The Newcomers Podcast

Building a village in a new country, what to let go of, and how to grow your circle

The diaspora child and the inheritance immigrants pass on whether they plan to or not

The four outcomes of acculturation theory, and why integration is both the healthiest and the most disorienting path

How representation constructs reality

What happens to your sense of home when the anchors back home start disappearing

The rules for connection cannot be copied from home. The version of friendship that formed back home, built over years of proximity and shared history, cannot be replicated quickly. Carrying those expectations into a new country is what sets people up to feel like they are failing socially when they are doing fine. One shared interest is enough to start. That's how Niki built her circle in Toronto, via dog parks and crochet circles.

Your kids will be seen through an identity they never lived. Niki talks about her daughter, who will be perceived as a woman of color, a South Asian, an Indian-Canadian, and who may not have the lived experience of any of those places to draw on. And as immigrant parents, the work is to understand the systems our children will operate in, and teach them how to navigate them. Because our battles do not have to become their battles.

Why "Canadian experience required" is, in his words, the polite Canadian way of saying "I don't believe you can do the job"

How communication became the single most critical skill for newcomers in this market

How AI is reshaping what signals employers use to decide who even gets an interview

What the human skills toolkit actually looks like, and why mindset is the meta skill underneath all of it

Why "get better at communication" is useless advice, and what to focus on instead

The concept of "Canadian experience" gets treated like a credential gap, but Luki believes it's a communication problem. Employers aren't withholding jobs because newcomers lack local context. They're withholding jobs because they can't see the value clearly enough to take the risk. So this probably means that this is a fixable thing, right?

"Get better at communication" is useless advice. Nobody gets better at basketball by trying to get better at basketball. You work on dribbling, on your shot, on reading the court. Soft skills are the same. Stand up straighter. Look someone in the eye. Slow down when you speak. Those are skills you can actually practice.

Relationships are the real hiring mechanism. As Luki puts it, "It's not what you know, it's not who you know, it's who knows you." Some immigrants I talk to understand this in theory and delay it in practice. They wait until they need the network before they build it. By then, the savings are low and the pressure is high, and asking for help from strangers you've never invested in is nearly impossible. The time to build is before you need it.

Connect with Luki Danukarjanto on LinkedIn

Read the takeaways from our AMA with Luki

How social media accentuates the extremes and makes it nearly impossible to reach the people in the middle

Why calling a system "broken" is a pejorative that shuts down problem-solving

Why immigration success should be measured through population goals, skills gaps, newcomer investment, humanitarian work, and the country's global brand, not just annual arrival numbers

What Canada stands to gain if it gets immigration right over the next decade, and what it stands to lose if it doesn't

If you have an overcrowded bus route, you increase the capacity of your transit system, not ban passengers. We need to adopt a similar heuristic when planning or having the Canadian immigration planning conversation. The question isn't whether we need people. It's whether we'll build the infrastructure to support them. For newcomers navigating a new country, the infrastructure they land in shapes their entire immigration journey.

The immigration system isn't broken. A broken system is one that's in total disarray, in pieces. Every day, settlement workers provide newcomer support by helping people find homes, jobs, language skills, networks, and belonging. That's not a broken system, it's one that's under strain and needs to be improved or optimized. The word "broken" is a pejorative that shuts down problem-solving and opens the door to dismantling. And the people most eager to use it are often the least interested in repairing it.

We need to measure immigration by what it builds, not just how many people arrive. Jonathan wants immigration success measured through skills gaps filled, investment brought in, population strategy, humanitarian contribution, and Canada's global reputation. Not just total arrivals and population rates. He draws a parallel to how we're slowly realizing GDP alone doesn't capture a country's real wealth and wants the same rethinking applied to how we measure immigration success. If we measured immigration through those lenses, the public conversation would probably change from "did we bring in too many" to "are we building the country we want to be." That could help change how we think about the Canadian immigrant experience.

We need to spend more time talking to the stretch audience. Jonathan splits public opinion into three groups: intuitive supporters, implacable opponents, and the bigger uncertain middle. The middle fundamentally understands immigration's importance but is being pulled by louder voices. The people who care most about immigration are posting on LinkedIn for the converted or fighting on X with the immovable. Neither reaches the stretch audience. The newcomer challenges that concern the middle group are real. Jonathan says settlement organizations and advocates need to spend far more time thinking about how to engage that middle group in communities, through direct conversation, through explaining the system, and through listening to their concerns.

Unless you're indigenous, every Canadian has a relationship to immigration somewhere in their history. Jonathan's family was in the UK for only three or four generations. Before that, they were refugees from Eastern Europe, fleeing religious persecution. Most of us have lost touch with that reality. And losing touch with our own immigrant stories makes it easier to view current newcomers as something separate from ourselves. The work of reconnecting Canadians to their own immigration histories, not as a guilt exercise but as a fact of Canadian identity, might be one of the most underused tools in rebuilding public support. Cultural diversity in Canada isn't a recent experiment but one on which the foundation of this beautiful country has always stood on.

How the dominance of networks in hiring puts newcomers at a structural disadvantage

How eliminating barriers to labor mobility between provinces could create more competition and opportunity

Why more newcomer voices in politics at every level, city, provincial, federal, is essential to changing policy

Why we need to move the immigration debate from quantity to quality of integration

The smaller the network, the stronger the need to network. In a market of 41 million people, with highly localized labor markets, networks become the dominant hiring currency. And for newcomers who arrive without the Canadian education, the social context, or the connections, that's a disadvantage they have to overcome.

Canada's institutional mindset favors stability over growth, and that mindset affects everything else. The institutional preference for status quo shows up in the quasi-monopolies across industries, the cost of phone bills and insurance, the trade dependence on the United States, and the snail-like approach to building the infrastructure needed for diversification. Victor says this trickles into the labor market, into salaries, into the cost of living, and is a major reason why skilled immigrants hit a ceiling and leave.

The Canadian immigration debate needs to shift from numbers to quality of integration. Victor points out that Canada has been talking about becoming a country of 100 million since the 1910s. We're still at 41 million. Part of the reason is that people keep coming and leaving. If the policy conversation shifts from "how many people did we bring in this year" to "how well did they integrate and what prevented them from reaching their potential," you start asking entirely different questions. You ask about retention. About credential recognition across provinces. About why someone with a career in international development applied for hundreds of jobs and got silence. That alone would transform how settlement support is designed and how communities engage with newcomers.

The gap between what different regions need is enormous, and our immigration policy seems to treat them as the same. In Peel County, Ontario, there are 169 births for every 100 deaths. In Queens County, New Brunswick, there are 41. The recently released Public Policy Forum publication authored by David adds another dimension to the newcomer conversation, which is: by 2035, 175 communities across Atlantic Canada will have at least a third of their population over 65, up from 12 in 2011. A national immigration policy that applies the same cuts everywhere ignores the fact that some of these communities are literally running out of people while others are congested.

When you bring in 1.5 million students but only have space to grant permanent residency to a fraction of them, you've built a system that manufactures disappointment. The people caught in that gap made life decisions based on what they were told. Now many of them, including people David says are in career jobs, are being sent home because their work permits aren't being renewed.

The yearning for a 1950s world, as David puts it, is a yearning for something that never existed. Even in New Brunswick's history, Catholics and Protestants fought like cats and dogs. There was never a time when everyone shared the same background and culture. David says Canada works because you don't have to agree with your neighbor's religion or views, you just have to tolerate that they can hold different ones. Cultural diversity is the foundation Canada was built on. When people push for restricting immigration to return to some imagined cultural homogeneity, they're chasing a past that was always fictional. And they're willing to sacrifice the economic and demographic future of their communities to get there. That's a Canadian identity question every citizen, newcomer and multi-generational alike, will have to answer.

How to tailor a business idea from home for the Canadian market

What 15 years away from home teaches you about adaptability and identity

How Futurpreneur's newcomer initiative bridges the credit score gap

Why Mo spent months saying no to jobs in Canada

A lot of newcomer entrepreneurs who fail do so because they don't understand their customer. You bring a product from home and you assume people here will want it the same way. But the customer here is different because their habits and tastes are different. As Mo says, when a customer says no, they're not rejecting your identity. They're telling you the product needs to meet them where they are.

Values-based job searching as an immigrant takes a kind of nerve that most people can't afford. Mo spent six or seven months without a steady income, saying no to jobs that didn't align with what he wanted to do. That wait was expensive but it's also what landed him at Futurpreneur, where his values matched the mission. Not everyone can afford to wait. But for those who can, Mo's story is proof that the wait can pay off. The wrong job at the right time is still the wrong job.

How personal credit determines your business lending options till a certain stage

Why banks can't help with everything

The fantasy of being your own boss

Why crowdfunding, pitch competitions, and micro-grants might be better starting points than bank loans

When you should take your first loan

The best market research sometimes is a job. Getting a job in the industry you're hoping to launch a business in means you have a front-row seat to everything. You'll learn the regulations, find the gaps, and even build the relationships that could lead to your first clients or your first mentors.

Starting a business as a newcomer can be hard. Not to be a downer here but people (myself included) often fantasize about how starting our own business can mean some form of freedom. But you get in and discover that if you can't fund the business, the business won't fund itself. Capital is scarce. Grants for for startups are hard to come by. Lending requires personal credit you might not have yet. So you end up running the business on top of a survival job, funding it from your nine-to-five, and testing your product on weekends. Know this and plan for it.

Immigrants sometimes come from economies that have solved problems the Canadian market hasn't even identified yet. The challenge is knowing how to position that expertise in a market that doesn't know it needs it yet. Bontu thinks one way to do that in Canada is to pair that knowledge with local understanding. And execute fast.

Network outside your community. It's natural to stay within your diaspora community when you arrive. But if you want to build a business that reaches beyond that community, you need relationships outside of it. Especially because in Canada, your network is a big part of far you go.

How a song, a spontaneous trip, and a failed credit card led to four and a half years in Budapest

The gap between what the algorithm sells you about Canada and what you actually find

Why parenting far from home forces you to become your own village

The lessons he'd share with anyone thinking about moving

Every country you live in installs something in you that you can't uninstall. Emmanuel picked up a European habit in Hungary, which is mind your own business even in the elevator. Then he moved to Canada and found people who wanted to chat as "too friendly." Every country you make home, even for a little bit reshapes your sense of what's normal, what you tolerate, and how much control you expect over daily life.

Home doesn't require you to fit perfectly inside it. Emmanuel is probably never gonna fit in fully into Ghana again. And I think one lesson I took from reflecting on this point he made is that home isn't the place you currently agree with on everything. You can question it, outgrow parts of it, or feel frustrated by it. But deep in your bones, you just know it's home.

Immigration will reveal all your biases. For Emmanuel, things that were fine in Ghana aren't fine to him anymore. Things that were normal in Hungary feel strange in Canada. Each move peels back another layer. And if you're not willing to do that work, you'll struggle, because the country you moved to doesn't care about preserving the version of yourself you arrived with.

How she's building community dialogues between policymakers and immigrant families

How her children's struggles pushed her into community building

What Canadians can do to welcome newcomers

Why she thinks immigrant parents need to get involved in building the society their kids are going to grow up in

The gap between policy and practice is where immigrants get lost in the workplace. Organizations will say they have a diversity and inclusion policy. But what are the actual steps? How is feedback received across cultural lines? Are there strategies for intercultural communication, or just a document filed away somewhere?

"Passionate" can be a compliment or a code word, and the difference depends entirely on who's saying it. Busayo went to multiple job interviews where interviewers told her she was "so passionate." She later found out that it was polite Canadian for "you're too much." In Nigeria, it's okay to be passionate and direct. In a Canadian professional setting, it can be seen as aggression. This is one of those invisible cultural translation problems that no settlement guide covers. I think the fix is for both sides to understand that communication styles are culturally coded, and different doesn't mean wrong.

Integration requires infrastructure that most communities don't have yet. And we immigrants need to do the work of building that connective tissue. Don't wait, stretch out your hand and kick off the conversation. Sometimes you'll get a handshake, sometimes you won't. And that's okay.

The most effective immigrant advocates I've spoken to on this podcast don't wait for permission. Busayo got county funding for her book. She got the mayor to write the foreword. She got it into schools by aligning it with the Alberta curriculum. She's organizing a community dialogue in the council chambers with policymakers, MLAs, school principals, and religious leaders. She's the first Black member of the library board. All these happened because she showed up and made the case. That's how societies change.

Giving up his medical degree

The door-to-door sales experience that changed everything for him

Starting a business during COVID

Why you shouldn't celebrate your wins too early

What he's hoping Panda Hub looks like by year 10

Being honest in business is a practical and moral position. In the early years of building a business, when everything is messy and relationships are fragile, honesty and consistency is worth more than any short-term advantage a lie could give you.

"Extract as much as you can from the opportunity in front of you" seems to be a better framework than goal-setting. Goals are useful, but they also create a scorekeeping mentality where you either hit the number or you didn't. Abdullah approaches it differently. He looks at whatever opportunity exists right now and asks: what's the maximum value I can pull from this? That mindset kept him from stalling when COVID killed his agency and when door-to-door sales hit a ceiling It's forward-looking without being rigid because there's always more value to extract.

Survival jobs can be more than placeholders. Abdullah's door-to-door sales job was some experience; commission only, no base salary, and dealing with constant rejection. However, it taught him to connect with strangers, handle "no" without crumbling, and figure out quickly what language makes people trust you enough to buy. Those are skills that have come in handy today as he works on Panda Hub.