Help! from Canada: A grassroots Immigration Service
(Page 3 of 4)
March/April 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
We also ran into staggering phone bills. These could have been avoided, I suppose, but every now and then the immediacy of a call seemed necessary (or at least preferable to trusting our mail service, which is only a cut above that in the U.S.). Fortunately, one of our little group is a lawyer who has horrendous phone bills anyway and didn't mind adding a few more dollars to the enrichment of Ma Bell.
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Our responses came from just about everywhere in the U.S.A.: Washington State to Florida, California to Texas to New England. People actually arrived here from just about every region in the United States except the Deep South. A great many have stayed, and we've yet to meet one we don't like. Indeed, some pretty close friendships have grown out of our project and we're still in touch by mail with one or two who didn't want to immigrate but were-we guess-lonely for someone to write to. This was the great joy and beauty of the program.
Another high point came in the middle of the summer, when the government had a change of heart and decided to grant an amnesty for "illegal immigrants". During this period such people could come forward without fear of prosecution or deportation and "regularize" their status. Of the some 50,000 who took advantage of the offer, a few had arrived in response to our notice . . . so we now have some bona fide landed immigrants in Ontario who came and stayed with our help .Better still, one or two of our correspondents took the formal "get your papers before leaving the States" route and managed to get here anyhow. The last one arrived around the beginning of December and is now happily ensconced on a pretty good farm where she's learning to tan hides and repair harness. We share her excitement in all this (and in the thrill she finds in our winter, too, since she came all the way from California).
On balance, we have a good feeling about the whole project . . . but the discouragements can't be overlooked. We were most disappointed in those people-we came to call them "plastic pioneers"who gave up too soon and went back to the Big Smoke in the U.S.A. Notwithstanding our screening and our personal letters about the solitude, hard work and grubbiness (if you want to put it that way) of farm life, we did encounter visitors who couldn't cope with being deprived of a flush toilet, or who couldn't stand getting wet or dirty. Needless to say, they didn't last long . . . and I guess their hosts were, like us, only half sorry to see them go. The lesson is obvious: Living on the land isn't for everybody. It's all very well to read MOTHER and dream . . . but before you actually make a start you should think very carefully about the privations of such a life (and, if possible, find a way to take a practice run at it).
