Quick Escape 
Yesterday, our CEO, Medora Uppal joined allied members of the Hamilton Immigration Partnership Council for a press conference on rising hate in our City. Here are her remarks:
At YWCA Hamilton we are proud that our commitment to Gender Equity means an ongoing commitment to building strong communities which stand together to fight hatred, bigotry and fascism in all forms. We firmly condemn acts like the one outside Jackson Square on Saturday calling for Mass Deportation, which seek to instill fear.
Men in masks hiding their faces while they try to reach out to those who share anti-immigrant views is an old and tired strategy designed to divide us all and it has no place in our City or our country.
Through our offering of settlement and other services uniquely designed for women, families and the LBGBTQIA+ population, YWCA Hamilton has direct experience with the challenges and successes stories of immigrants. We know first hand the incredible accomplishments of immigrant women and their contributions to our community. With over 500 staff, immigrants comprise a significant number (over 20%) of our workforce and bringing critical skills and knowledge to our organization from front line services to administration and throughout all levels of management. And through our employment programs we have been able to assist highly skilled women immigrants in advancing their knowledge in STEM to meet the needs of employers in Canada who we know continue to struggle with recruitment. In fact, without the labour of immigrants employment vacancies would be significantly higher across our country further impacting our economy and the quality of living for Canadians.
Every day at the front doors of YWCA Hamilton we see the scarcity, uncertainty and struggle Hamiltonians are facing. We understand the economic challenges like the housing crisis, the rising cost of living, and that people are struggling to secure well paying, stable employment. In these circumstances it is natural to wonder if we have enough to share with more people. It becomes easy in these times to forget how significant the contributions of immigrants have been throughout our history as a country.
As a daughter of immigrants whose parents were born in two different continents, I have listened to people distinguish good immigrants from unwanted immigrants. How we question people’s arrivals to this country because their circumstances are so different from our own. We fail to understand the settlement journey of newcomers who chose a different path then the path our families had taken. I have seen many of us forget that we ourselves are immigrants, the children of immigrants and even ancestors of immigrants. Immigrants have provided the foundations upon which we continue to build our country.
At YWCA Hamilton we believe our origin stories matter and unless we are Indigenous people, we are all settlers, immigrants and newcomers.
