Ep. 94 – Why Compassion is Needed in the Immigration Experience

TRANSCRIPT

Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world.

Gissele: Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. If you’d like to support the podcast, you can go to buymeacoffee.com/love and compassion. Today we’re gonna be talking about immigration and the immigration experience, which is personally important to me ’cause I’m an immigrant. And our guest today is Andy Semotiuk, who is an author who has been published five times.

Gissele: So he has five books. He is a US and Canadian immigration Lawyer in practice law in Los Angeles for 10 years. Worked in New York for five and helped over 10,000 clients with various Legal problems. Andy is a former United Nations correspondent for the last 10 years.

Gissele: He has written for Forbes where his articles have been read by over 1 million readers. Previously, he served on the tribunal panel of the Canadian Human [00:01:00] Rights Commission. Past president of the Canada Ukraine Foundation. He is a distinguished Toastmaster and a communication expert. Please join me in welcoming Andy.

Gissele: Hi.

Andy: Hi. Nice to be with you. Thank you for having me on.

Gissele: Oh yes. Thank you for coming. This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I myself am an immigrant . I was wondering if you could tell the, the audience a little bit about your own history or your own experience with immigration and why you became interested in immigration law?

Andy: Yes, I can. I was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, but my parents were both immigrants from Ukraine. And for those who don’t know anything about Edmonton, it is a very distant, far north city, one of the top cities in, in the northern hemisphere. Very cold during the winter. It drops down to 50 below sometimes.

Andy: And I remember in my childhood days where I was going to school and [00:02:00] the temperature was something like 50 below. And, it was so cold that you could hear sap in the trees, cracking the trees from freezing when you were walking to school. And, it was a city in which you had to have a block heater to plug in your car at night in order to get it started in the morning.

Andy: That kind of a place, but. For raising young kids. It was a great city and I had a good childhood. Now, my parents came at different times to Canada. My father, my natural father came before world War ii in between the two wars as an immigrant, and my mother came after World War ii. And they met up in a sort of a strange way.

Andy: Basically my father when he came to Canada, he came married to another woman [00:03:00] and he had five children. And a six child was born on the way. And he came to a place called Park Court, Alberta, which is, 60 miles west of Edmonton and then 10 miles north. And the way you could describe it is

Andy: Park Court is not the end of the world, but you can almost see the end of the world from Park Court. It’s in the middle of nowhere.

Gissele: Oh, wow.

Andy: And when they arrived they. Started a homestead. He built a hut there, a house and et cetera. But one day while the mother, not my mother, but the mother of the children there, excuse me, she was cooking breakfast over a logs stove and she keeled over, she had terrible pain in the stomach.

Gissele: Wow.

Andy: And, so he ran out trying to get help to [00:04:00] get her to the hospital. There was nobody around. And so he got one of the kids to hit, hitch up the horses to the wagon, and they put her on the