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LLED 510 Raheb Zohrehfard

Immigration, Investment, and social mobility

Introduction

Iranian community is considered to be relatively new in Canada. The history of the

immigration goes back to the Second World War when there were only about a dozen Iranians in

Canada. While immigration figures remained very low during the 1950s and 60s, there is a

significant rise after the Iranian revolution in 1979 when the monarchy was overthrown and the

Islamic government came to power. In the 1980s and during most of the 1990s several thousand

Iranians came to Canada each year, and the trend has continued to date.

Before the 1970s Iranians migrated to Canada mostly for educational and economic or

investment opportunities. However, the majority who immigrated later, particularly in the 1980s,

was often escaping political and religious persecution during the Iran-Iraq war, or because of the

cultural and social repression imposed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Entering the 21st century,

in addition to those who escaped the regime for political, cultural, and religious reasons, a

growing number of people affiliated with the Iranian government have also immigrated to

Canada. The vast majority of Iranian immigrants who applied through skilled worker category

came from urban areas, particularly large and mid-size cities, and they continued to live in major

urban centres in Canada. Based on the National Household Survey in 2011, there were 163,290

Iranians in Canada. Over 90% of the people in Canada who are of Iranian heritage live in

Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia.

(http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/iranians/)

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As a relatively new immigrant community with diverse backgrounds of class, ethnicity,

religion, politics and ideology, the Iranian community is relatively incohesive. Paradoxically,

although Iranians share great pride in their culture and history, instead of a single group, they

form a vibrant mix of sub-communities with a common language.

The huge interest in Iranian students, from Canadian universities, has also contributed to

the ever-increasing rate of immigration. The faculties of most Canadian universities in general

and engineering faculties in particular are full of Iranians that were given study permits. These

individuals are often highly successful students in Iran that are given the opportunity to continue

their higher education & research (Masters/PHD level) with a professor at a Canadian university.

They are given a visa that allows them to stay for the duration of their studies. Often enough,

during this time, they will apply to become Canadian immigrants. This phenomenon has really

gained traction over the past few years as more and more professors (mainly in engineering)

have had positive experiences with previous students from Iran and are looking for fresh

replacements. In such a context, exploring various factors or challenges facing adult Iranian

immigrants who travel to Canada seems to be timely. In what follows, I will express my interest

in the topic by providing a succinct reflection of my own experience as an international student

in Canada, followed by a literature review on Iranian immigrants in general as a unit of analysis.

Personal interest in the topic

September 22, 2014, a cloudy afternoon, on my way to education department where I was

supposed to attend a course on ‘Theory and Research in SLE’. Having spent almost three weeks

in Vancouver, I was struck not only by the evangelic beauty of the place, but also by the fact that

I was about to be gradually marginalized from the academic mainstream. I felt tongue-tied in

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class discussions and I was experiencing moments of utter blank-out due primarily to a barrage

of unknown subtleties. I started to feel like such strange soft skills were about to sap my energy

to zero. I couldn’t help comparing my past community of practice with the new one I was about

to identify myself with. Social relationships, codes of conduct, expectations all had come as a bit

of a shock and was getting yet more humongous to alienate me from the community. I was a

Persian and then became a foreigner. I was a citizen and then became an immigrant. I was a

competent EFL teacher and then became an international student with a bleak prospect of

professional identity. During the early days of my settlement, I was a quiet person, having

qualms about or being chary of participating in group-discussions. Though utilizing humor was

among my most effective coping mechanisms, this immediately disappeared upon my arrival

here, due to my lack of understanding of Canadian culture. I found it well nigh impossible to

make fun of social and cultural matters since I had no awareness of them. I used to be

surrounded with familiar faces, street signs, market places, seasons, and culinary tastes in my

home town and then became disturbingly overwhelmed by strange faces, confusing voices, and

bizarre body language that were incomprehensible to me. I had a strong sense of competence and

self-confidence in my hometown, Shiraz, as I was a socially active and mobile member of the

society. Moreover, I used to know myself well and could predict my reactions and responses.

Having lost parts of my identity and stumbled across situations that demanded new emotional

and rational responses, I felt some intimate distance from myself. After migration, my coherent

sense of self had transformed to an amalgam of pieces and fractions, the whole of which was

hard to recognize.

The lengthy journey of acculturation I have seriously started traveling through is making

me cognizant of changes in my personality, ideology, attitude, and lifestyle as a direct result of

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interaction with Canadian culture. Being somehow distant from Persian culture and scrupulously

measuring and comparing cultural disparities between Canadian and Persian cultures, I am

arriving at a more deep-seated understanding of both. I have found the process of acculturation to

be one of the most convoluted phenomena I have ever come up against. A multi-layered,

complicated experience that has been inconclusively portrayed in most acculturation studies and

the obvious discrepancy between my personal experience and the ambiguous picture of

acculturation delineated in the literature have inspired me to scrutinize this phenomenon and its

complexity on a deeper and more personal level.

Taking a broad look, the dimensions to any study conducted on Iranian immigrants will

incorporate tackling a number of issues: understanding the social dynamics in Iran, the way

power dynamics are revealed in the new community, the immigrants’ ideologies about learning

English and how these ideologies change, and how Iranian immigrants’ language ability help or

hinder the negotiation of their identities. However, for the purpose of this paper, the questions

that inform my study will be:

1. What are the measures of success for Iranian immigrants?

2. What makes them successful or unsuccessful?

3. What are the conditions to promote success?

The constructs of investment, identity, imagined communities (Norton Peirce, 1995) and

social class (Darvin & Norton, 2014a) are relevant and highly informative. In addition, the new

model of investment proposed by Darvin and Norton (2015) provides a comprehensive

examination of the relationship between identity, investment, and language learning. Thus, I will

draw on the theoretical framework on foundational work on identity. Then I will review the

literature on Iranian immigrants as a source of data and proceed to discuss how the model of

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investment can meaningfully operate at the intersection of identity, ideology and capital in the

literature on Iranian immigrants. Finally, I will bring the discussion to an end by reflecting on

what future seems to hold for Iranian immigrant community in respect to the current research on

identity.

Theoretical framework

Identity, investment, imagined communities, social class

The huge wave of immigration in recent years has been for the purposes of enjoying a

higher standard of living for skilled workers and pursuing higher education in top ranking

universities for students most of whom belong to middle social class. The notions of imagined

identity and imagined community hold a firm place in explaining the reasons why people decide

to immigrate. Being unsatisfied with the educational system, along with social and political

repressions as a result of sanctions can be considered as determining factors that serve as impetus

for many Iranian citizens to make a difference in their lives. As is evident, the hopes for gaining

academic standing and economic benefits speak to Norton’s notion of investment (Norton Peirce,

1995; Norton, 2000, 2013) which connotes economic returns, reinforces the role of human

agency in taking risks, and accumulating symbolic capital.

Considerable work has gone into the arena of language and identity in second language

teaching (Morgan, B., & Clarke, M. 2011; Norton, B. and Toohey, K. 2011), imagined

communities (Kramsch, C. 2013; Xu, H. 2012; Norton, B., & Kamal, F. 2003), and identity and

multimodality (Smythe, S., Toohey, K. and Dagenais, D. 2014; Toohey, K. and Dagenais, D.

2015). For Norton the notion of investment is a dynamic term with economic overtones, which

replaced the traditional term ‘motivation’ in SLA. Unlike motivation, investment implies hopes

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of returns and benefits; it highlights the role of human agency and identity in engaging with the

task at hand, in accumulating economic and symbolic capital, in having stakes in the endeavor

and in persevering in that endeavor. In SLA, this means that investment is based on the learner’s

intentional choice and desire. Learners cannot be moved to learn what is taught to them. The

communities they wish to belong to might not be those around them but imagined communities,

nourished by the hopes of economic mobility associated with the English language. Imagined

communities are aspirational communities that are also built and sustained, sometimes online.

United by common aspirations, learners of English around the world dream of such values as

freedom, democracy, agency and power (Kramsch, 2013). In a broad sense, the term imagined

identity refers to the identity constructed in the imagination about relationships between oneself

and other people and about things in the same time and space with which the individual

nevertheless has virtually no direct interaction (Anderson, 1991; Norton, 2001). Imagination in

this sense allows people to create unlimited images of the world and themselves based on limited

experiences.

More recently, the study on social class (Darvin, R. & Norton, B. 2014a) added a new

research strand to the work on identity and enriched it by introducing the notion of social class.

Recognizing how migrant students occupy segmented spaces in their country of settlement while

maintaining multi-stranded relations with their country of origin, Darvin and Norton (2014)

employed Bourdieu’s conceptualization of social class and connect it with the concept of

transnationalism. They argue that migrant learners operate with a transnational habitus and

continually negotiate their class positions. As evidenced in their case studies, social class is

inscribed in the different social and learning trajectories of migrant students. While John and

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Ayrton may have similar imagined identities and hopes for the future, their class positions

explained the extent to which these ambitions are realized.

Model of investment

The key constructs of this model of investment proposed by Darvin and Norton (2015)

are identity, capital and ideology. Recognizing how power flows in different directions through

the contiguous spaces, learners operating in different fields perform multiple identities. Their

habitus, shaped by prevailing ideologies, predisposes them to think and act in certain ways. In

this model, learners invest in particular practices not only because they desire specific material or

symbolic benefits, but also because they recognize that the capital they possess can serve as

affordances to their learning. While there are structures that indeed subjugate learners and

constrain their investment, this model draws attention to how learners may paradoxically

contribute to their own subjugation through the performance of hegemonic practices.

Literature Review

Reviewing the past studies reveals that much of the research focus has been on the social

problems Iranian immigrants have confronted in terms of life satisfaction, marriage, divorce and

education (Naghdi, 2010), accessing health (Dastgerdi, 2012), psychological problems

(Chrisman; Lipson; Muecke, 1992; Sedighdeilami, 2003), and issues of entrepreneurship

(Dallalfar, A. 1994) and its relationship with social integration of new minorities (Lynch, P.;

Mostajer Haghighi, A. 2012). Yet other research conducted on Iranian immigrants center around

their acculturation in the new society (Safdar; Struthers; Van Oudenhoven, 2009), cultural

trauma and ethnic identity formation (Mobasher, 2006), integration into the host society based on

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Iranian immigrants’ cultural identity (Chaichian, 1997) and patterns of communication among

Iranian immigrants (Sohrabi, 1997).

Of several studies gathered on Iranian immigrants, Mahdieh Dastjerdi (2012) investigated

the obstacles of accessing healthcare services in a new country through the lens of Iranian

healthcare professionals. She conducted a narrative inquiry to understand such issues this

immigrant population in the greater Toronto area faces through interviews with professionals and

social workers. The study, based on interviews, suggested that language barrier, together with

lack of knowledge of Canadian healthcare services, was responsible for creating such obstacles.

In addition, lack of trust in Canadian healthcare services due to financial limitations and fear of

disclosure exacerbated their condition.

Like Dastgerdi (2012), Chrisman, Lipson and Muecke (1992) drew attention to health

issues by reiterating that how psychological problems such as depression can affect Iranian

immigrants’ health and their encounters with American healthcare system. Financial problems

were a source of considerable stress among newer immigrants along with confronting loss of

their culture, habits and identity. The old timers, on the other hand, were worried about language

as well as occupational, financial and academic functioning. One on-going stressor was the

condescending attitude of the general public toward immigrants and the lack of social support in

the U.S.

In regard with the social problems of Iranian immigrants, Asadulah Naghdi (2010)

investigated immigrants’ problems in Sweden associated with employment, marriage, divorce,

furthering education after immigration, life satisfaction and feeling as outsiders. Given the active

and important economic ties between Iran and Sweden and due to Sweden’s reputation in

humanitarian affairs, low population and growing economy, many Iranians found Sweden a

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suitable country to move to. It has been found that education has a significant status in Iranian

culture. Education is an instrument that facilitates social mobility and a gate that provides

entrance to host societies. In addition, the findings suggest that in general, Iranian immigrants

have a better economic and scientific status than other ethnic groups in Sweden. In particular,

Iranian women have high potentials to adapt to European culture. They can assimilate more,

complain less, and learn language more easily.

In line with studies on psychological front, Farrokh Sedighdeilami (2003) looked into the

psychological adjustment of Iranian immigrants and refugees in Toronto. 103 Iranian men and

102 Iranian women were compared in terms of levels of anxiety, depression, anger and

psychological wellbeing. The findings revealed that Iranian men and old immigrants are more

likely to experience anxiety. English language, along with marital status and immigration status,

influence immigrants’ depression indicating that those whose level of English language is basic

have higher depression and internalizing problems.

A different perspective through which the life of Iranian immigrants has been studied is

based on their entrepreneurship. Arlene Dallalfar (1994), as a case in point, conducted an inquiry

into the role of gender relations in the ethnic economy between two religio-ethnic Iranian

immigrant groups, Muslims and Jews. Immigrant Iranian women’s combined utilization of

ethnic, gender and class resources in the ethnic economy of Los Angeles was examined through

two case studies of women’s entrepreneurial endeavors in family-run business (case of Leila)

and home-operated business (case of Nadia). The study demonstrated that women show

flexibility with working hours, expand their social contact beyond their religio-ethnic networks,

incorporate their special skills, talents and personality in their work environment and use gender

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resources to create small businesses. Gender, thus, factored remarkably in immigrant

entrepreneurial activity.

Likewise, the study by Lynch and Mostajer Haghighi (2012) explored the possibility of

integration through self-employment to determine entrepreneurship as either a facilitator or a

barrier to the integration of Iranian minorities in the context of Scotland. They found that socio-

political conditions of the home country define Iranian immigrants’ worldview, aspirations and

motivations. On account of socio-cultural differences, adaptation is a constant challenge.

Hospitality entrepreneurship can act both as a facilitator and a barrier. It facilitates economic

integration while being a barrier to social and cultural United States integration. However, their

businesses (restaurants) are places to socialize with local people, which helps them gain a deeper

understanding of the home culture. They also found that ultimate integration is not possible due

primarily to high cultural differences.

Compared with the above studies that focused on social and psychological problems of

Iranian immigrants, Mohsen Mobasher (2006) investigated Iranian immigrants’ identity

formation. He explained how Persian or Persian American identity emerged among the secular

and religious Iranian immigrants. The findings suggested that there was an inter-play between

the political forces in Iran and the U.S. and an anti-Islamic narrative was being constructed. His

findings showed that some Iranians selectively bound together pre-Islamic Persian culture and

political ideology in constructing their ethnic identity.

In tandem with the study on identity formation by Mobasher (2006), Mohammad A.

Chaichian (1997) had inquired about the extent to which Iranian immigrants in ‘Iowa’ integrate

into the host society’s culture. The majority of respondents were fully bilingual and receptive of

host culture but they were confident to bring up their children based on Iranian cultural values. In

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support of what Chrisman, Lipson and Muecke (1992) claimed, he revealed that in spite of their

educational, professional and economic successes, Iranian immigrants’ increasing isolation,

psychological depression and loneliness may signal a more serious problem of the existence of a

subtle but pervasive form of prejudice and discrimination against them. For another thing, the

social class and educational level of Iranian immigrants factor in reinforcing Iranian ethnic pride,

which leads to their failure to blend into the greater society.

Similar to Mobasher (2006) and Chaichian (1997) who studied identity formation and

integration of Iranian immigrants in the U.S., Nilou Mostofi (2003) investigated the perplexity of

Iranian-American identity as to whether different Iranian groups living in the U.S. share in the

all-embracing identity and whether they can collectively be constituted as a community. She

characterized the dual identity, interpreted the Iranian-American culture and focused on the

relationship between American civil society and its immigrants. She analyzed how Iranians view

themselves, what methods they use to create identity, how this identity becomes a culture in

diaspora and whether these forces have been successful in creating a community within the

American civil society context. The findings of her study suggested that Iranians not only

accepted American civic nationalism, but they also willingly assimilated into the public sphere.

Having cultural, religious and political freedom, Iranians found their rights and citizenship.

Iranian-American’s acceptance of American ideological norms lends to their adaptation and

relative prosperity as an immigrant group.

Bahram Sohrabi (1997) looked into the communication patterns among the second

generation of Iranian immigrants to Sweden and examined the effect of family background on

the shaping of communication background. His objectives were to first, assess the difference

between Iranian adolescents who were born in Sweden or migrated to Sweden at pre-school age

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and those who were born in Iran and did not spend their childhood in Sweden with the major

criteria of home language and Swedish language competence for investigating shift or

maintenance and second, examine the effect of parental education and occupation on the shaping

of communication patterns. His research depicted that mother tongue constitutes a natural feature

in Iranian home environment, that the child’s socio-economic status has some effects on parent-

child language interaction, that inter-ethnic marriages will result in language shift, that language

abilities are of central importance to the immigrants’ integration into the host society and that the

length of time is a decisive factor for the command of their home language.

Discussion

Iranian American members of the 1.5 generation, those who were adolescents when they

immigrated, were both too young to have lived independently in Iran and, upon arriving in the

United States, too old to feel completely American. Like members of other immigrant groups,

they have often experienced a feeling of “dual marginality,” of not completely belonging to

either their country of origin or their adopted land. For many of these people, there has been a

continued struggle as they attempt to define their identity within the confines of both cultures.

Ultimately, however, the fact that many Iranians have U.S.-born children who feel culturally

more Americans, or intermarry, causes most Iranians to choose to accept a hyphenated (Iranian-

American) identity.

Language proficiency and socio-economic status as economic and cultural capital are two

important benchmarks of acculturation that provide access to social capital. Using these criteria,

one can determine the extent to which Iranian community has been successful in assimilating to

a new culture and way of living. Language ability is implicit in the literature on Iranian

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immigration. Lack of sufficient language ability can hinder access to medical care (Dastjerdi,

2012) and can be a source of stess among immigrants (Chrismen, Lipson, Muecke, 1992).

Education, which implies language ability, is considered to be a facilitator in social mobility.

Having a better economic and scientific position as economic and cultural capital paves their

way to assimilation and provides entry to specific spaces (Darvin; Norton, 2015).

Constructed and imposed by structures of power and reproduced through hegemonic

practices and consent, ideologies are dominant ways of thinking that organize and stabilize

societies while simultaneously determining modes of inclusion and exclusion, and the privileging

and marginalizing ideas, people and relations. As the assimilation process has taken place over

the generations, there has been a noticeable change in what, to many Iranian Canadians,

constitutes being “Iranian.” To the first generation, the use of the Persian language was and

continues to be central to their identity. Generally, knowledge of the mother tongue rapidly

declines with each generation among United States immigrant groups: the first generation

principally speaks their native language, the second generation is fluent in both their parents’

native language and English, and the third generation typically speaks only English, while

maintaining knowledge of some isolated words and phrases from their ancestral tongue.

Ultimate integration seems to be hard due to high cultural differences. For Chaichian,

social class and educational level of Iranian immigrants factored in their failure to blend into the

greater society. The worldviews Iranian immigrants hold seem to be deeply rooted in the way

capital is distributed in the society, which can determine the rate of success. The capitals Iranian

immigrants have and the ideologies they develop in the host community can determine the ease

with which they navigate a set of different relationships. As Mostofi (2003) noted, having

cultural, religious and political freedom helped Iranians accept the American ideological norms,

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which contributed to their adaptation and prosperity. Language ability can provide Iranian

immigrants with access to all kinds of capital. The ideological structures put value on economic

and cultural capital, which facilitates connections to power networks and results in gaining social

capital. As delineated in the literature, the degrees of different types of capital possessed by

Iranians position them in different layers of social space. As their ideologies evolve, they acquire

more capital that is perceived, legitimated and valued in the new community while dispensing

with the ideologies that had been imposed on them. It seems that the yardstick of success for the

Iranian diaspora is determined by the extent to which they are able to manage without the

imposed ideologies that are at odds with those of the new community and their ability to adapt

and reshape their ideologies that brings about possibilities for their capital to travel across time

and space. The symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 4), as cited in the study by Darvin and

Norton (2015, p. 45) depicts the dynamism and fluidity of capital, which is contingent on and

predisposed to the presiding ideologies of the host community.

The construct of identity in this model undergirds Norton’s theoretical framework of

identity (2013), which defines identity as multiple, a site of struggle, and continually changing

over time and space. However, the model of investment seems to align well with the ways

Iranian immigrants utilize to integrate in the mainstream. This model seeks to elucidate further

that identity is a struggle of habitus and desire, of competing ideologies and imagined identities.

Governed by different ideologies and possessing varying levels of capital, learners position

themselves and are positioned by others in different contexts. For the Iranian diaspora, the

imagined identities are shaped in a site of struggle where imposed ideologies and liberating ones

are in combat. Lifestyle, values, dispositions, and expectations construct what Bourdieu calls

habitus. These values and expectations are associated with particular social groups that are

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acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life. For Iranian immigrants who

were raised exposed to a set of firmly established ideologies formed through a confined set of

social activities where social rights are violated, immigration is a window on opening

opportunities to shift ideologies and possess higher levels of capital. The model can be vividly

represented in the study conducted by Mostofi (2003) where religious and political emancipation

in the US provided an environment where they could feel at home, adapt to the new ideological

norms and achieve their desires and goals. As Darvin and Norton (2015, p. 46) note:

Although Bourdieu viewed habitus as a set of dispositions that are durable and shaped by

history, he recognized that “ guided by one’s sympathies and antipathies, affections and

aversions, tastes and distastes, one makes for oneself an environment in which one feels ‘ at

home’ and in which one can achieve that fulfillment of one’s desire to be which one identifies

with happiness” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 150).

Thus, it can be argued that the pull of ideologies as the result of sociopolitical conditions,

which has shaped Iranians’ worldviews and aspirations may not be valued by structures of

power. The systemic patterns of control serve as an impediment for them to attain their desired

capital, forge relations and build networks. In other words, the absence of desired capital

prevents their social mobility as their access to networks is denied.

In the study conducted by Dallalfar (1994), women were found to be vocationally flexible

capable of expanding their social contact. Reflecting on the model of investment, it can be

argued that these women were able to use their agentive capacity to evaluate and negotiate the

limitations and possibilities of their social context. It also reveals the conditions in which

immigrants can locate themselves across time and space and create opportunities to participate

and transform the multiple spaces of their life worlds (Darvin; Norton, 2015, p. 47). The concept

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of sens pratique introduced by Bourdieu (1986) lends a helping hand to explain how immigrants

can exercise agency to partake in the ‘communicative game’ and operate across different fields

by experiencing the dynamics of settings and gaining mastery over the inherent requirements of

communicative events.

Indeed, Iranians’ possession of economic, cultural, and social capital and their identity as

members of an economically advanced country allow them to position themselves as legitimate

participants and contributors in different spaces. The ability to use language at an operational

level and possessing high academic achievements (cultural capital) are the affordances that, if

possessed, can provide them with access to economic and social capital and can render as

measures of or conditions that promote ‘success’. As Darvin and Norton (2015) pointed out:

‘Occupying new spaces involves not only acquiring new material and symbolic resources but

also using the capital that learners already possess as affordances and transforming this capital

into something that is regarded as valuable in new contexts (p. 45)’.

Future direction

Globalization, transnationalism, hybridity

A number of scholars have referred to issues related to identity and transnationalism.

(Duff, P. 2015; Lam, E. 2013; Warriner, D.S. 2007) with a number of other studies focusing on

identity in a global world (Creese, A. & Blackledge, A. 2015; Menard-Warwick, J., Heredia-

Herrera, A., & Palmer, D. S. 2013. The road of research on identity has led us to future

directions where identity in the digital age has been studied (Deumert, A. 2014; Hafner, C. 2014;

Thorne, S.L., Sauro, S., Smith, B. 2015).

The contemporary themes relative to the notion of identity encompass issues of

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transnationalism and globalization in the migrant and multilingual landscapes, and in this view

the work of Higgins (2014) and Song (2012) are enlightening. The concepts of globalization,

transnationalism and hybridity seem to be highly relevant in studying Iranian immigrants in

recent years, especially those who wish to pursue higher education. As language ability is

immanent in education, understanding the flows of Iranian students, their ideas and their

economic status can be of paramount importance in expanding our views on their identity

formation. As is elucidated by Higgins (2014):

“By acknowledging that the meanings produced in language originate from these flows,

we may better understand why language learners form the identities that they do, and through

creative responses in pedagogy, we may be able to provide materials and activities that take

them up on these identities”.

Globalization and transnational educational migration have brought about challenges and

demands for the learners as well as immigrants. Hybrid practices and identities can be better

understood as it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the blurred borders between

ESL and EFL contexts due to the huge waves of migration. It is relevant to consider the

implications and consequences of such transnational fluidity as more Iranian students try to gain

entry into Canadian institutions to further their education. Delving into the ways Iranian students

choose to socialize in Canadian society at large as well as in the academia is highly likely to

disclose the degree to which they navigate their relationships across time and space and the

extent to which their language ability can help or hinder their negotiation of identities (Song,

2012).

In addition, the emergence of the new genres and contexts for communication in the age

of digital technology (Hafner, 2014) requires a reconsideration of how immigrants and

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immigrant students engage in communicative practices and what it means to learn languages

(Lam, 2013). Given the sociopolitical conditions, particular ideologies and limited capital new

Iranian immigrants possess, evaluating the model of investment in connection with the complex

web of power can shed light on how they move across ideological sites and can reveal the

capacity of their investment in social practices to gain symbolic resources.

There are many impediments to conducting a thorough analysis of the acculturation

process of Iranians within the larger Canadian society. In addition to lack of self-identification

due to the existence of sub-communities with diverse ideologies and worldviews, the Iranian

community is also one of the newer immigrant communities in Canada ('Iranian Canadians'. The

Canadian Encyclopedia. N.p., 2001). It is widely accepted that the immigrant generation

changes as it accommodates itself to life in a new society, but that these changes are usually

quite limited for individuals who have come to Canada or the United States as adults. Thus, a

call for a fresh longitudinal study is required to assess the acculturation process of the Iranian

community. Because many of second-generation Iranian Canadians are still young, studies on

Iranian Canadian acculturation are, therefore, currently limited in their scope.

As the first generation slowly gives way to the second generation of Iranian Canadians,

the assimilation process will further evolve. Many first-generation Iranian Canadian immigrants

feel a deep responsibility to ensure that their culture and heritage are commended and celebrated

in the forthcoming years by future generations. As a result, through cross-examining ideologies

in tandem with power manifestations, we can better gauge the fluidity of Iranian immigrants’

values and capital in the Canadian community. In so doing, we can witness Iranians as a well-

educated and highly accomplished immigrant community who can contribute to the economic,

social, and cultural fabric of Canada. As they do so, they will certainly continue to ensure that

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their rich heritage and their desire to be productive members of their new country are pursued.

This renewed vigor also provides hope for closer transnational ties between the people of Iran

and those in Canada and other parts of the world. It can also help them to understand what it

means to be global citizens.

Conclusion

One of the future promises this study can hold on to is to shed some light on how Iranian

immigrants’ language ability can ease their way of avoiding identity crisis which may result not

only from their cultural differences but also from their limited social interaction in the new

society. As Lewin Ahmadi declared: “An identity crisis is not only the result of lack of

similarity between an individual’s already constructed identity and the general value system of

the new social environment, but it also is an outcome of the individual’s social interaction in the

new society. In other words, the way the individual confronts the new social structure can play

an important role in diminishing or enlarging the dimensions of the individual’s identity crisis”

(Lewin Ahmadi, 2001:126).

Based on social identity theory, people can view themselves either in what makes them

unique compared to other individuals (personal identity) or compared to their membership in

social groups (social identity). Thus, by investigating Iranian immigrants’ language ability and

helping them boost their linguistic competence, we can pave the way for them to not only

understand the norms, values and beliefs of the new society that can guide their behavior, but to

also reconstruct new identities that are not at odds with those of the new social environments. In

so doing, there is every possibility that they can integrate more smoothly and raise their self-

sufficiency and social mobility. This will be of paramount importance for the new Iranian

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immigrants to Canada who desire to be socially mobile and self-sufficient.

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