She was 3 years old when she arrived on Nauru, a child fleeing war in Sri Lanka. Now, Sajeenthana is 8.
Her gaze is vacant. Sometimes she punches adults. And she talks about dying with ease.
“Yesterday I cut my hand,” she said in an interview here on the remote Pacific island where she was sent by the Australian government after being caught at sea. She pointed to a scar on her arm.
“One day I will kill myself,” she said. “Wait and see, when I find the knife. I don’t care about my body. ”
Her father tried to calm her, but she twisted away. “It is the same as if I was in war, or here,” he said.
Sajeenthana is one of more than 3,000 refugees and asylum seekerswho have been sent to Australia’s offshore detention centers since 2013. No other Australian policy has been so widely condemned by the world’s human rights activists nor so strongly defended by the country’s leaders, who have long argued it saves lives by deterring smugglers and migrants.
Now, though, the desperation has reached a new level — in part because of the United States.
Sajeenthana and her father are among the dozens of refugees on Nauru who had been expecting to be moved as part of an Obama-era deal that President Trump reluctantly agreed to honor, allowing resettlement for up to 1,250 refugees from Australia’s offshore camps.
So far, according to American officials, about 430 refugees from the camps have been resettled in the United States — but at least 70 people were rejected over the past few months.
That includes Sajeenthana and her father, Tamil refugees who fled violence at home after the Sri Lankan government crushed a Tamil insurgency.
A State Department spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the rejections, arguing the Nauru refugees are subject to the same vetting procedures as other refugees worldwide.
Australia’s Department of Home Affairs said in a statement that Nauru has “appropriate mental health assessment and treatment in place.”
But what’s clear, according to doctors and asylum seekers, is that the situation has been deteriorating for months. On Nauru, signs of suicidal children have been emerging since August. Dozens of organizations, including Doctors Without Borders (which was ejected from Nauru on Oct. 5) have been sounding the alarm. And with the hope of American resettlement diminishing, the Australian government has been forced to relent: Last week officials said they would work toward moving all children off Nauru for treatment by Christmas.
At least 92 children have been moved since August — Sajeenthana was evacuated soon after our interview — but as of Tuesday there were still 27 children on Nauru, hundreds of adults, and no long-term solution.
The families sent to Australia for care are waiting to hear if they will be sent back to Nauru. Some parents, left behind as their children are being treated, fear they will never see each other again if they apply for American resettlement, while asylum seekers from countries banned by the United States — like Iran, Syria and Somalia — lack even that possibility.
For all the asylum seekers who have called Nauru home, the psychological effects linger.
‘I Saw the Blood — It Was Everywhere’
Nauru is a small island nation of about 11,000 people that takes 30 minutes by car to loop. A line of dilapidated mansions along the coast signal the island’s wealthy past; in the 1970s, it was a phosphate-rich nation with per capita income second only to Saudi Arabia.
Now, those phosphate reserves are virtually exhausted, and the country relies heavily on Australian aid. It accounted for 25 percent of Nauru’s gross domestic product last year alone.
Mathew Batsiua, a former Nauruan lawmaker who helped orchestrate the offshore arrangement, said it was meant to be a short-term deal. But the habit has been hard to break.
“Our mainstay income is purely controlled by the foreign policy of another country,” he said.
In Topside, an area of old cars and dusty brush, sits one of the two processing centers that house about 160 detainees. Hundreds of others live in community camps of modular housing. They were moved from shared tents in August, ahead of the Pacific Islands Forum, an intergovernmental meeting that Nauru hosted this year.
Sukirtha Krishnalingam, 15, said the days are a boring loop as she and her family of five — certified refugees from Sri Lanka — wait to hear if the United States will accept them. She worries about her heart condition. And she has nightmares.
“At night, she screams,” said her brother Mahinthan, 14.
In the past year, talk of suicide on the island has become more common. Young men like Abdullah Khoder, a 24-year-old Lebanese refugee, says exhaustion and hopelessness have taken a toll. “I cut my hands with razors because I am tired,” he said.
Even more alarming: Children now allude to suicide as if it were just another thunderstorm. Since 2014, 12 people have died after being detained in Australia’s offshore detention centers on Nauru and Manus Island, part of Papua New Guinea.
Christina Sivalingam, a 10-year-old Tamil girl on Nauru spoke matter-of-factly in an interview about seeing the aftermath of one death — that of an Iranian man, Fariborz Karami, who killed himself in June.
“We came off the school bus and I saw the blood — it was everywhere,” she said calmly. It took two days to clean up. She said her father also attempted suicide after treatment for his thyroid condition was delayed.
Seeing some of her friends being settled in the United States while she waits on her third appeal for asylum has only made her lonelier. She said she doesn’t feel like eating anymore.
“Why am I the only one here?” she said. “I want to go somewhere else and be happy.”
Some observers, even on Nauru, wonder if the children are refusing to eat in a bid to leave. But medical professionals who have worked on the island said the rejections by the Americans have contributed to a rapid deterioration of people’s mental states.
Dr. Beth O’Connor, a psychiatrist working with Doctors Without Borders, said that when she arrived last year, people clung to the hope of resettlement in the United States. In May, a batch of rejections plunged the camp into despair.
Mr. Karami’s death further sapped morale.
“People that just had a bit of spark in their eye still just went dull,” Dr. O’Connor said. “They felt more abandoned and left behind.”
Many of the detainees no longer hope to settle in Australia. New Zealand has offered to take in 150 refugees annually from Nauru but Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, has said that he will only consider the proposal if a bill is passed banning those on Nauru from ever entering Australia. Opposition lawmakers say they are open to discussion.
In the meantime, Nauru continues to draw scrutiny.
‘I’m Not Going Back to Nauru’
For months, doctors say, many children on Nauru have been exhibiting symptoms of resignation syndrome — a mental condition in response to trauma that involves extreme withdrawal from reality. They stopped eating, drinking and talking.
“They’d look right through you when you tried to talk to them,” Dr. O’Connor said. “We watched their weights decline and we worried that one of them would die before they got out.”
Lawyers with the National Justice Project, a nonprofit legal service, have been mobilizing. They have successfully argued for the medical evacuation of around 127 people from Nauru this year, including 44 children.
In a quarter of the cases, the government has resisted these demands in court, said George Newhouse, the group’s principal lawyer.
“We’ve never lost,” he said. “It is gut-wrenching to see children’s lives destroyed for political gain.”
A broad coalition that includes doctors, clergy, lawyers and nonprofit organizations, working under the banner #kidsoffnauru, is now calling for all asylum seekers to be evacuated.
Public opinion in Australia is turning: In one recent poll, about 80 percent of respondents supported the removal of families and children from Nauru.
Australia’s conservative government, with an election looming, is starting to shift.
“We’ve been going about this quietly,” Mr. Morrison said last week. “We haven’t been showboating.”
But there are still questions about what happens next.
Last month, Sajeenthana stopped eating. After she had spent 10 days on a saline drip in a Nauruan hospital, her father was told he had two hours to pack for Australia.
Speaking by video from Brisbane last week (we are not using her full name because of her age and the severity of her condition), Sajeenthana beamed.
“I feel better now that I am in Australia,” she said. “I’m not going back to Nauru.”
But her father is less certain. The United States rejected his application for resettlement in September. There are security guards posted outside their Brisbane hotel room, he said, and though food arrives daily, they are not allowed to leave. He wonders if they have swapped one kind of limbo for another, or if they will be forced back to Nauru.
“Anyone who is brought here is still classified as a transitory person,” said Jana Favero, director of advocacy and campaigns at the Asylum Seeker Resource Center. “Life certainly isn’t completely rosy and cheery once they arrive in Australia.”
On Monday, 25 more people, including eight children, left the island in six family units, she said.
Those left behind on Nauru pass the days, worrying and waiting.
Christina often dreams of what life would be like somewhere else, where being 10 does not mean being trapped.
A single Iranian woman who asked not to be identified because she feared for her safety said that short of attempting suicide or changing nationality, there was no way off Nauru.
She has been waiting two years for an answer to her application for resettlement in the United States — one that now seems hopeless given the Trump administration’s policies.
Each night, often after the power goes out on Nauru, she and her sister talk about life and death, and whether to harm themselves to seek freedom.
For more than two decades, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s hostility to immigrants put him on the outer fringes of the Republican Party. When Congress seemed likely to pass comprehensive immigration reform—first in 2007, then in 2013—Sessions worked assiduously to scuttle it. In 2015, after the Republicans took control of the Senate, he circulated a memo titled “Immigration Handbook for a New Republican Majority,” in which he argued that the G.O.P. had lost the Presidency in 2012 partly because it failed to curtail legal immigration to the U.S. The next year, he became the first U.S. senator to back Donald Trump in the Republican Presidential primaries, which at once bolstered Sessions’s flagging public profile and legitimized Trump’s candidacy in the eyes of anti-immigration hawks. (“Sessions was Trump’s Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” Mark Krikorian, the head of the Center for Immigration Studies, an influential anti-immigration think tank, told me last year.) Addressing a group of immigration judges in Virginia last October, Sessions paused to marvel at his own good luck. “I’m just astounded that President Trump made the miraculous intervention, and I’m the Attorney General of the United States,” he said, grinning broadly. “It’s really, really hard to believe.”
On Wednesday, Sessions resigned under pressure from the White House. For the past year and a half, the President, who felt betrayed that Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, in March, 2017, had routinely mocked and insulted his Attorney General. Trump upbraided him in the Oval Office, called him a “dumb Southerner” behind his back, and taunted him in speeches and on Twitter. (“I’m so sad over Jeff Sessions because he came to me,” Trump said in September. “He wanted to be Attorney General, and I didn’t see it.”) But, as the Trump Administration adopted increasingly draconian policies, it became clear that, for Sessions, orchestrating the most systematic and wide-reaching assault on immigrants in modern history was well worth enduring near-constant humiliations from the President. As the government’s top lawyer, Sessions was responsible for, among other things, cancellingdaca, spurring family separations, trying to defund sanctuary cities, dismantling the asylum system, reshaping the immigration courts, and retooling multiple travel bans. To the extent that the President has styled himself as an anti-immigration crusader, it’s with a script written entirely by Sessions.
Trump’s immigration agenda has always faced an administrative hurdle that Sessions was particularly determined, and well-positioned, to try to overcome: the President wants to deport more people than the machinery of the federal bureaucracy can possibly process. When Sessions took over as Attorney General, in January, 2017, there was a backlog in the country’s immigration courts of more than five hundred thousand cases, and the number has since grown to more than a million. Meanwhile, at Trump’s urging, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been increasing the number of people it arrests, which has only compounded the problem. In April, Sessions, who presided over the country’s immigration-court system as the Attorney General, instituted a quota to force judges to hear seven hundred cases a year—about three per day—and then further restricted their ability to weigh evidence in individual situations. A former immigration judge told the Times, “Sessions is treating them like immigration officers, not judges.”
Sessions claimed to be making these changes in the name of efficiency, but his real motives were easy to discern. In May, he issued a ruling forbidding immigration judges from exercising a crucial form of discretion called “administrative closure.” As the court backlog has grown in the last several years, judges have frequently closed cases when an immigrant did not face imminent deportation. As of September, 2018, some three hundred and fifty thousand cases had been dismissed because the defendants were considered such a “low priority” for arrest by the enforcement standards established under President Obama. Sessions declared this practice illegal. A few weeks later, lawyers at ice received a memo that cited his decision and instructed them to reopen old cases. According to the document, “there is no burden to provide a persuasive reason” for rescheduling the cases, “or to provide any reason at all.” The signal from Sessions was justification enough. In the past fiscal year, ice lawyers have already reopened about eight thousand previously closed deportation cases.
What made Sessions so dangerous as Attorney General was his technical knowledge of which levers to pull to advance his agenda. As the head of the Justice Department, Sessions made frequent use of a fairly obscure authority to refer pending immigration cases to himself for review; in eight such cases that had come before a body known as the Board of Immigration Appeals, he ultimately issued his own, superseding legal judgments. (By contrast, this referral power was used nine and four times during the entirety of the Bush and Obama Presidencies, respectively.) In three instances, including the case involving administrative closure, Sessions ruled on how to manage the immigration court docket to facilitate increased deportations. In the remaining five, he attempted to redraw the system for how the U.S. government grants asylum. “He knew when he got the job what power he was getting,” Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “And you could see, based on the cases he referred to himself, what his priorities were.”
The most consequential of these cases involved a Salvadoran woman who had been granted asylum in the U.S. after escaping an abusive husband in 2014. In June, Sessions reversed the ruling on the grounds that victims of domestic abuse and gang violence no longer qualified for protection under U.S. law. Legal experts estimated that Sessions had single-handedly dismantled between sixty and seventy per cent of asylum jurisprudence from the previous three decades. An asylum officer at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services told me, “Ninety per cent of the people I’ve referred to a judge for an asylum hearing were referred on the basis of gang-related violence or domestic violence in Central America. Now what?” Sessions’s ruling came just as the Trump Administration, under a so-called zero-tolerance policy advanced by Sessions, was separating families as they sought asylum at the border. Parents who fled to the U.S. with their children, Sessions claimed, were scarcely better than human smugglers secreting contraband. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you,” he said. “That child will be separated from you as required by law.”
Where immigration policy is concerned, Trump will be hard-pressed to find an Attorney General as ideologically single-minded and crafty as Sessions was. Yet Sessions’s departure will likely do little, if anything, to slow the broader agenda he’s already set in motion. In large part, this is because Sessions can rely on a cabal of former staffers and loyalists across the federal bureaucracy to carry on in his absence. The most notorious and powerful of them is, of course, Stephen Miller, who is now leading the President’s crackdown on immigrants as a senior policy adviser in the White House. Others are less well known, but nearly as influential. Gene Hamilton, another former Sessions staffer (like Miller, he joined the Trump campaign in 2016), is a counsellor at the Justice Department and served briefly at the Department of Homeland Security advising then-Secretary John Kelly. Hamilton wrote the memo ending daca, partnered with Miller to sabotage the refugee program, directed officials at D.H.S. to separate families, and worked to quietly end a raft of humanitarian protections that have long defined U.S. immigration policy. L. Francis Cissna, who, as the head of U.S.C.I.S., is trying to punish legal immigrants for using public benefits, worked with Sessions as a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee—as did Cissna’s deputy, Kathy Nuebel Kovarik. Others, like Dimple Shah, a lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security, and Julie Kirchner, now the ombudsman at U.S.C.I.S., are also hardened ideologues who came out of Sessions’s political network. In effect, Sessions’s reach extends across every government agency that shapes immigration policy.
Since it was Trump who severed his relationship with Sessions, and not the other way around, there’s a temptation to cast the President as the one who got the better of their partnership. The opposite may be closer to the truth, however. In less than two years, Jeff Sessions managed to import his world view into the upper echelons of the U.S. government; Trump was Sessions’s mouthpiece, and his lifeline out of political obscurity. When Sessions was weighing whether to endorse Trump, in February, 2016, Steve Bannon had to persuade him. “Trump is a great advocate for our ideas,” Sessions told Bannon, according to Joshua Green’s book “Devil’s Bargain.” “But do you think he can win?” he asked. Bannon replied, “One hundred per cent. If he can stick to your message and personify this stuff, there’s not a doubt in my mind.”
David Bier of the Cato Institute on the midterms and immigration:
In this election, journalists following the immigration beat will focus on the outcomes of individual races. Dave Brat, the Virginia nativist whose defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014 doomed hopes of immigration reform, lost in a previously safe GOP seat. Democrats blew out Corey Stewart in Virginia and Lou Barletta in Pennsylvania, the most anti-immigrant Senate candidates. Kris Kobach, the author of state anti-immigrant laws across the country, cost Republicans the governorship in Kansas.
But the two most important outcomes of this election are in the big picture. First, nativists have officially squandered their last, best chance to restrict legal immigration. There may never be another moment like the one in 2017 and 2018, where the House, Senate, and White House were all controlled by Republicans with nativist agendas. They held multiple votes in the House and Senate on various measures to make legal immigration cuts, and all their effortswent downin flames.
The second outcome is even more important: the House of Representatives is now the most pro-immigrant that it has been since the 19th century. Current House Democrats would not only pass the broadest legalization in the history of the United States—they also would greatly expand legal immigration. No elected House Democrat is opposed to legalization, even if they would want it paired with some enforcement measures.
The last Democratic House from 2007 to 2010 did pass the Dream Act for a very small portion of the illegal population—only a subset of the Dreamers qualified—but it didn’t even reach a majority of the House (216, not 218, voted yes). House leadership lost 38 “blue dog” Democrats and got the votes of just five Republicans. Today, the Dream Act would easily pass the House with more than a dozen Republicans voting for it, even after moderate-Republican losses.
The last Democratic-majority House could not—and did not—pass any comprehensive immigration reform bill that would offer a path to citizenship for most illegal residents or expand legal immigration. From 1995 to 2006, the GOP majority bookended its tenure by passing the two harshest immigration enforcement bills since the 1920s: the Sensenbrenner enforcement bill in 2005 and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996.
Except for one Congress from 1933 to 1994 Democrats controlled the House and during that time the House did pass several bipartisan immigration bills, a mix of expansive and restrictive measures. The Immigration Act of 1990 expanded legal immigration, while hiring more Border Patrol Agents. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 provided for amnesty, but it was generally seen as a restrictive measure (which is why most of the Hispanic Caucus voted against it) because it made it illegal to hire someone without a valid photo ID, which naturally led to discrimination against Hispanic workers.
Prior to that, a Democratic-majority House passed the Refugee Act of 1980 which increased legal immigration for refugees. The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 legalized the status of Cubans who made it to the United States, and the Immigration Act of 1965 replaced the old national origin quotas and expanded legal immigration (though more than anyone expected at the time). Before 1965, House Democrats did only very slight liberalizations, ending the Asiatic Bar Zone and allowing some Jewish refugees to resettle in the United States. They mostly maintained the restrictive system created by Republicans in the 1920s.
House Democrats today would not just protect every expansive immigration measure enacted from 1965 to 1990—they would greatly build upon them if they could reasonably expect them to be signed into law. The starting place for reform for them is the 2013 comprehensive immigration reform bill, H.R. 15, a version of which the Senate had passed. At the time, every House Democrat except two cosponsored the legislation. The bill would legalize more than 8 million illegal residents and at least double permanent legal immigration.
However, the bill also had some provisions that are unlikely to remain. In particular, while it expanded immigration overall, it ended the Diversity Visa Lottery and cut so-called “chain migration,” two issues that President Trump has championed. Because the lottery disproportionately benefits African immigrants—who Trump reportedly referred to as coming from “shithole” countries—many Democrats are now opposed to repealing it as a matter of principle.
Rather than cutting family-sponsored immigration, Democrats will seek to expand it. The legalization provisions were also very restrictive, covering just three quarters of the illegal resident population. Democrats would certainly go further now. Especially after seeing how their colleagues did in this midterm, the remaining moderate Republicans would likely sign onto these measures if tied to stricter enforcement.
As importantly, this House will have the backing of the most pro-immigration general public in recorded history. More Americans oppose cuts to immigration and favor expanded immigration than at any point since at least 1965. Because the Senate is still in GOP hands, however, Democrats will have to focus on chipping away at the numerous legal immigration restrictions and enforcement measures that the Trump administration has implemented or has plans to implement. Republicans would be wise to work with them in a bipartisan manner.
Immigration minister Caroline Nokes has issued a “heartfelt apology” to members of the Windrush generation and admitted that she felt “ashamed” of how the Home Office had treated them.
Nokes was addressing dozens of the Windrush generation at a meeting at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, south London, and told them that she had come to listen to their stories and find out about their experiences.
She has come under fire for issuing contradictory statements about whether or not employers would have to make additional checks on EU nationals post-Brexit in the event of no deal.
“The way I always learn best is by talking to people,” she told the members of the Windrush generation who had come to speak to her.
Several people told Nokes and the team of Home Office officials accompanying her about their experiences as a result of Home Office hostile environment policies which the Windrush generation became caught up in. At times the conversation became heated.
Nokes said: “It’s really important, it really matters to me that people have a chance to shout at me. It really is. I just feel really ashamed, that’s the honest truth.
“I feel ashamed the Home Office got it so badly wrong over a long period. I was going to say I have to say sorry but I want to say sorry. I’m really conscious that we have a massive piece of work to do.”
One woman from the Windrush generation told Nokes she had been thrown out of her council accommodation because of a lack of clarity about her immigration status.
“I have kids and grandkids here but the Home Office want to send me back,” she said. “I’m going blind but I’m scared to see a doctor because of my issues with the Home Office.”
The NHS is required to ask about patients’ immigration status and can refuse treatment to those deemed ineligible.
Nokes urged her to speak to the Windrush taskforce but she said she was too scared to do so.
“I don’t want anyone to feel scared,” said Nokes. “It’s stories like this that demonstrate to me that what went wrong went really horribly wrong. I will pick it up and do absolutely everything to help you.”
It emerged during the meeting that not all the applications for redress under the Windrush scheme had reached the government. A Freepost address has been provided for these applications but one person showed Nokes that his application had been sent back to him with a “return to sender” notice. Nokes promised to hand the application over personally to the right person.
Solicitor Jacqueline McKenzie of McKenzie Beute and Pope, who represents some members of the Windrush generation, and is a member of the Windrush Action Group, expressed concern at the low number of people who the Home Office said have been assisted by the Windrush taskforce to regularise their immigration status. There were 2,100 of them, according to the latest published statistics.
“That’s shockingly low,” McKenzie said. Officials declined to respond to her question about how many people the Home Office had brought back from the Caribbean who had been unlawfully removed but said they would be in touch about it.
Nokes apologised several times for treatment of the Windrush generation who had been invited to Britain to help rebuild the country after the second world war.
“We went out and asked for help. Help came. We have treated people shamefully since then. I would like to give everyone a heartfelt apology. We are here to help, we will help,” she said.
Useful expansion of pre-arrival integration/settlement services:
Les immigrants francophones auront accès à des services d’intégration en français dans les provinces canadiennes à majorité anglophone avant même d’arriver au Canada.
Le ministre fédéral de l’Immigration, Ahmed Hussen, a annoncé mercredi 11 millions sur cinq ans pour faire de la Cité collégiale à Ottawa le principal centre de services des nouveaux arrivants. Quatre organismes régionaux en Nouvelle-Écosse, en Ontario, au Manitoba et en Colombie-Britannique pourront fournir de l’information sur leur province d’accueil.
« Ils pourront ouvrir des bureaux et embaucher du personnel à l’extérieur du Canada, dans des pays francophones comme le Maroc ou la Tunisie », a-t-il expliqué.
Les immigrants déjà sélectionnés par le Canada pourront ainsi avoir un « contact personnel » avec quelqu’un qui pourra répondre à leurs questions avant leur arrivée.
M. Hussen a donné l’exemple d’un ingénieur marocain sélectionné par le ministère de l’Immigration. Celui-ci aurait d’abord un premier contact avec la Cité collégiale, qui ensuite le référerait à l’Ordre des ingénieurs de la province où il compte s’installer. Cette personne pourrait ainsi commencer les procédures de reconnaissance de diplôme avant son arrivée en sol canadien.
Cette annonce vient corriger les lacunes existantes dans l’accueil des immigrants francophones qui pourront maintenant recevoir des services en français à toutes les étapes de leur intégration, selon la Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne (FCFA).
« L’immigrant francophone avait de la misère à se retrouver dans cette panoplie de services où il y a une offre en anglais qui est beaucoup plus volumineuse qu’en français », a constaté son directeur général, Alain Dupuis.
Un montant de 36,6 millions sur cinq ans déjà annoncé dans le Plan d’action sur les langues officielles servira à améliorer l’accès aux services en français.
« Est-ce qu’on va avoir tous les services de A à Z avec cet investissement-là ? Non, a-t-il reconnu. Ce n’est pas assez, il va en falloir plus, mais c’est une bonne première étape pour commencer à s’assurer qu’on ait un continuum de services en français dans toutes les régions du pays. »
Baisse du prix des tests de français
Le ministre a également annoncé que les tests de français requis pour vérifier les compétences linguistiques des immigrants seront moins chers et plus accessibles. Ils pouvaient coûter quelques centaines de dollars de plus que les tests en anglais, un fait qui avait été dénoncé par l’ex-commissaire aux langues officielles, Graham Fraser, en 2016. Le ministre Hussen a promis que le prix des tests en français sera « comparable » aux tests en anglais, qui coûtent environ 300 $. Dès le 1er décembre, ils seront offerts dans un plus grand nombre de villes.
Le gouvernement fédéral s’est fixé pour objectif d’attirer 4,4 % d’immigrants francophones à l’extérieur du Québec en 2023.
Does appear to be the case as the various articles I have shared or seen indicate:
The Home Office has been accused of operating in a “continuous state of disaster management” as an increasing number of erroneous immigration decisions are being overturned only once they are publicly exposed.
A number of recent news stories about individuals being refused entry to the UK or threatened with removal have prompted officials to reverse decisions within hours or even minutes news articles being published online or in print.
In the past two weeks alone, The Independent has reported on two such cases. Both in involved people being barred from entering the UK because officials were “not satisfied” they would return home. Both were reversed within 12 hours of the articles being published.
Experts have warned, however, that the speed at which the decisions are reversed following media coverage raises serious concerns about the accuracy and fairness of the Home Office’s decision-making process.
It amounts to a “popularity contest” in which only those able to access journalists can get their cases resolved, they said.
The decision to prevent six-year-old, UK-born Mohamed Bangoura from returning home to his mother following a holiday was also reversed, as was the case of Hafizzulah Husseinkhel, a 27-year-old Afghan man who was threatened with deportation despite having served in the British army.
Journalists reporting on these cases are usually contacted by either the individual themselves, charities supporting them or, increasingly, solicitors representing them. Immigration lawyers said media coverage was now often the only way to obtain a “fair and timely” resolution from the Home Office.
Chai Patel, legal director at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), said that while it was good for individual cases to get resolved, the process exposed a “completely dysfunctional” system which is “incredibly unfair” for those unable to get their cases in the media.
He added: “It shows how little faith or consideration immigration officials have in their own decision-making that they’re willing to reverse them in a matter of hours, minutes sometimes, of them getting a bit of bad publicity. And it’s seriously concerning that instead of having proper processes, we now have a popularity contest where, if you can get enough people to shout about your case, the Home Office will just change its mind.
“Many will never get their case in the press because it’s too sensitive, or they don’t have the contacts or the lawyers to get in touch with journalists and they don’t have communities building campaign groups around them.”
Mr Patel said each Home Office U-turn was an admission that there is no solution to the underlying problem whereby people are ”consistently – almost as a matter of course – given entirely unfair decisions that will destroy their lives until they’re lucky enough to get them turned around”.
Danielle Blake, a legal expert from the Immigration Advice Service (IAS), said it was a “big ask” for clients to willingly expose their personal circumstances to the world, but conceded that media exposure was often required to obtain a fair and timely resolution from the Home Office.
She added: “As advisers we come across many clients who are in the most desperate of situations. A lot of them are separated from their loved ones and have been for a very long time. All of this adds several months onto an already long and emotionally draining process. It’s very upsetting to think that for those who wish to keep their story private, they face being stuck on a never-ending merry-go-round of paying exorbitant Home Office fees, only to come up against a brick wall of non-communication.”
With Brexit on the horizon, campaigners raised concerns that an already “broken” system is going to be placed under even more pressure, with potentially disastrous implications.
Mr Patel said: “The Home Office can’t function with the number of applications made currently. It’s going to get a lot worse when the government has to develop an immigration system that includes EU nationals as well. Whatever happens, the pressure on the Home Office both in terms of future migration and dealing with the people here already is going to be huge. To prevent disaster they need to completely reform every part of the immigration system, because currently it is completely broken.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The home secretary has been clear since his first day in office that he wants a different approach to the immigration system which provides control, but is fair and humane. If evidence about a case comes to light then it will be considered by caseworkers, but solely because a case is covered in the media does not mean it will receive a favourable decision.”
“We cannot take what we have for granted. The anti-immigrant, anti-refugee rhetoric that is all around us — we are not immune to that,” he said during a speech and question-and-answer session at the Canadian Club in Toronto.
“This is the challenge before me and all of us — to double down on immigration, but also to really, really communicate, and listen carefully and communicate the real benefits of immigration locally. Because if we don’t, it’s going to be difficult for certain people who have anxieties about the economy and about their future to see immigration as a positive thing.”
The new communications campaign comes as the Liberals continue to be hammered by the Opposition Conservatives over border security and the government’s handling of asylum seekers crossing into Canada outside of regular border points. The Conservatives have declared it a “crisis,” while the government insists it’s a challenge that is being capably managed.
As part of the federal initiative, Hussen launched the “Immigration Matters” website, which provides information on how the system works and how immigration offsets the economic effects of an aging population by meeting the economy’s labour needs.
The initiative comes a day after Hussen announced increased immigration levels, setting a new target of 350,000 for 2021. That’s up 40,000 from this year’s target of 310,000.
Surge in global migration
Hussen said we are now living in a world where the word “immigrant” evokes starkly different responses as global migration reaches levels not seen since the Second World War.
He said Canada is isolated from the pressures of global migration patterns experienced in countries like Germany, where hundreds of thousands of people have arrived to claim asylum.
“We’ve been sheltered by three oceans and our border to the south. But as we’ve seen with growing numbers of asylum seekers crossing irregularly from the United States between ports of entry … we’re starting to see some of the challenges faced by others, although the numbers pale in comparison,” he said.
Hussen said Canada must be vigilant in ensuring that newcomers integrate successfully, while listening to the legitimate concerns of people who fear immigrants will take jobs from Canadians. The government says its communications efforts will present statistics and showcase success stories to show that immigrants help the economy and create jobs for Canadians.
Immigration critic Michelle Rempel said Canadians’ confidence in the immigration system has been eroded by the Liberal government’s handling of asylum seekers illegally entering the country outside official border points. They see that as a “blatant abuse” of Canada’s social programs and a sign of the government’s misplaced priorities, she said.
“Where Canadians have lost support for immigration over the last year stems from the fact that (Prime Minister) Justin Trudeau has created a new permanent stream of entry into the country with a zero-day wait time, which has no sort of criterion on who can enter it and places a great burden on Canada’s social welfare programs,” she said.
Trudeau’s approach to the immigration file has been “unfocused, unplanned and ill thought out,” she said.
When one takes away the partisan sniping, and the points that are easy to say but hard to implement (e.g., closing the loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement with the Trump administration), the main points boil down to:
establishing metrics to determine levels with transparent consultations with industry and provinces (agree, but all parties in opposition promise more transparency than they deliver once in power);
Greater focus on privately sponsored refugees compared to government sponsored refugees or asylum seekers, a valid policy choice but the anti-United Nations role in selecting refugees is more playing to the base and picking up the tone of some of the debates South of the border;
Promise to have difficult conversations regarding Temporary Foreign Workers to address concerns that Canadians are not first matched with available work; and,
Vague language around economic levels matched to regions, and not providing a specific number (when in power, the percentage climbed to about 60 percent from about 55 percent, under the new levels plan, it will climb to 72 percent). Historic data shows that immigration has substantially responded to regional demands in the West, thanks in part to the Provincial Nominee Program but always important to consider and respond to regional needs.
As to numbers pulled out of a hat, my understanding is that has been longstanding practice under both Conservative and Liberal governments, so while I agree with her in substance, I am sceptical as to possible implementation:
So what would a Conservative government do differently? What levels would we set?
At the end of August, I sat in this very room and outlined some key changes an Andrew Scheer led government would make to Canada’s immigration system. To recap, our approach to setting immigration would:
First recognize that how we allow people to enter the country, and who we allow to do so, matters. Justin Trudeau has failed to recognize this principle.
End the practice of setting immigration levels by an auction for votes or a seat on the UN Security Council.
Immediately seek to dramatically decrease the number of people entering Canada illegally via upstate New York and subsequently claiming asylum. We would do so by seeking to close the loophole in the safe third country agreement, and significantly expedite the processing and removal of those who Trudeau allowed in. The lengthy process between entering Canada illegally and being removed, all while being able to access social welfare programs, is an incentive for this behaviour that must be ended. It is not acceptable that Trudeau has planned on this being a permanent situation.
We would also establish a set of metrics to determine what Canada’s immigration levels should be, based on transparent principles, with integration and self-sufficiency at the forefront. For Canadians to see immigration as a positive thing, they should be able to easily see the employment and social welfare statistics for immigration levels for any given year and stream.
We would also establish a transparent system for consulting with industry and the provinces to set immigration levels.
We would focus on setting humanitarian immigration levels that focus on higher utilization of the privately sponsored refugee program, where individual Canadians through their own funds, not taxpayer funds, support the entry of refugees, and would restrict the utilization of the government assisted refugee program to instances of the four atrocity crimes.
We would end the practice of allowing the United Nations to be the sole agency for selecting humanitarian immigrants to be resettled to Canada, and we would not cede our sovereign right in setting immigration levels to this agency.
We would reform the Temporary Foreign Worker program and not shy away from difficult conservations [nice to know even MPs occasionally make typos – should be conversations] around employment insurance, working conditions, and wage depression associated with the program and other reasons why Canadians don’t take or aren’t skilled for certain jobs, and ensure that Canadians are first matched with available work.
We would also change our immigration programs and support to better focus economic immigration levels and retention to regions with acute labour shortages. It is not enough to cite the Conference Board of Canada in saying that the economy needs more immigrants; immigration levels should be set to ensure that newcomers are matched with jobs in regions where Canadians are not out of work.
In short, a Conservative government would not pull a number out of the air in terms of how many people we would allow into the country. The number we would present to Canadians would be shaped by the above principles, and would be answered as follows:
There are X number of job vacancies in a certain industry or region, here’s the reason why Canadians aren’t doing the job, here’s what we did to try to fix that problem, and as such we are allowing X number of people to enter Canada, with X skill set, to fill this need. Then we would track our outcomes to make sure our programs are working.
On the humanitarian side, we would not allow people to enter Canada illegally and abuse our asylum system. The target number for that stream of entry should be zero. All other targets would be met by gaining consensus from Canadians that we should help a certain cohort of people (for example, genocide survivors), and then gaining consensus from Canadians on how much money we should spend to support the initiative, in terms of the cost of integrating into Canada, and in the context of putting the needs of Canadians first. We wouldn’t take a false morally superior position that excludes Canadians from helping to decide how our humanitarian immigration system should function, and be funded.
The levels Justin Trudeau has put forward in this report are unfocused, unplanned, and ill thought out. There is no justification included herein on how he would change the system to make it more just, fair, or lawful. It is simply a continuation of his failed immigration policies. The reality is that Canada can’t sustain high immigration levels under Justin Trudeau’s failed immigration policies. A change in government must occur before Canadians will be able to regain faith in our immigration system.
For all the reasons I’ve given you today, the Conservative Party of Canada strongly opposes the levels set out in this report.
One day after the Liberal government unveiled plans to ramp up immigration levels to 350,000 people by 2021, the Conservative immigration critic won’t say what she believes the figure should be.
The number is not the point, according to Michelle Rempel.
“Justin Trudeau has no credibility to set Canada’s immigration levels,” she said Thursday at a news conference.
Hussen told CTV’s Power Play on Thursday that the plan is “responsible and ambitious” and focuses on bringing in “highly-skilled talent that creates middle class jobs for our country.”
“Canadians are asking us to provide them with more workers, more skilled immigrants who can grow our economy and create good-quality, full-time middle class jobs,” Hussen said.
Hussen added that the Federal Skilled Workers program, which offers residency to people like international students who find work, makes up the single biggest component of immigration.
“The vast majority of those folks are people applying from within Canada,” he said. “They already have a job.”
At her press conference, Rempel cited an Angus Reid pollfrom August which found that 49 per cent of Canadians wanted to see the country reduce its immigration intake – up from 36 per cent four years earlier and the highest number in the 43-year period since the question was first asked.
She said that Canadians’ appetite for increased immigration has hit its lowest level on record because of how the Liberals have handled an influx of people crossing the border and claiming asylum.
Federal numbers show that 15,726 people crossed into Canada irregularly at all points in the first nine months of 2018, up from 15,102 in the same time period one year earlier.
The Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United States requires most people seeking refugee protection to file their claim in the first of the two countries they arrive in. It means people cannot pass through the U.S. to seek asylum at the Canadian border checkpoint, but does not apply to people who cross at places other than standard border checkpoints.
Rempel argued that people who are not legitimate refugees are taking advantage of the Safe Third Country Agreement “loophole,” knowing that they can live in Canada for years before their claims are even processed.
“Having reached upstate New York, these people are not fleeing persecution and should not be treated as such by Justin Trudeau,” she said.
Rempel said the Conservatives would crack down on irregular border crossings by closing the loophole. The Liberals say they have repeatedly asked the U.S. government to reopen the agreement.
Rempel also accused the government of spending “hundreds of millions” to normalize the crossings, including $50 million on temporary accommodations for people. Many of them are now living in Toronto hotels.
Hussen told Power Play that the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) is in charge of deciding whether irregular border crossers are legitimate refugees and that those who are not legitimate refugees will be told to leave.
“We’ve reinvested in the Canadian Border Services Agency as well as the IRB to make sure that these claims are heard expeditiously,” Hussen said.
“A big percentage of those found not to be genuine refugees voluntarily leave Canada,” he added.
Rempel also singled out the temporary foreign worker (TFW) program for criticism. Under the government’s new plan, the number of migrant workers allowed into the country will rise to nearly 250,000.
Rempel said that the TFW program was “rife with abuse,” and that it lowered wages and working conditions while keeping certain jobs out of the reach of out-of-work Canadians.
“That this government has made no move to radically change Canada’s economic dependence on this abusive and ill-thought-out system also undermines the credibility of the numbers in this levels report,” she said.
She said the Conservative preference would be to have migrant workers instead “settling in those communities and staying employed” – or to have those positions be filled by people already in the country.
“Is there a way that we can reform that program such that Canadians are matched with those jobs?” she added.
A Conservative government would also look to increase the focus on having refugees be sponsored privately by Canadian citizens, with the government-assisted refugee program being reduced to people fleeing the “atrocity crimes” of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and genocide, according to Rempel.
In line with the previous plan. If I recall correctly, the Conservatives said barely a word on the change to a multi-year plan (understandably so, as this was long overdue) nor to the increase in levels. That the focus of this year’s plan is a higher percentage of economic class immigrants makes sense as that is where public support is greater.
What will be interesting (and worrisome) to watch is the extent to which the toxic US debates and hate-filled anti-immigrant campaign of Trump will play on Conservatives, along with any impact from Bernier’s new party. Will it pull them in that direction, and if so, how far?
Writing this before Conservative critic Michelle Rempel has her press conference so we will see. To date, most of her focus has been with respect to asylum seekers crossing the border with the CPC resolution restricting birthright citizenship part of their messaging regarding government management of immigration:
Canada will take in 40,000 more immigrants in 2021 than it plans to accept this year, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen said Wednesday.
The target for new arrivals in Canada will rise to 350,000, which is nearly one per cent of the country’s population.
The figures were announced Wednesday as part of government’s updated multi-year immigration levels plan, which covers the next three years. The target rises annually from 310,000 this year, counting all classes of new arrivals.
The vast majority of these newcomers are coming under economic programs designed to address skills shortages and gaps in the labour market.
Hussen says economic immigration is badly needed in areas across the country that are short on workers and long on older residents.
“In certain regions the hunger for workers is huge,” he said. “This plan is making us very competitive in the global market. It enables us to continue to be competitive, it enables us to continue to present Canada as a welcoming country and to position us to continue to be (a leader) in skills attraction.”
Many immigration advocates and economic groups had called for bigger increases to Canada’s immigration numbers. The government’s own economic advisory council suggested admitting 450,000 people in a report in 2016.
Hussen says the Liberal government is taking a measured approach, keeping in mind the need to ensure newcomers have access to suitable settlement services.
“You need to be able to house them, you need to be able to settle them, you need to be able to provide integration services,” he said.
The Trudeau government did increase funding for settlement services by 30 per cent since taking office, but if the immigration levels plan were increased dramatically, this would require even further funding increases, Hussen added.
“It’s also a question of gradual increase so our immigration system can be able to process these things, communities can be able to absorb them and local immigration partnerships can do their work,” he said. “We can’t just go to 450,000 at once. You need to build up to that.”
Meanwhile, as the global number of displaced persons reached a record high 68.5 million last year, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has called on countries around the world to do more to help those being pushed out of their homes by wars, violence and persecution.
Canada does plan to gradually increase the number of refugees it will accept under its humanitarian, family reunification and sponsorship programs from 43,000 to reach 51,700 by 2021.
Nevertheless, the lion’s share of the new admissions under Canada’s immigration levels plan — 72 per cent — will be allocated to economic programs in 2021.
Hussen says he acknowledges that more must be done to help refugees around the world, and says he fights every single day to increase the number of refugees Canada admits.
He also noted that Canada has “exported” its program allowing private citizens to sponsor refugees to several other countries that previously did not offer a program like that. The United Kingdom has implemented its own version of Canada’s program, with Ireland and Germany set to soon do the same.
Additional funding has also been earmarked to bring 1,000 vulnerable women and girl refugees to Canada over the next two years, Hussen said.
Noah Rothman on Trump’s anti-immigration campaign strategy. But as Trump might himself see, “we shall see”:
There is no doubt that Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings electrified Republican voters. Democrats spent two weeks demonstrating how they would govern in the majority, illustrating clearly for Republicans who might have been lukewarm on the GOP in the Trump era that the alternative was deeply problematic. But if the Kavanaugh effect was real, it had a short half-life. And Donald Trump seems to know it.
The president was never comfortable with the notion that GOP voters might be motivated to vote because of their enthusiasm for Republicans other than himself. Within days of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Trump insisted that his first midterm election should be a “referendum about me.” The terrible massacre of observant Jews in Pittsburgh and a disturbed Trump fan’s campaign of terror directed at Democratic officials (an act Trump inexplicably attributed to political media’s critical coverage of his administration) has all but reset the nation’s political consciousness. Trump senses that, and he resents it. “The Republicans had tremendous momentum, and then, of course, this happened, where all that you people talked about was that,” Trump said last week to the cameras that followed him into a North Carolina campaign rally.
So, Trump has set about trying to reset the national narrative himself, and a caravan of migrants walking north from Guatemala through Mexico on a supposedly inevitable collision course with America’s southern border has helped him do it. While this is a real assault to American sovereignty, those who see it as a politically convenient development have wildly exaggerated the threat and damaged their credibility in the process.
The last time this stunt was attempted—in April—a small number of those who initially set out on the journey made it to the United States. Once at the border, they congregated on the Mexican side and awaited processing by U.S. officials. Most were processed without incident. Some were charged with the misdemeanor offense of entering the country illegally and without proper paperwork.
Although this month’s caravan is larger than April’s, the response it has generated from the president is entirely divorced from anything resembling sobriety and circumspection. Trump harangued Democrats for failing to do anything to stop this caravan, though he remained vague about the actions the minority party in Congress could take. Trump has warned that the march contains criminals and possibly even radical Islamic terrorists, though he later admitted that he had no evidence to support that contention. The president initially threatenedto close the southern border entirely for all comers, including asylum-seekers. Finally, he took matters into his own hands.
On the 25, Defense Sec. James Mattis consented to a Department of Homeland Security request to dispatch 800 U.S. troops to the border. Failing to impress, it seems, the Pentagon soon increased the number of soldiers to 5,200. It would be the largest quick deployment of American soldiers since the mobilization to provide aid to Haiti following a devastating earthquake in 2010, and the U.S. footprint would greatly exceed the number of Americans deployed in an advisory capacity to Iraq and Syria. But even that wasn’t impressive enough. A Pentagon official told Newsweek that “the units deployed right now are of actual strength between 5,000 and 7,000. With another 7,000 on standby on 24-hour notice.” That’s a total of 14,000 soldiers on call for deployment at the border—a number equivalent to the total number of service personnel Trump deployed to Afghanistan as part of a late 2017 troop “surge.”
There is no strategic justification for these deployments. This caravan is still weeks away from the U.S. border. Today, the procession is believed to number approximately 4,000 people—a dramatic decline from the 7,000 who began the march earlier this month. They must still travel at least another 1,000 miles to get to the nearest U.S. border crossing in Texas, all while maintaining the group’s integrity. Then there’s the interference by Mexican authorities and the myriad logistical hurdles in their path. We’re left to reach a cynical conclusion: These deployments are a political tactic designed to keep the caravan on the minds of Republican voters, not a strategic defense of U.S. interests.
If the game wasn’t clear enough, Trump resurrected a road-worn campaign-trail theme on Wednesday by flirting with the prospect of issuing an executive order that would repeal the right of people born on U.S. soil to automatic citizenship. This is, quite simply, nonsense. The voters at whom this is aimed should be insulted by the White House’s underestimation of their intelligence. On the right, there is a robust debate over both the value of birthright citizenship and whether it can be severed from the 14th Amendment to the Constitution for the children of illegal immigrants via legislation. But there is no serious debate as to whether a Constitutional Amendment can be undone via the presidential pen. The very idea is anathema. Those who allow themselves to be taken in by this ruse are being willingly manipulated by a White House that appears to think they’re idiots.
After several weeks of recovery, Donald Trump’s job-approval rating is reverting to an abysmal mean. The Democratic Party’s edge in the generic ballot test is once again steadily increasing. The “Kavanaugh effect” is dead and gone. Donald Trump appears to think he can reverse the tides by banging the nationalist drum. Amid disorientation and desperation, Trump and his advisers have bought into their own hype. Their awakening on the morning of November 7 could be a rude one.
