Help! from Canada: A grassroots Immigration Service
(Page 2 of 4)
March/April 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
In one fell swoop the authorities had effectively slammed the door on would-be immigrants . . . and would have killed our plans, too, if we'd heeded their stern dicta. As it was, we decided to take the usual Canadian approach to dealing with government: Simply keep a low profile and ignore the whole thing. We warned those who seemed interested in immigration about the change in the laws, and counseled them on how one way or another-they could still enter this country. As it turned out, many of our contacts just came for visits.
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The next problem was how to screen those who replied to our ad. We thought this step was necessary because we didn't want to stick any really straight farm folk with absolutely incompatible apprentices . . . and we also wanted to spare potential settlers the effort of coming here only to find the life too hard and the work too rough. To be frank, we suspected many of our correspondents probably wouldn't give enough consideration to the fact that they'd be placed on real, live, up-to-your-butt-in-manure farms where the work is hard and dirty (although, as we see it, rewarding in its own way).
Our answer to the selection problem was to devise a questionnaire . . . which sounds like a terribly institutional proceeding but was really an effective way to weed out those who were just looking for an escape or a good time. We asked our applicants what experience they'd had with farm work, whether there was any job they wouldn't want to do, what sort of accommodations they expected, whether they'd ever had to manage without "all the facilities" . . . and so forth. The questions were straightforward (enough so, apparently, to scare off some of our contacts) and brought equally candid replies that gave us a pretty good idea of where each respondent was at. Next we made up a corresponding questionnaire for Ontario farm folk, and placed an ad in a widely read rural newspaper asking those who had room for an immigrant to get in touch with us. We were pleased with the response . . . surprised, too, for Ontario's country people, like New Englanders, have often been pictured as rather cold and aloof. We thought otherwise, and were in general far from disappointed with the positions that were offered.
Our work then became a matter of trying to match the offers with the people who wanted to come. We let the parties deal directly with one another as much as possible and work out their own arrangements about room and board, work expected and so on. Only one or two of our correspondents wrote to say they'd changed their minds about immigration after replying to the questionnaire. What really ticked us off, though, were those very few who decided not to follow through and then didn't tell us. It was an awful feeling to get a letter from a farm owner asking, "How come I didn't hear from so-and-so?" We hardly knew what to say. I suppose it was just human nature at work, but somehow we wouldn't have expected the sort of person who reads MOTHER to pull a trick like that. After all, no one-least of all us-was in this for the money . . . so a little note of explanation, or any courtesy at all, would have gone along way to repay us for our efforts. (Conversely, however, some people who couldn't participate in the project wrote anyhow to wish us well and enclosed a dollar or two to defray expenses.) Costs, incidentally, were greater than we'd estimated. Postage mounts up when you write a couple of times to-say-100 people, and we figure we spent about $16.00 that way. The small newspaper ad came to a total of about $6.00. (That paper-the Wood bridge Advertiser of Palgrave, Ontario-is really terrific: charges only $1.00 per insertion for whatever you want to say, and covers a good deal of the province's rural area. No, we don't owe the Advertiser a plug, we just feel sure MOTHER's readers would like it. A year's subscription is $4.00 in Canada. We're not sure about rates to the rest of the world, but a quarter should bring you a sample copy.)
