Immigration, adaptation and connecting the third generation to the motherland, Bangladesh

Kazi Zahir Uddin

Immigration is an important step in human life. I consider marriage as the first instance of immigration and changing one’s own place of living from one place to another may also be considered as immigration but in a small scale. The large scale of immigration happens when people leave one country to another for a better style of living.

We, the inhabitants of Bangladesh, have migrated to many other countries; for example, to the USA, UK, Canada and some other countries of the world. Whenever, we are leaving the country of our origin along with our immediate family members, we take our hard earnings, education, experience and a dream in our mind.

Whenever, we are landing to the new country, our hearts are filled with joy and minds are with full of expectations and we think that we have come to the heaven. The honeymoon period with the new country continues from six months to a year and after that reality rear its ugly head. The situation could be compared to the feelings of a new bride whenever she is entering into the in-laws house she has lot of hopes and aspirations in her mind but reality appears before her as a challenge as to establish herself in the new world where there is a new father, new mother, new siblings and a brand new husband and expectations are completely different from the previous family.

First, the immigrants start working on is the lifestyle that is completely different from the home country, then language both speaking and writing, typing, driving in the roadways and highways and on top of everything, there is no domestic help in the new world. Every single immigrant struggles a lot to settle down in a career of their own field. They are required to get some kind of certification to make themselves eligible for the workplace. Every single immigrant works from 3-7 years to settle down in the new country. They are exposed to an environment that they have never been exposed to and the struggle surmounts all levels of lives of the new immigrant family.

The amount of stress that the immigrants face is enormous and some immigrants even die through heart attack and some families’ breakdown. Some immigrants accept the survival job forever, some plan to go back to their country of origin and only very few settle down in proper jobs.

Governments of the host country bring in the immigrants and spends a lot of money and expertise to train up each immigrant but the industry considers everything as business and employment becomes the most crucial to the immigrants.

The situation of an immigrant is like whenever we are meeting the people of our own country in any environment their look is completely different and host country people also look at us in a different way. So, we are all in a situation that cannot be explained by anyone without the sufferer. And probably, there are not enough language available to express the situation.

When immigrants are struggling to settle down in the jobs and by this time, their kids start going to the schools and kids get influenced by the teachers and peers and they are exposed to the multicultural environment. Family values are now get influenced by the new environment and every single family start struggling with the new situation. Father and mother may be from two different streams of the same home culture but kids try to prove that now they are with modern knowledge, skills and values. So, the family values start reshaping with the new challenges.

I came as an immigrant to Canada with my small family of two kids; one of them were 5 and another one was 14. After 5/6 years, I have observed that my son who was 5-years old he is talking in Bengali but with an English accent and he didn’t do that consciously rather he was being influenced by the English speaking environment. I have monitored that very carefully and tried to correct his thinking process that how he is losing his Bengali accent and told him to correct that with a conscious mind. And it worked very well and now he is fine.

To maintain our own culture and values, I and wife are consciously working with two Bengali organizations; namely, Chittagong University Alumni Association of Canada Inc (CUAAC) and Udichi Canada. Almost 300 families are involved with each organization and it gives a flavour of our own culture among us and to our kids. These organizations work as a joint family for us because most of the immigrants are here with their nuclear family.

Whenever immigrants are living in a country, they always think and consider the home country as the country of origin and all dreams are always focused on that. But kids are in a transitional situation. If we take the aggregate immigrants who are the citizens of Bangladesh and living abroad, the amount of population might be few millions. These immigrants have left the country on their own and have become the citizens of another country but still they are contributing to the economy of Bangladesh.

Me and my wife both have studied at York University and my daughter is a student of the University of Toronto. She is also working for the Bangladeshi Students’ Association (BSA) in the university where this association arranges different cultural programs for the Bangladeshi community. This organization has also arranged programs with different universities in Toronto.

At this point, what I would like to focus on is what will happen to the third generation of our immigrants and how they will be connected to our motherland. Because once I was working in a Call Centre and I met a lady whose look and complexion was like a Bengali but she couldn’t speak a single word in Bengali. Then I asked her that where she is originally from and she said that her name is Jasmine and she is from Guyana and her grandfather migrated from British India to Guyana few decades ago.

After meeting Jasmine, I have felt one thing that ethnicity is a very important thing in human life and it cannot be changed in few generations even and I was also thinking about how would be the look and feelings of my third generation in Canada. Will they ever have any feelings that I have for my home country or how they will act or the total immigrant generation in different countries will go into oblivion?

These immigrant individuals are hardworking, law abiding and have commitment to the motherland, Bangladesh. All these individuals want that their third generation needs to be connected to the motherland, otherwise all these people will be finally disconnected from Bangladesh. As the third generation does not have any physical connection to the motherland and only parents are the source of connection.

The hard work of immigrant families is working well because their kids are receiving very good education from the host country and holding very good jobs. If we take initiative and connect them to our motherland then we will be able to see a rich Bangladesh and our country will be able to be the global leader.

The government may take an initiative where all the citizens of Bangladesh will be connected through the different embassies or high commissions and Bangladesh will have an exact count of citizens those are living in abroad. Government may provide some kind of facilities to the people who are residing outside of Bangladesh and also contributing to the economy as well.