Maytree Conversations

Or, rather, cities learning from each other.

As we welcome the world to Toronto next week for our DiverseCity onBoard Learning Exchange, we are also sharing Good Ideas in immigrant integration from around the world.

Maytree’s Cities of Migration staff are in Baltimore at the National Immigrant Integration Conference (NIIC). This year, they brought copies of our latest publication, Good Ideas from Successful Cities: Municipal Leadership in Immigrant Integration.

Compiling nearly 40 international good practices from cities across Canada, the US, Europe and Australasia, Good Ideas showcases why municipal leadership on integration matters.

We’re sharing these good ideas for a simple and compelling reason. They’re examples of integration done well. They help fuel economic growth, spur innovation and talent renewal, create new knowledge, and promote an open, richer and more inclusive social fabric. Through ideas such as these, new forms of social, economic, cultural and political capital create benefits for thriving urban communities globally.

As Alan Broadbent, Chairman of Maytree, writes:

“Cities know and feel both urbanization and immigration profoundly. At the national and sub-national levels, urbanization and immigration are policy issues. At worst, they become xenophobic political issues as politicians stir fear of immigrants. At the municipal level, though, they are primary lived experience. And at the city level is where we find the political and community voices that embrace immigrants, knowing they bring strength, vitality, and innovation. So at the municipal level, in our cities and urban regions, managing the settlement and inclusion of newcomers is vital.”

Ratna Omidvar has spoken frequently about the essential and unique role cities have to play in the welcoming and successful integration of newcomers. As she says, “Cities are uniquely positioned to learn from each other and to import, replicate, adapt ideas… Done well, integration creates great benefits.”

The city government that understands this will ensure local, regional and national prosperity.

Related:

• Good Ideas from Successful Cities: Municipal Leadership in Immigrant Integration
• Alan Broadbent on cities and international collaboration
• The Three I’s of Immigration Integration
• Cities of Migration shares Toronto’s diversity experience with the world

We are so very, very excited to congratulate Ratna Omidvar on being appointed a Member of the Order of Canada!

We think this is a great opportunity to reflect on some of Ratna’s recent thoughts and insights about her experience coming to Canada, and her hopes and dreams for our country.

For those of you who may be new to Ratna, here’s a short bio:

Ratna Omidvar is president of Maytree, a private foundation that promotes equity and prosperity through its policy insights, grants and programs. Under Ratna’s leadership, Maytree has been recognized for its commitment to developing, testing and implementing programs and policy solutions related to immigration, integration and diversity in the workplace, in the boardroom and in public office.

Two recent initiatives have been the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) and DiverseCity: The Greater Toronto Leadership Project. Internationally, Maytree is best known for the Cities of Migration project.

Ratna serves as a director of Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance (formerly Toronto City Summit Alliance), the chair of the Board of Directors of TRIEC, and a director of Connect Legal.

In 2006, she was appointed to the Order of Ontario and, in 2010, the Globe and Mail profiled Ratna as its Nation Builder of the Decade for Citizenship.

Last year, Ratna gave the 4th annual June Callwood Lecture at the Toronto Reference Library. Her speech, “A Canadian in the Making,” was of a very personal nature and she chose to write four letters to Canada:

• Exile
• Endurance
• Awakening
• Redemption

“As I prepared for this year’s lecture, I thought about the thirty years since my arrival in Canada, and how much Canada and I have changed,” explained Ratna. “How much we both are a work in progress…. I’m going to tell you my story in Canada… My story is no different than that of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who choose to make Canada their home. We all have a starring role in the same reality show.”

Read more (PDF) and watch Ratna describe her journey from exile to belonging, from refugee to one of leading social activist creating opportunities for a better Canada.

While Letters to Canada chronicles much of Ratna’s life in Canada, she hasn’t stopped reflecting, wondering and contributing to our country.

Recently, Ratna Omidvar expanded on her hopes for Canada when she spoke about immigration, integration and inclusion at the second Martin Luther King lecture organized by the Koerber Foundation in Hamburg.

Titled “The Next Dream,” Ratna noted that it is now more and more unlikely in countries such as Canada to witness open acts or expressions of racism. But systemic barriers to inclusion still exist. While much has been accomplished in the battle for equality, Dr. King would agree that much still needs to be done. Ratna discussed how one important way to overcome these barriers is to focus on, talk about and learn more about how immigration impacts us positively. That is the only way to get past one’s inherent fear of the new, different and foreign.

Martin Luther King lecture – listen:

Read the full text of her lecture online.

In 2012, Ratna’s call to action to all of us in Toronto, and beyond, is to focus on our mutual hopes and dreams, to connect more with each other, to invest in our communities. She asks us all to really focus on the hard but rewarding work of inclusive community engagement.

“So my hope for 2012 is for all of us to get a tad sticky and to put our fingers in the glue.”

Cities are the destination of choice for most immigrants. The welcome cities provide to their newest residents is key to successful integration and, in the end, vital to their social and economic health. It’s also essential to the ongoing prosperity of cities themselves. It’s not surprising then that cities worldwide are eager to learn from each other about what works to integrate immigrants.

From November 28 to December 2, a delegation from Toronto, led by Maytree’s president Ratna Omidvar and chairman Alan Broadbent, will visit four cities in Germany: Stuttgart (Nov. 28), Hamburg (Nov. 29), Berlin (Nov. 30 and Dec. 1), and Cologne (Dec. 2), to share good practices in immigrant integration.

Toronto’s delegates are:

• Matt Galloway, Host, Metro Morning, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Matt will speak about how CBC has reinvented itself and achieved national success by paying close attention to who lives in the city;
• Elizabeth McIsaac, Executive Director, Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC). Elizabeth will speak about how working with businesses can ensure that recent immigrants find employment in their field;
• Donna Quan, Deputy Director – Academic, Toronto District School Board. Donna will speak about how the public education system plays an important role in the integration of immigrant youth and their families; and
• Deputy Police Chief, Peter Sloly, Toronto Police Service (TPS). Peter will speak about how TPS has changed itself to reflect the new demographic reality of the most diverse city in Canada.

In each city, Toronto’s delegates will also have an opportunity to visit with staff of German projects to learn about local immigrant integration practices. One of the hoped-for outcomes of this exchange is for each delegate to bring back a good idea that his or her organization may be able to implement.

In the following video, Ratna speaks to the important role cities have to play in the welcoming and successful integration of newcomers. At the end of the day, integration and inclusion is an inherently local phenomenon.

Alan Broadbent speaks about the successful model of immigrant integration that Toronto’s institutions are working hard to establish, how it’s useful and important for us to celebrate and share these successes, but that we also have much to learn from others.

This exchange of ideas is organized in partnership with the Canadian Embassy in Berlin. We also thank our German partners, the Robert Bosch Foundation and the City of Stuttgart in Stuttgart, the Körber Foundation in Hamburg, the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin, and the Bertelsmann Foundation in cooperation with the Ministry of Labour, Integration and Social Affairs, North Rhine-Westfalia, in Cologne.

Find out more about the tour, read about the good ideas in integration being presented, and a daily update as we tour the four cities.

Letter to the editor in response to the September 7, 2011 Globe and Mail editorial “Ontario Liberal immigrant hiring proposal is discriminating politics.” A shortened version of this letter was published on Saturday, September 10, 2011.

The Globe and Mail editorial about the Ontario Liberal platform plank of creating a tax credit for employers who employ skilled immigrant gets it almost exactly wrong.

First of all, the tax system is, and always has been, a fundamental way to deliver public policy. Governments at all levels undertake initiatives to help particular groups access the labour market more effectively, whether it be youth, the disabled, or disadvantaged. The proposed tax credit is the expression of the government’s ongoing efforts to employ immigrants at the level that they can contribute best to the economy, in the way that our national immigration system said would happen when it admitted them.

Second, the employment of immigrants in the jobs for which they have experience and training is in the national, and provincial, interest. Numerous studies have pointed out the enormous economic inefficiency of under-employing skilled immigrants.

Third, the editorial ignores the barriers immigrants face in breaking into the Canadian labour market. They are not on a level playing field with workers born in Canada, but face issues related to a lack of Canadian work experience, employer lack of familiarity with non-Canadian education and professional credentials, and racism.

The tax credit is a good idea, which should be embraced by the other parties, and implemented by the next government of Ontario.

Alan Broadbent, Chairman and CEO, Avana Capital Corporation, and Chairman, Maytree

Ratna Omidvar, President, Maytree

Are you frustrated that your messages on immigration are not getting across?

Frank Sharry, Founder and Executive Director of America’s Voice, knows a little something about about both frustrations and successes in promoting positive immigration reform. According to Frank “Every Western industrialized nation faces the same issues of an aging society that needs migrants, a skeptical public and some hostile media. In supporting migrants, we do face formidable challenges but I’m still optimistic; we just have to focus on bringing together the needs of our societies and the aspirations of migrant families.”

Earlier this month, Frank spoke with Maytree’s President Ratna Omidvar at an evening event about how to change the channel on the immigration debate and create effective campaigns.

Watch Frank talk about:

• How you can cut through the clutter and harness the media as a tool for supporting immigration;
• How to position immigrants and refugees as nation builders;
• Proven strategies of activists in other countries that we can borrow and learn from; and
• How to create effective media campaigns.

A bit of background about Frank

Few people know the American immigration reform scene as well as Frank. He is a leading advocate on immigration issues in the United States. He is the Founder and Executive Director of America’s Voice, an organization dedicated to building both public support and political momentum for immigration reform. He founded America’s Voice in 2008 to strategically direct the way in which issues around immigration reform are communicated. Prior to that, he served as Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum for 17 years. The Forum, based in Washington D.C., is one of the nation’s premier immigration policy organizations, and has been at the center of every major legislative and policy debate related to immigration for the past quarter of a century.

An advocate for 11 million undocumented immigrants, he calls America’s Voice the “communications war room” for the immigration reform movement, an important tool in a discourse that is considered to be toxic and polarizing.

Related reads:

• Maytree’s election insights
• DiverseCity Voices
• The first rule of advocacy: don’t talk about advocacy. Until now.
• The Next Dream
• Visions of 2011

On January 17, 2011, Ratna Omidvar spoke about immigration, integration and inclusion at the second Martin Luther King lecture organized by the Koeber Stiftung in Hamburg.

Titled “The Next Dream,” Ratna noted that it is now more and more unlikely in countries such as Canada to witness open acts or expressions of racism. But systemic barriers to inclusion still exist. While much has been accomplished in the battle for equality, Dr. King would agree that much still needs to be done.

Ratna Omidvar in conversation with Melinda Crane (Photo credit: Claudia Höhne)

Ratna discussed how one important way to overcome these barriers is to focus on, talk about and learn more about how immigration impacts us positively. That is the only way to get past one’s inherent fear of the new, different and foreign.

While Germany and Canada are very different countries when it comes to population density and history, they can learn from one another. During the conversation with the audience that followed the lecture, Ratna took the opportunity to share her experiences.

Some audience members were doubtful that the negative image of immigrants found in the German media could be overcome, or that you could create enough incentives for successful integration. But Ratna encouraged them to be optimistic: “Those who want to change the current negative climate have to start working on it now.” She added, “In fact, Germany can cite some interesting examples of success. Just look at who plays in your soccer clubs, and who succeeds in your political parties.”

Ratna gave the audience some final thoughts to take them forward in their work moving towards inclusion. Things have already started to change for the better. Advocates and influencers have to point to them to show how these changes are positive.

Immigration is here to stay. Ultimately, the countries that adapt will be successful in this globalized world.

• Listen to Ratna’s lecture
• Read her lecture online

DiverseCity onBoard connects qualified candidates from racially and ethnically diverse communities with governance positions in agencies, boards, commissions and nonprofit organizations across the GTA.

In this video Maytree President, Ratna Omidvar, explains the origins, goals and importance of the project.

“DiverseCity onBoard is our effort to revitalize the governance profile of the city region, bring it closer to the demographics of people who live in the city. This is not just an effort on representation, or tokenism of any kind. It is more of an effort to bring people with real qualifications, with real capacity to provide value, but a different point of view and a different perspective.”

(3:45)

Related links:

• DiverseCity: The Greater Toronto Leadership Project
• Diversity in Governance Awards

In an article in the July-August 2010 issue of Policy Options, Maytree President Ratna Omidvar asks how the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who arrive each year in Canada fare in the immigration process. She examines the extent to which Canada’s immigration policy succeeds in the short, medium and long terms for both Canada and the immigrants.

Perhaps the best indication of how well Canada does in the medium term is how immigrants themselves describe their feelings of belonging. According to the General Social Survey, 84 percent of immigrants who arrived between 1990 and 2003 reported strong or somewhat strong feelings of belonging in Canada, compared with 85 percent of all Canadians.

Using a number of economic, social and political indicators, she finds that Canada is doing well in the medium and long terms, but must do better in the short term: “Canada’s score on this front is abysmal,” she says. She makes several recommendations to increase the benefits of immigration in the first few years of arrival, notably by strengthening the federal Skilled Worker Program.

Read the article (PDF).