Rostam does not sleep through the night anymore. At 2 a.m., when his phone buzzes, he’s awake before the sound finishes. It might be his parents calling from Tehran, on a connection that is unreliable, sporadic and sometimes cut off mid-sentence. He has learned not to miss those calls, because the next one may not come for days.
Rostam is a pseudonym for a participant in our ongoing research study on diaspora workers, but his experience is one that many workers across Canada will recognize.
Rostam checks the news constantly, piecing together what is happening. Since the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran in late February, the conflict has escalated rapidly. By 4 a.m., he has been awake for two hours. This is hypervigilance: the body monitoring a threat it cannot act on and refusing to stand down.
When the call does come through, the relief is physical. They are alive. They speak carefully, partly to protect him and partly because the call may be monitored. He hears his father’s voice and thinks this could be the last time.
In the morning, he will go to work. He will sit in meetings, contribute to agendas and make sure his face doesn’t betray what he’s feeling — a competency that has always served him well.
He doesn’t speak about any of this at work. To talk about it risks being regarded as a representative of a country he has complicated feelings about or as importing politics into a space that doesn’t want them. So he says nothing. That silence is the problem.
(Getty Images/Unsplash+)
The invisible cost at work
Decades of research have established that code-switching — the constant calibration of self-presentation across cultural contexts — carries a real psychological toll on workers. It can contribute to stress, anxiety, burnout and costly errors in judgment at work.
These impacts often remain invisible to employers until the damage has already been done to both the individual and the organization.
Diaspora employees who are struggling don’t signal it in ways that trigger organizational concern. They manage, but at considerable personal cost. These costs accumulate in ways that surface slowly and are almost always misattributed. Declining engagement is read as a shift in attitude, and withdrawal is interpreted as a personality change.
In some cases, employees do not withdraw at all. Instead, they bury themselves in work and appear by every visible metric to be thriving. Managers have no reason to look closer until the break happens.
This isn’t a problem that diversity, equity and inclusion programs can solve as they exist, because it’s not about inclusion or diversity. It’s a perceptual problem: leaders don’t see what diaspora employees are managing and therefore cannot respond to it.
Read more:
Diaspora communities carry the burden of watching war from afar
A condition without a name
This challenge extends well beyond Canada’s Iranian community, which numbered approximately 200,000 people in the 2021 census. Many other diaspora communities, including Ukrainians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Afghans and Syrians, are navigating similar terrain.
A 2025 study found higher rates of severe depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder among diaspora Tigrayans in Australia than among people inside the war zone itself.
People inside a conflict zone often suppress their own fear to protect family members living through it with them. Members of the diaspora, by contrast, often cannot meaningfully assist those in immediate danger, which creates a profound sense of helplessness. At the same time, those around them may not recognize the fear and distress they’re concealing.
Aitak Sorahi, an Iranian Canadian, tried to explain what she was living through to a reporter at The Canadian Press in April as U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to destroy Iran unless it agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. She could not find the words. “I don’t even know how to describe my feeling,” she said, “because I don’t have a name for it.”
We propose one: diaspora distress, a framework emerging from our ongoing research and organizational practice.
Diaspora distress
Diaspora distress is the psychological burden carried by people living in one country while their homeland — and the family, friends and memories embedded there — are under active geopolitical threat. Often, this burden is compounded by the policies or rhetoric of their host country’s own government.
The feeling sits closest to grief, but the comparison only goes so far. Grief has a fixed point — a death, a diagnosis, a loss that has occurred and can be named. It comes with a recognized social script: people sit together and are able to share memories of the deceased. Diaspora distress offers no comparable ritual because the loss one is anticipating may or may not arrive.
(Meg Aghamyan/Unsplash+)
In addition, diaspora communities are not monolithic. Outsiders often assume a shared solidarity, but geopolitical crises tend to deepen existing internal divisions about what intervention means, who is to blame and what liberation looks like. The people who should be each other’s community of grief often find themselves on opposite sides of an argument.
The result is that diaspora employees are frequently alone with this in every environment they occupy: at work, at home and within communities that might otherwise support them. That isolation is the specific nature of diaspora distress.
What organizations should do
Developing the capacity to recognize diaspora distress does not require expertise in geopolitics or new policy infrastructure. It requires language: the organizational decision to name what some employees are carrying as a recognized condition.
Institutional acknowledgement works differently than other supports because it removes the requirement that employees claim what they’re carrying. It gives them a name for what they have been living with.
In practice, this can take three forms: a leadership message acknowledging that some colleagues are carrying weight from events in their home regions; a line added to standard manager check-in prompts asking whether anything outside work is affecting employees; or an addition to existing employee assistance programs and benefits communications that names diaspora distress explicitly.
Rostam will open his phone again tonight at 2 a.m. In the morning, he will code-switch from the person who spent the night reading the news into the person his organization knows. What remains is whether his organization will adopt the language to see it, and whether his leaders will decide that seeing it is part of their job.
