2 Conversations with Egyptian Uber Drivers: Why Emigrate? Why Canada?
2 Conversations with Egyptian Uber Drivers: Why Emigrate? Why Canada?
Michael Akladios
Census Canada recently estimated that the proportion of Arabic speakers in Canada is projected to increase 200 per cent by 2036. Yet, the study of immigration and ethnicity in North America tends to ignore Middle Eastern immigrants. The region remains in the Western imaginary as an ahistorical and hermeneutically sealed zone.1 However, one would be hard-pressed to find someone in Egypt today without a friend or relative who has emigrated.
I visited Egypt for a six-week research trip in summer 2017, to compile documents from state and institutional archives on the history of Egyptian immigration to Toronto and the New York/New Jersey area in the post-WWII period. In the process, I often asked myself what my study of the history of Egyptian emigration contributes to our present understanding of Egypt and its émigré populations. The answer to that question began to form as I traveled throughout the country. On every excursion from a hotel, I requested an Uber. There are approximately 150,000 Uber drivers in Egypt and it is the most convenient and comfortable form of travel for visitors. Stuck in mid-day traffic, I would engage the drivers in conversation. After nearly three-dozen conversations, patterns emerged.2 The perception of emigration, its motivations, and the expectations of those wishing to emigrate have all changed in the past sixty years.
When I interviewed a self-described “Canadian of Egyptian origin” in Toronto last spring, who had immigrated to Canada in the early 1970s, he recalled seeing his own migration as a journey from city to village.3 For him, as for many other Egyptians who began to emigrate to North America in the late 1950s, Toronto and Montreal were young, empty, and lacked the diversity of populations and services that characterized their city lives in Cairo and summers spent in Alexandria. They recounted that the streets of Cairo and Alexandria rivaled those of Paris and were the envy of western Europe.
The factors that once prompted many to emigrate were quite varied. First, the expanding post-secondary educational sector and private enterprise in Canada provided an endless array of opportunities to succeed. Second, their youthful sense of adventure; of exploration and dreams of self-made success. Third, fears of President Gamal Abd’ al-Nasser’s secret police and of being drafted into yet another regional war. The majority of émigrés up to the late-1970s were of middle-class backgrounds in Egypt and still remember a prevalent sense of dread that continued military spending would further cripple the national economy. Yet, almost thirty interviewees to date have described their decision to leave as one of many options; whether pursuing higher education, youthful adventure, or job security and social mobility, most maintained the option of eventual return to Egypt years after their arrival.
Unlike the documented migrations of many ethnic