But integration is a two-way street: it entails the willingness of new Canadians to embrace their new home and — equally signifi cantly — the willingness of the wider society to lower the barriers to their becoming active and productive members of their adopted home. [...] The perception exists that the Somali Canadian community has failed to integrate into the wider soci- ety to an unusual degree; that this is the fault of the community itself; and, moreover, that this failure represents an alarming and growing threat to Canadian security in the form of young people who have been lured to the radical extremism of the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabaab movement in southern [...] It relies on both the willingness of new Canadians to embrace their new home and — equally signifi cantly — the willing- ness of the wider society to lower barriers to participation and to ease the process of becoming a pro- ductive member of one’s adopted home. [...] Rather, I consider these interviews — every one about inte- gration into the wider society — to be windows through which to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Canada as an adoptive home and diasporic space.2 The questions that I asked and the way I formulated them were informed by classes that I teach in di- aspora studies at the University of Toronto and by my interactions with hundreds o [...] The fi rst, which I call “internal integration,” involves an individual’s weaving of a belief set acquired in the birth country or parental household with that of the adoptive home in an ongoing rene- gotiation of identity and reevaluation of beliefs, attitudes and perspectives on everything from food to clothing to friendship to religion.