What the experience of first-generation immigrants is most similar to is the experience of early Canadians and some of the pioneers.  What?  How can there be much similarity between the experience of those hardy self-reliant individuals and that of the supposedly soft, subsidy-dependent immigrant?  Immigrants, when they first arrive, mostly have to put up with apartment-living for many years, even if, as is mostly the case, they are from a middle class and relatively well-to-do background.  This is similar to the pioneer building a primitive shack that serves to keep out (some of) the elements, until many years later, when he can perhaps build himself something better.  Like the immigrant who, many years later, and at the expense of much risk and sacrifice, builds or buys himself a home.  The pioneer’s life consists of a constant battle against a hostile environment that has no place in it for him.  The first-generation immigrant’s life much the same.