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Welcome to this podcast, following what it's like to be a mother and an immigrant. This idea started with a conversation. Back in February, I spoke with a man named Mike Papa. He immigrated to Canada from the Philippines when he was nine years old. Years prior, his mother had left to get work hours in Hong Kong.

 She then made it to Canada. When Papa arrived, he hadn't seen his mother in over six years. Though most of our conversation landed on Papa's first impressions of Canada, I couldn't stop thinking about his mother. I wanted to find out more about the women who travel thousands of kilometres from home in search of a better life for their families. Gisela Brisseno works at a newcomer information centre in the Halton region.

 In a quiet carpeted office building, she told me that family separations are very common. Their endings aren't always happy. There can be separations and then getting together with like a nice ending or it can be a really bad ending. I just heard last week about a mother. A mother came here leaving home the husband and three kids, right?

 So she was dealing with many things in order to settle, you know, learning English, getting a job, try to build something, save something for the family to come. And when she collect all the paperwork to be able to bring family, the lawyer makes some mistakes. And that mistakes were very hard to fix it. And even though when they were able to, when the kids came here, they feel that they don't belong here, right? And they haven't seen mom for what, four, six years.

 So it's kind of, who is this person, right? Because they haven't spend time with her. So the father couldn't settle either. So they come back home and the mother stay here. So the family is divided.

 When a newcomer come here to Canada, everyone have their unique journey. But what I believe that everyone share is this, this dream to have a better future. Better future for themselves and better future for their kids, better future for their family. No one leave their country, you know, without any issue. Because it's your culture, it's your language, it's your family, it's your relations.

 So moving from your country to a new one is a great deal of courage, right? And some parents make those decisions in order to provide a better future to their kids. Sometimes the mom come or the dad come and it takes time to bring the family over. It can take years. And now with the backlog that we have in the immigration processes, it takes up to nine years.

 The immigration processes that Briseyna was talking about are numerous. There are many complicated options for people looking to live or work in Canada. For those wishing to bring family, they need to become a permanent resident. There are various programs to become a permanent resident, such as express entry for skilled workers or the path for caregivers. These all involve time and luck.

 It can take years before receiving permanent resident status. It's only then that someone can sponsor their spouse and children to come to the country. Alyssa Thompson works in newcomer services, primarily helping refugees get established in Canada. When I met Thompson to speak with her, I expected to ask questions from her perspective as an immigration worker. However, she told me that she had a more personal connection to the topic.

 Both her parents immigrated to Canada before she was born. My dad immigrated to Canada on a whim because his friends were coming. And so he's like, oh, I'll come too. And so he came to Canada and he surprisingly liked it better than Jamaica, which I will never understand. But yeah, and then my mom, he had been involved with my mom like years before and they kept in touch.

 And he wooed her back and talked her into coming to Canada with him eventually. Thompson talked about her mother, how leaving her family behind in Jamaica was hard for her. The problem with immigration is that you're separated from all of your family. And so to this day, she's always talking to me about how lucky I am that I have my parents, that I can visit them anytime. And that when she came to Canada, like she saw her stepmother who she adores like twice after that.

 And then that was it. It's like there's a lot of separation that happens with immigration that I think a lot of people are kind of broken hearted. Regardless of all the red tape and all of that, there's this hole. You're missing the people that you love a lot of the time. And it's very hard to get people over here now.

 Thompson said that immigrating in any case is hard, especially for her client population who are mainly refugees. Having children only further complicates things. If you have even more difficult situation, if you're the mother and your child is back home, then a lot of the times like you don't really know what's going on with your child because they're so far apart. You can't necessarily hear everything that's happening. I would say the technology has helped a lot with that.

 Because in the past, you weren't able to call people so easily. Like now you have WhatsApp and you have FaceTime and you have all of these different ways. And most people have cell phones no matter where you are. And so it makes it a lot easier for people to stay connected. Before that, people would bring their kids and they hadn't seen them for seven or eight years.

 And the kids are not, like there's a disconnect. The kids don't want to be here. They don't want to be with their parents or they hate their parents. Or they say you abandoned me or whatnot. And so that is like another heartache.

 Thompson told me the story of her friend and his mother. What it left me with was an understanding of how traumatic immigration can be for families. And how essential people like Briseno and Thompson are in helping newcomers find their way. I have a friend who immigrated here when he was nine or so with his mother. And he says that if he wishes that his mother had somebody, like a settlement worker or somebody who understood the system to help her.

 Because she never really recovered from immigrating because she had a good job back home. And then she came here after traveling to different places trying to get refugee status. And she was ready to work but she didn't speak the language. And she couldn't get a job. And so that was a source of frustration and bitterness for her.

 That kind of broke her. Thank you for listening. And a special thank you to everyone involved who made this podcast happen.(Transcribed by TranscribeToText.ai - Go Unlimited to remove this message)