Immigrants can be detained at any time. The Home Office casts its net widely: anyone deemed not to have the right to reside in the UK can be detained and deported. Those who do not have legal representation, who do not speak English and who are newly arrived in the UK are least able to challenge a Home Office decision to detain them.
More than 27,000 people were detained in 2017, according to the most recent figures. Detention is now a significant part of the UK’s immigration enforcement efforts, but locking up immigrants without a time limit is a relatively recent phenomenon.
The power to detain was created in the 1971 Immigration Act – however, it was not until the Labour government under Tony Blair that the detention estate expanded to become what it is today.
Some people are detained as soon as they arrive by Home Office officials stationed at airports and ports. Others can be detained after living in Britain for many years when they try to renew work, family or study visas.
The Guardian survey found 15% were detained at a Home Office reporting centre, where immigrants must attend regular appointments while their applications are processed. They can find themselves starting the day queuing to see a bureaucrat and ending the day in a small cell with a stranger.
Others were apprehended during dawn raids at their home addresses, after rough sleeping, found working illegally or while making applications for leave to remain.
The 2007 UK Borders Act introduced “automatic deportation” for some ex-offenders, which has been an important factor in the expansion of the detention population. Guardian research found more than half of respondents were detained at the end of a prison sentence.
Where does this happen?
Detainees are held in eight detention centres and two ‘short-term holding facilities’, where they can stay for up to a week. One is run by Her Majesty’s Prison service, but the rest are contracted out to outsourcing firms G4S, Mitie, Serco and US-owned GEO Group.
Most are exclusively for men, while Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire is the only centre designed to hold women.
Foreign national offenders can also be detained in mainstream prisons, typically after serving their criminal sentence. In 2017, 1,691 people were held under immigration powers in prisons.
Less than a quarter of those held in prison have access to legal representation, according to research by Bail for Immigration Detainees, a charity which assists with detainees’ bail applications.
A spokesperson from BiD said: “If any British citizen, anywhere in the world, was kept – without warning – in prison after they had finished serving a criminal sentence there would, rightly, be uproar. Yet the British government routinely holds foreign nationals in exactly that manner.”
Who are the detainees?
The nationality of those held in detention changes over time, depending on global migration flows. The Guardian survey found Nigeria and Algeria were most commonly represented among our responses, while Home Office open data for the second quarter of 2018 showed that South Asian countries made up the largest proportion of detainees.
Detainees are overwhelmingly male – women made up just 15% of the total detention population in 2017.
The government announced it would end indefinite detention of immigrant families with children in 2010, while detaining unaccompanied children for more than a day was banned in 2014. As a result, the number of children in the system fell from 240 at the start of 2010 to just 22 in the most recent Home Office figures.
However, unaccompanied children may still be detained during criminal cases and escorted during returns. Families are still detained together in “exceptional circumstances”. The Guardian survey uncovered multiple examples of children being detained in adult facilities.
How long do they stay locked up?
The UK is the only country in Europe with no statutory time limit on detention. While most are held for days or weeks, the Guardian survey uncovered several cases where a detainee was held in excess of two years.
Indefinite detention has been a key criticism of UK immigration policy. In 2015, the first ever parliamentary inquiry called for a 28-day time limit on detention. The Guardian survey found the vast majority of detainees are not told how long they will be held for or when they will be deported.
The Shaw report found that more than half of detainees were ultimately released back into the community, posing questions about the use of taxpayers’ money to pursue lengthy periods of detention.
How much does it all cost?
The Home Office has paid a handful of private contractors hundreds of millions of pounds to run the UK’s immigration removal centres, but no one knows for certain just how profitable the industry is.
The Home Office’s annual report and accounts for 2017-18 states detention costs of £108 million in the year ending 31 March 2018, while the Shaw report says it costs £85.92 per day to hold someone in detention.
Commercial confidentiality agreements mean the Home Office and outsourcing companies are not obliged to publish detailed financial information about immigration detention centres in the UK.
Earlier this year Mitie won what is believed to be the largest immigration detention contract ever awarded, valued at more than half a billion pounds. The contract will cover a range of services and it is not known how much of this is for management of removal centres.
The profitability of detention facilities has proved to be a contentious issue for the contractors.
A Guardian investigation last year pointed to a 20.7% profit margin at G4S-owned Brook House in 2016, while at Tinsley House, the margin was 41.5%.
Not surprising. Self-imposed rather than responding to external events:
Two years in, President Donald Trump’s promised immigration crackdown is hardly on pace to deliver his stated goal of deporting up to 3 million people. But it has produced something else: gaping budget holes that the administrationhas scrambled to fill.
Since taking office, the president has repeatedly ordered sweeping and often improvised changes that gave federal agencies a greater stake in immigration enforcement but muddled their missions. The sudden policy shifts sparked self-inflicted crises that regularly required band-aid solutions far more expensive than the status quo. And to pay for it all, the administration pulled money from federal agencies that have nothing to do with immigration ― including cancer research, Head Start and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It’s policymaking for the Trump era: rushed, chaotic, expensive — and ultimately self-defeating.
A Tent Camp For The Price Of A Luxury Hotel
Perhaps the most glaring example of the wastefulness of the White House’s approach is the creation of the tent shelter for migrant children at Tornillo, Texas. The administration had the camp hastily erected in Juneas an emergency measure to shelter 400 unaccompanied minors and children it had separated from their families at the border. The Tornillo contract was supposed to expire in September. But as the month wound to a close, officials decided to keep the facility open to solve a new crisis of the administration’s own making.
Because sponsors are often unauthorized immigrants themselves and therefore reluctant to be fingerprinted by federal agencies, the outcome was predictable: More children are stuck in shelters for longer periods of time. The system, run by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, is currently housing more than 13,000 of them — about five times as many as a year ago. So instead of shutting down the Tornillo tent camp, the Trump administration is packing more children into it, with plans to hold as many as 3,800 minors.
The expected cost: $750 per night, per bed. For about the same price, the federal government could pay for a deluxe hotel room — with a view of Central Park — at Trump’s Manhattan hotel. For every month that the Trump administration locks up a single undocumented minor in the Texas desert, it pays more than the annual cost of putting a student through state college, complete with room and board.
The policy of fingerprinting sponsors and sharing that information with ICE didn’t exist when Congress approved the HHS budget. But the government is still stuck with the bill. To cover the gap, HHS reshuffled about $260 million last month from other parts of its budget, as Yahoo! News first reported. Among the losers in the battle of priorities are cancer research ($13.3 million), Head Start preschool ($16.7 million) and HIV prevention ($5.7 million).
Improvising A Bigger Detention System
Trump’s improvised crackdown blew a similar hole in the ICE budget.
Within a week of taking office, Trump signed an executive order eliminating arrest priorities set by the outgoing Obama administration. Instead of focusing on detaining recent border-crossers, people with serious crimes or those who had been deported in the past, the White House freed the agency to arrest any unauthorized immigrant its agents find. The mandate was clear: Arrest more migrants.
ICE did just that. The agency’s immigration arrests jumped 42 percent over the first eight months after Trump took office. Immigration arrests jumped an additional 17 percent over the first three quarters of this fiscal year, to nearly 120,000, ICE’s most recent data show. More than a third of those people ICE arrested had no criminal convictions, meaning they wouldn’t have been arrested under the Obama-era guidelines Trump scrapped.
Indiscriminate arrests make intuitive sense for a politician who campaigned as an enforcement hard-liner. But they’re an inefficient way of removing unauthorized immigrants from the country. People without serious criminal records or deportation orders are typically entitled to a hearing. Because the immigration court backlog has ballooned by more than 48 percent over the last two years to 764,000 cases, it often takes years to get new arrestees in front of an immigration judge.
“They’re overwhelming us,” Dana Leigh Marks, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Immigration Judges, told HuffPost. “The number of immigration cases coming in continues to be crippling to the court.”
All of those new arrestees waiting for hearings are straining the immigration detention system. Congress last year showered nearly 1 billion new dollars on ICE — a windfall larger than the previous six years of budget boosts combined. But that budget gave the agency only enough money to lock up an average of 38,000people facing deportation per day. ICE blew past that by 2,000 beds in average daily capacity.
So, just like HHS, the Department of Homeland Security, which is ICE’s parent agency, had to reshuffle about $200 million last month to make up the shortfall. The most public loser was FEMA, which lost $10 million just as Hurricane Florence barreled toward North Carolina.
To fund detention and deportation operations, Homeland Security pulled $13 million from Homeland Security Investigation’s domestic investigation budget and an additional $270,000 from its international operations. The Coast Guard and Transportation Security Administration coughed up tens of millions each.
“They’ve put the cart in front of the horse here,” former ICE official Alonzo Peña said. “They’re going to do these programs and figure out how to pay for it afterwards.”
The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of referring all migrants caught crossing the border illegally for criminal prosecution is also both expensive and inefficient. At an average daily bed cost of $80 per prisoner — not to mention the costs of judges and public defenders required to make the policy work — the Justice Department is spending hundreds of millions of dollars detaining and prosecuting people the Department of Homeland Security aims to deport anyway.
So Damn Much Money… And Not Much To Show For It
The irony of the Trump administration’s approach is that, by all the most obvious metrics, it has failed to meet its goals. With the first three quarters of this year tallied, ICE is on track to deport about 250,000 migrants — well below the more than 409,000 removals registered in 2012.
You’re robbing one piece of the immigration system to feed that beast of the detention system. Those are tough decisions that Congress will be forced to make.Tracey Valerio, ICE’s former head of management
Likewise, with one month left to tally for the fiscal year, arrests for illegal border crossings stand at about 355,000. Those numbers are among the lowest registered since the 1970s. But they’re up, modestly, over the previous year, indicating that Trump’s massive spending — aimed squarely at scaring potential migrants from trying to cross the border — isn’t working.
Congress, firmly in Republican control, has so far declined to halt the agency’s backdoor expansion of the immigrant detention system or its evolving prioritization of petty immigration arrests over investigative work.
“You’re robbing one piece of the immigration system to feed that beast of the detention system,” Tracey Valerio, ICE’s former head of management, said. “Those are tough decisions that Congress will be forced to make.”
DHS funding legislation winding its way through Congress suggests the plan is to throw still more money at the problem. If passed, Congress would shovel another quarter billion dollars into ICE next year — a small increase compared to either last year or to what the White House asked for, but still well above any other year since 2012.
But until that new funding bill passes, the Trump administration is left shuffling money around to pay for its immigration agenda. Even Trump has had to curb his ambitions to pay for his administration’s haphazard policymaking. Last month, DHS yanked $26 million that Customs and Border Protection had earmarked for “border security fencing, infrastructure and technology” and gave it to ICE. It was money for Trump’s promised border wall.
The Provincial Nominee Program in Canada certainly led to a diversification of where immigrants settle even if most went to our largest cities:
Immigrants to Australia will soon find themselves excluded from Sydney and Melbourne, the country’s two largest cities. Instead, new arrivals will be confined to rural, low-growth parts of the country—or so the government intends.
The proposal is part of “a decentralization agenda” announced by the country’s population and urban infrastructure minister on Tuesday. “Nearly all of the growth in Australia is into the three population centers of Melbourne, Sydney and Southeast Queensland. And that’s putting enormous pressure on Melbourne and Sydney particularly, and we see that in the congestion on the roads every day,” Alan Tudge told an Australian TV program.
Australia has been widely criticized for its treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, but it settled the second most refugees per capita in 2017, after Canada and Norway. Now the government wants to use migration policy to limit population growth in Sydney and Melbourne, each of which counts more than 4.5 million residents and has grown by more than 10 percent over the past five years. Three in four new arrivals in Australia settle in one of the three areas that would be off-limits to new migrants not sponsored by employers or reuniting with family.
In the U.S., virtually none of the country’s largest cities would have added population in the last few decades without immigrants. But the impact of new arrivals is felt in rural areas too: the majority of non-metropolitan population growth between 1990 and 2010 came from Hispanic migrants. The connection between immigrants and economic growth is complicated, but various politicians have floated the idea of revitalizing depopulated areas through immigration. Why not let Syrians settle Detroit? Or Fremont, Nebraska?
In the U.S., at least, where unfettered interstate travel is sacred, plans like Australia’s can provoke unease—even when they are framed, as they usually are, as bonus lotteries to offer green cards to those who wouldn’t otherwise have them. Shouldn’t new Americans be entitled to the same rights as everyone else, including the freedom to move? Why wouldn’t immigrants want to move to the same opportunities sought by native-born Americans? Then again, others point out, employer-sponsored visas like HB-1s already essentially constitute place-based immigration.
Some economists argue confining migrants to low-growth areas doesn’t make sense: Immigrants (and natives) should move to fast-growing regions with high-paying jobs, and those places should provide enough housing and transportation to accommodate them. (Even high-cost cities like New York continue to draw newcomers.) Cities, the thinking goes, function best at scale, strengthened by the increasing potential interactions between people and jobs. That’s little consolation for regions with little population growth, some of whom will pay you to move there.
In the same way that the U.S. helps settle refugees but doesn’t restrict their movement, Canada doesn’t actually make regionally-sponsored visa recipients stay put. In Australia, Roman Quaedvlieg, the former head of the country’s border police, argued that enforcing the new provision would be nearly impossible.
The Australian government hasn’t announced yet how to make sure new immigrants don’t do what immigrants have done for centuries the world over: Move to the big city.
Silicon Valley media paying increasing attention to the immigration advantage of Canada. May help explain why the government made a high profile political appointment to the San Francisco ConGen and its ongoing efforts to woo tech companies to invest in Canada:
Two weeks: That’s how quickly a foreign technology worker in Silicon Valley can get an employment permit from Canada. In the U.S., that process takes months.
As the administration of President Donald Trump has increased scrutiny of H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers and plans to ban their spouses from holding jobs in the U.S., Canada has been moving aggressively to suck top foreign talent out of Silicon Valley and other technology-rich regions of the U.S.
The Canadian government won’t say if it’s leveraging the tumultuous and uncertain immigration climate in the U.S. But experts say Canada’s year-old “Global Skills Strategy” program, which offers work permits similar to America’s H-1B visa, is ideally structured to attract highly skilled foreign tech workers to Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. Though immigrants make up just 20 percent of Canada’s population, they hold about half of the science, technology, engineering and math degrees at the bachelor’s level and above, government figures show.
Before the program launched, Canada’s employment permit process for skilled workers took months.
“It captures all of the Silicon Valley people, and it captures them quickly,” said Asha Kaushal, a professor at the University of British Columbia law school who studies immigration law.
Trump’s plan to overhaul the H-1B — a visa intended for the kind of skilled workers Silicon Valley companies rely on but attacked by critics as a tool to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor — has ratcheted up anxiety levels and created uncertainty for many skilled foreign tech workers in the U.S.
Former Bay Area software developer and Indian citizen Shobhit Khandelwal has already moved to Toronto. He came to work for note-taking app firm Evernote in Redwood City in February 2017, with a master’s in operations research from Columbia University, experience at Citibank and e-commerce company Jet.com, and an H-1B visa. Eighteen months later, he left.
“I wanted to work on my own startup and I didn’t want to wait another 20 years or 30 years to get a green card,” said Khandelwal, 28, who acknowledged that the uncertain climate for immigrants in the U.S.also played a role in his decision. “I thought about, if I do a startup (in the U.S.), if I can’t get the right kind of talent, how can I build a company?”
Rather than simply get a work permit, Khandelwal opted to obtain permanent residence in Canada — the equivalent of a U.S. green card. It took about six months. In the U.S., Indian H-1B workers like him wait years, if not decades, for a green card. Later this month, Khandelwal plans to launch his startup’s artificial-intelligence-based parking-technology product.
“I don’t have to worry about my visa, I don’t have to worry about am I going to be able to come back in if I leave the country,” he said.
Uncertainty about U.S. visas and long waits for green cards were causing a brain drain in Silicon Valley long before Trump’s election. Canada has been working for years to grow its technology hubs, putting up recruiting billboards along Bay Area freeways as far back as 2013.
But experts say the current climate has made Canada more appealing for some foreign workers.
Matthew Kolken, a New York immigration lawyer whose firm helps clients immigrate to both Canada and the U.S., said he’s had about a dozen foreign-citizen clients decide to move to Canada even though they were already in the midst of official proceedings to come to the U.S.
“They gave up on their American dream,” Kolken said. “You want to be able to plan your career and your future. Why would you put your entire career potentially on hold if you have a viable opportunity in a country that has open arms to you?”
Two years ago, software engineer Vikram Rangnekar, an Indian citizen, emigrated from the Bay Area to Canada with his wife and two small children. He left behind a region, and a job, he loved.
“We would go to Santa Cruz all the time,” recalled Rangnekar, 36, who lived in Saratoga. “I used to love to drive Highway 17. It was like a racetrack. We were one of the few families who would drive up to San Francisco every weekend.” Working at LinkedIn, he said, was “the best thing ever.”
But even though he had spent six years on an H-1B visa, a green card seemed no closer. And the H-1B locks employees to the company that obtained the visa. Rangnekar wanted both a sense of permanence in his life and flexibility in his career. The family moved to Toronto, where he now works for a tech startup and in his spare time runs the Mov North web forum for people interested in relocating to Canada.
Hugo O’Doherty, co-founder of Moving2Canada.com, believes his country’s government and employers see the U.S. immigration climate as a boon.
“There’s been like an all-out effort for capitalizing on the opportunity,” said O’Doherty. “You’re going to see even more people moving from the Bay Area to Canada in coming months and years.”
O’Doherty, who saw U.S.-based traffic to his site more than double so far this year, said most Moving2Canada.com users are tech workers. On forums connected to the site, “You get people who are quite clear that Donald Trump is the reason they’re leaving the U.S. but you also get people who might’ve made the move anyway,” O’Doherty said.
Google software engineer Karthik Ravindran, in Silicon Valley on an H-1B, applied for permanent residence in Canada late last year with his wife after the Trump administration first proposed banning foreign spouses from working. He received residence in four months.
“It seems like a lot fairer system than in the U.S., unfortunately,” said Ravindran.
When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited the Bay Area earlier this year he declined to say whether Trump’s immigration policies were helping Canada attract skilled workers. Instead, Trudeau pointed to U.S. firms’ investments in Canada, including Salesforce’s $2 billion investment in its business there and a plan by AppDirect, another San Francisco tech company, to add 300 jobs in Canada over the next five years. Google and Facebook have established outposts in Canada, along with Amazon and Microsoft.
A spokeswoman for the Canadian government also declined to address the impact of the current U.S. administration’s policies, saying only that Canada selects permanent residents for their “positive impact” on the country’s economy.
“Immigration will continue to play a crucial role in keeping our country at the forefront of the global economy,” according to the government’s statement. “Thanks to immigration, Canada is in a strong position to face future labor-force challenges arising from our aging population.”
Despite disruptions arising from Trump’s approach to immigration, the tech industry in Silicon Valley — where outrageous housing costs and horrific commutes are the norm — has more to worry about than Canada, said Harj Taggar, CEO of San Francisco-based Triplebyte, a jobs platform for software engineers.
“The biggest threat to Silicon Valley is not so much from another country. I think it’s other locations in the U.S.,” Taggar said. “I am seeing more people leaving Silicon Valley for Seattle or Portland or, crazy as it sounds, to L.A.”
But Michael Tippett, a prominent Vancouver technology entrepreneur who travels regularly to Silicon Valley to help foreign tech workers move to Canada and launch startups, believes the U.S. immigration climate under Trump will produce broad, long-term effects.
“The brand of America as the land of the free and the place of opportunity has really taken a hit,” Tippett said. “It’s no longer the default go-to place for people who have world-class talent.”
Good solid analysis by IRCC and confirms what I am seeing in some of the data that I am looking at:
Refugees who arrived in the late 1980s and early 1990s are now earning more than the average Canadian.
An internal immigration department document shows that, after 25 years in the country, a typical refugee is earning as much or more than the Canadian norm, which is about $45,000 a year.
The document quotes a senior department official who says the long-term study of refugees’ wages suggests the recent wave of 50,000 refugees from Syria could several decades from now do as well as earlier refugees in regards to earnings.
“In a nutshell this is the trajectory we would expect (all things being equal) from government-assisted refugees and privately-sponsored refugees,” senior immigration department official Umit Kiziltan writes in a memo obtained under an access to information request.
The immigration and tax department data, which tracks refugees’ earnings from 1981 to 2014, shows that average government-assisted refugees earned less than $20,000 a year in their first decade in the country, when many families rely on provincial welfare and other government benefits to get by.
However, after 25 to 30 years in Canada, the average refugee is earning roughly $50,000 a year, about $5,000 more than the average Canadian. The study also shows the earnings gap between government-assisted refugees, who initially do worse than privately-sponsored refugees, basically disappears over the long run.
The largest groups of refugees to Canada in the 1980s and early 1990s came from Vietnam, Cambodia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa. In that era the total number of refugees arriving ranged from 15,000 to 40,000 annually. In recent years Canada has accepted more than 50,000 refugees from war-torn Syria alone.
Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, who obtained the internal government documents, said they contain reliable information that strongly indicate most refugees, no matter where they come from, develop usable skills and do well in the labour market over their careers.
However, even though the senior immigration department’s memo welcomed the news that refugees who arrived several decades ago perform well, Kiziltan cautioned that it’s hard to forecast how more recent refugees will do, given the “cyclical nature of the economy overall and especially (the) human capital of the Syrian cohorts.”
The report, in addition, also does not compare the earnings of refugees who have been in Canada for several decades (which means many would be in their 50s and at the peak of their careers) with the earnings of other Canadians of the same age cohort.
The data on refugees’ slow road to labour-market success in Canada comes on the heels of 2018 controversies over thousands of asylum seekers illegally crossing the Canadian border, a Syrian refugee being charged with the murder of Burnaby teenager Marrisa Shenand a Postmedia story revealing the federal Liberal government has not produced any report in two years on whether recent Syrian refugees are learning English or French, working, receiving social assistance or going to school.
This is not the first federal government indication, however, that many refugees eventually earn solid incomes. In 2014 then-federal Conservative immigration department minister Jason Kenney cancelled the contentious immigrant-investor program while revealing that refugees were actually paying more in Canadian income taxes than wealthy newcomers who had in effect bought their Canadian passports.
Asked about the contrast between taxes paid in Canada by refugees and rich immigrants, Kurland said it’s “a complicated comparison.” The breadwinner of an immigrant-investor family, Kurland explained, “usually returns home to support the family’s millionaire lifestyle in Canada” and therefore, unlike a refugee who stays in Canada, doesn’t pay significant income taxes in this country.
Previous studies have consistently shown that, while adult refugees often struggle in the short to medium term, many of their children quickly perform well in their new land, in large part because they gain extra social support, a taxpayer-funded education in English or French and the time to develop skills.
This recent internal study of refugee earnings, however, is among the first to emphasize that, over many decades, most of the refugees who had direct experience of war, persecution and trauma in their homeland are capable of attaining financial success in the country that welcomed them.
Refugee and immigrant youth are more likely to end up in the emergency room during a mental health crisis than their Canadian-born peers, a new medical study shows.
Newcomers did not seek early help from primary care doctors likely due to barriers in accessing and using outpatient mental health services, said researchers from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) and the Hospital for Sick Children.
“Efforts are needed to reduce stigma and identify mental health problems early, before crises, among immigrant populations,” said the study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal Tuesday.
Based on health and demographic data, researchers looked at emergency department visits for mental health issues by youth between the ages of 10 and 24 years in Ontario.
They identified a total of 118,851 young people who visited an ER with a mental health concern between 2010 and 2014, including 1.8 per cent or 2,194 refugees and 5.6 per cent or 6,680 non-refugee immigrants. The rest were Canadian.
“Most major mental illnesses have an age of onset in adolescence and young adulthood with about 20 per cent of youth experiencing mental illness. Our findings suggest that there are important subgroups of immigrant and refugee children who face barriers in accessing outpatient mental health care,” said study co-author Dr. Astrid Guttmann, chief science officer at ICES and staff pediatrician at Sick Kids.
“Interventions to improve access to the mental health system should consider the needs of specific immigrant populations.”
The gaps between immigrant and non-immigrant youth can be attributed to differences in culture, language proficiency, ability to navigate health services and even referral biases by health care providers, said the report.
While the majority of youth sought help for mental health issues at an emergency department first, the rate was higher for newcomers. The study found 61.3 per cent of refugee youth, 57.6 per cent of non-refugee immigrants and 51.3 per cent of Canadian youth went to an ER first.
Report lead author Dr. Natasha Saunders, a pediatrician at Sick Kids and adjunct scientist at ICES, said the differences are both statistically and clinically significant.
“Emergency services are important for managing acute mental health crises, but for most mental health disorders, primary care would be the most appropriate place for treatment and referral to specialized services,” she explained
“The high proportion of immigrant and refugee youth who have not been previously assessed for mental health problems suggests a need to understand specific cultural and other barriers and enabling factors related to the use of mental health services and access to care.”
Among all immigrants, recent arrivals had the highest proportion (64.3 per cent) of first contact in the emergency department, as did non-refugee immigrants from East Asia (61.7 per cent) and refugees from Africa (65.4 per cent), Central America (64.6 per cent) and East Asia (62.5 per cent).
Those who live in low-income and rural areas and those without OHIP coverage also had higher rates of first contact for mental health in the ER, said the report.
All governments posture to a certain extent. The question lies more how they posture and for what purpose and in this case, the French critique is correct:
French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe urged far-right Italian leader Matteo Salvini on Monday to drop his “posturing” on immigration and help find a European response to the issue.
Salvini, Italy’s powerful interior minister and deputy premier, has singled out French President Emmanuel Macron for criticism in recent weeks, as well as other EU leaders he considers too soft on immigration.
Philippe promised to be “direct” in his conversation with the 45-year-old Italian, head of the far-right League party, over dinner on Monday night in the French city of Lyon where the two men, along with ministers from Britain, Germany, Spain, Poland and Morocco, met for talks on immigration.
“I rarely use the same words or the same vocabulary (as Salvini) but that doesn’t stop me being direct as well. I hope we’ll have a frank and direct exchange,” Philippe said.
“Beyond the posturing, the issue of immigration cannot be solved with a national response. It requires coordination. It’s a complex issue of common interest.
“I think you have to tackle it with conviction, with respect for national interests, but also with the desire to build a common position that is the only way to find a solution.”
Philippe’s statement came amid open conflict between the new populist Italian government, led by Salvini and the head of the Five Star movement, Luigi Di Maio, and Macron’s centrist administration in Paris.
Last week, an aide to the French president accused Salvini of “living off the migrant crisis” and blocking attempts to forge a common EU migration policy.
Leaving the dinner, Salvini made no attempt to disguise his differences with the Paris government — just hours after meeting French far-right leader Marine Le Pen in Rome, whom Macron defeated in last year’s presidential election.
“I had the pleasure of seeing Marine Le Pen this morning and talking with her about Europe, the future of young people, trade and work,” he said.
“I need to work with everyone, but I feel closer to the views of Marine Le Pen,” he said.
The talks in Lyon were an attempt to bridge differences between hardline anti-immigration EU member states such as Poland and Italy and others like France and Germany that are in favour of accepting refugees.
The gathering, which continues for a second day on Tuesday focused on efforts to combat terrorism, precedes a larger meeting of European interior ministers in Luxembourg on Friday.
Morocco’s interior minister, Abdelouafi Laftit, was also invited to the talks amid rising concern in Europe about the increasing number of migrants heading to Spanish territory via Morocco.
Spain has become the biggest port of entry for illegal migration into Europe.
The issue of returning Moroccan migrants to their home country, particularly thousands of unaccompanied minors in Spain and France, was discussed on Monday night.
“It’s in the process of being resolved,” Laftit told reporters.
The risks are real without proper consideration and oversight:
A Department of Home Affairs plan to outsource visa processing will lead to increased automation and “premium” services that could undermine the integrity of the system, a former senior immigration official has warned.
Abul Rizvi, a former departmental deputy secretary, told Guardian Australia the potential for a private provider to create a fast and slow lane for processing had “frightening” long-term implications and the proposed use of applicants’ data for marketing purposes was “appalling”.
Rizvi joins the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) and the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia in expressing concern about the outsourcing plan, which has not received a final sign-off from the cabinet after months of testing the market for expressions of interest.
In February Guardian Australia reported that departmental briefings to industry had revealed that a successful private bidder could offset the $1bn cost of a new visa processing system by raising revenue through “premium services for high-value applicants”, different access for those able to pay more, and “commercial value-added services”, such as offers from banks, telcos and tourist operators.
Rizvi said he was “very concerned” about the prospect of premium services because “there would inevitably be an incentive for the company to be more facilitative with regard to subjective criteria for applicants who have paid for the fast lane”.
“Any monopoly provider would want to maximise charges for the fast lane and try to drive as many applicants as possible into that lane.”
He said applicants whocould not afford the higher charges were likely to come to Australia on visitor visas and apply for other visas after arrival, exacerbating “integrity problems” caused by the existing backlog of people in Australia because of the department’s “extraordinarily poor administration”.
Rizvi predicted that outsourced visa processing would lead to tension between the Department of Home Affairs’ increased use of “subjective criteria” for certain visas and the private operator’s desire for increased automation.
“The company or companies that win these tenders will want to automate decision-making as much as possible to minimise costs.”
Rizvi said it was appalling that “extraordinarily personal information” such as an applicant’s relationship status, job, income and health could be used by a commercial firm for marketing purposes.
The chairwoman of the Federation of Ethnic Community Councils of Australia, Mary Patetsos, said it would be “very concerned” about commercialisation of applicant information. She also opposed measures that could lead to an increased cost of visas, particularly for family and partner visas.
“Australia has a long-standing reputation for its impartial, fair and transparent immigration system,” she said. “It should not be put at risk.”
Patetsos warned that premium services “could undermine fairness”. “The opportunity to bring family to Australia to live or visit for extended periods should be available to all Australians – not just the wealthy.”
She said it would be unacceptable for Australian families of limited means to be denied family reunion, which was “integral to successful settlement, social cohesion and wellbeing”.
The deputy national president of the CPSU, Lisa Newman, said a two-tiered visa processing system “will lead to dangerous outcomes”, with the operating company incentivised to to put its profits ahead of the need to assess “gold-plated” visa applicants to the same standards applied to those who could not afford to pay a premium.
“It would also give the company an incentive to further delay processing times for regular customers to try to force them into upgrading.”
She called on the Coalition to abandon the proposal.
The CPSU intends to campaign on the visa outsourcing issue at the next federal election, targeting the immigration minister David Coleman’s seat of Banks, and other electorates with a high number of Australians born overseas, including in western Sydney.
Tender requests went to the market in July and there have been industry briefings in Sydney, Canberra, San Francisco, Singapore and Bengaluru, as well as consultation by the Department of Home Affairs with its workforce.
Groups reportedly keen to bid include a joint venture between Accenture and Australia Post, and a consortium involving Pacific Blue Capital, Qantas Ventures, PwC and Ellerston Capital.
Pacific Blue Capital is run by Malcolm Turnbull’s former employee and friend Scott Briggs. In September, Labor signalled it would pursue the government’s planned outsourcing of the $1bn visa processing system in Senate estimates and called on ministers linked to Briggs to recuse themselves from consideration of the outsourcing proposal.
The federal council that regulates immigration consultants has temporarily suspended the licences of former Edmonton MLA Carl Benito and one of his sons, as it awaits the outcome of a Canada Border Services investigation of an alleged large-scale immigration fraud.
At a hearing Tuesday, Cindy Ramkissoon-Shears, an independent chairperson of the Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council (ICCRC), determined there were reasonable grounds to conclude that allowing Benito and his son Charles to continue practising as consultants may cause harm to the public and could undermine the reputation of the profession.
The temporary suspensions mean the Benitos must have no further involvement with their clients. They must immediately make arrangements for another consultant or lawyer to assume their clients’ files.
Benito and his son did not respond to interview requests from CBC News on Tuesday.
The ICCRC is the national body that, by federal law, regulates all individuals, except lawyers, providing Canadian immigration, citizenship, and international-student advising services.
The council only seeks an interim suspension in exceptional circumstances, following a preliminary investigation, when it considers allegations so serious that allowing the consultant to continue to practise poses a potential risk to the public.
The hearing Tuesday heard evidence the ICCRC had received three complaints about the Benitos’ immigration consulting practice dating back to 2016.
But the council only began its investigation after it learned from CBC News on Aug. 16 that the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) had raided Benito’s home and office in late June as part of a major immigration fraud investigation.
Bundles of $100 bills seized
Court documents obtained by CBC News revealed the CBSA seized more than $250,000 in cash — mostly bundles of $100 bills stashed in two floor safes — as part of an investigation into what the agency alleges was a three-year immigration fraud scheme. The agency also seized numerous cash-filled payment envelopes bearing what appear to be the names of clients.
In search-warrant documents, the CBSA alleged that since Nov. 11, 2015, Carl Benito had counselled dozens of Filipino immigrants to improperly extend their stay in Alberta. The agency claimed Benito organized a scheme involving bogus applications for study and work-permit extensions.
The CBSA also alleges it found at least one Filipino immigrant, and possibly several more, working illegally for the Benitos’ consulting business.
The ICCRC had previously determined there was sufficient evidence to hold a hearing for interim suspensions against Carl and Charles but there was not enough direct evidence to include a third son, Mark, in the proceedings.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Carl Benito’s lawyer, William Macintosh, argued the information contained in the CBSA search-warrant documents did not constitute sufficient evidence because it was essentially hearsay and, in some cases, double hearsay.
But a lawyer acting for the ICCRC said the information in the search-warrant documents, supplemented by similar information contained in the three previous complaints, created credible and compelling grounds to support the suspension of the Benitos.
“In my submission, there are more than reasonable grounds to believe the Benitos have been running a practice, the modus operandi of which was to perpetuate a fraud against the Canadian government,” lawyer Lisa Freeman told the hearing.
Carl Benito did not speak at Tuesday’s hearing. His son, Charles, who was self represented, told the hearing that he had done nothing wrong and was innocent.
None of the Benitos has been criminally charged and none of the allegations from the search-warrant documents has been proven in court. The CBSA has confirmed its investigation is ongoing.
Council investigation delayed
An ICCRC investigator admitted under questioning by Macintosh that the council’s investigation, and potentially a full disciplinary hearing, can’t continue until after the CBSA concludes its investigation.
The investigator conceded the council is wholly dependent on documents from the CBSA for its investigation, and it could take up to a year for the CBSA to conclude its investigation.
In an August interview, the council’s director of professional conduct told CBC News the investigation process can be complicated by the immigration status of individuals who may be critical witnesses in a disciplinary hearing.
Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council director of professional conduct Michael Huynh says the investigation process can be complicated by the immigration status of people who might be critical witnesses in a disciplinary hearing.
“Because of the nature of the services members provide — that is, the members of the ICCRC — a lot of the complainants sometimes are of precarious status,” Michael Huynh said. “So they might not be willing to, after filing the complaint, testify, in which case it gets a little harder for us to procure the evidence necessary to prove our case.”
Huynh said there are also situations where a complainant may have been “complicit” in the immigration consultant’s activities, which may make them reluctant to testify for fear of compromising their status.
Benito was elected to the Alberta legislature in 2008. He became an immigration consultant after losing the Progressive Conservative nomination in 2012.
On websites and Facebook pages filled with photos of beaming clients, “Kuya Carl” (Brother Carl) claims he can help fellow Filipino immigrants secure residency, study permits, and work permits.
“Carl is simply the best in immigration consulting in Edmonton,” one of his websites reads.
In an article recently published in a local Filipino newspaper, and republished on his immigration firm’s website, Benito claimed he was a victim of “sensationalized” journalism.
“We have several clients who are our direct witnesses on how Triple Maple Leaf Canada and Carl Benito conducts his Consulting Services with utmost transparency and within legal bounds and following the guidelines as set by Immigration Canada,” Benito wrote in the article.
Suspect someone finally noticed the inconsistency in language between the website and ministerial remarks:
The immigration department changed a web page about asylum seekers to swap the word “illegal” for “irregular” as a debate was erupting between the federal government and Ontario on the issue, CBC News has learned.
The change in July came 18 months after the web page, titled “Claiming asylum in Canada – what happens?,” was first published — and just one day after federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen suggested the provincial Progressive Conservatives were mistaken in the way they were describing the status of people entering Canada at non-official entry points.
Throughout the web page, which is intended to provide information on Canada’s asylum laws, the words “illegal” and “illegally” were switched to “irregular” or “irregularly” in six separate instances on July 10, 2018.
A Wayback Machine snapshot shows that “illegal” was the word of choice on the immigration web page before it was changed 18 months later. (CBC News/Olivia Chandler)
On July 9, Hussen attacked Ontario’s newly-elected premier, Doug Ford, and provincial Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod, who oversees the immigration file, over their use of the term “illegal border-crossers” when describing asylum seekers crossing at non-official border points.
As Hussen was telling a news conference Ford and MacLeod were wrong to call those border crossings ‘illegal’, his own department was still using that word to describe such crossings on the asylum web page. The next day, the wording was changed to “irregular.”
The change was not ordered by Hussen, said Mathieu Genest, the minister’s spokesperson.
Cached web page reveals change
The Wayback Machine website, an open online library that archives published internet pages, retains a snapshot of the immigration web page as it appeared on July 4, 2018 — when it was still using the word “illegal.” The backgrounder was published originally on March 2, 2017.
The web page lays out the process for seeking asylum or claiming refugee status after crossing the U.S.-Canada border at a designated port of entry, or after arrival at an unofficial crossing point.
Language used on the immigration department web page – “Claiming asylum in Canada – what happens?” – was modified on June 11, 2018. (CBC News/Olivia Chandler)
“The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) play an instrumental role in protecting Canada’s border, deterring and intercepting irregular entry to Canada and keeping Canadians safe. CBSA, the RCMP and its domestic and international partners work together to intercept individuals who enter Canada irregularly,” the website now reads.
“Given significant confusion around the terminology, the department made incremental updates to all pages to minimize mischaracterization of asylum seekers as being in Canada illegally,” said Nancy Caron, spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, in an email to CBC News.
“Until their claim is decided, or if they are found to be a refugee, a person will not be charged with an offence based on how they entered Canada.”
However, the change does not appear to be consistent across the department’s website. Another web page that provides monthly updates on the numbers on asylum claims and interceptions still refers to “illegal entry to Canada” and to the CBSA and RCMP’s efforts to “intercept individuals who enter Canada illegally.”
Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel dismissed the changes and said she’s more troubled that the government has not tabled a concrete plan to deal with the problem.
“They need to be focusing on solving this problem that’s being created by tens of thousands of people illegally crossing on the border into Canada after having reached the United States, and the strains that it’s placing on Canada’s social program and, frankly, the backlog it’s creating,” she said.
NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan — who has pushed all levels of government to stop using the word ‘illegal’ in the context of asylum-seekers — welcome the department’s changes, but noted the government’s decision to do it under the radar.
“I think it’s very significant for that change to have been made, and for it to be acknowledged publicly really through their website. I guess I should say ‘quietly’ through their website, because the government loathed to admit that they are wrong,” she said.
“When we call asylum seekers ‘illegals’ we are denigrating them as people.”
Charged debate
The language surrounding the emotionally-charged political debate over border-crossers has been a source of friction and confusion.
(The CBC’s Language Guide allows for the use of both terms to describe border-crossings outside of official border points, depending on the context. See more below.)
Last March, Hussen was asked by Conservative MP David Tilson at a committee hearing which word he prefers to use to describe the act of crossing the border to claim asylum at an irregular crossing point.
“I have used the word ‘illegal’ and I have used the word ‘irregular,’ and I think both are accurate,” Hussen replied.
Weeks later, the immigration minister had changed his tune.
On July 13, Hussen called MacLeod’s approach to the issue of asylum seekers “not Canadian.”
Federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen and his provincial counterpart from Ontario, Lisa MacLeod fall out over irregular migration at minister’s meeting in Winnipeg. 1:23
“Asylum seekers are processed in a separate queue at the IRB and all the other regular immigration programs are processed by IRCC, and conflating the two knowingly is irresponsible, it’s divisive, it’s fearmongering and it’s not Canadian. And it’s very dangerous,” he said.
MacLeod fired back.
“The minister should sit down, have a nice cup of tea, calm down a little bit, and maybe phone me and apologize for calling me un-Canadian,” she said.
“There is a problem at the border. The border must be enforced.”
Caron said that the department chose to standardize its terminology on the website “to underscore that it is not illegal for someone to enter Canada for the purpose of making an asylum claim at any point along the Canada-U.S. border.”
In late July, MPs held special “emergency” committee hearings that led to heated debates between the Liberals and opposition parties over the government’s handling of border-crossers.
Kwan has made repeated requests for all parties to stop calling asylum seekers “illegal” because it generates negative public opinion.
“The immigration refugee protection act clearly states when a person crosses over to the border directly or indirectly for the purposes of seeking asylum, they are not committing a criminal offence,” she said.
According to the RCMP, authorities intercepted 14,125 border crossers at the border between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31, 2018.
CBC uses the terms “illegal crossing” or “illegal migration” when referring to the act, but does not describe the individual making the crossing as an “illegal migrant” or “illegal border crosser.”
Crossing into Canada outside a formal border point is against the law under the Customs Act.The UN Convention on Refugees acknowledges throughout its statutes that some refugees cross borders illegally and states that they should not be prosecuted for it if they are legitimately seeking asylum.
It’s against the law to enter Canada without the proper papers, and without going through an official port of entry during designated operating hours, according to the federal Customs Act. Asylum seekers are not prosecuted for such illegal crossings, pending a review of their refugee applications, according to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. But this does not make the crossing, itself, lawful. The government reserves the right to pursue charges later. Applicable international law uses similar language. For example, the UN Status of Refugees Convention and Protocol specifically refers to such unauthorized border crossings as “illegal entry.” The convention goes on to state that countries “shall not impose penalties” on refugee claimants solely because of “their illegal entry” as long as they “present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence.” For this reason, it’s OK to use terms such as “illegal border crossings” and “unlawful border crossings”.
Some politicians and refugee activists prefer the term “irregular border crossings”. While the word “irregular” is becoming more common, choosing between “illegal” and “irregular” is now also seen by some as a partisan decision. CBC News strives to avoid taking sides in political debates over language. We believe the modifier “illegal” is generally preferable because it is accurate and entrenched, and so, instantly helps our audience understand the story. “Irregular” is less familiar and more bureaucratic, but there’s no ban against using the word as long as a given story’s context makes its meaning clear. Just be sure to explain or define “irregular border crossing” if you use the term (e.g., “refugee claimants entering Canada without going through official border points”). It’s worth noting that “irregular” is a statutory designation found in Section 20.1 of Canada’s 2001 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The once-obscure jargon started becoming more widely used by federal officials in 2017.
Illegal migration
Be aware that while the modifier illegal is an entrenched and acceptable way to describe the general act of unlawful movement across borders (e.g., illegal immigration and illegal migration), it’s viewed by many as a poor way to describe people themselves. Instead of using a term such as “illegal immigrant,” therefore, prefer specific detail (e.g., “entering or living in a country illegally”). Another option is to use a neutral modifier that applies to a given set of facts (e.g., undocumented worker). The same principle applies to asylum seekers and refugee claimants. While it’s OK to describe an act as technically unlawful (e.g., an illegal border crossing), we should not call people “illegal border crossers.” Avoid shorthand such as “an illegal” or rounding up “the illegals,” which reduces the identities of human beings to a criminal act they’re accused of
Multicultural Meanderings 