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.
It is refreshing to read “Third Way Style” perspective on the Tamil ship situation. I will be checking this blog again and look for “third way perspectives” on issues. Thank you.
Where can I find this exhaustive list of studies proving that refugees boost a country’s economy and make significant contributions?
Seriously, 24 million is a lot of money and you can’t possibly believe if they stay there won’t be boatloads more behind them, family and friends costing many millions more. So it is absolutely necessary to establish that taking refugees is in the economic interests of Canada or we will have to start making cuts to healthcare and education and turn Canada into a country that more closely resembles the ones these people leave behind.
If every person granted Canadian citizenship pulled their weight this would not be a problem. The problem is that refugees are generally coming from very unstable countries that haven’t prepared them for life as a taxpaying contributor to Canada, this isn’t Canada’s fault, nor is it theirs, but we can’t afford to teach everyone English, set them up with special education and job training and still properly educate and care for our own citizens.
Well, we can start with:
Tell it like it is: the truth about asylum, R. Council, 2006
The economic life of refugees, K Jacobsen, 2005
4 Immigrants Economic Status in Toronto, V Preston et al, 2003
World Refugee Survey, 2004
And that’s just for starters. You can also start digging through the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford (www.rsc.ox.ac.uk) or the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University (yorku.ca/crs) Both have a lot of research and presentations coming out.
$24 million is a lot of money to an average Canadian. It’s not in a government budgetary sense – especially when (as you will read in the above) the government nets from refugees. It’s an investment.
The fear of “boatloads behind them” has been around, well, since at least the Komagata Maru arrived in 1914. It’s just not tenable in Canada – we’re too far away by sea. In fact, there have only been a handful of refugees who’ve arrived by boat in our history (not including the boat loads of Europeans who make up the majority of Canada’s ancestors – oddly absent from any discussion of ‘boatloads arriving’). Only 30% of refugee claimants arrive in Canada each year “illegally” – in other words, without already being sponsored either by the government or privately.
To establish that “taking refugees is in the economic interests of Canada” is actually illegal. We can determine immigrant claims that way, not refugee ones. They’re not the same. Refugees are people in need of protection, as based on the 1951 Convention (see this in my post). It would be inhumane to base refugee claims on economic contribution to Canada, because the reason they’re here is because they are afraid for their lives elsewhere. People don’t live through the horrendous conditions refugees do to escape their countries for adventure.
The first round of privately sponsored refugees, and the first large wave of refugee immigration, came to Canada in 1979 from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. I’ve just finished a summer of interviewing these people, and I’ve never met a more hardworking or grateful group of people – certainly NOT among Canadians who have been here for generations. They usually work in factories, and their children are now mostly doctors, lawyers, engineers, and the like. If we want to talk about people in Canada who need to pick up the slack, it is not among refugees. Know any Canadians born here drifting though life? I certainly do.
That doesn’t mean that there are no people who have ever abused the system. Of course there are. People are people, regardless of their status or where they’re from. It’s true that when refugees arrive they are often ill prepared for life in Canada. That’s because they didn’t plan on coming here! They’re refugees by chance, not choice. It’s also why Private Sponsorship (where a group – say a church, or a group of five agree to be responsible for them for the first year) is such a superior system. Having people who are there to guide you through the shock of adjusting to this new life results in vastly improved statistics for success. It’s not the refugees who aren’t pulling their weight.
By the way, who are “our own citizens”? The white Canadians, who are mostly descended from refugees and immigrants? (Many relatively recently, from Europe after WWII)? Or maybe you mean the Indigenous Canadians – who have reservations that meet third world standards, according to the UN? We’re certainly not taking care of our own citizens if that’s who you mean. Or perhaps you’re afraid we’ll all end up living like the First Nations do, once the new face of Canada is no longer European?
By the way, if we took in all the refugees in the world (16 million), then our population would be upped to 49 million. That is almost half of Germany’s (82 million), which is quite a bit smaller, and has public healthcare and education (including university, which we do not).
[...] 13, 2010 Filed under: Refugees,Social Justice — laurastempmorlok @ 10:35 pm Since I wrote about the Tamil refugee claimants who recently arrived in British Columbia, I’ve been spending a [...]