Why as Canadians we can’t turn away Tamil ships (or any others)

Cargo ship Sun Sea docks in B.C. full of Tamil asylum seekers

Experts in the government have discredited the passengers as frauds and economic opportunists. A government official said, “The line must be drawn somewhere.” Their government has assured us that they’re closely monitoring their situation, and everything is alright. If we let them in, their counterparts will arrive in floods. Clearly, they must be turned away.

Oh, but wait. This isn’t the Sun Sea, that docked in British Columbia full of Tamil refugee claimants a few days ago. This is 1939, and the boat  is the St. Louis, filled with 930 Jews from Nazi Germany. That’s right. We turned away Jewish refugees during World War II, citing all the same reasons we want to turn away refugees today. “Brain drain”, “economic opportunists,” and yup, even “terrorists.” We turned away this ship, and denied all claims of asylum, because we didn’t believe them and we didn’t want them. Almost everyone aboard that ship died in Nazi concentration camps, because every harbour they sailed to rejected them, and left with no choice they returned to Europe.

Jewish Refugees aboard the St. Louis, 1939

After the horrors of the Holocaust were fully realized, the countries of the world, with the West in the lead, declared “never again.” Something had to be done to help asylum seekers, hence the creation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the 1951 Refugee Convention (of which Canada is a signatory). This convention defines who is and who is not a refugee. In fact, the definitions are somewhat limited and do not include the c. 30 million internally displaced persons (IDPs).

This is not charity. This is a legal obligation where we committed to never return refugees if they have a valid fear of persecution. Once asylum seekers reach our waters and are in Canada, they cannot be returned unless their claims are denied.

This process itself is not exactly the welcoming arms of comfort it was intended to be. Our review process has changed from one of determining legitimacy of their fears, to one of trying to find fault with their claims. A subtle, but very important difference. Claimants are regularly refused asylum with decisions that essentially say, “we believe that everything you’ve said is true. Everything you said happened to you actually did. But we’re sending you back because we think things are better now/you could’ve gone somewhere else.”

For the people on board the Sea Sun – ranging in age from under a year to their late seventies – the review process will cost the Canadian government about $ 24 million. That might sound like a lot, but when you consider that several hundred people granted asylum will start to pay taxes, earn jobs, and contribute to the economy, it is a clear net intake. That’s right, refugees are not a drain on the system, as is commonly thought. In fact, study after economic study has proven that refugees actually boost a country’s economy and make significant contributions to their new society.

But what about turning away boats before they arrive? That’s illegal. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, along with other human rights organizations, have found that asylum seekers’ right to life legally requires that they have a fair process to determine their claims, not an arbitrary one at sea. Closer to home, such an act would violate our own Charter. The Supreme Court of Canada has determined that we cannot be complicit in human right abuses or torture, and that turning asylum seekers away without first fairly determining their risk would violate their right to life and security of the person.

As a country, along with other countries such as the U.S. and Australia (who, for the record, both take in far more refugee claimants than Canada) we have committed to these laws because we were determined to learn from our past. We do not have the right to judge past wrongs if we refuse to change our ways.

Religious Tolerance and Curbing Extremism go Hand in Hand

Two recent events have caught my attention: the first is the flood in Pakistan, where c. 10 million people are displaced, many without any access to food, water or medical care in the middle of a Pakistani August (to put this in perspective, a friend of mine from Pakistan was chatting with her Mom there in June, when it was 50C – that’s about 130F for my American family and friends). Needless to say, they’re in a very rough situation, and it’s only getting worse. An MSF doctor was on CBC last night saying their medical centre is completely full, with people on the floors and on the lawn, and still about 50 people show up every day looking for treatment for intestinal problems (water-born illnesses), most of them children. Quick reminder for you, diarrhea remains one of the leading 5 causes of death in children under 5.

On the other side of the world, a Muslim group in New York City are building a Mosque and Islamic Centre adjacent to 9-11′s Ground Zero. Touchy issue. Or is it? Well, it has certainly become one in the last few days, but ironically, when

Daisy Khan, wife of the "Ground Zero Mosque"'s Imam

they started building it wasn’t. See this article from the Washington Post for more info: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/08/17/AR2010081701473.html?hpid=topnews But basically the Imam of the Mosque said years ago that they were building it because of its location. In fact, it’s situated exactly where some of the wreckage from the Twin Towers fell. That’s because, as he says, this centre is the antithesis of what happened on 9-11. They are actively working to fight against extremism. Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham interviewed the Imam’s wife on the O’Reilly factor, and said “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it. . . . I like what you’re trying to do.” Well, unfortunately, in recent days the tone has changed a lot and many people now see this mosque as an unpopular group pushing their rights insensitively in the faces of people still in mourning.

So, what do the floods and the Mosque have in common? That we, who are not Muslims in the West, have the opportunity of either helping extremism along, or helping to quelch it. Not through dropping bombs on extremists (anyone notice how that tends to breed more extremists, not fewer?). For someone who is desperately thirsty or hungry, they’re not going to refuse water or food for their children. Pakistan, unfortunately, has several hotbeds of extremism, but the majority are moderate Muslims. If the West turns away from them in their hour of desperate need, while the extremists provide aid, who do you think is going to win their favour? In New York, when a progessive group of Muslims tries to actively engage in community building to foster better relations between Muslims and other people, and to provide Muslim youth with positive direction, should we support them or suppress them? Who do you want teaching young Muslims the way of Islam?

Hmong Story Cloths

By far, one of the coolest things to come out of my internship this summer with Mennonite Central Committee is this: Hmong story cloths (pronounced “mong” – the “h” is silent). First, a little bit of background. This summer, I have had the great honour of serving with MCC by spearheading a pilot project to collect oral histories of former refugees who came to Canada through the MCC private sponsorship of refugees program (find out more here). Because MCC Ontario has sponsored 15 000 refugees since the program began in 1979, I clearly had to narrow it down. I decided to focus on the first group, the people from Southeast Asia, more commonly (and inaccurately – not to mention less-than-sensitively) known as the “Boat People.” When images of the humanitarian crisis in Southeast Asia in the late ’70s started flooding televisions in the west, people began jumping up and down insisting something be done. That something took the form of sponsorship. In Canada, MCC became the first signatory with the Canadian government, creating the private sponsorship of refugees program. Important side note: to this day Canada is the only country in the world that has private sponsorship of refugees – O Canada!

Vietnamese Canadian Federation members

Anyway, because this wave of immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were the first to come, they were the ideal group for several reasons. First of all, practicality. In trying to find participants for oral history projects, you have to be able to actually find them. I had a stack of Notice of Arrival forms, housed in the MCC archives, that listed the person(s) sponsored, the church/business/group that sponsored them, and the person who was point of contact. I then contacted the sponsors in order to track down the contact in order to find the people sponsored. Phew. Thankfully, helping this along, were many commemorative celebrations in the last year or so. See, many of these people came to Canada 30 years ago, and had celebrations with their sponsors to commemorate that.

Well, interviewing these people over the past summer has been one of the most rewarding and challenging projects I’ve undertaken. Even more than that, though, having the opportunity to speak with these people has been a truly great honour. The stories are incredible (you, too, can appreciate their stories, just as soon as I get the project web site up and running! I’ll post about it here when I do).

I’ll speak more about the project when I finally complete the project’s site and post about it here, but today I want to focus on what, as I already said, was one of the coolest discoveries for me, the Hmong story cloths, of course.

The Hmong are an ethnic group from Southeast Asia who have no homeland.

Hmong New Year celebration

To get a quick idea of what their history has been like, think of the Kurds in Iraq, or the Jews in Russia. Not a happy history. After the Vietnam War and the Secret War in Laos, the communist regime and the Viet Cong targeted the Hmong for retribution. The Hmong had worked with the American forces and so were ruthlessly hunted down as a people. (Side note: while the situation is not as dire as it was in the mid-70s, life is far from safe for Hmong people in Laos and Vietnam today). It is estimated that upwards of two-thirds of the Hmong population in Laos was killed.

Ban Vinai Refugee Camp

Not surprisingly, many Hmong fled to neighbouring Thailand, where they landed in refugee camps such as Nong Khai and Ban Vinai. To read an excellent Hmong family memoir, I highly recommend Kao Kalia Yang‘s The Latehomecomer. For those who don’t already know, refugee camps are not happy places. They are filthy, overcrowded, unsanitary, undersupplied prisons. Many Hmong spent several years in these camps. In order to whittle away the time, but even more importantly, in order to make sure future generations would not forget what had happened, Hmong women turned their tradition of needlework to recreating their own stories. Hmong women would embroider intricate pictures on wholecloth quilts, illustrating their escape from Laos into Thailand. Some quilts are small, and some are quite large. This had a practical element, too. Once completed, the Hmong would sell these quilts to foreigners working in the camps, and to friends or family who were already overseas, in order to create an income for themselves and their families. The quilts display images of village life, warfare, escape across the Mekong River, and life in the refugee camps.

Hmong story cloth

When I told my husband about these quilts, he replied, “Well, there’s your dissertation right there!” We’ll see – the idea certainly has merit! But for now I’m just so thankful they were brought to my attention by one of the women I interviewed.