Life Stories of Young Immigrant Graduates of French Language Schools in Toronto and Edmonton
The article focuses on the life trajectories of two young men, Benjamin and Pierre, from immigrant backgrounds who live in the Francophone communities of Toronto and Edmonton. Through the use of life stories, we examine closely the processes at work in their experience of academic and social integration. We assume that integration is a dynamic, long-term, multidimensional, and nonlinear social process. This view of integration recognizes that the process takes place on a continuum that includes the pre- and post-migration experience of the immigrant. How do Benjamin and Pierre describe their immigration experience? How do they represent their integration, both academic and social, at the time of their arrival? The migration stories of the two young men, expressed in their life stories, testify to the complexity of the migratory process between family project, relationship of otherness, and motility (Kaufmann & Widmer, 2005).