0:00  
I'm Margaret Miller.

0:01  
and I'm Ron Miller.

0:02  
We moved from Glasgow, Scotland to Toronto, Canada.

0:06  
We move to here when we get married six months after we married and landed here on April 14, 1969.

0:12  
I was the same age as what my granddaughter is now 20 and 21. Driving down Eglinton Avenue and you had all these lights, like neon lights like and it just look absolutely humongous. And when we arrived, it was hot 75 degrees. 

0:30  
Something like that, yeah. 

Unknown Speaker  0:32  
And he'd had on a wool suit and I had on a wool suit and shirt and tie and the whole bit. And it was like we were dying.

0:41  
Going through the emigration when we landed here at that time they asked you know how much money you have got that you're coming to Canada with. We had the equivalent of $350 it was a lot of money then. And they basically are putting us down almost as destitute. And they gave us the address of this hotel downtown Toronto because we didn't have any family or anything here. And there was a it's gone now, but it was the Ford hotel, which was near the bus station and the old Bay Street bus station. I think it's still there and little did we know when we got there but there was a hotel where guys used to pick up women, prostitutes and take them there as well. So we were in the elevator going up and there were guys in the elevator looking at looking at me and looking at Margaret.

1:21  
Way our suitcases. And they're looking at us as if to say, you know.

1:29  
I guess we fitted in in the sense that a lot of the friends we had came from Britain, whether they were English or Scottish or Irish or whatever, but Canadians no so much.

1:42  
So used they used to say to us, you're over here just a few years to take the money, and you're gonna go back. That's exactly what they said, you're gonna go back to Scotland and stuff like that and we were stunned. 

1:53  
And some of the people I worked way, especially in the Bank of Nova Scotia, they weren't very nice.  

1:58  
I went to the unemployment office to sign on right as I got here. They would say me, do you have any Canadian experience? I go, what do you mean Canadian experience? Well, I have any, how much Canadian experience have you got?  I said well I've been working for two months or, you know, a month in this machine shop. No, no we're looking for people who has at least a year or two years, Canadian experience. Everywhere, everywhere I went, IBM, General Electric, all the big jobs the big employers in Scarborough. Who hired like people like me and that was the thing you always have to have Canadian experience. You can't say, well, why you no higher me, I've got all this experience, you know. I had engineering degrees as well. Right? So it's just, it's just a way of being nicely saying, well, you're now getting the job and instead of saying, well, why? It's just you don't have the Canadian experience.

2:48  
That of course, becomes becomes a major, major issue in terms of why people might encounter encounter economic disappointment. You know, it certainly goes against that branding of you know, Canada as a welcoming country to the world through through immigration. I'm Myer Siemiatycki. I'm a professor in the Department of politics and public administration. I am the past founding director of Ryerson's graduate program, MA program in immigration and settlement studies. One of my areas of teaching and research interest is migration, so we're trying to explain why does a one in seven minority not find this a happy land, a happy landing pad. And I think in addition to the economic conditions, which I think are the major factor, I think another one that that that plays in is can they cope with a change in their own social status and place in a society? I think it's a subjective response to lived experience. I would put in a second category, this is a terrible thing for anyone to be subjected to a significant self perceived decline in their place in the social hierarchy or positioning of where they are in their society. So, a lot of it then comes down to if you okay, so if you're going to be confronted with that, can you handle that?

4:25  
I went to a job site north of Frankford, north of Trenton and there was a there's a non union job getting done somewhere. So I gets out the car and I walks up and this guy standing, you know. I say excuse me I says ah you know, who say who's doing the mechanical part of this job here on this gate? And they guy turns around as says what's it to you? I went, I says, I'm the union rep, I says and we represent the contractors that do this work. I'm very interested in who's doing it. Well, then it started. You tell me that some foreign born cocksucker is going to come on my job site and tell me who's going to be installing work on my job. You've got fucking problem. He says, I went fucking fire away then, let's do it. This in 1990...I'd say five, four or five, right? So 25 years ago and I was still foreign born cocksucker. And I'm no, I don't look Asian. I don't look brown. Until I open my mouth he didn't know what I was, right? It was just because I opened my mouth and I said that, I was a foreign born cocksucker. I'd say a lot of the attitudes changed later on maybe later in the 70s. But then there was a different kind of almost if you want to call it a different kind of racism. Because now they weren't worried now about us. They were worried about immigrants that were coming from other places that they doesn't particularly like and then the right changes. You know, you're okay. When we were the same people that came here in 1969.