Creative Integration: Persian Bahá’í Newcomers in New Brunswick

Our paper analyzes the experiences of Persian Bahá’ís who arrived more than twenty years ago and stayed in New Brunswick. We conducted seven interviews involving ten people. This paper presents a widely ignored aspect of immigrant life: namely, the creativity that immigrants use to overcome local residents’ hesitancy in reaching out to them in friendship. This paper further analyzes two aspects of these immigrants’ arrival that account for their success. First, the receiving Bahá’í communities integrated them immediately into the social and administrative affairs of their communities. Second, the immigrants’ recent spiritual connection to the birth place of the Bahá’í faith became the means of Canadian Bahá’ís to welcome their brothers and sisters from Iran