The kids are watching

Somewhere in this province, there’s a child whose mother runs a small shop and whose father drives a delivery route after being an engineer back home.

That child is watching. Not on purpose, but constantly, for a picture of what someone like them is allowed to become.

And almost everywhere they look, the people who run things, own things, get called successful, look and sound nothing like their parents.

So they absorb a quiet lesson nobody sat them down to teach: people like us work for the people who own things.

We don’t get to be the people who own things.

Here’s what makes that lesson a lie, and an expensive one.

In Canada, immigrants are nearly a third of all business owners with paid staff.

Roughly one in three people signing pay cheques in this country is an immigrant.

We start something like one in four new companies. The kid scanning the horizon for someone like their parents isn’t looking for a rare thing. They’re looking for a thing that is everywhere, and nearly invisible in the stories they get handed.

That gap, between what newcomers actually do and what newcomer kids get to see, isn’t a vibe problem.

It’s infrastructure.

“You can’t be what you can’t see” gets repeated so often it’s gone soft, but under the cliché is something load-bearing. The first time a child of immigrants sees someone with their surname, their accent, their family’s exact story running a real business, not just surviving, succeeding; a ceiling they didn’t know they’d absorbed quietly lifts.

That isn’t a nice feeling. It’s the raw material of ambition. And its absence is a tax, paid silently, by every immigrant kid who grows up assuming the ownership of things isn’t meant for them.

There’s a harder layer under this, and it’s the reason I think showing the wins matters even more than showing the struggle. A lot of immigrant entrepreneurship in this country isn’t a dream. It’s a workaround.

Recent immigrants are far more likely to be overqualified for their jobs, far more likely to be working outside the field they trained in. (the “Canadian experience” wall doing its quiet work.)

Plenty of newcomers start businesses not because they chose to, but because the doors they knocked on stayed shut. So when we only ever tell the struggle story, we teach the next kid that the immigrant road is just suffering with a flag planted on it.

When we tell the success story honestly, hard parts and all, we teach them something better: that what their parents built out of necessity, they might build out of choice.

That the hard road actually goes somewhere.

So here’s the ask of anyone with the means to tell these stories — media, organizations, funders, founders with a platform.

Stop filing newcomer success under feel-good. Stop treating it as the warm segment you run during a heritage month and then forget. Treat it as infrastructure, and build it on purpose.

A few things make it actually work. Center the success, not only the struggle. The struggle alone teaches a kid the road is painful; the success teaches them it leads somewhere.

Keep it local and specific. A child needs to see someone from their actual city, with their actual accent, not a billionaire on another continent they’ll never mistake for themselves.

And put the person on screen in their own words, as a whole person and not a statistic or a symbol, because a kid can’t see themselves in a data point. Only in a face.

This is the entire reason I made My New Brunswick Business Experience.

Not as content. As infrastructure.

It puts real newcomer entrepreneurs in this province on screen, telling their own success stories in their own words, so that a kid three streets over, with the same surname and the same accent and the same family story, can watch it and think, maybe for the first time, that could be me.

I’m a newcomer. I hit the wall myself. The rejections, the “Canadian experience” nobody will give you until somebody finally gives you a chance. I’m not building this from theory. I’m building the thing I wish that kid already had, and the thing I wish I’d seen

when I landed here, unsure whether a person like me got to build anything at all.

Again, If you understand that this is infrastructure and not sentiment, if you’re a partner, an organization that serves newcomers, an investor who sees it, or a newcomer with a story worth putting on screen, come build it with me.

The kids are watching. Let’s make sure they see the whole picture.