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As part of my consulting on immigrant rights projects, I am researching the emotional needs, challenges, and successes of multi-generational immigrants (currently focusing on Canada). Primarily to evaluate what data points we could collect to address the gaps. A few weeks have been into the project already, and I am uncomfortably sensing a pattern.
The pattern is that I can’t find distinct differences! Not in the way I was hoping for.
For example, from the interviews so far, I observe that many lived experiences, emotional challenges, and social needs are more common than different between ones immigrated within the past 7-8 years vs. those who immigrated in the mid-late 70s (mid-late 70s is the maximum up to which I have been able to go back so far).
At first, I attributed some core commonalities to be general empathy and personality types between the groups. Still, I am now seeing a reason to explore deeper into these commonalities. In my mind, I expected the challenges to be different (not more or less, but different).
I am beginning to wonder – if, at some point, “apples” and “oranges” start to share more similarities than we know of, then the question becomes – what is going on with the resources they have access to for real growth?
I’ll keep you posted on a summarized version of this work in one of the future editions of data uncollected.
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