounds the case study approach within real-world contexts, mainly when “the boundaries between the phenomenon and the context may not be clearly evident” (Yin and Campbell 2018, 45). Instead of controlling the environment, a case study examines the context that harbors and reproduces a phenomenon (Yin and Campbell 2018, 46). Merriam and Tisdell emphasize the single-entity nature of the case study, making the existence of a bounded system conditional to the validity of using a case study as a method. Furthermore, they explain that unlike other types of qualitative research, a case study is not defined by the topic of the research but by the unit of analysis—a bounded system (2015, 38). 32 In this thesis, I adopt case study as an (intrinsic7) ethnographic and instrumental research design: Syrian refugees in Kelowna and their settlement community constitute a bounded system, which can be considered a case. Thus, the case study is a suitable research design to address how a particular population of refugees experiences settlement in a conditioned setting and how this experience exemplifies integration, multiculturalism, and social capital in a mid-sized Canadian city. It is especially valuable when used in combination with ethnographic methods, which generate a thick in-depth description (Geertz 1973) that layers “meaning into closely observed details” and “helps make people’s behavior more comprehensible when we aren’t immediately familiar with their assumptions” (Narayan 2012, 8). Finally, using the case study as an instrument allows me to situate this research vis a vis and alongside other case studies of small and mid-sized cities and within the theoretical debates on multiculturalism and social capital in refugee integration. 2.4 Research Site Kelowna, a mid-sized city, lodged over two banks of the Okanagan Lake, is the largest urban center in the Thompson-Okanagan region (BC). The Kelowna metropolitan area (CMA) is home to 217,214 residents and one of the fastest-growing urban centers in BC and Canada (COEDC 2019). The city has been branded in the past couple of decades as a site for tourism, nature, retirement, and recreation: a “year-round playground” (Aguiar, Tomic, and Trumper 2005). On its website, Welcome BC, a government information hub for immigrants, the Thompson-Okanagan region is described as a “popular tourist destination with a sunny climate, beautiful landscapes, and a relaxed lifestyle. Its diverse economy is based on agriculture, the service sector, logging, and manufacturing” (WelcomeBC). In comparison to other mid-sized cities, Kelowna also has one of the least ethnically diverse populations in BC, with 81% of its residents declaring European origins and 9.5% categorized as so-called visible minorities, compared to 30% and 22% at the provincial and federal levels respectively (Statistics Canada 2016). Economically, the city thrives on attracting students, immigrants, and refugees to make up for the chronically low fertility rates of the region. As the 2017 local Vital Signs report recommended, “the indicators for both British Columbia and the Central Okanagan, like Canada, demonstrate a need to attract and retain a larger proportion of workforce aged adults, families, and adults of child-bearing and rearing age” (Central Okanagan Foundation 2017, 5). Recent literature on Kelowna contests the constructed image of the city as a benevolent urban zone (Aguiar, McKinnon, and Sookraj 2010; Tedesco and Bagelman 2017). The city is often described in academic circles as a “white oasis” (Tedesco and Bagelman 2017, 389), premised on the violent 7 An attempt to better understand the case itself (Stake 1995), in this case Syrian refugee settlement. 33 replacement and assimilation of Indigenous populations, the spatial segregation of racialized immigrants, and the exploitation of migrant labor (Aguiar, McKinnon, and Sookraj 2010; Grinnell 2014; Lo and Teixeira 2015; Tedesco and Bagelman 2017). The “whiteness” of the city is embodied in an upper-class business elite and is assumed to benefit greatly from the market economy and rapid urbanization, rendering minority populations spatially and politically absent (Aguiar, McKinnon, and Sookraj 2010; Tedesco and Bagelman 2017). Teixeira (2009) describes Kelowna as lacking “a multicultural atmosphere,” stating that it “has no distinct and large ethnic neighborhoods where new immigrants could go for help in finding housing and jobs on arrival” (328). Interestingly, this is the second time in recent history that Kelowna has received a sizeable number of refugees from a singular ethnic demographic. The first was the resettlement of Kosovar refugees in BC in 1999. Sherrell, Hyndman, and Preniqi (2005) suggest that the Kosovar refugee settlement outside Lower Mainland was the first manifestation of the policy shift towards the regionalization of immigrants and refugees in BC. 2.5 Participant Recruitment Prior to undertaking this research, I embedded myself in the settlement community of Syrian refugees in Kelowna. Working as a volunteer between August 2019 and February 2020, I had the chance to meet a good number of sponsors and service providers, some of whom became part of this research, and visit a few Syrian households. Only one individual refugee whom I volunteered with participated in the interviews. Through volunteering and building rapport with both refugees and the settlement community, I was able to locate some launch points for recruitment. I followed the snowball technique for the purposeful recruitment of research participants (Merriam and Tisdell 2015). Initially, through volunteering, I asked one mentee, who had already shown interest in participating, to inform other refugees at the English schools about my research and to obtain approval for initial contact. Simultaneously, I asked two service providers and one sponsor to tether me with Syrian refugee families and individuals with whom they worked directly. The logic of these two streams for recruitment was to aim for: a) a representative sample, and b) ensuring that the data gleaned from the settlement community was relevant to the refugee sample. Upon obtaining my Research Ethics Board approval on April 15, 2020, I initiated preliminary phone calls with the list of potential participants that I had already compiled. Those who agreed to take part in the research were scheduled for interviews and asked to provide referrals for other participants when possible. The small number of Syrian refugees in Kelowna, informally estimated between 40 and 45, and the small number of settlement community members made very clear the line where information 34 saturation occurred. Given that Syrian families in Kelowna live in a tight-knit community, an in-depth qualitative inquiry probes significant segments of the small community and its affairs through the narratives of its members. Those narratives intersected, converged, and overlapped with one another, to the point where some stories were reported more than one time. The participants in my study numbered 20 in total: ten refugee family members, four refugee individuals, three sponsors, and three service providers. For individual refugees, I recruited four out of the five individuals resettled in Kelowna. For sponsors and service providers, I recruited them through my volunteer work and their sample was sufficient since they were part of a small group that maintained active engagement in refugee settlement, worked with the families of the refugee sample, and held key positions in relevant organizations and programs. 2.6 Semi-Quantitative Profile of Research Participants The exact number of Syrian refugees in Kelowna and the surrounding towns of Central Okanagan is hard to identify due to the recent nature of Syrian refugee settlement in the region. The 2016 national census tallied 2,125 Syrian refugees in BC, roughly 60% of the total refugee population in the province (Houle 2019). In the same census, Kelowna had 30 Syrian-born immigrants, and 1,380 resettled and in-land claimant refugees between 2011 and 2016 (Statistics Canada 2016). The most recent statistic is that of February 2018 by Immigration Service Society (ISS) of BC, which identified 4,400 Syrian refugees living in 65 communities across BC (Friesen and Sherrell 2018). In Kelowna, a settlement agency organization reported receiving 18 Government-Assisted Refugee (GAR) families between 2015 and 2020, ranging in family size between three and 12, with an average of seven people. There is no official statistical account of Private Sponsorship Program Refugees (PSR). A major local private sponsorship group reported sponsoring 12 Syrian families and three Syrian individuals. Overall, community members, refugees, service providers, and sponsors revealed a consensus ranging between 45 and 50 resettled Syrian refugee families in Kelowna and 70–80 families in Central Okanagan between 2015 and 2020. Only two out of nine Syrian families interviewed were GARs. One family was sponsored through a partnership between the government and a local (blended visa) sponsoring group, or BVOR, and six families were PSRs. One PSR family was resettled through an Islamic congregation sponsorship group, and five were resettled through Christian congregation sponsorship groups. Out of the Christian group sponsorship, only one family was directly selected. The rest (n=4) of the families were recommended for private sponsorship by resettled families (family reunion). Two of them were fully financed by their resettled relatives. The interviewed families (n=9)8 ranged in size between three and 12. The average 8 The number of family individuals interviewed is ten, as two members of the same family were interviewed. 35 estimation of the parent male age was 50, and the average parent female age was 40. The ages of children ranged between two and 19. Two families were resettled four years ago, three families were resettled three years ago, two families were resettled less than two years ago, and two families were resettled less than a year ago. Only one male and two of his children were “naturalized.” One family reported having some of its members employed. Women, in general, did not have much employment since their arrival, while less than half of the men reported having some sort of employment during their time in Canada. One family consisted of a single woman, her children, and her father-in-law. The majority of Syrian families reported chronic and acute medical conditions amongst their members. Most of the families interviewed resided in the Rutland area. Almost all the Syrian children were attending school, except for three family members (aged 17–19) who reported being employed after finishing some sort of education or vocational training. Syrian families interviewed shared a low-income rural socioeconomic background in Syria. Only two parent males reported having post-secondary vocational training. None of the families resided in a refugee camp before resettlement, and all families expressed some degree of religious commitment. Individual refugee interviewees (n=4) were privately sponsored through partnerships with local sponsoring groups. Individual refugees ranged in age between 30 and 40, with half of them being females. Three of the individuals have been resettled for just over three years and expect to be “naturalized” soon. The three were employed and dwelled independently from their sponsors around the downtown area. The remaining individual arrived less than a year ago, lived with their sponsors, and was unemployed at the time of contact. This group of refugees did not reside in refugee camps before resettlement, shared an urban middle-class socioeconomic background in Syrian, and possessed post-secondary education and English credentials. Two of the individual refugees reported being religiously committed. The other two reported being an interfaith observant and an atheist, respectively. Service provider and sponsor interviewees resided in Kelowna around downtown and West Bank areas and were employees or members of settlement agencies and sponsorship organizations. Sponsors (n=3) aged 42 and above had post-secondary education and belonged to middle to upper-middle-class socioeconomic backgrounds. Two of the sponsors were women, with one sponsor belonging to an ethnic minority. Two of the sponsors associated with religious sponsorship groups and one reported independently partnering with a sponsoring organization. Service providers (n=3), aged between 35 and 55, had post-secondary education and belonged to a middle-class socioeconomic background. They were all women, with one belonging to an ethnic minority. Service providers were employed full time by settlement agencies in various sectors of refugee support such as reception, employment, housing, legal work, and translation. One service provider reported being religiously committed. Five refugees reported 36 volunteering with the settlement agencies in assisting other refugees, and two sponsors reported doing some volunteering with refugees through and outside settlement agencies. 2.7 Data and Data Collection To gather qualitative data, I conducted interviews with research participants over the phone between April and May 2020. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, Interviews could not be conducted in person. This has affected the overall scope of the research as ethnographic fieldwork was not possible anymore. Instead, data collected through phone interviews were analyzed using ethnographic methods, as presented in the next section. Before the interviews, I read the consent form to my participants and obtained verbal consent from them over the phone. Interviews were audiotaped with the permission of each participant. The length of the interviews varied, with the shortest being 40 minutes and the longest being 180 minutes. Six interviews were conducted using English and 14 using Arabic. After transcription, I disposed of the audio records and locked the transcripts in a secure folder on my personal computer. In designing the interviews, my focus was to uncover subjective meanings, stories, and experiences of Syrian refugees in Kelowna in order to write a descriptive account and infer systemic themes deriving from these accounts. For these reasons, I followed a constructivist and ethnographic approach in designing interviews, adopting unstructured and semi-structured interviewing techniques (Skinner 2012; Rapley 2011). Regarding interview techniques, Rapport (2012) maintains that the three types of primary qualitative interviewing (structured, unstructured, and semi-structured) “constitute a continuum rather than discrete points. What begins by intending one kind of exchange develops into another” (56). An interview can be a conversation where knowledge production takes place (Skinner 2012). This conversation, most scholars maintain, cannot be naturally occurring and should be shaped by the researcher’s interest and research questions (Rapley 2011). Kvale (1996) defines a constructivist interview as “a conversation, whose purpose is to obtain descriptions of the life world of the interviewee with respect to interpreting the meaning of the described phenomena” (cited in Skinner 2012, 9). With refugees, I decided to employ an unstructured design to allow their insights and lived experience to substantiate the inductive and abductive analyses. Sharing cultural commonalities and some similarities in the experience with refugee participants facilitated a reciprocal conversation, using Rapport’s words, an “incremental zigzag” (2012, 54) of the talk flow. I followed Rapport’s simply-put anecdotal account on interview evolution, “I begin with the intention of having a casual conversation with my daughter about our love of Scotland and end by wishing to interrogate her concerning her love life” (Rapport 2012, 56). The interview process began with asking a general question to set an oral account in motion, such as, “tell me a bit about your life experience in Kelowna so far.” Next, I used the theme that the 37 interviewee focused on the most to ask follow-up and in-depth questions concerning an experience, e.g., employment. Throughout the interview, I tried to allow participants to engage in monologues to obtain rich descriptions. However, I had tentative themes in mind informed by the literature (Hynie, Korn, and Tao 2016), mainly English learning, health, employment, housing, and social relations. In general, refugee interviewees addressed at least one of these domains when they described their lives. The only theme that required the formulation of structured questions was cultural integration since most participants did not address it organically. After I was done with supplementary questions, I asked participants about their experience with cultural integration, which generated a conversation on issues of values, gender, and family dynamics. Albeit unstructured by category, interviews gained incremental structuring through follow-up questions, and sometimes through specific questions about certain events. In adding supplementary questions, I was able to explore several areas: participants’ feelings, imaginations, understandings of their settlement and integration, reflections on their social interactions within their community and across ethnic boundaries, and finally, the participants’ beliefs and cultural values and their objective standing relative to the expected integration outcomes. At the end of each interview, I asked my refugee participants to provide some demographic and socioeconomic information about themselves and their families. Next, in translating the Arabic interviews, I followed Schrauf’s direct translation of the audio or video recording into a transcript in the target language method (2016). This method of audio-to-text translation is only intended for a bilingual researcher: one whose experience of first-language acquisition and primary enculturation took place in the specific community in which the cross-cultural researcher wishes to conduct research, and whose second-language acquisition and secondary acculturation have taken place over many years in the culture of the research team. (Schrauf 2016, 98) I conducted a verbatim translation and transcription with the omission of insignificant filler words; simultaneously, I made visible the cross-linguistic difference and cultural clues that are only explicable in the native language (Schrauf 2016). I also highlighted the cultural and colloquial use of certain words and terms. Finally, with the settlement community, I conducted semi-structured interviews to obtain direct feedback on the thematic topics. This stream of data was intended to increase the reliability of the findings and provide more in-depth insights into the workings of settlement and integration. I asked open-ended yet more structured questions about the community members’ experiences with Syrian refugees, their job descriptions, thoughts on specific events, motivations, policies of their organizations, social interactions, and challenges they faced. 38 2.8 Data Analysis In performing data analysis, I followed the ethnographic method detailed by Wolcott (1994) as a process of “description, analysis, and interpretation” (11–13). According to Wolcott, description pertains to the question, “what is going on here?” It is thick and treats data as if they “speak for themselves” (1994, 10). Analysis identifies the essential features and the systematic description of interrelationships among them. Finally, interpretation addresses the meanings attached to data patterns, answering the query, “what does it all mean?” (12). The underlying logic for ethnographic data analysis is the guiding objective of introducing a descriptive account of the lives and experiences of Syrian refugees in Kelowna. On the other hand, I used the case study as an instrument to engage with the broader theoretical debates around the topic. An instrumental case study is when the case is used to provide an understanding of a broader context than the particular situation, as well as give insight into and perhaps refine theoretical frameworks (Stake 1995). I began the analysis process during the period of data collection. After reading and reviewing interview transcripts, I coded data segments that pertained to my research questions. The codes9 were descriptions, terms, and ideas participants shared in the interviews. These essential bits of data contained details on integration, health, employment, English learning, relationships, culture, ethnicity, values, community, belonging, citizenship, settlement, discrimination, housing, challenges, fears, wishes, family, children, women, gender, and age. Next, when all interviews were transcribed and translated, I did a second reading of the coded scripts and identified regularities, similarities, and discrepancies in the accounts of participants. Using the software NVivo, I drew patterns inferred from the relationships between codes and clustered those patterns in six themes: English and education, healthcare, employment and financial support, housing, community relationships, and culture and integration. Within each theme, I organized data into three subsets: family, individual, and settlement. Within the subsets, I further reduced data by aligning codes into new nodes,10 where the theme’s matters of significance were described and narrated successively. In the presentation, I organized the findings in two chapters. In chapter three, I described some of the integration indicators: English, health, employment, and housing. The findings of those themes—correlated and interdependent—constituted a descriptive profile of the settlement conditions of refugees and contributes to the literature on the practical aspects of settlement. In chapter four, I introduced the social conditions of refugees in Kelowna, their relationships with each other, and with the settlement and broader communities. In this chapter, I expanded the descriptive scope and included three ethnographic 9 Code is “a word or short phrase that symbolically assigns a summative, salient, essence-capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language-based or visual data” (Saldaña, 2013, 3, as cited in Merriam and Tisdell 2016, 199). 10 A cluster of related codes. 39 portraits of participants, giving in-depth insights into the microcosm of refugees and service providers. In the sixth theme, data were structured according to the conversations I had with participants on the topics of integration, family, and gender. The analysis in the final theme continues abductively through the discussion, drawing on the pre-existing knowledge in theory while maintaining a relative ambivalence, which allows grounded work to remain central to the analysis (Timmermans and Tavory 2012). Data gleaned from the settlement community were also coded and categorized according to the themes that emerged from refugee interviewees. I analyzed the settlement community data side by side with refugee data. I compared, contrasted, and validated the accounts of the two groups. Finally, I incorporated the findings of this analysis into the six themes and presented them at the end of each theme, in addition to introducing an ethnographic portrait of one service provider. 2.9 Positionality As a resettled refugee in Canada, I belong to a group of forced migrants who did not arrive on a boat, did not live in post-arrival refugee camp, and we were not forced to wait for months to receive residency. In the refugee world, this is considered luxurious resettlement. As a “privileged refugee,” this has shaped my interest in understanding the uniqueness of the Canadian immigration system and its multicultural society. Being a resettled refugee who is studying refugee settlement places me in an emic position relative to the refugee group and an etic position relative to the settlement community. To that end, it is essential to present how my experience as a refugee has been different from the experience of those with whom I worked throughout my research. Like the refugees I interviewed, I was born in Syria, but I inherited the stateless legal status from my parents, which was passed down to them by their parents, the first generation to be forcefully displaced from Palestine in 1948. Growing up in Syria, I cultivated a sense of belonging and a love for Syrian people, as they have always been supportive of the Palestinian cause—Syria is historically the largest recipient of Palestinian refugees. Still, I stayed partly faithful to my inherited identity as it was contested continuously by occupation and reinforced by family. However, life inside a totalitarian regime is a peculiar experience. The Assad family has ruled the country since 1971 and turned Syria into a dogmatic and militant one-party republic. Akin to North Korea, the dynastic dictatorship controls information, shapes space, and propagates ideological discourses, using excessive force to maintain the image of the Assad family as feared and worshiped. Tyranny has manifested over the years in the form of torture, confinement, and the terrorizing of Syrian bodies and spirits. Syrian people have invariably resisted the Assad family over half a decade using both micro and macro forms of resistance. A few of my friends were imprisoned for 10–15 years for carrying political materials or attending an intellectual circle 40 in the 1980s. Many have died in prison. Many still die in Assad prisons as per the recent Caesar’s graphic photo leak (BBC 2015). Chronic fear has trumped the belief in change. The fear of politics, information, and difference is a feeling that has haunted my experience of everyday life in Syria, especially before 2011. Fear is generational and often inherited and self-propagated. There is a time in each Syrian child’s life, including my own, when they have the talk at home: not the sex talk, but the fear talk. We were taught to fear authorities and to avoid harm. Not only were our feelings reproduced by the totalitarian state, but our bodies were militarized in schools, and our awareness was stained with false consciousness about the world around us and the people outside our borders. Our identities were fabricated by half-baked dogmatic ideologies, and our relationships with one another were shaped by fear, corruption, and how far we measured from absolute obsequiousness. When people expressed their frustration in the streets in 2011, I was with them, chanting for their freedom and my own. The brutal military response was not unforeseen, but perhaps unparalleled in modern times. After two years of living in war-torn Syria, I decided to leave, to drop out of school, leave my family and friends, and relocate to Lebanon. There, I was able to secure a scholarship that allowed me to continue my education. After graduation, I was lucky again to qualify for a unique program that offers refugee students education and private sponsorship in Canada. In Kelowna, I must confess that I have struggled to reproduce a social life that was comparable to the one I had living in the Middle East. I experienced social isolation and had to relocate to a bigger city for some time to experience the diversity that is clearly missing in Kelowna. Even in this larger city, it took me a while to acclimate. My non-religious quasi-liberal upbringing did not help me “integrate” early on, for example. Social isolation was more salient than capitalizing on shared worldviews. Liberal thought as a contender to some fundamental and undemocratic ideologies in the Middle East loses a great deal of its attractiveness when it curtails Indigenous rights and reproduces racial hierarchies in Canada. Nonetheless, time is key, and later I cultivated friendships and established meanings around my position in Canadian time and space, and this research project has cemented my desire to unpack “refugeeness,” that of mine and others. Meanwhile, the route that my fellow Syrians took fleeing the war was more dramatic and precarious. Many Syrian families who made it to Canada experienced multiple internal displacements beforehand. Their homes and neighborhoods were destroyed, besieged, or appropriated. Many lost family members and loved ones and had to suffer for years before being able to cross the border to obtain asylum. In Lebanon, I lived in the capital Beirut, where thousands of Syrians today live in extreme poverty in informal settlements in the underdeveloped Beqaa valley. Some of the Syrian refugees who arrived in Canada waited for years in those camps to get on the U.N. resettlement waiting list. This 41 significant difference in the resettlement experience marks two important distinctions in terms of dealing with research on refugee communities. First, even though we come through similar resettlement vehicles, our experiences as refugees are diverse and colored by our personal history, socioeconomic background, and geography. Second, as a researcher, I must be aware of and reflect continuously on the privileges I carry today and the privileges I had in the past. In their analysis of positionality in seven cross-site participatory research projects, Muhammad et al. note that “matching researcher identity with that of the interviewee minimized social distance, mistrust, and barriers to hidden transcripts” (2015, 1057). It is almost intuitive that speaking the language of research participants and sharing a historical and cultural background with them, let alone sharing a parallel refugee experience, enriches the research and contributes to its validity and reliability. Bilingualism, news reporting in the Middle East, and social work experiences are my main non-academic qualifying assets to conduct this research. Pillow (2003) poses that “having racial commonalities with the subjects of your research does not automatically yield the research egalitarian” (182). In other words, being an insider amongst research participants does not necessarily negate biases, privileges, and imbalanced power dynamics. As a matter of fact, in research that deals with two different social groups (sponsors/providers and sponsored refugees), belonging to one group, preferably, places me in a dual position as both insider and outsider. My knowledge of private sponsors and service providers is limited to my personal experience, the literature, and my familiarity with Canadian society. This knowledge evolves with fieldwork and rapport building. So, I approach the communities of refugee sponsorship with a set of epistemic and ideological predispositions that are inherent to my cultural and academic repertoire. Some of these inclinations, hunches, and values may influence the research design and outcomes; I will disclose to the reader when they do so. Other predispositions relate to my institutional knowledge and political views, such as my belief in equity, human rights, representation, and countering hegemonic thought, as well as my commitment to make visible the struggle of historically marginalized populations. 2.10 Notes on Limitations, Anonymity, and Rigor Since I do not intend to produce generalizable findings, I believe the sample size is adequate for this research. What makes this thesis rigorous is the careful design presented in this chapter, i.e., how I got from point A to C through B (Merriam and Tisdell 2015). The approach to this research—constructivist, interpretivist, descriptive, and ethnographic—entails that internal validity is established through triangulation—the use of multiple sources of data, multiple techniques for analysis, multiple theoretical propositions and hypothesis, and positionality (Merriam and Tisdell 2016, 244–55). Having three streams of data—family, individuals, and settlement community—has helped validate the accounts 42 by comparing the streams and juxtaposing varying perspectives on the same issues and sometimes on the same story. Intentionally, I asked the settlement community to comment on specific matters raised by refugees, and often, refugee interviewees talked about the community and other refugees. For example, individual refugees articulated a critique of the Syrian community and reflected on their volunteer experience. However, some claims and assumptions put forward by interviewees were more difficult to validate internally. There were also some disparities in the accounts gleaned from the three streams. I made sure to highlight those disparities in the analysis. Nonetheless, the purpose of this research is not investigative, and accounts are analyzed according to their significance in the life-world experience of research participants. When further explanation of an issue was required, I utilized external resources, such as official websites and policy publications, to situate constructed knowledge in a broader context. In the analysis and discussion of results, I used ethnographic and instrumental methods. While the ethnographic portion is purely inductive and descriptive, the instrumental techniques are abductive in that they alternate between observation and theory, aiming to validate observations and modify theory (Baxter and Jack 2008). For that purpose, I conducted a few follow-up phone calls to ensure the interpretation of certain events was in tandem with participants’ accounts. Further, as presented in the theory section, I chose an interdisciplinary approach to theoretical deliberation. I drew on multiple fields of knowledge in the design, execution, and presentation of my work, such as anthropology, urban geography, political science, postmodern critical theory, and feminist theory. In the discussion, I employed theoretical frameworks from those fields to explore alternative explanations of the data or highlight how a constructed explanation can inform theory. Beyond my use of multiple methods, positionality was crucial to reliability as it highlighted my socially constructed understanding of the topic, and how it is positioned relative to participants’ accounts. I safeguarded against my own biases by explaining my position, personal history, and beliefs, and by minimizing my assumptions and interventions during the interviews. In a mid-sized city, Syrian refugees are highly visible to institutions and local communities. Most of the interviewees have participated in surveys before. Therefore, I faced two challenges in relation to participant bias in some of the family interviewee accounts, particularly with the construction of meaning being informed by participants’ relationships with each other. First, there was an inclination towards providing accounts that conform to normative outcomes expected by society and institutions. For instance, sometimes (un)employment, the justification for relying on financial assistance, gratitude, and good relationships with sponsors were overstated. Second, there was an increased self-awareness of the participants as a differentiated group, which resulted in concealing information that could be regarded as controversial or harm the reputation of 43 the Syrian community. Some participants shared information off-the-record and insisted on avoiding such information in publication even though they were provided full anonymity. Confidentiality and anonymity are essential when researching a small community. As a researcher, I believe that I have a duty to protect my participants, particularly in the way they ask to be protected. I provided anonymity for refugee participants but maintained their accounts distinct from each other through assigning aliases to their narratives. I changed, modified, and disguised information that could make a participant indefinable to the reader. Nonetheless, when data was crucial for establishing a personal narrative and connect the experiences of refugees across different themes, I included direct information after consulting with research participants. A few participants asked to review information about them before publishing the thesis, and their suggestions and requests for modifying the presentation of their accounts were taken into consideration. For settlement community participants, I fully anonymized their accounts due to the small number of participants, except for one ethnographic portrait where an alias was given. Even so, this is a descriptive research endeavor. I do not believe that it is my duty to obscure information to accommodate the moral inclinations and ideological beliefs of all participants. Inevitably, analysis is a process of framing information in an intelligible manner. To safeguard against the previous biases, I allowed the accounts of individual refugees and settlement community members to make visible those sensitive issues such as family dynamics and gender equality. Conversely, I used family refugee accounts to expose some misconceptions, biases, and prejudices in other accounts. 44 Chapter 3: Integration Indicators Integration indicators, as proposed by Ager and Strang (2008) and Hynie, Korn, and Tao’s (2016), are essential since they correspond to policies designed to include refugees in public life. Examining those indicators and describing the refugee experience in health, education, employment, and housing can also inform an understanding of how refugees navigate those domains of settlement agentively. Hence, instead of evaluating refugee performance or advancement in those domains, I focus on their perceptions, actions, and constructed meanings. I uncover the places where reality and expectations are mismatched and where refugees create their own alternative pathways to settling in Kelowna. This chapter is the first part of the results of the semi-structured interviews with refugee families, individual refugees, and sponsors and providers. I introduce each of the four themes with an overview, then I analyze the smaller subsets of patterned family data followed by individual data, and I close with feedback from the sponsoring communities and a conceptual linking to the frameworks presented in chapters one and two. I order the thematic analysis according to the consecutive construction of the relationship between the themes. This chapter addresses the first research question of how settlement and integration contested, negotiated, and perceived. It also addresses the neoliberal policies concerned by the third question. 3.1 Language and Education It did not come as a surprise that none of the family interviewees had English credentials before they arrived in Canada, given factors such as age and education. Families are well aware of the limitations of their “human capital,” and some did not approve the “lofty” expectations of individual refugees who were younger and more educated. What refugee families wanted, for the most part, is functional English knowledge that could facilitate their access to services and interaction with other groups, but that was challenging and more time consuming than refugees and their settlement community had expected. Those who attended the English school stressed the need for informal learning environments where they could organically interact with native speakers (Agrawal and Zeitouny 2017). There is a general perception amongst refugees that the Language Instructions for Newcomers in Canada (LINC) program has a limit to what it can teach. Fares shared his view on the LINC program: learning at LINC is not very productive, maybe you learn 25%. You basically do it to earn a certificate that will make you eligible to apply for citizenship. What teaches you properly is interacting with Canadians. If you work with Canadians, you will learn. If you have Canadian friends, you will learn. Another interviewee, Nazem, shared his experience after three years of learning English: 45 I feel like I am at a 50% progression. I would like to meet Canadians to learn better…for now, I just need to get by, to be able to answer calls from the government and doctors. But my age does not help. I forget a lot. Some words I have heard, and I know them, but I keep forgetting them. It requires persistence. Amongst the Syrians who were attending English schools, some were returning students, and others were preparing for the citizenship test and interview. In this sample (n=9) of Syrian families, the time spent in Canada did not always correlate with English advancement. There were cases such as Nida, part of a family of 12, who explained that her family members conduct most of their daily transactions in English and that they no longer required support or a language interpreter. Due to the size of the family, it was suggested that the children’s education could help enrich the family’s linguistic skills. On the other hand, I learned from interviewees and providers that some Syrian refugees did not advance significantly, even after 4.5 years in Canada. When the first Syrian families came to town, there was barely anyone who spoke Arabic. “I had the need to learn,” Khalid told me. Only this year, he decided to take a break from learning English after reaching a “good enough” level for him to take a shot at the Canadian high school diploma. He passed all sciences but failed English as it was too advanced for what he learned at LINC. Earlier, when he enrolled in his first vocational training, he was the only non-Canadian in the classroom. In the beginning, he had a harder time understanding technical terms, but when the training was done, he finished in the first place. “When I said I only had a Syrian high school diploma from 1980, no one believed me,” Khalid recounted. Syrians who did not attend English schools were mostly women. While some interviewees cited the absence of free daycare as a reason for not going to English classes, others stated that women had to stay at home to care for the children (Senthanar et al. 2020). Family size was brought up, this time, as a barrier to attending classes. In one specific case, the family reported that the woman could not go to any English classes because she had to care for a disabled child. Others failed the citizenship test and had to go back to school. The language barrier, as discussed further in the following themes, has a multitude of impacts on the quality of the settlement experience and the accessibility of resources, services, and information (Roy 2016). All Syrian families reported having uneasy communications with their sponsors, providers, and neighbors due to the language barrier. Job seekers emphasized that their language affected their eligibility for listings and their chances for upward mobility. Limited language skills impeded interviewees’ ability to negotiate and manage conflict in the workplace, as well as access healthcare and support. Indeed, Syrian families believed that learning English was their responsibility, especially with the expectations placed on their ability to achieve self-sufficiency in one year (Kyriakides et al. 2018). Although I did not question the level of their proficiency in English, they were mostly quick to state their 46 advancement and couple it with justifications such as, “I forget,” “I can’t focus,” and “I can’t practice.” The latter justification pertained to feeling trapped inside an Arabic-speaking social bubble (Drolet and Moorthi 2018). Syrians engage in self-reflection through critiques of the larger group by using the demonym “Syrians” instead of “we,” as one interviewee shared: if you come here and find people of a similar environment to where you came from…some people will get socially comfortable. Then, the language barrier continues to prevent Syrians from interacting with people outside their group and from accessing assistance. You need to know how to communicate with others here. Some of the refugees who arrived alone (“individual refugees”) took pride in their English credentials and the ways it allowed them to feel competent and included, but emphasized more how this differentiated them from family refugees. Others extensively elaborated on the effort and time required to learn English. Attending secondary education was noted by a couple of individual refugees as a great benefit to learning English beyond LINC. Frustrations with the lack of recognition of previous academic and work credentials were more salient amongst individual refugees (Wilkinson and Garcea 2017). For instance, Nour L. found her degree in applied chemistry to be useless in Kelowna and decided to switch careers and obtain a new degree in early childhood education. For Samer, who wanted his credentials in accounting to be recognized, the journey was longer. Samer’s experience was not taken seriously since any degree from Syria is non-transferable until Canadian credentials are obtained: This is my biggest issue here. I came with an education. Before, the US recognized all my credentials but did not grant me a visa, and Canada opened its doors for me, and I’m happy, but it did not recognize all my previous achievements. They made me redo several basic accounting courses to be able to repeat my CPA. Although, I have a bachelor’s degree, a diploma in auditing, and a Chartered accountant certificate, with 11 years’ experience in the field…I am employed now, but after almost three years, I am still working to obtain those Canadian education credentials. The lack of English skills made refugees hesitant to approach the settlement community for help. Every time they asked for help, it entailed an “awkward” interaction and a sense of “burdening” the community. When I asked members of the settlement community about English, they overwhelmingly stated the importance of language for the integration of refugees in society and institutions. Most of them had great expectations that refugees must learn English first for the settlement process to work according to plan. Although they did acknowledge advancement in some cases, and indeed applauded individual refugees’ English skills, their verdict was that Syrian families did not care much for learning English. Providers pointed to the low socioeconomic background of Syrian families and how that was a challenge since providers perceived education credentials to be essential for teaching refugees “Canadian ways” and matching them with jobs. They expressed frustration with the lack of Arabic interpreters and the high dependency of refugees on interpretation and translation services (Roy 2016). One provider shared what 47 they thought was the reason for the low attendance rates of Syrian refugees at English schools between 2015 and 2017: lots of families did not have much interest in learning English in the beginning because they had lots of support…the community was excited and wanted to help at the outset…sometimes when you get too much support, you become dependent on it, and you will have less desire to learn, especially if you have someone translating for you all the time. A year or two lapsed, and they still asked for interpreters. Someone would say I don't want to use the bus to go to English classes even though she knew how to use the bus. Another provider pointed to unemployment and the social dynamics of the Syrian community as barriers to learning English: my understanding is that the refugee families from Syria stick together, and this makes learning English more challenging and same with other groups too like Koreans. There is also a problem with refugees refusing to take lower-income jobs offered to them while they’re still learning English. Learning English is one integration indicator that is observed closely by scholars and the host society. When refugees learn English, they are more competent in making choices and living independently. However, looking beyond challenges related to age and previous education, it is clear that learning English is delinked from the social dimensions where language is a medium that sustains an intercultural dialogue. After refugees experienced the structural barriers resulting from lacking language interpretation and teaching programs, they have accepted language as a functional tool for acquiring support or employment. This finding supports the proposition that settlement is not multicultural per se (Hansen 2016). Another remarkable finding in this theme: in the accounts of the settlement community, the refugees’ motivation to learn English is coupled with the level of support. It is implied that “excessive” support spoils refugees, which uncovers two discourse; a neoliberal one that places self-reliance at the top of the settlement paradigm (Arneil 2006; Silvius 2016), and an orientalist one that assumes refugees are prone to idleness (Kyriakides et al. 2018; Malkki 1995a). Therefore, to self-rely does not require social and emotional engagement with the English language and its native speakers but rather requires a functional level provided by the non-immersive LINC program, which helps, first and foremost, with fast and low-skilled economic integration. 3.2 Healthcare It was quite remarkable to learn that refugee families only began to realize the compounded implications of health issues after they arrived in Canada. With little healthcare before resettlement, chronic diseases and disability grew worse with time and unpacked throughout the settlement. Syrian families addressed medical conditions and shared them with me. I sensed that they felt stigmatized when a disability resulted in reliance on welfare assistance. While much of the literature focuses on barriers and 48 unmet health needs (Tuck et al. 2019), disability amongst Syrian refugees remains undiscussed as a state of living instead of a mere barrier to ability. Indeed, refugees are rightly painted as “resilient” (Kyriakides et al. 2018), which demoralizes the rescue–pariah narrative. However, one has to question the ability of resilience frameworks to substitute vulnerability without prioritizing competency and outcomes, particularly when resilience is defined as “good adaptation despite having faced adversities” or “positive or average outcome despite the presence of risks and high odds for psychopathology” (Güngör and Strohmeier 2020, 2). Most of the time, I did not ask about refugees’ medical affairs since I did not intend to evaluate their well-being. Interviewees cited medical problems when they spoke about English learning, employment, and access to support. On the other hand, physical health was not a concern that individual refugees addressed, although some faced psychological repercussions after discriminatory encounters, as I discuss later in this chapter. Some of the medical conditions amongst Syrians are chronic and war related. Sari, one of the recent refugees to arrive with his family in Kelowna, told me that he was unconscious when he was carried out of Syria. He suffered a unilateral loss of vision and a skeletomuscular injury. Sari is satisfied with the medical attention he received but was, like many other refugees, frustrated with the waiting time (Newbold and McKeary 2018): It took me 11 months to see a specialist. It seems that they are short on staff in this area. I can’t complain and say that healthcare is bad here, I have nothing to compare it to, but if there is no direct threat to your life, you have to wait. Rami’s family suffered from the lengthy process of matching with a specialist for a 4-year-old child who suffered from a rare medical condition that resulted in a disability. The family did not receive medical attention after they arrived in Kelowna. Several times, the doctors did not take the child’s case seriously, and language was a barrier as interpreters were not always capable of effectively communicating the parents’ concerns to the doctors and vice versa: In Jordan, [they were] only two years when the disease started. We tried all sorts of doctors and clinics looking for the right diagnosis and trying different treatments. We started to get worried. My [child] showed symptoms of delayed development…it took us a year to see a pediatrician who wasn’t the right specialist…when they said they had to refer us again to a neurologist, I said, “this is what I have been telling everyone for a year!” The doctor laughed. All refugees were provided with family doctors when they arrived in Canada. Afterward, seeing a specialist remained a complicated and lengthy process (Newbold and McKeary 2018), as Rami explained: When you go to the family doctor with a complaint of back pain, they ask for a simple x-ray. Then they would say that you have problems in your back, and you should go to physiotherapy, and they give you painkillers after 5–6 months of therapy. You go back and tell the family doctor 49 that therapy and painkillers did not work. Now they refer you to a specialist who will take another 5–6 months. It took another six months for Rami’s family with the rare medical condition to see the new specialist, and after another period of testing and waiting, they received the right diagnosis, which classified the child as disabled. Later, an Arabic-speaking specialist was made available to the family. Now the child receives special care and has shown signs of improvement: It took three years. Finally, last year they appointed a bus to take [them] to school, a private tutor, and a nurse. The doctor also signed [them] up for the At Home program. They help challenged kids with everything until the age of 18. We know that there is no cure. We were lucky to do the genetic testing and be able to treat [them] with diet. Now, [they] can walk, speak, and use the washroom. [They] are able to recognize danger, and [they] can remember events better than before. For the most part, chronic illness and disability among refugee families compounded their efforts to seek employment and learn English. A couple of interviewees shared with me that their fear of stigmatization made them take a longer time to access disability resources. In other cases, as I show later, the lack of direct communication with health professionals and some paternalistic medical decisions made by the settlement community compromised the agency of refugees in choosing their preferred medical treatment. One persistent healthcare issue the settlement community agreed on was the lack of certified Arabic interpreters and the bureaucracy around the access to language translation (Newbold and McKeary 2018; Agrawal and Zeitouny 2017). Some interviewees associated the unmet need for interpreters with the persisting language barrier and the slow English advancement amongst Syrian families. Others located the problem in the fact that only hospitals and family doctors can benefit from free interpretation services. Specialists and private clinics must pay for it, and a few doctors have refused to see patients without an interpreter present. Both providers and sponsors reported having to go with refugee families to doctor clinics as uncertified language interpreters, as one provider explained: I go with them to the doctor in the first year, and volunteers do the same, although we are not supposed to do that. We are not certified language interpreters. It is a big responsibility, especially with medical terms…there are cases when the dialect of the interpreter cannot be understood by the refugee. Providers stated that the health of refugees is a determining factor in their settlement and integration. The extent to which health is considered in decisions with regard to settlement programming and assessment was not made clear to me. Though most members of the settlement community believed that refugees have PTSD, I did not learn about specific measures for addressing that within the settlement plan. Only one provider shared with me that their agency was uncertain when refugees were psychologically and physically ready to work and learn English. Only after they attempted to match some refugees with employers did providers and sponsors realize the impact of the health factor. 50 While many acknowledged some post-war psychological complications, namely depression and anxiety over relatives left behind, I did not get the impression that refugees sought mental medical attention. I certainly did not further probe their mental well-being, but I inferred from various accounts that the Syrian community benefited from the positive healthcare attitudes in Canada and the acknowledged limitations of the human body, while a great deal of their health needs remained unmet (Tuck et al. 2019). I suspect that the narratives of survival and “resiliency,” prevalent in the settlement community, coupled with the bureaucracy of medical care and the stigma of the “psychopathological refugee,” can push some to overlook their health issues or to take care of themselves with the help of the community. For example, refugees were informed by sponsors and providers that it was typical for wait times to be in months and years and that it is the same case for Canadians. That, in turn, compounded the lack of knowledge of the healthcare system and relegated its know-how to the community level. Syrians share tips about accessing healthcare within their community, which in many cases disseminate inaccurate information as noted by providers. Typically, when refugees needed disability assistance, it was not suggested by their sponsors or providers. Family doctors and other Syrians often recommend those measures since the settlement community prefers refugees to be working and not receiving assistance after the first year of sponsorship. After all, refugees must exhibit the expected resiliency. These findings are quite critical when social capital and multiculturalism are considered in neoliberal conditions. On the one hand, the insufficiency of the reliance on community knowledge and networks in acquiring healthcare proves that social capital is used as a “cheap” solution that disguises structural inequalities in material and information support in the healthcare sector. Szreter and Wollock (2004) have defended social capital in healthcare, but rightly cautioned that social capital is most valuable when its linking form is optimal, i.e., when both the state and community networks are involved and connected, which in turn requires a robust welfare state. Hanley et al. (2018) found the linking capital of Syrian refugees to be lacking in Montreal, where social networks are abundant. In Kelowna, an enclosed bubble of bonding capital where healthcare information is “discovered” solely by social interaction can perpetuate inequalities (Szreter and Wollock 2004). One the other hand, to put this in multicultural and neoliberal perspectives, the large number of refugee families requiring disability assistance indicates to some that sponsorship, settlement, and integration have “failed.” The image of a working and medically “resilient” refugee is interpreted as a reaffirmation of the righteousness of choice to sponsor them and it approves “good” diversity politics; alternatively, an unemployed refugee is a “problem” that needs to be “justified” to the broader community (Jenson and Paquet 2019). Nonetheless, refugees do naturally draw on their friends and relatives to acquire healthcare. When the system fails them, and when medical conditions are beyond treatment, refugees rightfully negotiate disability and claim the right to take care of their bodies despite the welfare stigma. 51 3.3 Employment and Financial Support This theme is where settlement is hardened, reframed, evaluated, and, most importantly, exposed as a normative place to integrate refugees into a neoliberal society. To the extent that refugees perceived employment as a discursive field of settlement, their sponsors, providers, and the broader community emphasized and expected employment as a gauge of “success.” As I presented in the literature review, the employment of refugees has been equated not only with that of immigrants but benchmarked with refugees of other ethnic backgrounds and reiterated in policies such as the road for “successful settlement.”11 In our case, only two families had members working at the time of contact. Other families had members working in low-paying jobs in the past and have stopped due to COVID-19. In contrast, most individual refugees found jobs before the end of their first year of settlement, but they were subject to greater discrimination. Employment in the eyes of refugees is defined by challenges and alternative solutions and not by the values it conveys to the family or broader society per se. The logic of that position is quite simple: refugees perceived their pre-arrival hardship as space and time where their capacity for the physical and psychological struggle was filled to the brim. Resettling in Canada, on the other hand, was seen as emancipation from having to navigate harsh conditions to provide for the family. Sari recounted, “I am 57. What I did before and left behind trumps what I expect from the rest of my life.” Employment, therefore, was not essential for self-realization, if we exclude the host context, as much as killing time or helping out within the Syrian community. When we do include host expectations, employment becomes essential for negotiating the settlement plan. The idea of employment in the first place was introduced to refugees by the settlement community. Considering Lam’s (2018) caveat that settlement is predicated on the incorrect assumption that all refugees are “eager” to work and achieve monolithic economic integration, it is fair to demonstrate too how refugees endeavor to find employment despite the various challenges I present below. 3.3.1 Credentials and Barriers A few refugee family members found employment in the first year, though they were only allowed to earn the equivalent of half of their settlement financial support. After the first year, refugees were expected to be employed. If and when they did not manage to secure employment, they turned to provincial and federal income assistance in addition to the continuing child tax benefits. In this case, six 11 The Syrian Outcome Report (2019) indicates that Syrians are “catching up” with other resettled refugees (iii). 52 out of seven Syrian families interviewed have followed the pathway mentioned above after their sponsorship ended; and the other three had not passed month 1312 yet, but they felt anxious about financial security. This process begs the question: Are refugees being served a recipe for poverty (Bokore 2013)? Doing the math, yes, refugees receive financial assistance similar to that of impoverished Canadians. The refugees’ math is rather distinct. Financial assistance is weighed against employment. If the latter is “worth it,” they will take a shot at it; if it is physically taxing and complicated by barriers, immense budgeting skills and social networking are employed to have their ends met outside formal employment channels. Refugees consider the type of jobs available for them and weigh the requirements against age, physical injuries, and chronic medical conditions: I tried different jobs. I worked in construction and carpeting for some time, but I could not do it for long because I have a medical condition in my back and my legs, it prevents me from doing intensive labor and blue color jobs that are usually available for refugee newcomers. Health barriers are compounded by the lack of relevant credentials that fit the local economy. Most male interviewees emphasized that settlement agencies tried to match them with employment opportunities in construction jobs such as roofing and carpeting. “Jobs are everywhere. Syrians usually do not face a hard time finding jobs in those areas such as construction and factory line production,” Rami concurred. Access to credentials and jobs in white-collar, managerial, and administrative positions seems farfetched since settlement agencies can only tether refugees with labor-intensive jobs given that employment, any employment, should be in place before month 13 (Hynie, Korn, and Tao 2016; Kyriakides et al. 2018). Rami tried to overcome his physical disability by picking up a less labor-intensive craft initiative that he had excelled at back in Jordan. Coming to Canada with some savings, he studied the Kelowna market, imported materials from Italy, leased a workspace, and started designing products that he believed had a decent demand in the market. But eventually, he could not manage to sell that product: I exhausted all possibilities…I tried to compete by offering sellers my product to exabit at their shops for a 30% profit share, and at times, I did not ask for the profits. All I received were empty promises. People always said they would get back to me, and they never did. Khalid, a sheep trader in Syria, humorously acknowledged that there was no sheep trading in Kelowna and that his age did not help in employment. As the first Syrian man in town, everyone was expecting him to find employment. His employment was needed for the framing of “we are happy, I have a good job” to be not only true, as is often the case, but the only facet of his integration before a community awaiting tangible outcomes of its humanitarian endeavors (see Brach 2016). Indeed, he worked for minimum wage at a carwash a few months after he arrived in town. While attending LINC, he took a couple of vocational 12 The first month after the end of the year-long sponsorship. 53 training courses with the help of a settlement agency. Later, he was matched with a job as a factory line worker. There, he was not granted reduced hours or an unpaid vacation for the month of Ramadan since he could not work 12-hour shifts while fasting. As a result, he had to quit. Switching jobs, Khalid realized the following: I was an idiot. I did not know how companies worked here. After six months of working as a security guard, I went to my supervisor and said, “I have been working here for six months, and I want to negotiate a better salary.” He started laughing. I asked, “why are you laughing?” He said, “you don’t get a raise after six months of working here. You don’t get a raise at all.” I realized I didn’t need such work. I needed a job that allows me to evolve. So I went back to the English school. As previously noted, language has had a significant impact on employment. Settlement agencies negotiated with a couple of construction companies to offer job opportunities to newcomers with minimum English skills. Able Syrian males, such as Khalid’s sons, are aggregating in those jobs, and one company became known for employing Syrians. I was told that as young able workers start to get specialty licensing and trade tickets, they can make average wages similar to Canadian workers. However, even after employment, language continued to affect the quality of employment and hindered upward mobility (Agrawal 2019; Oudshoorn, Benbow, and Meyer 2019; Senthanar et al. 2020). Fares came to Kelowna without any previous knowledge of the English language. He has advanced significantly through formal classes and working at a local restaurant, but he is not optimistic that one day he could run his own Shawarma business in Kelowna: I looked into it. The bank did not agree to grant me a loan…English is the biggest challenge in my life here. At work, you can’t express your thoughts and feelings in another language. For example, if you face a problem at work, you feel like you can’t exercise your rights because you don’t have enough vocabulary and expressions…Upward mobility is hard for us due to the language. Women mostly did not work and did not have plans to do so (contra Senthanar et al. 2020). They voiced the lack of free daycare as a significant barrier to learning the language and finding employment. For some, they sensed how unemployment might appear to society at large and in the settlement context: This country needs people to work and pay taxes. So, if the women are staying at home and don’t work and they don’t speak the language, what are they going to do?…Believe me, if we had daycare, Syrians would be doing better…Syrian women want to learn the language and obtain citizenship and work. 54 3.3.2 Discrimination and Success Since most of the families did not have employed members, they did not discuss discrimination in the workplace. Some differential treatment could be found in Khalid’s account on Ramadan working hours and Rami’s perception of his accent to be the reason why he was not taken seriously as he attempted to market his product: Brother, in this country, and I’m going to say it as it is: if you are not Canadian with a 100% Canadian accent, you can’t make it here. When you speak to them one-on-one, once they see your accent is not right or you make a grammatical mistake, they think that you are a fool, and your deal is not real…Here, if you have an accent, you can never do business like Canadians. All Arab businesses you see around here have a Canadian person in front representing them. Discrimination in the workplace and the lack of credential recognition, alongside some of the previous barriers, became more evident in the employment experience of individual refugees. Individual refugees had to accept lower-paying jobs, which made them vulnerable to mistreatment. Sami, who was resettled to Kelowna less than a year ago, came with 13 years of experience in design. When he applied for a few jobs in his field, he only heard from one company. He was offered a minimum wage salary and was asked to clean the office after work. While Sami did not take the offer, his frustration with the “small-town life” pushed him to relocate to Ontario before the end of his first year. As Nour L.13 was working on obtaining new credentials, she was happy to work at a salad bar and later at a grocery store. “It gave me the Canadian experience and improved my English a lot,” she recounted. The owner of the grocery store was empathetic, but he did not respond well to her complaints about physical and verbal harassment by her supervisor, a person of Middle Eastern origins who resented women wearing a hijab: That was the worst experience in employment here. Unfortunately, at that time, I did not know my rights…more than one time I told him [the supervisor] that I did not like to be touched on my shoulder or my hand, but he intentionally kept touching me. He would tell me, “You are in Canada, and you should get used to that.” I told him this has nothing to do with Canada; it just made me uncomfortable. One time he said to me, “you come from an environment where they don’t respect women. You should be thankful because I respect you.”…As a woman, I was not comfortable working with this guy at all. Another Syrian woman worked with him after and told me she suffered similarly. Nour L. told me that she thought she bore the responsibility for not knowing her rights and not standing up for herself, but she was surprised that in Canada, you could be harassed for being religious. A friend of Nour L., who shares her name, also suffered from discrimination in the workplace but decided to act and sue the company for discrimination. I present a more detailed portrait of her story in a later section. Despite discrimination and the refusal to recognize their credentials, individual refugees stressed 13 There are two women called Nour in this analysis and they are friends as I show later. This Nour L. resettled to Kelowna. The other Nour K. resettled to a neighboring small town and moved to Kelowna three years later. 55 the importance of their employment in Canada. Some were able to overcome the credential barrier by starting at low-paying jobs and acquiring Canadian post-secondary education. Nour L., who had to acquire new credentials, was very proud of the contribution she was making to society through her work with autistic children. Samer is often described by sponsoring and settlement communities as the most successful refugee in Kelowna. He embraced his public image as he was indeed the only Syrian refugee who had a high-paying job and owned property. Concerning families, Khalid settled for a more “laid-back” job delivering food to kill time. His three sons have joined a roofing company, and he still received some support for his younger children. Rami eventually resorted to income assistance after three years of working multiple jobs and trying to mobilize his business. I was surprised when he disclosed to me that, after receiving his citizenship, he had aspirations to immigrate to another country where he can make money beyond minimum wage and government support. However, family comes first, and it all depends on whether the medical conditions of his family members allow travel. Mostly, unemployed refugees expressed that they would not mind working under the right conditions, but their narratives about their day-to-day life revealed a nonchalant perception of employment. Securing and locating assistance, caring for the children, reuniting with families, and networking with other Syrians were far more important than employment. This finding does not support most of the literature that presumes employment as destined for resettled refugees (Agrawal and Zeitouny 2017; Wilkinson and Garcea 2017; Senthanar et al. 2020). 3.3.3 Expectations, Responsibility, and Negotiation According to the settlement community’s account, settlement agencies prioritize employment from day one of a refugee’s arrival. A new program14 was implemented to connect with refugees before they arrive and survey their skills and education in order to improve the job search and matching process. In one organization, more providers were working in employment services than other social support areas. Some employment counseling and training programs cater to immigrants and refugees without differentiating between them. Providers often compared employment statistics and benchmarks between multiple ethnic groups and genders. One sponsor shared the following: The men can get into trade relatively easy and especially now that there is a good base of Syrian refugees in town that they have made their own connections and established themselves as good workers, and employers are more apt to hire more. Generally, members of the settlement community accentuate the role of human capital in facilitating employment, even though the Canadian market requires Canadian experience and Canadian credentials. The point here is that the more human capital a refugee has, the better their chances at employment and 14 Part of a research-induced policy for enabling pre-arrival contact with refugees. See prearrival services (IRCC 2019). 56 upward mobility. A few sponsors stated that upward mobility is possible for “able Syrian men,” but suggested that refugees “would hit a limit” in their upward mobility due to the competitive and exclusive nature of the employment market in Kelowna. They pointed out the lack of companies that were willing to employ people with limited English skills. The business community in Kelowna has been described as “cliquey” and run by conservative men elite that excludes immigrants and minority women from high-paying visible job positions (Lo and Teixeira 2015). Related to that, it was emphasized by one provider that men were more likely to find jobs than women: Hiring a woman with a hijab who is totally capable of doing a receptionist job is something I have never seen here…we hire people who look like us. Men like to hire men, and that is why there are so many men on business boards. One sponsor interviewee did not agree with Rami’s perception of the need for a “white person” to speak on the refugees’ behalf in their entrepreneurial endeavors: I think it is more of a difference in how Western society does business versus Syria. I think the entrepreneurial spirit in Syria is very strong…however, it does not translate the same in Canada; owning a business here can actually be more hassle than it’s worth. There is so much legislation and so many licensing. It is trickier to negotiate that bureaucracy, which stumbles a lot of immigrants and refugees…It is made difficult so the people who are in, to stay in, and the ones who are out, to stay out. Other settlement community interviewees reported that, compared to other ethnic minorities, Syrian refugees did not accept lower-paying jobs, preferred to receive social assistance, and sometimes had unrealistic salary expectations. In some cases, a family can earn more from government assistance than working in labor-intensive and low-paying jobs. A provider complained: Most of the Canadians who are opposing Syrian refugees now, they do so because refugees are not working…because they believe that those refugees are living off their taxpayer money… Their [refugees] socioeconomic background sometimes does not allow them to understand the responsibility, so they get sad and then they compare support between different families. There is like a competition between the families of who can get the most material support. Refugees negotiated this trade-off between work and financial support since, obviously, starting from the bottom is not the first idea that comes to people in late middle age, most of whom have worked for most of their lives. Instead, many seek semi-retired status, and the settlement community was not happy with that nor with the fact that some refugees were saving their income assistance money (Lenard 2019). The satisfaction of the host was not always a concern for refugees. There is a space for negotiating what can be done in employment, e.g., the employment of the children or working within the community in offering services and trading goods. This finding supports Kyriakides et al. (2018) findings that Syrian refugees contest neoliberal expectations and carve an agentive space for their livelihoods despite the settlement community’s expectations. A provider shared their frustration with the reliance on services of 57 refugees: They think that you are there to do everything for them…I tell them, “when you were in Syria you decided for yourself, you worked and raised your kids without assistance. Even in Turkey, you were responsible.” But when they come here, they totally depend on the government, maybe because it is a big and wealthy country. In employment, social capital is salient in two ways. First, while the government expects refugees to secure employment and evaluates their “market outcomes” (Picot 2019), it is the responsibility of the host community to pool resources and personal and communal networks to assist refugees in finding jobs. Second, while bonding capital is exploited in employment, it can trap refugees in low-paying and physically-taxing jobs (Nakhaie, Lin, and Guan 2009), such as an entire community becomes labeled as one that produces certain labor force, roofers for example. On other occasions, cultural barriers prevented refugees from obtaining work, such as Khaled’s Ramadan leave case, and as one provider explained with frustration. I arranged an interview with a company for a driving job and again it was difficult because [the refugee] was very devoted so he wouldn’t shake hands. People don’t understand that here. That’s what needs to be understood on the HR level and needs the appropriate training. But also, for example, in the States, they would simply say, “here in America we shake hands, and that is the way it is.” When the government provides financial support to refugees and simultaneously tasks their host-community with integrating them in a competitive labor market, it plays a critical double role. It provides refugees with poverty-level support which defines their entry to Canadian society as impoverished populations, and it overlooks the structural barriers to refugee employment, which creates frustration on the part of the host community when refugees become “unemployable” under such conditions. The Kelowna labor market is discriminatory against Muslim and refugee women and is not prepared for cultural diversity. Discrimination and devaluation of refugee skills and experiences are not paradoxical to the desire to employ them. Instead, refugees are expected to be positioned in lower-skilled labor sectors. When this is not applicable, refugees are either to join the impoverished and stigmatized Canadian populations, or to start from scratch and “catch up” with the professional and neoliberal market. 3.4 Housing The house is the central space in the Syrian family’s dynamics and social life. Although most refugees were dispersed in the beginning, they eventually came together in the Rutland area—a low-income neighborhood that houses multiple ethnic communities.15 Refugees perceived their homes not as 15 Hynie, Korn, and Tao (2016) state that it is not unexpected for refugees to cluster in periphery and low-income neighborhood given their material conditions in Canada. 58 private spaces but often as Syrian spaces, places for communal interactions and gatherings. Therefore, when housing was lacking, so was social and familial comfort. During a few visits I made to Syrian houses while working as a volunteer prior to this research, I was not surprised to find the living room a lively shared space for families and guests regardless of age or gender. The apartments I visited looked less like the local arrangement of space and furniture and more like Syrian apartments in Syria. Indeed, the size of the apartments and the low quality of their infrastructure did not leave much room for differentiating between spaces and providing privacy to family members. Relative to the dominant single-detached housing style in Kelowna, Syrians lived in matchboxes (Wilkinson, Garcea, and Bhattacharyya 2018). Most interviewees described difficulties in securing housing in the first or two years of their settlement. After that period, families expressed frustration in finding housing of adequate size. All interviewees dwelled in apartments, with the largest household consisting of 12 members. Individual refugees faced almost no challenges to housing. Most of them stayed for a short time with their sponsors before they were assisted in finding separate accommodation. The longest time an individual refugee stayed with their sponsors was eight months. One obtained a mortgage after three years of settlement. Social networks and sponsors’ friends are the first lines of housing support for PSR Syrian refugees (Hanley et al. 2018; Silvius 2016). Families either stay or change their initial accommodation based on factors such as rent, size, lease period, and eligibility for assistance. A good number of families had to move more than one time during their settlement in Kelowna. After moving two times, one family was able to strike a deal with the Masjed and lease one of its properties. The Masjed has tethered the Syrian community with other ethnic groups, which helped in locating communal resources and key persons in the Muslim community. However, it has been communicated to me that the Masjed suffers from chronic financial shortage compared to other religious congregations. Fares, a father of two, told me about his family’s experience in finding housing: we had to move four times to find more affordable housing and a bigger space for the family, and just after we found one, we were informed that we were eligible for assisted housing. First, they gave us two rooms and then they gave us three rooms. The BC Rental Assistance Program provides low-income families with cash assistance to help with monthly rent payments (BC Housing 2019). The assessment of support is calculated proportionally to household income. Families who received housing assistance expressed content with the support. “I only pay $570 plus bills. BC housing helped us a lot with budgeting,” one interviewee reported. Conversely, Nida, a mother of ten, had a different experience with BC assistance: 59 Because we are a big family, we have been waiting for housing assistance for two years. We still live at the apartment the sponsors secured for us, but it is expensive. Mostly, all the children’s tax benefits go to the rent. We are living on a tight budget. Due to the lack of adequate official support, social networks are essential to securing adequate housing for Syrian families. The Masjed tethers people with community resources (D’Addario, Kowalski, and Lemoine 2008) and Syrians now know where to look. Over time, they have come to explore the hidden housing market in Kelowna. Syrians also circulate housing knowledge and tips within their community, teaching newcomers how to navigate the market and housing support. It was noted that families who arrived after 2017 had an easier time finding housing. For example, the community prepared housing for families who were privately sponsored through family reunion before they arrived. Sari conveyed to me how much he was surprised by the sponsors and the Syrian community’s readiness for his family's arrival. “Not only an apartment, but I also found they prepared a toothbrush and washroom and outdoor flip flops for me,” he recounted. Similarly, Lina’s brother-in-law worked with the church to find her an apartment close to the community. Munir, who arrived recently, found housing in Rutland close to his brother and nephew. He pays his rent with the financial support he is receiving from his sponsors, but he is worried about his family’s housing situation after the sponsorship ends. Talking about housing assistance prompted interviewees who received housing support to discuss work and physical disabilities that ruled out the possibility of their ability to afford the full rent. Even those who received support complained about the prices and the competitiveness of the housing market. One issue that came up was the unfeasibility of securing houses instead of apartments. Larger families dwelling in apartments protested the limited space and the uneven distribution of rooms amongst children and parents. Without assistance, a refugee family cannot afford a single-detached house. With assistance, the government always favors apartment arrangements for families. A small family believed that their small size was the reason why they were placed in an apartment, while a larger family believed that their large size was delaying assistance. Most Syrians described good yet formal relationships with their neighbors. Nonetheless, the lifestyle dictated by apartment living and the proximity to other people created some tensions between Syrian families and their neighbors. A few cases were reported to me about neighbors calling the police or the Ministry of Children and Family Development after incidents of perceived negligence, which I present later. Aside from that, the socialization norms of Syrians that entail late-night visits with children has been problematic in some neighborhoods. One interviewee has experienced such conflict firsthand: You know Canadians sleep at nine, and Syrians start visiting each other after nine. The neighbors filed noise complaints to the condo office three times. I stopped hosting guests with kids after nine. I would tell my Syrian friends, “we’re closed. Chairs have been flipped over tables.” 60 Finding housing for newly arrived Syrian refugees is one of the hardest tasks of the settlement process, according to many interviewees in the settlement community. The housing market in Kelowna has been described as slim, competitive, and semi-segregated (Teixeira 2015). “Kelowna is a wealthy town…and tends to be for non-racialized people,” one sponsor described to me. That explains why for a refugee family, finding housing is a matter of pleading, mediating, and extensive networking on the part of the settlement community and refugees (Silvius 2016). Newly arrived refugee families stay at hotels until their sponsors and providers find housing for them. Landlords are often skeptical of large families with limited English skills, and their first answer tends to be negative. Sponsors and providers usually convince landlords by appealing to values and behaviors preferred by property owners in Kelowna, such as the argument that Syrian families “do not drink or party” and will pay rent on time because they receive support. Sponsors stress the need for them to accompany refugees when they go for viewings, as one interviewee explained: If they were to have a Syrian family that comes up with poor English and the wife is in a hijab, they would not get the success rate for getting the place that I get…because I am a white female, well-spoken, well-dressed, friendly…I am the perfect tenant per se that the landlords look for. However, I get frustrated sometimes because I think “guys I advocated for you; I pledged your case. The landlord is giving you a chance here so don’t blow it. Don’t play into that stereotype of what people think that immigrants and refugees are going to be. Don’t play into that!” With the devolution of official housing responsibilities (Tanasescu and Smart 2010), the settlement community hopes, not for the government to provide better housing support, but to build a better rapport with landlords, so more acceptance is fostered in the market for refugee families. In turn, refugee families are expected to live up to the expectation of their sponsors and landlords. In other words, they are expected to capitalize on their “positive stereotypes.” When they do not do so, they are thought to damage the established community reputation. This finding is another evidence for the poverty-level support for refugees and the market bias against them in Kelowna. It is evident in housing how the intersection of self-help social capital policies, lack of multicultural frameworks, and the exclusionary housing market push refugees to ethnic clustering and social isolation. Under those conditions, when refugees are faced with structural barriers and burdening expectations, they prefer to tap into their limited ethnic networks to secure housing closer to their families and friends regardless of accommodation conditions. In this chapter, I found that the English barrier complicates other fields of settlement and hinders the refugee's ability to communicate their needs, particularly with the acute lack of certified language interpreters and the non-immersive English programs. Some refugees endeavored to find employment mainly individually sponsored refugees; however, most refugees did not emphasize employment and managed to support their families through financial and community supports. Moreover, the housing situation of Syrian refugees in Kelowna is characterized by poverty level conditions and tight spaces. 61 Subtle and overt discrimination in Kelowna’s employment and housing markets moderates equal access to adequate housing and upward mobility. Discrimination at the workplace and in public spaces, coupled with the unrecognition of academic and work credentials and exclusive employment and housing markets, pushes refugees further down the self-help pathway. However, refugees repurpose the neoliberal narrative to make agentive choices by relying on themselves and their ethnic community to make up for the missing official support. More importantly, refugees contest the destined and normative plan for their settlement and find alternative pathways to financial sufficiency and social and emotional support. On the other hand, the settlement community places many unrealistic expectations on refugees, especially in terms of employment and language learning. Providers and sponsors are too tasked with utilizing their limited community resources to settle refugees in Kelowna. This community investment in settlement and integration falls short in meeting the needs of refugees with the lack of proper public support. Therefore, when refugees decide to depart from the host community’s plan, providers and sponsors feel frustrated and helpless. This will be further explored in the analysis of community relationships in the next chapter.62 Chapter 4: Community Relationships and Cultural Integration In this chapter, the results and data analysis are continued as I provide an in-depth analysis of the relationships that produce refugee settlement and mediate its implementation. Through describing the social worlds of refugees and their settlement community, aspects of multiculturalism and social capital can be critically examined and situated in the context of this case study. Social interaction highlights the challenges to settlement and the ways they are negotiated through relationships and refugee perceptions of integration culturally and socially. Therefore, in the fifth theme (community relationships), I expand my descriptive account of the communities in question and present three in-depth ethnographic portraits. In the last theme (Culture, family, and integration), I analyze data on integration, family dynamics, and gender. Different than the structure of the previous chapter, I analyze ethnic social relationships separately from relationships with the settlement community and Kelowna residents. This is done to highlight the emergence of the Syrian community in Kelowna and its characteristics through the narratives of its members. However, in the last theme, I close with feedback from the sponsoring communities and a conceptual linking to the frameworks presented in chapters one and two. This chapter addresses the second research question of how intergroup and intra-group interactions inform the settlement. It also partially addresses the third question on the roles of multiculturalism and social capital in neoliberal conditions and paves the way towards an elaborate discussion in chapter five. 4.1 Community Relationships 4.1.1 Syrian Community and Social Spaces Three years ago, when I started considering my research topic, there was not much talk about Syrians as a community in Kelowna. The number of Syrian immigrants did not exceed a double-digit figure (Statistics Canada 2016), and refugee families were too dispersed to cluster in a cohesive social group. Between 2015 and 2020, the Syrian community was in the making, and today Syrian refugees speak confidently about the existence of 45–50 families in Kelowna and 70–80 in the Central Okanagan region. The confidence in the number of families in the community was not only a matter of estimation. Syrian families knew each other by name, as well as their regional origins in Syria and sponsorship status. When I expressed my surprise to one Rami—dubbed by the community as the Mukhtar16—about his knowledge of the number of Syrian families in the area, he explained: Well, I mostly know everyone because I am one of the first people to come here. When families arrive, they start asking about other Syrians in the area, and mostly they would come to the 16 The head of local government of a town or village in Syria, used here to signify importance and influence. 63 Masjed, and I rent an apartment from the Masjed, so I would mostly be one of the first people they meet here in town. The composition of the Syrian community in Kelowna is primarily familial and kin based. After a few families were resettled in the area, a private sponsorship chain reaction took place. First, one local sponsorship group received numerous requests to sponsor the relatives of the resettled families. Accordingly, private sponsors shifted their quotas to prioritize family reunions. Amongst the families (n=9) I interviewed, four were related—two families related at a time. Moreover, one family and one individual interviewee had relatives in Kelowna. I can claim with confidence that the Syrian community is tight knit. Syrian families live together day-to-day. They spend a decent fraction of their day socializing with one another, visiting each other, and, obviously, talking about other Syrians. Families converge privately inside houses and publicly in parks and recreational spaces (Hanley et al. 2018). Namely, there is a park where families hang out and let kids play. Many of them call it the “Syrian park.” At the park, women and children socialize during the day, and men mingle at night before they gather at one of the community members’ apartments. On these occasions, the men converse, share coffee and tea, and some play cards until late at night. As the only Christian Syrian in town, an interviewee expressed to me his content with the inclusivity of the Syrian community: You know, after the crisis, there was a lot of sectarianism in Syria, but not here. Being the only Christian family here, we never felt discrimination from Sunni17 Syrians. They treat us like they treat each other. We participate in everything. One time I went to attend the Mawlid,18 and I was the only Christian there…I love socializing with the guys. Unlike the first two years of settlement in Kelowna, Syrian refugees now rely on each other to locate resources; secure housing and employment, emotional and child support; and mediate conflicts (Hynie et al. 2018). Over the past five years, Syrians have accumulated a fair amount of experience in navigating disproportionate private and public systems of support, as well as finding alternative ways to provide certain products and resources to community members. In fact, I noticed a sense of competition amongst interviewees in presenting their knowledge of resources and how to find and access the most affordable products and services. For example, one interviewee travels to Oliver to buy cheaper groceries he can resell to the community. Another told me that he supplies the community with untaxed tobacco he imports from a First Nation reserve in Ontario. Further, one woman said that she sometimes offers tailoring services for community members for free, though she plans to charge people once she has established a customer base. Locals have noticed the intimacy of the Syrian community and several 17 Sunni Syrians refer to themselves as Muslims and their sectarian identity is not emphasized when discussed outside the Syrian political context. Since the interviewee is Christian, they used the term Sunni. 18 A Sunni religious celebration. 64 sponsors expressed their fascination with Syrian social and cultural life. One refugee commented on this matter: Rarely do I ever spend a night alone at home. There are always Syrians over, or we get together and go spend the evening at someone’s apartment. Canadians who know us always say, “you Syrians stay together all the time.” The Syrian community provides emotional and material support for its members. Community members usually support women who came alone or with their children. Fares, for instance, shared with me that instead of selling a car he has received as a gift, he dropped it at a local church so other community members could benefit from it. Most importantly, Syrian refugees who arrived after 2017, invariably found community members welcoming them at the airport who were prepared for their arrival. Munir shared his experience with the community upon arrival: The Syrian community welcomed us at the airport. They are good people. They are like us; we are all displaced. It would have been harder without other Syrians here (emphasis added). Individual refugees employed their credentials and English skills to volunteer within the Syrian community, helping women at home with English learning, accompanying families to clinics, and babysitting Syrian children and teaching them Arabic. This volunteer experience did not last after the second year of the Syrian refugee settlement in Kelowna, in part due to the feeling of detachment from the community that individual refugee members began to experience. I elaborate on this matter next. 4.1.2 Syrians Discussing Community Although Syrian families enjoy their extensive, yet small, social networks, they also like to talk about the community and other Syrians. Indeed, one way to look at that is as a form of community gossip. Another way Syrians express their views on their community is through reflection and critique. When asked about the community, some would talk about “Syrians,” and less commonly, some would use more reflexive language such as “we” and “us.” However, the excess of familiarity in this small community could render socializing challenging to some members. 4.1.2.1 Too Many Children, Too Many Benefits One of the topics that Syrians discuss extensively is financial support. Knowledge about accessing financial support circulates heavily in the community. However, the community is of two minds regarding the entitlement to and the use of financial support. A couple of family interviewees shared with me their belief that other Syrians are hoarding their financial support instead of spending it on enhancing their families’ lives. In addition, some thought that Syrians excessively have children to receive the child 65 tax benefit and avoid working. For example, while talking about finances, one Rami asked me if I came here as a bachelor, and when I answered yes, he replied: You will never be able to save money in Canada…it is all about the family here…the poorest of them [Syrians] has $50,000 in savings…They come here with big families…I came here with two kids, but most of the families came with five and six. I know a family of ten kids. Every kid will receive $600 in support from the government, and through the first year they receive $1,500 for each family…After the first year, they work or apply for income assistance.…It is a matter of proportion and fit for Syrian families. Fares did not share the same exaggerated sentiment. With regards to having many children, he said: Then what’s next? The kids will grow up eventually…Syrians are not thinking about the future. They are budgeting well, but they are not accounting for one meter ahead. They have kids for the sake of the $600 tax benefit. Kids will grow up…and ask, “Dad, you got paid a salary for me; what did you do with this money? You did not work, and you stayed on welfare.” Individual refugees who volunteered with the families expressed concerns about the number of children in Syrian households and the reproductive and psychological well-being of women. One volunteer disclosed to me that they had been approached by Syrian women who wanted advice on reproductive health and how to curb their spouses’ desire to have more children. 4.1.2.2 Stuck Inside or Outside of the Community A small, tight-knit community always comes with a price (Drolet and Moorthi 2018), especially when its size and collective resources (social capital) are not enough to sustain the needs of all its members. Despite the social and cultural comfort that the community provides its members, many interviewees expressed feeling constrained by the group dynamics, namely in their advancement with language. In his critique of the community, one Khaled highlighted the reason for Syrians’ struggle to learn English: If you live with Syrians, eat with Syrians, and work with Syrians, you will never learn English. Some came here illiterate in Arabic. How are they going to learn English?…when they stay inside the community…The language barrier persists more to prevent them from interacting with people outside their group. While talking about their struggle with learning English, Fares and Munir wished they had not found Syrians when they arrived in Kelowna, as they believed it would have forced them to learn English. As Munir explained, “maybe we would have learned the language faster had we not been surrounded by Syrians.” Khalid emphasized that he had “the need to learn” because his family was the first to arrive in Canada. For Lina, however, she wished to have friends outside the Syrian community for remarkably different reasons. Being resettled as a single mother in a small community only served to worsen her isolation after the loss of her spouse in the war. 66 4.1.2.3 Lina Lina was happy that her brother-in-law sponsored her and her six children. He had been resettled in Kelowna a couple of years earlier and convinced his sponsoring group to support his father and his sister-in-law. When Lina arrived in Kelowna, everything was good, and she felt most happy that her children received a decent education and lived a safe life. Nonetheless, as a single mother, Lina became a subject of community gossip, especially after her sister-in-law spread false information about Lina arriving in Kelowna to steal her spouse: She went to my sponsors before I arrived here and asked them not to sponsor me because I would steal her husband. She thought I had a project to marry my brother-in-law. She also convinced everyone in the community that I was a bad woman with no morals. Domestic disputes arose in the brother-in-law’s household, and a series of fights broke out between the spouses to the extent that all members of the settlement community cited those incidents in one way or the other. When I spoke with the settlement community about Lina, they were oblivious to the internal conflict in the family, and they maintained that their struggle with the family stemmed from the brother-in-law’s tendency to exert control over Lina’s family. One sponsor stated that they had to stop visiting Lina because they could not deal with her oppressive brother-in-law. Similarly, a provider told me that a language volunteer teacher stopped going to Lina’s house because she was never ready for classes. Lina did not perceive her brother-in-law as controlling or oppressive. “He was trying to help,” she told me. On the contrary, Lina’s predicament is more profound than the sponsorship community’s assumptions. Lina suffers from chronic depression and social exclusion. Her sister-in-law has damaged her reputation in the community, which negatively affected her self-image and status amongst other Syrians. She decided to cut ties with the majority of Syrians in Kelowna and resorted to an isolated life focused on caring for her children. Yet again, her depression and isolation were made worse by another injury, this time, to her physical appearance. Overlooking her agency (Kyriakides et al. 2018), sponsors decided upon a dental treatment for her that rendered part of her face unrecognizable. In her words: Every time I look in the mirror, my face looks ugly. I feel sad and cry. I told them I did not want the denture treatment. But they went with it anyway. They said this is the best for you. Sponsors and providers had conveyed to me that Lina was “ultra-conservative” when she first arrived in town, an impression that I did have when I conversed with her. Lina has a few Iranian and Turkish friends with whom she socializes from time to time. Her English skills are still limited, but she is determined to learn and attend classes. She is also working to obtain a driver’s license and to restart her profession as a hairdresser. She told me that she already started styling some of her friends for free, only for the sake of 67 practicing. Lina’s isolation from the community taught her that she needs to learn English, saying “I would love to have minimally functional English so I could have Canadian friends.” 4.1.2.4 Individual Refugees In my interviews, I found that all the individuals volunteered at some point to help other Syrian refugees. However, most of them did not feel that they “belonged” to the Syrian community in Kelowna. The relationship between the families and individual refugees had taken a nosedive when the community started to consolidate around core families who adhered to more traditional values. Individual interviewees had a strong sense of individuality and felt a marked difference between them and the community. “We are here for different reasons,” Samer stated. The common perception of the community amongst individual refugees is that it is closed, conservative, and has the stigma of a “welfare community.” This last description is well established in the individual refugee accounts of their struggles to be “self-reliant” and make a living in Canada that is equal to that of Canadian citizens. That is often contrasted, by individuals, with a more “idle” and dependent life led by families. Notwithstanding and perhaps more important, individual refugees did not feel included in the Syrian community, as Nour L. shared: They looked at me differently when I lived alone. They could not accept a woman living alone…I don’t get along with them. All people are good and blessed, and I really hate the urban/rural binary in Syria…but some of them are coming here to relax and benefit from the government…it frustrates me when I see them working under the table, or refusing to work and having so many kids to get the child benefit without thinking about parenting. Samer communicated to me that he has no friends at all in the Syrian community as he believed that the community rejects his gender identity: I don’t think that they are at a level they could accept LGBTQ people. I received lots of criticism when I came out in the media [as LGBTQ]. I don’t think any of them were happy with that. Nour K. too had to distance herself from the community. When the community learned that she came to Canada alone and that she was not wearing a hijab they became harassingly inquisitive. She described the community’s reaction when she moved to Kelowna from her initial neighboring settlement town in BC: They found me a bit “too much.” Syrian women were shocked that I came without my family. They asked me how did I do it? I said to them, “I grew up to be an independent woman since I was in Syria, to be strong and do things by myself and not rely on anyone.” 68 4.1.3 Relationships with the Settlement Community For reasons that were not always clear to me, Syrian refugees were hesitant to critique their sponsors. This attitude is part of a broader set of knowledge that is circulated in the community when reporting to institutions, as I explained in the methodology. For other reasons, Syrian refugees frequently expressed their love for sponsors and providers. While a few interviewees presented some critiques of the settlement agencies, most reported a great relationship with the settlement community and expressed particular appreciation for its members. When I mentioned challenges with sponsors, Sari, like other interviewees, was quick to interrupt me: Listen, son, you are going to have a hard time probing these issues with refugees here…I would be ashamed of myself if I said one bad word about my sponsors…there is no price I can place on the respect for human dignity and freedom I am enjoying because of these people. Interviewees expressed gratitude for the service and material support the settlement community offered them in the first year, and for the continuing support beyond sponsorship. Interviewees listed for me all the services they received from their sponsors and providers. These include housing, furniture, employment, translation, paperwork, clinic visits, training and workshops, and many other services. As Sari contentedly stated: Since I came here, I don’t have to think. They [sponsors] think for me. They book a clinic appointment for me, they call me to remind me, and they come to pick me up. Most families maintained a positive connection with their sponsors as they relied on sponsoring institutions to bring additional relatives to Canada. Unlike the transactions with providers where a language interpreter is often present, the communication between sponsors and refugees is curbed by the language barrier. Family interviewees described their interactions with their sponsors as akin to using “sign language.” Most of them did not report maintaining friendships with their sponsors, but emotions such as nurture, love, gratitude, and respect were often cited when talking about sponsors and providers. Despite that, I sensed that those emotions have changed over time, and after providers and sponsors completed their tasks, they expected refugees to reciprocate by becoming independent. In turn, refugees felt that it was more burdensome to ask for help, and they preferred to rely on the Syrian community and its extra-ethnic connections for help. Individual refugees reported excellent relationships with their sponsors. Two interviewees considered their sponsors their second family. One interviewee became an intimate friend of one of their sponsors, and another was asked to stay with their sponsors beyond the first year of settlement. Individual refugees had good relationships with providers through their voluntary work and were better connected with the settlement community. However, they benefited less from services than family refugees. For the most part, sponsors expressed greater satisfaction than providers regarding their relationship with 69 refugees. Sponsor interviewees cited their content with the “tremendous” gratitude shown by refugees for their sponsorship. One sponsored shared: Every time we visited, we were cordially welcomed, and I don’t know how many times I had to explain and reexplain “that as much as I would love to have a cup of your coffee, I medically cannot”…We continue to consider the families as friends, and they consider us friends. Sponsors appreciated the families’ valuing of their children’s education and the efforts they made to understand the education system and collaborate with it. Volunteering amongst the Syrian community in helping newcomers and cooperating with bureaucratic settlement procedures was also positively cited by sponsors. “That really spoke to the character and the values and the morals of the families that we sponsored,” one sponsor said. Furthermore, they were impressed by what they described as the “resilience of Syrian refugees.” Notably, the fact that refugee families were able to budget within what one sponsor described as “poverty-level financial support” (Bokore 2013). They added: We were just amazed that the Syrian household, at that level of income, paid the rent, fed the family, and was making regular deposits in a savings account…and we were thinking none of us would have the will to do that. The settlement community described having excellent relationships with individual refugees. Their education and work credentials and their English skills are points of admiration for the sponsors. Moreover, settlement community members expressed sharing more values with individual refugees who were women and members of the LGBTQ community. 4.1.3.1 Refugee Quotas and the Community Retreat Sponsors affiliated with organizations expressed that they preferred to use their sponsoring quota to reunite the families in Kelowna with their relatives. Recently, the quota has been reduced by the government despite an increase in the demand from refugees for family sponsorship. One sponsoring community organization received no quota for 2020 at all. A few interviewees attributed the quota cuts of private sponsors to a shift in the government criteria for refugee selection. Lowering the private quota allows the government to select refugees for adaptability after a perceived backlash against admitting 25,000 Syrian refugees on purely humanitarian criteria (Browne 2020), as one sponsor explained: There is a bit of a backlash in Canada about the refugees because they don’t speak English…they [the government] brought in a lot. Communities are overwhelmed…There is a lot of growing pain in welcoming that amount that quickly, and those growing pains result in public discontent. 70 Providers shared that they only realized the huge lack of government funding for their programs when the community’s support for Syrian refugees declined.19 Many Kelowna residents were enthusiastic about sponsoring and assisting refugees. At one time, there were so many sponsorship groups and organizations that a formal association was needed to coordinate the efforts. Private sponsors, community members, volunteers, and providers had regular meetings where they shared knowledge about refugee settlement and the culture of the arriving families. The association survived for one year before most of its members stopped attending the meetings. The community was tired, lost interest, or was done validating its self-image as caring and humane, or simply it bit off more than it could chew.20 However, the relationship between providers and refugees was not less animated than that of the sponsors. Providers are considered public sponsors of refugees, private actors, and government agents at the same time. Their agencies contract the government to implement settlement and integration programs and policies. This has been punctuated by “burnout.” Next, I introduce a qualitative portrait of a provider that delivers a more in-depth perspective on the subjective experience of providers in their mediation of refugee settlement in the Okanagan. 4.1.3.2 Hiba If I had to describe Hiba, based on my interactions with her and the community’s anecdotal account, I would say she is the godmother of Syrian refugees in Kelowna. Well, that is obviously different from her spouse’s title in the sponsoring community: the godfather of Syrian refugees—the couple work at different organizations that offer distinct services. Though more profoundly, Hiba not only has more profound insights into the inner workings of the Syrian household, she is very critical of some practices amongst community members. To say she is only critical does not provide the full picture, since Hiba diligently employs those critiques in her interactions with Syrian refugees. As much as she is committed to the well-being of the community, she remains loyal to a blend of Muslim and liberal values that guide her decision-making process. She draws on insights from her personal experience as an immigrant to help refugee newcomers have a favorable settlement experience. Hiba dropped out of a Ph.D. program in the Middle East to join her spouse in Canada. When she came to Kelowna, 14 years ago, she picked up her Ph.D. project at the university but shortly had to drop out again to care for her children. After her youngest child started kindergarten, Hiba began to volunteer at a settlement agency and secured a job as a settlement worker in the Refugee Assistant Program (RAP), 19 Dam and Wayland (2019) demonstrate that even with continuing local support, some local initiatives collapsed in Hamilton upon receiving a large number of Syrian refugees without sufficient IRCC support. See also the news report by Flanagan (2018). 20 For more on the humanitarian response being related to Canadian self-image, see Hynie (2018), Wallace (2018), and Winter et al. (2018). 71 a program for refugee reception and initial settlement funded by the government and run by not-for-profit organizations: I was the first hijab-wearing Muslim to work with them. In the beginning, I felt there was some tension in their interactions with me. But eventually, they learned that I am a human just like them. I understand that. They had never dealt with Muslims in a professional setting before. Muslims were always on the receiving end with [settlement agency]. Hiba speaks passionately about her work, and whenever she expressed an idea, she always supplemented it with examples and reflections. Conversing with Hiba in Arabic, I could not help but notice her exclusive use of the third person in the feminine form unless she spoke about a specific male—a more laborious endeavor for an Arabic speaker than for an English speaker adhering to gender-neutral pronouns. She is content to have been raised in an educated family. Although she is from the Middle East, Hiba belongs to a non-Arab ethnic minority. While she shares a good deal of Muslim traditions with Syrian refugees, she had to learn about their culture and the Syrian dialect. She clarified, “otherwise, they would not understand a single word of my dialect.” It was tough to pin down Hiba’s exact position and which part of her work was paid. Her role in the community invariably extends beyond the first few weeks of the RAP, during which she assists refugees in finding housing and connects them with the settlement programs and services such as language classes and employment. She additionally volunteers to aid Syrians with personal issues, family disputes, paperwork, translation, interpretation, and many other services. The “burnout” was inevitable: The first two years I was, like everyone, very excited. I volunteered after work to receive calls and go to their houses to meet their needs. My husband would stay until midnight helping refugees with their relative’s sponsorship papers. I had to learn their dialect. Otherwise, they would not have understood a word of what I say. So, I would get calls late at night and early on weekend days, and then I felt that I was going to burn out like a lot of the community members did. So I had to slow down.21 The sponsorship and support communities in Kelowna have burned out almost a year after a myriad of individuals, organizations, and religious groups were incited by the media and the government to act and support refugees. At the immigration department of a settlement agency, Hiba recalled a time when they had more than 70 volunteers, compared to having two volunteers at the time I spoke with her (Ashton et al. 2016). She believed that the superfluous support from the community and the subsequent inertia had influenced the course of refugee settlement in Kelowna during the first two years: After the support ran out, lots of families felt that it was like they had just arrived in Canada again and had to start from scratch. After two years, even sponsors changed the way they provided support because they wanted refugees to be more independent. 21 Wood, McGrath, and Young (2011) questioned the social sustainability of overworking under-resourced service providers. 72 Hiba recognized that Syrian refugees realized that their host community became less excited and invested in driving them around, translating and interpreting for them, and giving them free goods. They had to rely more on themselves and on each other to access services and provide for their families beyond the first year. Hiba emphasized that, after two years, Syrian women grew more interested in learning English than men as they had to use the language to communicate at their children’s schools and talk to doctors. Due to those types of necessary communications and the lack of Arabic interpreters, Hiba always cautioned Syrian women about choosing to get pregnant in their first year. She believed that there is some sort of control by men over households, but she opposed the equivocal narrative of subjugation, and she recognized Syrian women as “strong and they answer to no one.” Aside from that, Hiba is fascinated by the warmth of the Syrian community and the strong ties of Syrian families. She spoke positively about a few well-integrated families, especially Nida’s large family, highlighting the miracle of having ten well-behaved children. Her advice to Nida to refrain from having an eleventh child was something she thanked her for later. Recently, Nida has been enjoying her new driver’s license after she believed she would never be able to do it. She joked with Hiba before her spouse, “you see, I don’t need my husband now. I just ride and go anywhere I want” while pointing to her car keys. Hiba never forced her views on Syrian families, but she was asked for her opinion on almost everything: Sometimes, I feel like I am their mother. There is no topic in the world that they would not ask for my opinion and I can’t weigh in on everything. It is just impossible. For example, I say, “those are your kids. You have to think and make decisions for them as you did in Syria and Turkey or Lebanon.” I joke with them, and I say, “I have enough kids to make decisions for.” They laugh. I also give them serious advice [female addressed], “take care of your kids’ education, go to their schools, and go to your school.” Throughout her work with Syrian refugees, Hiba had only one minor personal conflict, which she describes mildly: “One woman whom it took us a month to find housing for, her family said to me, ‘Hiba, I will raise my voice and shout, but I will be shouting at the government, not at you.’” With all her love for her job, Hiba echoed some sponsors’ concerns that the private and government support for Syrian refugees sometimes comes at the expense of other refugee groups (Al-Solaylee 2018): Now every time you talk about refugees in Kelowna, people think of Syrians right away. They don’t know that a refugee could be from anywhere. Recently, we have been receiving other refugees, and people come over to donate and offer help for Syrians, and we always tell them that they could help other refugees, too, who need support. There has been a discrepancy in support amongst refugees. I believe that all refugees should be treated the same. 73 4.1.4 Relationship with Kelowna Residents At the time of contact, none of the Syrian family interviewees had relationships with white Canadians outside their sponsorship groups. A few families mentioned having friends or acquaintances who belonged to ethnic minorities such as Turkish, Iranian, Sudanese, Lebanese, Pakistani, and Egyptian groups. Those nationalities also resided in the Rutland neighborhood, where all the family interviewees lived. Syrian children had a more diverse group of friends, according to their parents. One interviewee, who spoke fluent English and had just graduated high school, told me that he only had Syrian friends and one Turkish friend, but he had a few white acquaintances. When I asked him why he did not have any white Canadian friends, he answered with some hesitation, “because they are different from us.”22 Interviewees identified language as the main barrier to making Canadian friends. Some said that even with good English knowledge, it remained hard to understand native speakers, let alone have a meaningful conversation with them. Most interviewees used the demonym “Canadian” to refer to white residents. On the other hand, when they talked about non-white Canadians, they included their ethnicities, and sometimes they only referred to them by their ethnic background. This implies that refugees felt more included within minority groups more than the larger society. The narrative that constructs them as “others” in the eyes of the majority is reproduced by perceiving the majority as “others.” For instance, Rami, who had more frequent interactions with Canadians through his attempts to market his crafts and enter the business market, expressed contempt toward white Kelowna residents. He felt his thick accent and grammatical errors hindered him from establishing equal relationships and finding business partners. He shared his frustration with the Kelowna market being cliquey and closed to ethnic minorities: Even the wealthy Lebanese people here who own businesses, none of them work under their names. They always have a Canadian person in the front…what bugs me is that no one here is Canadian: we are all immigrants. Individual refugees described having meaningful relationships with Canadians of all backgrounds. Mostly, individual interviewees had friends through school and work, and the majority of their friends belonged to ethnic minorities. “Baby boomers” was mentioned by two interviewees as the generation of white Canadians that they were most likely to befriend. Younger Canadians were described to me as less tolerant and sometimes uninformed about other cultures. 22 Guo (2019) demonstrated the same finding but instead projected on Syrian children at schools. See English and Janzen (2017) for challenges to integration of Syrians in schools. 74 4.1.4.1 Small-City Life, Conflict, and Discrimination Most interviewees, both individuals and families, reported enjoying living in Kelowna and emphasized the importance of nature for their recreation. For families, the small size offered them more tailored personal support from members of the settlement community, especially between 2015 and 2017 (Agrawal and Zeitouny 2017; Drolet and Moorthi 2018; Haugen 2019). As mentioned in the previous section, the support has lessened with time, and some provided anecdotal accounts that the settlement community spoiled the first resettled families. The enthusiasm to resettle and support refugees and the public support for them in Kelowna were mainly sparked by the photo of the Syrian child Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean coast in 2015. One sponsor marked the boy’s death as the point when residents began to pool resources to resettle families to Kelowna. They recounted that their organization was “turned upside down” by the news (Dam and Wayland 2019; Wallace 2018). Kelowna was excited to accept refugees as news articles and discussions on social media cited humanitarian ethics and rescue rhetoric to mobilize the community and alleviate its fears. Two years into the settlement process, the city lost a good deal of its interest in refugees. One sponsor explained how she thought local residents perceived ethnic minorities in town: The way cultures are here in Kelowna is like, “Yay, we celebrate them on cultural days and then they disappear. There is this kind of superficial take on cultural diversity…It’s like, “oh how cute and how cool we’ve got this Korean Community. It’s so nice. They come out and have a booth on Canada day.” It is tokenism, for sure (emphasis added). A provider shared her frustration with companies not hiring Syrian refugees: The refugee is another type of stereotype that they like here. “The poor Syrian refugees” come to Kelowna, and they have to be given a bunch of stuff…we say, “look at the refugees we take in here, aren’t we good,” but hiring is another story. The relationship between refugee families and Kelowna residents has not been described to me as a strong one. Families exchanged greetings with their neighbors and maintained connections with their sponsoring communities; nonetheless, feelings around social interactions were colored by caution and marked by cultural differences. For instance, aside from noise complaints, I have been informed of three cases where neighbors called the police or the Ministry of Children and Family Development for reasons of perceived child negligence. On one occasion, neighbors were concerned about a skin rash that appeared on one of the Syrian children. The other two cases were related to Syrian children playing outside their houses, which was perceived as negligence by neighbors and reported to the police. Often, providers and sponsors are called to mediate and speak on behalf of the families in these situations. One time, a provider only learned about the incident when they saw people discussing the case on social media, and they explained: 75 I went on Facebook and there were just all these people commenting back and forth. This little guy has wandered into the neighbor’s house, and that neighbor decided that it was unfit parenting and she was going to call the ministry and the police, and then all these other neighbors and other people from everywhere adding their input, “yes you need to call the ministry right now, this is not acceptable,” or “Oh don’t do that”…it could have been disastrous, but was it because they were Syrians? No, it could happen to anybody. I would reason that individual refugees face more stereotypes than family refugees because they have greater contact with Canadian society through work and education, as well as leading a more individualist lifestyle. The stereotypes that women interviewees reported stemmed from the absence of some expected appearances and behaviors. In other words, since individual refugees resembled locals in their appearance and habits, locals questioned the absence of stereotypical refugee markers. For instance, some coworkers asked Nour L. to explain her ability to drive a car because she is a Muslim woman wearing a hijab. In an interesting variation, the other Nour’s Western appearance was a point of disbelief by some locals who were not used to seeing Muslim women behaving and looking like Westerners. Nour L. explained: They never ask me about the values of Islam or the life of Mohamed. They only ask me about eating pork and drinking alcohol. Sometimes they ask if I feel suffocated under my hijab or whether I was allowed to drive back in Syria. The differential treatment by the community was favorable for the most part for individual refugees since the differences from families were points of admiration for individuals’ unique identities. A few interviewees were featured on the local news and in community events several times, mainly to share their success stories as women or members of the LGBTQ community. Although tokenism is evident in the public discourse on refugees, as noted by sponsors and providers, none of the individual refugees felt tokenized by the community; on the contrary, they repurposed that tokenism to differentiate themselves from the Syrian community in Kelowna. Does tokenism pit community members against each other? To a certain extent, it does. Family interviewees alluded to the disproportionate treatment and the “loftiness” of individual refugees who arrived in Canada with professional human capital. Discrimination and racism, especially against women, were not absent from the individual refugee experience as presented in the employment theme. Often Canadian women are the instigators of discrimination against Syrian women. “Go back to your country” is a phrase that some women in the community have heard on the streets, at grocery stores, and at bus stops on several occasions (Mohamed and Bastug 2020). I was told about a Syrian woman who was resettled with her children and had been subjected to verbal and physical racist attacks by a Canadian woman at the bus stop. It has been reported to me that this Syrian woman suffered multiple racists encounters and eventually relocated to Vancouver with her children. Nour K. was able to share with me her story with discrimination in Kelowna, as I present in the next ethnographic portrait. 76 4.1.4.2 Nour K. Nour K. had no idea that her very long settlement honeymoon would reach an unsettling end when she moved from a BC small town to Kelowna. Nour K. has been praised, possibly framed, in her town of settlement as the “model refugee”: she loves her sponsors and the small-town community, she regularly has been invited to speak at public events, and the local newspaper would interview her at every stage of her resettlement. Instead of one Canadian family, she has two. And instead of one father, she has three. She would invariably add an adjective to the word family to clarify whether she was speaking about her Syrian or Canadian family. Nour K. is a Syrian woman from the city of Damascus. Back in Syria, she enjoyed a comfortable middle-class urban life and worked as a social worker with several organizations, including the United Nations and the Red Crescent. Belonging to the Sunni majority, Nour K. described her family and social sphere in Damascus as “quite liberal,” emphasizing that she had always been mistaken for a Christian. In 2014, she crossed the Turkish border fleeing Syria by herself. On an island in Turkey, she helped a Canadian couple who had just come off a cruise ship. When the Canadian couple learned that she was planning to cross the Mediterranean on a refugee boat, they decided to sponsor her. The couple partnered with a local sponsoring organization and brought Nour K. to Canada on a rare seven-month sponsorship track, though she could only stay with them for a few months. She needed to find an opportunity for work or education, and their town was too small. In her first experience with a Canadian education, Nour K. wanted to study hospitality management over humanities and social sciences, although she was more inclined towards the latter. She thought of social sciences as a place where people would emphasize her identity as a refugee and put her under a spotlight to share her story. By the first summer in a new university town, she had three jobs in addition to her courses and volunteered with other Syrian refugees. A few Syrian friends she met while visiting Kelowna finally convinced her to move over to a “little bit bigger place.” Those friends included Samer, the other Nour, and Sarah. Nour K. had already met the other Nour L. in Turkey through a serendipitous event only made possible by the two women sharing the same name, being from Damascus, and waiting for their Canadian sponsorship to go through. I was lucky to interview both Nours. Despite having two jobs in her first settlement town and having just moved in with her Syrian family, she decided to relocate to Kelowna and rent a room from Samer, the most popular Syrian in town. At the 5-star spa, Nour’s first job in Kelowna, she was a victim of a series of discriminatory encounters that she identified as “racist incidents.” She was told from the beginning that she needed a “thick skin” to survive in her position. She could not understand what that meant but jokingly replied, “I thought spas required a thin skin!” After taking a few phone calls from customers, Nour K. was approached by a colleague with a piece of paper that had a script on it, and she was unkindly asked to “speak proper English”: 77 She said to me, “only read from this paper.” And what she wrote on the paper was a straightforward way of talking to customers and had no empathy. Reading the paper sounded like I was giving orders to the customers. That script did not have any feeling to it…with that, other things were happening. Workers at the spa would pass by me and never reply to my greetings. That day I was shaking. I was pretty sad. I went to the back and cried. The manager had heard Nour K. was crying, empathized with her, and said she would talk to the other employee after admitting that such an incident should not have happened. Later, another colleague of her who does the same work and only has been employed for three months showed a crueler prejudice. Nour K. recounted: She would intentionally hit me with her elbow as I was typing to force me to make mistakes… she came to me and asked, “Are you organizing the files by alphabetical order?” I said, “yes, of course.” She said, “what language do you use in Syria? You use the English alphabet, right?” I answered, “no.” …She said, “I don’t get it. What do you mean, you have your own alphabet? How come you don’t use the English alphabet?”…before I answered, she cut me off very furiously and slammed her hand on the table, screaming in my face, “you know what, if in Syria you don’t use the English alphabet, don’t touch these files anymore!” After telling me this story, Nour K. had a hard time explaining to me over the phone how she felt. She was speechless for a few seconds, then added: Her body was charging at me, and she was aggressive in a way that I thought she was going to punch me in my face. I did not feel safe…I left and went to the back room, and when I came back, she looked at me and fabricated a new story, “Nour, why are you selling gift cards over the phone? A customer just mentioned your name,” she said. On another day, after a manager approved refunding one of our sick customers, she said to me, “Nour, you are a terrible, terrible person. You are stealing money from our workers and putting it into another person’s pocket.” Of course, no one called asking about Nour K., and she did not sell gift cards over the phone, nor did she take money from anyone. It was apparent to her, at this point, that she was being staged for something terrible. Nour K. submitted an incident report to the human resources department, but the pressure kept building, and that day Nour K. had an anxiety attack, and an ambulance was called for her. False accusations and verbal harassment continued at the spa until she realized that this all was part of a bigger plot put in place to get her fired. When one of her colleagues left her email open on the shared computer, she thought it was her email. When she looked up her name, she saw the plot unfolding in front of her eyes. An email sent from the manager to her colleagues read as follows, as paraphrased by Nour K.: I have been directed by the HR to let you know you have to help me let Nour go. We need to find mistakes against her, so please take any pictures or keep any documents that can get her in trouble. This is the only way to deal with her, given that she had the attack after her interaction with [employee name] and we believe Nour is suffering from PTSD. 78 It seemed to Nour K. that the human resources department was trying to avoid a public relations scandal by conspiring against her. Despite the conspiracy against her, the last remark in the manager’s email was the most disturbing accusation to Nour, as she noted: only because I am from Syria, I have to have PTSD. I don’t have PTSD. I worked for three years in hospitality in way more prestigious places. I finished my diploma with high grades. No one has ever given me any feedback that made me feel that I was different except for here. Nour, with the help of Sarah, decided to face the company with the information they had. When confronted with the email, the manager “was shaking.” Sarah is currently helping her to take legal action against the company. All in all, Nour K. does not regret coming to Kelowna, and she is still very content with her overall Canadian experience. The same way she conceptualized herself and her life history beyond her resettlement to Canada, she acknowledged that this incident only accounted for 5% of her four-year experience. She described the other 95% as “very successful and positive.” Nour K. expressed her happiness with her Canadian families and friends, especially those of the “baby boomer” generation. Most of Nour’s friends are “baby boomers” and first-generation Canadians, as she believed that older Canadians are more capable of relating to her. “Very friendly and interested to know you,” she said. Nour K. loves the subtle warm touches that small cities can offer in Canada: Very simple things, the bus driver recognizes your name. They will wait when it is snowing. He would tell me, “I don’t want you to break your leg.” He would sometimes give me candy. I would give him chocolate. My college was amazing. All the professors and employees, everyone, was friendly and kind to me; they’d always say, “we’re happy to have a student like you who has been through a lot but still smiles all the time.” In this theme, I allowed for the descriptive accounts of refugees and the settlement community to demonstrate their relational dynamics. The refugee ethnographic portraits detailed the ways unparalleled power dynamics inform settlement relationships. Alternatively, the provider’s portraits uncovered the workings and the integration logic of settlement agencies. Indeed, analyzing relationships revealed multiple findings in this theme. First, refugees face prejudice, stereotypes, discrimination, and paternalism in their relationships with the settlement and broader communities. Second, refugees negotiate relationships and act in ways to safeguard against discrimination. Refugee families assert their existence as a group in Kelowna and minimize their need for external support. Likewise, individual refugees fight discrimination and explore different segments of Canadian society to position themselves within accepting and diverse social spheres. Third, the broader relationship between the host society and refugees is conditioned by Kelowna’s humanitarian and neoliberal self-image, discourses of tokenism and othering, and humanitarian fatigue. Forth, the Syrian community exerts exclusionary power and cultural policing over its members emphasizing the unity of condition and protecting its “integrity.” 79 4.2 Culture, Family, and Integration Unlike the five previous themes, I would not categorize integration as an emerging theme in this research per se. Family interviewees did not raise the topic of integration without provocation. Typically, when I gave interviewees time to speak generally about their settlement experience, they spoke about some or all five domains (language, employment, health, housing, and relationships) with varying intensities. Indeed, their settlement experience in these domains underlines many aspects of their integration into Canadian society and institutions. However, family interviewees did not address integration as a separate topic, or as the sum of their experiences and endeavors in those domains. Similarly, multiculturalism was not mentioned by interviewees. Instead, it was implied in two areas: first, when interviewees demonstrated their children having friends of multiple ethnic backgrounds; second, when interviewees talked about diversity and their cross-ethnic relationships in the Muslim community. Interviewees felt content with diversity in Canada. Noticeably, they perceived their ethnic and religious rights as outcomes of privacy and liberty, not multiculturalism per se. When I asked about cultural integration, more discursive understandings were unpacked as interviewees talked about weighing liberal values side by side with Syrian ones and vice versa in a deliberative process. Munir’s statement summarizes the intercultural thinking of refugees (Mohamed and Bastug 2020): We come from a special society and a distinct culture. We are here to influence and to be influenced. We did not come here with rigid minds; we want to learn and teach. When I asked more specifically about the sorts of values interviewees draw from each culture, this centralized gender and children in the final portion of many interviews. Liberal values of gender equality, secular education, liberty, and the right to sexuality have been characterized as more challenging to reconcile with some family traditions. The degree of this perceived difficulty and the extent to which it is perceived varied remarkably amongst interviewees. 4.2.1 Children and Gender: Pride and Honor The families I interviewed had children between the ages of two and 19. When they talked about their children, families distinguished younger (<12) from older ones. Younger children were referenced as a point of emphasis for integration but also a significant cause of future anxiety. The older children were distinguished as having been raised according to traditional values, but parents’ fears concerning the upbringing of young children were profound. To illustrate, Fares used the past tense to talk about integration: We integrated, we worked, and learned English…we are independent of our sponsors…the kids had already integrated into schools, but hopefully, they won’t get lost between the culture of their family and the Canadian culture. 80 Addressing integration, Rami conveyed to me that his young children did not know the difference between nationalities, races, or ethnicities, nor did they explicitly identify as Syrians. “All they know is that everyone is Canadian, including themselves,”23 he said. Rami stressed his indifference toward the loss of his children’s Syrian identity. However, he did acknowledge another inevitable challenge: his young children will grow up secular. To illustrate his point, he cited the Bosnians who came to Kelowna in the 1990s. “Only five families are Muslim now,” he sighed. If the children decided to convert to Christianity one day, Rami would not be bothered, but his belief that the Canadian education system makes children uniformly irreligious was most worrying. Still, he seemed to concede, “eventually, my kids will decide their studies, their life, and their friends. Mostly, they will cut loose from religion.” Conversely, Fares cast doubt on the common belief that children would be able to integrate fully. Instead, he believed that only the second generation (first-generation Canadians) becomes “100% Canadian.” He stated, “those who came with us, they will keep our traditions to a certain extent.” Unlike Rami, Khalid was impressed that religion is not taught in schools. While his two younger children are continuing their education, the older two sons each received one year of schooling before they joined the construction labor market. “Those ones are here for the labor market, not schools,” he commented on the older children not attending further schooling. Children aged 16 and above faced more challenges integrating into the Canadian education system. Older teenagers join the labor market after they end up in educational limbo—they are older than high school age, and they do not have the proper credentials and language skills to access secondary education. I had the chance to interview one young family member, 19, who graduated high school recently and is planning on attending college for a ten-month aircraft engineering course that will grant them a job at the airport. They shared their schooling experience with me: First, I did not know English. They gave me a tablet so I could communicate with people through a translator. After six months, I was able to talk to people and study…the school was easy…I did not take classes like Canadians. I was taking ELL and cooking classes in the beginning; then, later, I started learning sciences like everyone else. As much as Syrian families were proud of the rapid integration of their children in schools and the labor market, I only needed to ask how they perceived the future for their children for the policing of cultural boundaries to intensify. Most interviewees raised their contempt for their children’s right to have intimate relationships, mostly concerning their daughters. Interviewees communicated feeling extraordinarily anxious about their daughters’ futures. Premarital intimate relationships are unthinkable for families of 23 Contra Guo, Maitra, and Guo (2019), who found the opposite in Syrian children aged 10–14. 81 conservative and tribal24 backgrounds. Daughters represent the family’s honor before the community, and for them to have intimate partners damages that honor and hence damages the social status of the family in the community. In addition, in Islam, premarital sex is prohibited and penalized. Some shared similar concerns about their young male children, fearing that they would “get lost” if they learned to party and drink alcohol. For the most part, families were ambivalent about how to deal with this perceived conundrum, and the majority expressed that they would have to emphasize the importance of traditions and values, mainly modesty and chastity for young women. Some cast doubt on the ability of traditional upbringing to “protect” their children from mainstream society’s norms. One interviewee disclosed to me that he was waiting for his six-year-old daughter to obtain a Canadian passport so he could send her back to Syria to be raised “traditionally.” Another interviewee said he could not even imagine his young daughter growing up to have a boyfriend. A third shared with me his uncertainty: I hear so many issues with kids that it is becoming normal by the age of 16 for them to have girlfriends and boyfriends and go partying…life is good here, but the future is dangerous. Can you guarantee that your kids will not live like that? I don’t know, brother [deep sigh]…leave it to God. I asked some sponsors and providers about their experience working with Syrian children hoping to probe the boyfriend dilemma further. Nour L., who volunteered to help families settle in Kelowna, disclosed to me that physical discipline is still a common practice in Syrian households. She described the Syrian children as having two personalities: an Arabic one and a Canadian one. When kids spoke to me in Arabic, they were not well-mannered, and sometimes they were rude, but once they switched to English for some reason, they spoke quieter and more politely. I started to feel that the Arabic language is associated, in the kids’ minds, with fighting and being loud. It is the language of the household, while English is associated with discussion and manners. The sponsorship community brought my attention to the fact that parents seemed to exercise more authority over older children, the ones who grew up in the Middle East. One story that was told to me, in parts by some members of the sponsoring and settlement communities, reveals another dynamic for the treatment of children in the Syrian household. An 18-year-old woman who just finished high school and planned on moving to another province to pursue education was “coerced” into a pre-arranged marriage to an individual who had yet to come to Canada according to accounts from the settlement community. Notably, this young woman belonged to one of the oldest Syrian refugee families in a town, which was 24 Tribalism here is not territorial sovereign social forms. When interviewees mentioned their tribes, it was exclusively in the context of kinship and concerning lineage. For more on Syrian tribes see Dukhan and Taylor (2018). 82 primarily perceived by the community to have “better integrated” than other families. One sponsor commented: We had to bite our tongues. The girl expressed discontent in private circles but did not object, and we could not intervene in the family’s business. Those families have been doing certain cultural practices, maybe, for hundreds of years. We had to respect their agency. A provider shared their version of the story with me: I was shocked. When I went before to visit this family, the girl was planning on relocating to another province to study medicine. On that visit, her mother said to her, “study as much as you want, but eventually, you will get married.” I said, “why not? Allow her to study; she has the right brain for it.” Later, when I went to her brother’s wedding, the girl looked very different to me. She was all dressed up and wearing makeup. She looked like a woman, and the innocent, hardworking student look was gone from her face. I learned that she got married remotely, a marriage by proxy. Also, the girl looked happy, and she seemed to enjoy some freedom. Young girls might enjoy that because once they are spoken of formally, the family exercises less censorship over them. However, it is too late. She is not going to follow her dream. Her dad told me that she was taking some courses here in town until her future husband makes it to Canada. [name], and I could not say anything. The sentiments and concerns about the children’s lost futures, their irreligiousness, being destined to labor or more education, all imply a common understanding amongst refugee families that the hidden cost for their resettlement is the human capital of their children. Khalid’s comment on his older children being destined for the labor market and his younger children being destined for education, besides other remarks made by interviewees, exemplified the following assumption. Since the Canadian government resettles large families to secure a future labor force, the integration of these families becomes predicated on “outsourcing” the traditional authority over young children to the Canadian society and government. When a refugee family asked a member of the settlement community about the logic of their resettlement, they were answered: They [the government] don’t really want you for yourself…they want your kids. They are the future…they want their strength to build Canada. Some members of the settlement community used the same logic to justify the government’s inclination to sponsor large families from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The underlying sense here is that those refugee families, ones that tend to have more children, supplement the Canadian population instead of contributing to its decline. On the other hand, educated and professional immigrants tend to have fewer children. One could argue that the integration of children serving as a yardstick for the integration of the family in the parent’s account is a notable finding in three facets. First, while talking about the integration of adults was often defined by challenges, the integration of the children was presented as a substantial achievement for the family. Second, the enculturation of young children is perceived to be mostly inevitable. Third, the “full” integration of children seems to eclipse the “lesser” integration of adults and 83 older children. For older children, traditional values are still enforced behind closed doors, and they are only expected to integrate economically. Integration entails giving up some of the traditional authority over young children, perhaps particularly the authority over their bodies in time and space. While employment, language, and social relationships are cited as arenas where refugees negotiate integration, the young children’s enculturation is an arena where negotiation is not permissible. Instead, the children’s enculturation is claimed by the family and is used to negotiate a more favorable definition of adult integration. In other words, if the integration of the family comes into question, the children will be invoked as the integrative exchange with the government’s plan for them. 4.2.2 Gender Dynamics I preferred not to interview the spouses of the men to avoid the husband being around during the phone call. I could only interview three women compared to seven men in the family data stream. In the individual refugee data stream, I interviewed two women out of four interviewees. At the same time, I made sure to ask men and women about their spouses. Gender equality was not of interest to women and they were quick to dismiss it. Given that only so much information is shared with those outside one’s inner circle, I had to further probe the topic through my interviews with the settlement community. Syrian women regarded gender equality as something they acknowledged without compromising traditional gender roles. Mostly, women did not emphasize being empowered by coming to Canada. The term “empowerment,” unsuccessfully employed in a question in one interview, invoked talking about the spouse in what seemed to be a process of subtracting power from men. Syrian women highlighted the importance of traditional values, especially in the ways they managed their household and raised their children. They cited religious scripture, whereas men were more inclined to cite Middle Eastern, Islamic, and tribal traditions. Overall, men believed that gender and integration were reconciled from a relativistic point of view: “our traditions do not conflict with gender equality. Our personal preference is different.” Women, on the other hand, had more deliberative justifications. Though through the settlement community’s accounts, Syrian women seemed to employ checks-and-balances through utilizing women’s rights and democratic institutions, one provider noted: I feel that Syrian women make their men think they have lots of influence over them, while in reality, women are the boss. I noticed that many of the women who came here are smarter than their men. I rarely have to repeat information to women…I also came to the conclusion that women here would never consider divorce. They come and complain to me just to let some steam off, but eventually, divorce is not on the table. The same provider said that women had used the privilege of holding the tax benefits to assert dominance in disputes. Women resorted to law enforcement and sometimes to courts to discipline their spouses exclusively: 84 When they came here, they were pretty aware of women’s rights, and they when they called the cops or brought a fight out to the street, they only wanted to discipline their men. However, when they disciplined their men, sometimes they disciplined themselves, too. In one case, the judge rejected a woman’s initial plea for her abusive husband to return home after a restraining order. The women I interviewed and the spouses of men interviewees were not employed. When I asked about managing finances and receiving child tax benefits, Ida said: I don’t like to challenge my husband. I gave him my bank account since day one. I have rights and everything here, Alhamdulillah, but we are Muslims and we live by our traditions and we raise our kids that way. Another woman stated that the financial dynamics did not change since she controlled the household budget before coming to Canada. On the other hand, Lina seemed to have more time and interest in being independent of her relatives and the Syrian community. The attacks on her personality and behavior as a widow contributed to her loneliness and depression, as I showed in her portrait, but she did not seem to internalize the image projected on her. Instead, she distanced herself from the community to achieve further independence. Before the damage to her teeth, she had male and female friends from the settlement community and friends from other ethnic communities. Discussing the topic of female employment, male interviewees did not object to the equal worth and entitlement of men and women. Fares mentioned that his spouse worked in Kelowna in the past, and Nazem noted that he had run a business with his spouse back in Syria. Khaled, on the other hand, answered my simple inquiry to whether his spouse was working with the following: No, she does not. Mind you, for us, our view to women did not change radically, and that was not from the premise of tyranny and subjugation, but it is written in our DNA that you, as a man, are responsible for the family. Therefore, if my wife had to work one day to support the family, that means I have a shortfall. Alhamdulillah, I can provide for the family, so why tire her with extra work? In contrast, the settlement community demonstrated concern about the physical and psychological well-being of women in big families, as well as about the agency and awareness of Syrian women. Sponsors and providers highlighted child tax benefits as a significant incentive for families to have more children. One provider shared with me: I heard about a Syrian father cheered “$600” upon the delivery of his newborn. I feel bad for the mothers, but I never want to be harsh and say, “don’t have kids.” I know it is their absolute right. However, I always tell them to give themselves 2–3 years when they come here before considering having new kids. Sponsors and providers explained to me that when families decided to have children in the first year, women did not have time to learn English or look for jobs. That, however, is complicated when pregnant women cannot receive regular medical care due to the language barrier and the lack of interpreters. On the 85 issue of daycare, I highlighted earlier the consensus among families that the lack of free daycare is a barrier for women to learn English and obtain employment. Some providers and individual refugee volunteers did not agree that daycare was a barrier since it was made affordable by one church and another organization. Nonetheless, I heard from the community that the church’s daycare was only affordable at some point in the past. Certain authors (Morantz et al. 2013) concede that immigrants and refugees often must navigate a bureaucratic, complicated, and bifurcated system of child support. Refugees did not seem to be aware of all the services and support available for their children and were not adequately informed or assisted by providers and sponsors to locate and benefit from child services. The complex and bureaucratic reality of childcare seems to be beyond the families’ English skills and ability to complete the paperwork. The childcare support is very segmented and bound to the conditions of age, licensing, and the type of care. After a quick scan for child services on the internet, I found that in Kelowna, no childcare program has been implemented to cater to immigrants or refugees specifically. Again, some providers felt that families were not utilizing other resources, such as child tax benefits and salaries, to pay for daycare so women could have time to learn English and work. Sponsors and providers agreed that refugee families are less keen on paying for services. They prefer to rely on the community and public support to meet their needs. One provider said that a Syrian woman did the laundry by hand because the family was waiting for an opportunity to receive a washing machine for free. Based on information circulated in the community, they believed that they should get house appliances for free. The topic of gender and procreation is delicate for Syrian families, especially women. Discussions about women’s education, employment, and having too many children often charge them with the responsibility of “fixing” the traditional structures of their families. It also places them on the wrong side of the integration scheme. A sponsor shared her perspective on the expectations placed on women’s employment: I think it’s really hard to put pressure on or have any expectations that a single mom, like the mom I worked with who had limited education—to get her working. I mean, it’s just a really tall order, and she is struggling anyway. Concerns about women’s health and agency are not unfounded. However, it seems that the type of agency cultivated through Syrian women’s life experience is posed in two ways: first, through the adherence to the traditional values that provide a rationalization and moral grounds for their gender identity and socially constructed roles as mothers and household managers (Mahmood 2004); second, through their protective attitudes towards external inquiry and examination (Nourpanah 2014). A few settlement workers and volunteers conveyed to me that Syrian women stopped sharing sensitive issues 86 with them and behaved differently amongst each other from the way they behaved in front of the settlement community. In this chapter, I found that despite their recent settlement and small numbers, Syrian refugees have established a nucleus for a Syrian ethnic community in Kelowna. The Syrian social habits and close familial and kin ties contribute to the emergence of the community. However, the rapid formation of this community can also be attributed to multiple intersected factors. Refugees felt the weight of social capital demotion policies and relied on ethnic networks to secure settlement needs, especially with the declining host social capital and interest in their affairs. Discrimination and visibility of Syrian refugees also contributed to ethnic clustering and fostered a sense of sameness of status amongst refugees. In some way, the Syrian community represents a larger societal body that can demonstrate its rightful existence in Kelowna better than doing so through individual efforts. On the other hand, individual refugees felt excluded from the Syrian community and preferred taking the pathway of the perspective settlement and adopting neoliberal values such as self-reliance and economic contribution. In fact, the Syrian community polices the cultural boundaries of its members and exerts exclusionary power towards individuals and practices that are perceived to compromise the unity and reputation of the community. Syrian refugees negotiate their cultural values and social relationships as they deliberately integrate into certain domains, such as children’s education and upbringing, and contest other domains such as family values and matters of honor. In all cases, there is a process of “exercising prudence” and drawing on multiple moral and cultural paradigms to reach a sound decision as I elaborate in the discussion. Remarkably, refugees lightly associate with multiculturalism but more deliberately engage with liberal values and human rights as their right to cultural expression is understood within the paradigm f privacy and individualism. Overall, there is little evidence that multiculturism as a set of policies plays a significant and systematic role in the refugee settlement plan. Instead, social capital represented by social interactions and negotiations between the settlement community and refugees and between refugees and their ethnic community makes a great deal of the settlement but also falls short in accomplishing this its goals without sufficient government support. Finally, the burnout of the local support and the frustration in the host community exemplify the negative consequences of neoliberal policies that charge locals and volunteers with unrealistic responsibilities. The small Kelowna society and the lacking diversity and multicultural knowledge foster assimilative expectations in settlement and excessive focus on outcomes similar to the processes of immigrant settlement. This creates a chasm between what refugees want and imagine for their life in Kelowna and the state's assimilative vision enforced on host communities through prescriptive settlement policies without sufficient funding or clear multicultural frameworks. 87 Chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion 5.1 Discussion In this case study, I introduced a refugee-centered descriptive account of settlement in a mid-sized Canadian city, Kelowna. I analyzed the multifaceted experiences of Syrian refugees in language learning, healthcare, employment, and housing, where I found refugees burdened by the discourse of self-reliance and unable to meet the normative expectations of the state and their host community. I also found that refugees adopt pragmatic and community-based strategies to navigate living in Kelowna outside the normative milieu of settlement. Intergroup interaction, or the lack of it, informs the multicultural attitude around the settlement and the role of social capital in integration and assimilation processes. The “two-way” integrative conversation is encumbered by the “invisible” majority’s evaluative examination of the “visible” refugee, and the assimilative desire to transform them to be “like us.” In its place, there is a frustrated one-way gaze that exemplifies the host society’s disappointment in settlement outcomes and its uneasiness around cultural difference. Simultaneously, there is an intensified and encouraged bonding capital—the refugees’ intra-ethnic networks as exploitable resources for settlement. Bridging and linking capitals that are presumed to connect refugees with broader society and institutions are found to be lacking since the dialogues that would sustain them are one-sided, evaluative, and hindered by the language barrier. In effect, social capital is a great social phenomenon that exemplifies human cooperation and communal belonging. However, in this case, social capital is insufficient on its own in meeting the needs of settlement. The government utilizes social capital in passing the implementation of its regional policies to community actors and not-for-profit organizations such as settlement agencies. Social capital is the tool through which those policies acquire resources and human capital. For instance, programs discussed, such as LINC and RAP, are broadly designed and under-funded by the government, and host communities must figure a way to implement those programs by pooling informal resources and adopting a work method of trial and error. The multicultural framework proves to be almost absent from the implementation of those programs and policies. The intended purpose of the various programs to employ and educate refugees is mainly practical and functional with emphasized assimilative outcomes. Social capital strategies replace multiculturalism in settlement policies instead of the presumed intercultural dialogue that results in refugee–host “two-way” integration. Neoliberalism is the framework that I would argue conditions multiculturalism, social capital, and settlement to serve the economic assimilation in the labor market and the desired transformation of the “object” refugee into a neoliberal self-reliant “subject” of the nation-state. 88 The nation-state intends refugee settlement as a set of procedures and practices which aim to “integrate” newcomers into the nation-building project (Macklin et al. 2018), which is neoliberal, cohesive, and pluralistic (Ahmed 2014; Malkki 1995). This is exemplified in regional and neoliberal policies that formulate integration in economic and communal terms and reproduce refugees as rescued human capital, as evident in the tension in the host community between humanitarian ethics and economic and cultural assimilation. The state offers refugees protection and legal rights, but for them to make sense within the national project, their host community must assimilate them into the labor market. Social capital ensures that it is the responsibility of refugees and their host community to “bridge” and “link” their lives and experiences where national cohesion is locally foregrounded, and multiculturalism is relegated to the “bonding” capital which, in multicultural terms, is “cultural expression” and “differentiated ethnic rights” (Kymlicka 1995). Once again, multiculturalism-focused policies are moderated by the discourse of social and fiscal responsibility and do not form premises nor intelligible frameworks for settlement. Several findings throughout the analysis indicated refugees and the settlement community did not understand multiculturalism as the framework for integration, which should be informed to be an intercultural engagement. This, in part, supports Hansen’s three Aristotelian propositions about multiculturalism in Canada: multiculturalism policies are settlement policies; settlement is a set of prescriptive procedures to achieve integration; integration through settlement is “assimilation by stealth” (2016, 68). Hansen contests that assimilation, properly understood, “is a process rather than an endpoint” (2016, 85). However, Hansen’s proposition that assimilation, different that forced assimilation, is a “natural process,” proves to be equally problematic as “naturalism” can and has been homogenizing and forceful. Nonetheless, settlement for the host community is a cultural and economic investment plan. Refugee social services have been off-loaded on under-resourced individuals, volunteers, and not-for-profit organizations that are motivated by a humanitarian ethos and a desired pluralistic self-image. Communities pool limited state funding and local resources to afford the material conditions for settlement in a free-for-all or locally contingent fashions; however, they imagine a normative integration outcome since investment entails return. Although not short of problems, practical multiculturalism becomes enigmatic here—large, well-established, and economically embedded inter-ethnic networks are missing in small cities (Lo and Teixeira 2015). Therefore, diversity politics are tested for their capacity to accommodate difference and maintain measurable integration into lesser diverse geographies such as Kelowna (Tedesco and Bagelman 2017; Chambers 1996). It could be argued that the visibility of refugees in the small community and their right to cultural expression undermine the wish that one day “they will look like us.” Alternatively, fostered is an emphasis on economic self-reliance and the cultural benevolence of refugees; thus, some assimilation could be “accomplished,” and the community’s 89 endeavors are not “fruitless” after all. Still, this normative speculation quickly turns into unmet expectations in the absence of clear multicultural or assimilative frameworks, and hence disappointment, humanitarian retreat, ambivalence, and helplessness manifest in the host community. On the other hand, social capital lends exclusionary and inclusive power to local politics in redrawing the boundaries of the integration project. Thus, diversity is power-centered, and the “invisible” majority offers the “visible” minority a conditional right to difference while simultaneously bearing the responsibility not for accommodating an uneasy intercultural dialogue but for assimilating refugees, in this case, into the labor market (Day 2000; Winter 2015). Perhaps the host community is trapped between its Alan Kurdi epiphany, the unrealistic expectations of its members, and the lack of multicultural settlement policies and funds. Kelowna seems not to possess the know-how of multicultural integration—if anyone does—and short of inclusivity imagined outside economic and institutional assimilation. For Berry’s “multicultural hypothesis” to be correct, he insists the “intercultural component” is paramount (2013, 666). When the intercultural dialogue is half-hearted, such as in our case, one can agree with Hansen (2016) that the Canadian assimilation of immigrants and refugees takes place exclusively through the labor market and Canadian public schools. Settlement for refugees is a negotiated life strategy. It is not the sum of their experiences in Canada, nor is integration the end of their endeavors. To settle, istawtana, is a verb that did not make it form formal to colloquial Arabic.25 For refugees, the closest meaning to settlement is life. The words meisha and hayat are used to describe living and livelihood, respectively, signifying settlement as ontological: place, time, material, relation, attitude, action, and affection, not epistemic and predestined (Haraway 1988). Indeed, as a program offering only normative outcomes, refugees navigate prescriptive settlement through learning English, looking for jobs, and fulfilling their bureaucratic obligations. On the other hand, refugees understand the reasons for their regionalization, and they cope with living in a mid-sized town by clustering in their smaller kin-based community. They exchange the government’s plan for the assimilation of their children as future labor with the freedom in saying no to the normative outcomes expected from them. To that end, refugees utilize the settlement program for material and informative support, albeit selectively and pragmatically, until their bridging capital is exhausted (contra Hanley et al. 2018) or until refugees located more reliable communal resources. Bridging capital exemplifies intergroup interaction and networks of support and it is exhausted by the limited resources, the end of the sponsorship, and the lack of unprejudiced and emotionally intelligible communication between refugees and the host 25 The Arabic dictionary defines settlement as “the state of the alien subject in the new country. The phenomenon of settlement is common in the occupied territories” (Almaany). 90 community. In turn, refugees’ naturally occurring bonding capital—their kin-based ethnic networks—partially fills in for the dearth of official support and the decreasing support of a “burned out” community. It has been argued that the bonding capital fails to accommodate the planned settlement solely (Karimi 2020), but it remarkably forms a substantial part of a settlement defined, this time, by refugees. As a state of corporal and affective movement in time and space, settlement is experimental, lived, situated, and negotiated in various ways. The statist conditions for assimilation—self-reliance and cultural and economic adaptation—do not match up with the refugee agenda and are substituted by deliberative negotiations between refugees and the host community. A refugee’s settlement, to borrow from Haraway (1988), is ontologically situated in “power-charged social relation of ‘conversation’” (593). Being for refugees is “problematic and contingent” (585) and not prescriptive. This is significant when culture, values, and relationships are considered. I will discuss next how intercultural dialogue is difficult with the absence of multicultural frameworks. Multiculturalism should not be understood as a mere right for ethnic association or cultural expression, which Hansen (2016) argues is not unique to multiculturalism. The objective barriers to multicultural settlement are ultimately in policy. Meanwhile, the tug of war between the liberal and conservative governments in policy reformation rendered multiculturalism, at times, inert and symbolic. In this case study, the subjective and structural barrier to multiculturalism is evident in market discrimination, health inequality, housing differential access, refugee tokenism, and prejudice, discrimination, and othering. Further, the multicultural solutions to those barriers are absent and impossible without dialogue. On the other hand, refugees recognize liberalism in policies and culture in Canada, and they cite some of its aspects and the ways they carve their living and morality under the neoliberal political order that attends liberal thought today. To describe the different perceptions and meanings of integration and how it is lived and negotiated is a major calling for this case study. Therefore, I will continue my discussion with further dialogue between the constructed meanings around the colloquial a Syrian proverb “eat for your taste and dress for others,” which sounded quite comical to me when I learned that it was an adapted from a quote in Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanack” (Lena 2016, 149). Khalid felt that the case in Canada was “eat for your taste and dress for yourself.” The two variations of this proverb reflect a good deal of how integration or assimilation is understood by refugees and the host community. Franklin’s anecdotal account of dress and food is unsurprisingly a liberal-capitalist one. In the age of the transformation from nobility to politeness and from feudalism to industry, journeyman Franklin realized that having a neutral dress code that does not reflect much of one’s character but fits the general taste of the wider society is a crucial factor for individual success (Lena 2016). Simultaneously, the first part of the proverb, “eat for 91 thyself,” moderates how much one should conform to the public taste. This keeps a clean separation of the public and private spheres and sets rules for competitive behavior in the social world. Franklin’s proverb holds true in a multicultural society where the right to difference is often emphasized. In practice, difference is not always perceived as a form of diversity and is only tolerated to a certain extent. Some degree of conformity is needed, as per multiculturalism theoreticians (Kymlicka 1995; Taylor and Gutmann 1994). That being so, the acculturation of people is still needed for citizen-making; for instance, Bill 62 and Bill 21 in Quebec that infringed upon the freedom of choice in dress. Here Franklin’s “dress for others” norm mirrors a policy that aims to alienate people from their culture and broader society. At the same time, rooting in space and culture (Malkki 1995a) simultaneously takes place for a symbolic multicultural post-shame national “we” to make sense (Ahmed 2014). For instance, a refugee who does not embody “refugeeness” is as problematic as one who embodies all marked refugeeness. Syrian women, in this case, were stigmatized and stereotyped whether worn hijab or not—whether they dressed for others or themselves. In Kelowna, the appearance of refugee families marks them as visible and different, which, when coupled with prejudice and stereotypes, results in differential treatment and discrimination, if not a tacit exclusion from public life and a desire to keep the visible marked but also invisible in the larger context of things (Tedesco and Bagelman 2017). The way Syrian refugees dressed in public made the host community uneasy around their visibility, as I showed in some of the settlement community accounts. As noted, in many cases (housing and employment), refugees needed supplication and advocacy to be accepted in the host community. There is a tension between accepting difference as a marker of others and recognizing its underlying logic and what it means to “us” as Taylor’s (1994) multiculturism was intended as a “fusion of horizons,” where the ongoing dialogue with others grounds and informs “our” understanding of ourselves. Instead, those horizons are predicated on a “we,” rooted in values, and “others,” rooted culture (Fortier 2008; Malkki 1995a). Therefore, culture and national values are presumed to be reconciled through integration and settlement programs, where refugees have to demonstrate market competence, and their culture can be made benevolent and cute and therefore invited to occupy a booth on Canada day, as one local sponsor opined earlier. For Khalid, though, the original Syrian proverb was more intelligible through a traditional perspective, while the modification he introduced was more intelligible through a liberal perspective. To “eat for yourself” is to have your household remain private and exclusive to your values and beliefs. Then, to “dress for others” is to be attentive to your moral position in broader society and the way people regard and judge you. In this case, the second part of the proverb imposes a greater hold on the first: “eat for yourself.” This implies that the normative values of the larger society, in Syria, should be respected, 92 and differences should be avoided. Conversely, in Canada, to “eat for yourself and dress for yourself” pertains to the democratic underlining of liberty and individualism and not multiculturalism. Hence, inside a liberal society, identity is not universally enforced by the dominant group, and one is free to choose—it is one’s human right to choose. One interviewee said, “one can never forget his roots, but my home is where I live with dignity and safety, even if that country were Israel.” The association with human rights in Canada is not unexamined by refugees. The stark Israel reference is indicative of a particular way of understanding and practicing traditional values and human rights. For many Muslims, Arabs, and peoples in the Middle East, the state of Israel is the antithesis of their identity and sometimes their existence. Nevertheless, such a statement is not a matter of crying for dignity and safety so much as an imperative claim to human rights sand certain liberal values that can take precedent over traditional values. Indeed, this shows that deliberations about rights and values preceded the arrival of refugees in Canada and is not a result of the resettlement per se. This agrees with Poteet and Nourpanah’s (2016) caveat that refugees do not come to Canada with a “blank slate” (xvi) and with Kyriakides et al.’s 2018 finding that refugees draw on their pre-arrival identities to reaffirm their agency. Identifying with human rights is deliberative and not always accompanied by an identification with the values around those rights. In “integrating” themselves, refugees chose the “good habits” of Canada and married them with the “good habits” of Syria. The morality of this choice, as one interviewee put it, is a matter of “exercising prudence,” since the matter of good and evil, he admitted, is “relative.” Liberal values are always contextualized within traditions and cultural values. This challenges Berry’s (2013, 667) integration hypothesis as the “doubly engagement” of refugees with their culture and the larger society through vehicles of social capital. Here what seems to be the case is that integration entails a tactical positioning of values and habits and not an intercultural dialogue about those values. Only refugees are engaged in this form of value deliberation. The host community’s values, on the other hand, are unmarked. Political and cultural identity and the values and traditions of Syrians are not easily mapped onto intelligible typographies. Syrian identity has been contested throughout history and more so post-2011 (Matar and Kadri 2018, 32). In our case, most interviewees belonged to the majority Sunni population in mid-West and rural South Syria. In refugee accounts, Islam is emphasized as a practice and a tradition more than a political ideology. The morality of Islamic and traditional values is contextual, and the right to hold and practice them is not predicated on one form of jurisdiction. For example, justice and privacy, two Muslim virtues, could impose restraints on honor and hospitality, pre-Islam virtues, and vice versa. 93 Moral choices are mostly deliberative and attend different systems of legislation and traditional knowledge. The rule of law and broader social norms are also modulators in moral deliberation. For instance, we saw how the Syrian family patriarchy holds its value in some form in Canada but is simultaneously deliberative. The Muslim scripture does not assign specific gender roles to women; however, it states that men must protect women and families. Gender inequalities and female subjugation, therefore, are embedded in traditions and para-scripture jurisdiction. It is argued that guardianship in Islam is the cornerstone of gender roles, and it is also argued that scripture does not require women to stay at home, make food, or serve the spouse (ul Haq 2012). Now, this deliberative scheme can be further expanded, and it allows for a positioning where gender roles are preserved by both men and women, albeit negotiated within the different schools of theology, traditional knowledge, communal contexts, and the liberal rights in a legal system. We saw that refugee women use police and court orders to discipline men and negotiate their rights entirely outside the settlement scheme. Alternatively, for refugee women to resort to the settlement community for matters of women’s rights has proved to be stigmatizing and would saddle them with the responsibility of “fixing” their “misogynistic” cultures. The deliberative association with liberal rights and values is consistent with the way Syrians negotiate their own principles and norms. The conflict of those rights with some values and traditions, too, becomes a subject for prima facie deliberation—a process of rearranging value hierarchies and redistributing the moral weights amongst them. Hence, to “eat for yourself and dress for yourself” is a deliberative choice that extracts agency from individualism, and remarkably not from multiculturalism, as it proved to be absent in most of the refugee accounts. Though one might argue that all of the previous can be found in multicultural thought, can multiculturalism not be found in liberalism? We should not forget that multiculturalism grounded its legitimacy in diversity-accommodating appeals to liberalism and has viciously opposed postmodern knowledge and critical power discourses (e.g., Taylor and Gutmann 1994). When individualism is understood as the right to adhere to a group identity, multiculturalism is implied not as highlighting the differential values of recognition-worthy group identity as per Kymlicka (1995), but remarkably as disbelief in multiculturalism’s inability to foster the equal worth of people justly and beyond mere one-sided acceptance of difference. That being so, to “dress for yourself” could also mean to behave according to the beliefs and values of your ethnic group as per the use of the pronoun “we” when interviewees addressed the gender equality question. Similar accounts, such as the protection of kin honor, the ability to perform prayer in the street, and the need for a tight-knit community exemplify how the pragmatic understanding of liberalism trumps multiculturism as a framework for settlement 94 negotiation. So, while the modified version of Franklin’s proverb attests to the agency of the group against the normative settlement, i.e., “we will eat for ourselves and dress for ourselves,” the Syrian version of the proverb, “dress for others,” maintains its moral weight inside the Syrian community. It was evident to me the growing cultural policing power of the Syrian community over its members. The community enforces uniformity over families living in proximity and excludes forms and behaviors which do not conform to traditional values, as we saw in the exclusion of individual refugees and single women from the community. As it grows numerically, the Syrian community uses restraining powers to ensure the cohesiveness of its members and the protection of its integrity against the external gaze and the evaluative milieu that embodies the intergroup interaction. As discussed thus far, the bridging capital, whether intended for a functional tethering of refugees with their host community or as an organic two-way communication, is unsustainable as long as it is caged in provider–provided and sponsor–sponsored evaluative frameworks. Therefore, with the absence of intercultural dialogue, the whole social capital edifice crumbles, and what it considers its bonding capital prevails as the main, if not only, aspect of integration beyond the labor market. With the perceived emotional and material burdening of intergroup interactions resulting in reduced trust and retreat in support, Syrian refugees in Kelowna experienced two forces pulling them in different directions. One force pulled them towards a form of cultural assimilation, and the other force marks the difference of refugees as unassimilable. The first force compromises the cultural values of the group; such is the case of children’s assimilation, discrimination, and gender equality. Conversely, in the individual refugee case, the difference from the original group, in cultural values and human capital, is emphasized by both refugees and the settlement community as “the right approach” to integration. The second force accentuates the visibility and difference as barriers to achieving equal status with Canadian citizens. Refugees can internalize the second force more than submit to the first. In families, cultural un-assimilability for adults is accepted but discursively exchanged with the inevitable assimilation of the children in the education system. Integration for refugees is contingent and pragmatically situated to serve the broader purpose: life. Visibility, on the other hand, is reclaimed through belonging to a “like-us” community that establishes a legitimate presence of the group in the city as a de facto social phenomenon. Then, with the absence of meaningful intercultural dialogue, acceptance becomes more important than recognition (contra Taylor and Gutmann 1994). Belonging to the Syrian community creates a unity of condition, which ameliorates the frustration with lacking equal status to Canadian citizens. The first force (assimilation) and the exclusion from the Syrian community prompted individual refugees to negotiate alternative positions such as assimilating into corporate and academic institutions. In other words, individual refugees 95 reframed their position in the host society through underlining their conformity with economic and educational normative expectations, while cultural integration maintained its status through differentiation from the group (the Syrian community). The second force invariably questions of refugees’ integrative capacity after the settlement outcomes did not match expectations. In fact, in the first two years of settlement, 2015–2017, the community did not have many expectations since the humanitarian response rhetoric dominated. The recoil in response is attributed to three factors. One is the recent backlash in the Canadian media and political rhetoric against immigrants and refugees. Second is the failure to fully implement settlement plans that were intended to reproduce refugees as neoliberal subjects assimilated into the local economy. Third, the pluralistic and humane self-image does not sustain an intercultural dialogue but operationalizes refugees for its reflection. This is evident in the settlement community’s frustration with the slow advancement in English learning amongst refugees and the challenges of assimilating them into the labor market. Under such pressure for assimilation, refugee families adhere to the community to be shielded from the examination of their performance—they hide their visibility as individuals and mark the solidarity of the collective. Simultaneously, they explore alternative living possibilities for employment, financial support, housing, healthcare, and social relationships inside their communities alongside a growing connection with other minority ethnic groups. Reporting to me, some refugees gave uniform accounts about specific issues, and others requested some information not published despite granting them anonymity. The community’s high sensitivity to external inquiry into its affairs marks the protective nature of its social formation. For individual refugees, the retreat in host community support was not significant in their settlement since they enjoyed special treatment from the settlement community and have achieved economic and social independence before the end of their first year. Still, a few individuals experienced a second-hand effect of the community’s changing attitudes towards refugees as one refugee stated that in the last couple of years, locals only asked her about employment once they learned she was Syrian. Interestingly, the assimilative rhetoric in town pits refugees against each other, as individual refugees believe that families are undermining their reputation in town by being a “welfare community.” The challenges to normative settlement such as the barriers to employment, healthcare, housing, and social relations required refugees to draw on their community to navigate different systems of support. That forged a form of communal knowledge and a sense of belonging where identities are not rigid and rooted in culture but negotiated and engaged in a day-to-day situated sense of being. The way refugees contest self-help and othering discourses through establishing a communal living in a mid-sized city and the various constructed meanings of settlement, integration, and assimilation is quite instructive 96 to how diversity politics work in Canada. The growing of the Syrian community is in itself a negotiation strategy against the assimilative settlement plan. However, an ethnic community in isolation it also runs the risk of social exclusion and spatial segregation of refugees. As established in the literature and throughout this case study, drawing on a “poor” ethnic social capital can only exacerbate the lack of this social capital. It is important to differentiate ethnic isolation from the multicultural right to ethnic association within an open cultural dialogue. Pushing refugees down the pathways of poverty, exploiting their natural ethnic relations, and tasking host communities with social services are “cheap” answers to cultural diversity that expose how the political benefits of multicultural policies and their demotion trump the understanding of diversity as a national identity. It uncovers integration as an assimilative process and not an intercultural dialogue. 5.2 Conclusion In conclusion, the conceptual framework of settlement is problematic when understood and practiced as a normative, if not assimilative, outcome of the procedural settlement. Establishing a bounded Syrian community accounts for refugee agency and also the unrealistic expectations and the failure on the part of settlement practice and policy. Here, multiculturalism suffers a great deal of reduction and uncertainty, particularly when it is framed as the recognition of cultural difference but not as a discursive understanding of the underlying deliberations of those cultures. Moreover, social capital is implied as a framework for settlement policies that substitute for the multicultural responsibilities of the welfare state; thus, a discussion is avoided regarding the inclusivity of local communities and the injustices that the poverty scheme of refugee support causes in the long run. In other words, when the settlement is “successful” in an economic sense, multiculturalism and social capital take the credit, and integration is said to be complete, as per dozens of scholarly works referenced above. When the settlement is “unsuccessful,” the culture and human capital of refugees are brought into question, and social capital is prescribed as a remedy. Success is primarily defined by the ability of refugees to learn the language and utilize their language skills to integrate into the labor market and the education system, becoming self-reliant subjects. Neoliberalization processes have repurposed multiculturalism to serve a procedural understanding of diversity as an attribute of economic assimilation, population replacement, and securing future labor force for the nation-building project. Assembling refugees into what Malkki (1995a) calls the national order of things lends itself to social capital—the devolution of the state’s responsibility to self-reliance discourses, and the regionalization of immigrant and refugee affairs into local discrete contexts that are uncoupled from the broader conjectures that produce its premises. In a pluralistic society, Ahmed (2014) argues there is a love for multiculturalism: “You must like us – and be like us” (138), and love our multicultural national “we.” The reinvented national “we” in 97 Canada as plural and tolerant is equally hegemonic when it remedies shame of the past with unfettered and unexamined love for multiculturalism as an ideal for post-polemic liberal citizenship. This way, refugee settlement becomes an object to sustain the ideal ego of the plural nation-state. In context, multiculturalism entails that while “we” enjoy culture, “they,” refugees are “culture” (Fortier 2008). Refugees are anchored in culture, and “we” are anchored in values, and culture always manifests in the bodies of the people who are marked with it. Syrian refugee women have been mostly harassed for their bodily appearance, which is marked, examined, and assumed to stand at odds with liberal values. Love for multiculturalism is offset by love for national values, social cohesion, and responsible-community building that must foster social services, solve chronic social issues, and integrate newcomers and refugees. In this case study, multiculturalism has proved to be absent as a policy in some areas of settlement and compromised as an ideology for a common belonging. Outsourcing settlement to social capital with sleight of hand can only disguise the continuous devolution and repurposing of multicultural policies and its everlasting debates. However, this outsourcing does not constitute a multicultural settlement, neither integration, as defined by multicultural theorists, should be called integration. So why is it still called integration and not assimilation? The answer is primarily embedded in the rampant and uncritical differentiation of Canada from the United States in immigration and diversity literature. There is an urgent need to re-examine multiculturalism not only in practice and against measurable outcomes but in theory and principles, mainly when homogenizing liberal thought disguises under its cloak and when it roots people in a national ideal and fixed cultural categories. In short, multiculturalism should be re-examined when homogenous geographies are exposed to diversification through neoliberal policies and when integration is, in fact, assimilation by stealth. In an assimilation scheme, what is left for refugees in Malkki’s national order of things are bound to a mere conditional right to cultural expression and ethnic clustering which are in addition to being a given right in non-multicultural liberal democracies (Hansen 2016), they serve the segregation and isolation of minority groups. In Kelowna, refugees and immigrants are marked by their bodies and appearance. Nonetheless, the visibility of refugees should not exceed cultural expression, and they must be invisible in political and professional spaces as Tedesco and Bagelman (2017) and this case study found evident in Kelowna. This is because the type of dialogues that would make refugees equally visible are beyond the workings of social capital and the weak multicultural policies of settlement in Kelowna. One of the godfather theorists of multicultural ideology, who has been generously funded by the Canadian government over half a decade, defends its viability not by explaining its failures in deterring prejudice and xenophobia—say, against Muslim minorities—but by reframing the ideology itself according to the “achievements” of the nation-state, mainly advancements in Indigenous and national 98 minority rights (Kymlicka 2010). Immigrants and refugees are gradually elided from those multicultural sedentary discourses and held, when applicable, as a token for multicultural symbolism, then indicted when they “fail” to make their culture benevolent that it sustains the ideal. Multiculturalism is often fronted as an accomplished theory that only deals with negative feedback when it is not applied “the right way.” In further research, multiculturism should be questioned for what it is premised on and how it applies in specific contexts beyond its master debates. Moreover, liberalism and liberal thought must be located in the Canadian political and cultural landscapes rather than disguised in comparative literature. The settlement experience of immigrants and refugees in small and mid-sized cities is a microcosm for teasing liberal and multicultural thought and praxis. Particularly when matters of diversity are relegated to private spheres that should attend the diversification plan for secondary urban centers. Lastly, to expand the discussion on the limitations of this research project, a few points can be made, so further research benefits from what has not been done or what could have been done differently. As I mentioned in chapter two, refugee interviewees were inclined towards providing accounts that conform to normative outcomes expected by society and institutions. When fieldwork and space-grounded research is possible, triangulation methods of data collection and analysis can afford to mitigate this gap in knowledge, in addition to the required trust establishment with research participants. Considering the sample size, it represented the small community in question. However, my initial intention was to do ethnographic work in the spaces of Syrian refugees and conduct focus groups. COVID-19 restrictions limited data collection to interviews. Phone interviews also introduced limitations due to the absence of non-verbal cues and the inability to situate the research participants in their environment. Also, this research was limited in its access to women independently from men. Methods must prioritize strategies for working with women of specific cultural backgrounds and traditions and having a female research partner can help establish trust around gender dynamics in research with refugees. Finally, this thesis, being descriptive and constructivist in its design, does not provide generalizable results, and further research is needed in Kelowna since this is the only inquiry on Syrian refugees so far. 99 5.3 Epilogue Arriving in a new country, for any reason, can be unnerving and alienating. As refugees, we start from a place of vulnerability, which colors much of our subsequent experiences in the world. Ontological vulnerability is a feeling we deal with and hopefully overcome. We also must confront the vulnerabilities projected on us. We are often talked about as subjects of rescue, cited as a problem to be addressed and dealt with, as subjects-to-come, and as projects of integration and citizen-making. Indeed, by forces of displacement and statelessness, some sort of compromise has already taken a toll on our agency, but not on our capacity to renegotiate that agency anew. The nexus of our pre-war identity and our new life is not the crisis, nor the resultant resettlement offered to us according to a liberal scale of deservedness. Instead, it is our will to look to the world and demand a normative place for ourselves as multitudes of lives, stories, ideas, subjectivities, dreams, and feelings; it is our capacity to resettle ourselves as subjects of self-rescue—global citizens who skipped the bureaucracy of documentation. We do embrace the emancipatory workings of displacement as we are ejected from national borders. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
“Eat to Your Taste, Dress for Others:” A Critical Ethnographic Inquiry into Multiculturalism and Social Capital in the Resettlement and Integration of Syrian Refugee in a Mid-sized City in Western Canada
Text