Conservatives didn’t cherry-pick religious minority refugees: Alexander

2016/02/01 Leave a comment

Valid defence of the policy but the documents suggest a more interventionist approach. Alexander, in the article, is silent about the tiny numbers admitted (which suggest more ‘cherry picking’ – see Conservatives cherry picked certain Syrian refugee files: documents).

More interesting, he does not comment on the implications of the PMO audit: that PMO did not trust Alexander, CIC, or PCO to ensure that the policy direction of preference for religious minorities was being implemented, and what would likely be unprecedented PMO involvement in a refugee file .

When I worked in PCO, the normal way PMO would ‘manage’ what was considered a problematic file (one that departments were not managing well), was through PCO, not directly:

Former immigration minister Chris Alexander is defending his government’s approach to resettling Syrian refugees, denying that the Conservatives cherry-picked cases by prioritizing religious and ethnic minorities.

Every country working with the United Nations refugee agency on the humanitarian crisis in Syria operated under agreed-upon criteria for how to decide which refugees they’d accept, Alexander said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

The basic principle was to focus on the most vulnerable, but additional priorities had to be applied, Alexander said.

“To determine who was the most needy, who is the most vulnerable among four million people, you need to set some priorities,” he said.

“And that’s what the Syria core group has done from the beginning and that’s what Canada’s operation to resettle Syrian refugees has striven to do.”

Alexander, who lost his Toronto-area seat in last fall’s election, was at the helm of the Immigration portfolio when the Conservatives announced last January they would increase the number of refugees accepted by Canada from 1,300 to 10,000.

But they also announced they would concentrate on bringing in members of religious and ethnic minorities, prompting accusations of an anti-Muslim bias and charges that the government was violating UN rules.

Most religious minorities in the region are from Christian groups. The UN also specifically asks countries not to use religion as a factor in determining who to take in.

‘Areas of focus’

How exactly the Conservatives applied their approach was made clear this week via documents tabled in the House of Commons in response to a question from the NDP.

In them, the Immigration department said visa officers working in Lebanon and Jordan pulled cases that met the “areas of focus” criteria and processed those on a priority basis, while others were processed on regular timelines.

‘The principle we respected all along was humanitarian need. There were a variety of priorities under that heading’ – Former immigration minister Chris Alexander

Alexander said religion and ethnic status were not the sole area of focus and that they were working from a set of principles agreed upon by resettlement states.

A document he provided outlining those principles makes no mention of religion or ethnicity, but Alexander said they were understood to be part of a category described as people “belonging to a group for whom the authorities are unable to provide protection.”

He also pointed to another document, available on the website of the British arm of the UN refugee agency.

“Refugees who face serious threats to their physical security, particularly due to political opinion or belonging to an ethnic or religious minority group, may also be prioritized,” the document states.

In prioritizing religious minorities, the Conservatives were not picking a single faith, Alexander noted.

But applying that lens to the program reflected the nature of the conflict, which includes Islamic militants targeting Christian minorities or the Assad regime in Syria going after Sunni Muslims.

“This is the way this conflict is unfolding and those groups who face persecution because of their faith, or their ethnicity or their political views deserve special forms of protection,” he said.

Source: Conservatives didn’t cherry-pick religious minority refugees: Alexander – Politics – CBC News

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Conservatives cherry picked certain Syrian refugee files: documents

2016/01/29 1 Comment

Not one of the previous government’s finest hours, even if a case could be made to prefer those from threatened minority communities:

Newly released government documents paint the clearest picture to date of how the Conservative government’s controversial approach to Syrian refugee resettlement played out last year.

Before last winter, the previous government had only committed to take in 1,300 Syrian refugees from the millions fleeing the civil war there and spilling into surrounding countries.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper had been under intense pressure — including from inside his own cabinet — to increase that total, but only agreed to accept a further 10,000 provided that religious and ethnic minorities were prioritized.

The policy, unveiled last January, was contentious. The vast majority of the Syrian refugee population is Muslim. The decision to hone in on “religious minorities” prompted allegations the government was biased against Muslims and was also violating United Nations principles governing refugee resettlement.

The refugees the Canadian government accepts for resettlement are chosen by the UN. They do not use ethnicity or religion as a basis for determining whether someone requires resettlement to a third country.

But documents tabled in the House of Commons this week in response to a question from the NDP show how the Conservatives found a workaround.

In February 2015, visa officers in Jordan and Lebanon were instructed to track “areas of focus” for Syrian refugees, which included tracking whether someone was a member of a vulnerable ethnic or religious minority, the documents say.

They applied that criteria to the files they were receiving from the UN.

“Cases meeting at least one of the areas of focus were identified for expedited processing,” the documents say. “Cases that did not meet the areas of focus were included in the mission’s inventory and processed as a regular case.”

The tracking stopped in November 2015.

The Citizenship and Immigration department, asked repeatedly in recent months for a breakdown of Syrian refugees by religion, has consistently said it does not track that information.

On Wednesday, however, spokesperson Jessica Seguin said while the department applied the areas-of-focus approach, it never recorded how many cases met those criteria in part because the computer system isn’t set up that way.

“It is true that for a short time this information was anecdotally tracked in a few missions, but it was never done systematically,” Seguin said in an e-mail.

“No refugees were screened out of the resettlement process as a result of the areas of focus.”

The documents also illustrate the impact of another controversial Conservative move last year — auditing government-assisted refugee case files to see whether they were in keeping with the areas of focus and security requirements.

According to the data tabled in the House of Commons, in June 2015, the highest number of government-assisted refugees admitted to Canada so far that year was 62. That same month, Harper ordered the audit.

The following month, admissions fell to just 9 people.

Source: Conservatives cherry picked certain Syrian refugee files: documents

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Educators have a superficial understanding of multiculturalism: expert Anna Kirova

2016/01/26 Leave a comment

I expect this varies depending on the community and school board. Toronto District School Board, for example, seems to have a good integration track record, and readers will undoubtedly have other examples, either good or less so:

Soon, thousands of Syrian refugees will call Canada home. Along with frigid winters, and a lack of knowledge in the English language, they will also face a cultural shift. So how do we make children refugees more comfortable in our classrooms?

“It’s an interesting question how we, after more than 40 years of multiculturalism, all of a sudden now begin to talk about these issues,” said Kirova, whose research has focused on developing an inter-cultural early learning  program for immigrant and refugee children, including understanding how newcomer children experience loneliness and isolation in school. “It’s overdue.”

“We have, what we call in our field in education, a very superficial understanding of multiculturalism,” Kirova said, as she commented on the multiculturalism policies that are currently in place in Canadian classrooms.

Kirova’s research has been highly critical of the interpretation of multicultural policies in classrooms, and that the idea that multiculturalism is about much more than having a couple of books in a variety of languages, a doll of a different race, or hosting days focused on the food and entertainment of a culture, it’s about making children feel more comfortable, and tapping into the vast knowledge from their past.

“We’ve been very good in identifying what they can not do. What we haven’t really been good about is to identify what they can do.”

Kirova suggests focusing on their resourcefulness, strength and resiliency, as opposed to their lack of communication skills, knowledge of school routines and ability to pay attention in class.

“Many children have never held a pen or a pencil and this is one of the ways we assess children’s knowledge and skills,” Kirova said. “We need people from the communities to help us understand what is best for children when they come to the class.”

Source: Educators have a superficial understanding of multiculturalism: expert | Globalnews.ca

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Wise counsel for first-time refugee sponsors: Goar

2016/01/23 Leave a comment

Carol Goar on the messages coming from a meeting on “Faith Groups and Syrian Refugees” hosted by the Intercultural Dialogue Institute, in partnership with the Canadian Association of Jews and Muslims:

Most of them [attendees] were first-time refugee sponsors. They looked to Mary Jo Leddy, who has been welcoming asylum-seekers at Romero House for 25 years, for guidance, tips and suggestions.

But she surprised them. Instead of providing an inventory of “dos” and “don’ts,” pre-arrival preparations and cultural pointers, she told them not to plan so hard; worry so much; or focus so intently on what lies down the road. “As you take the first step, the second step will become clearer.”

She urged them to celebrate the “remarkable moment we’re living through” and rejoice in the rare willingness of Canadians to make time in their harried lives to care for desperate strangers. “I’ve never experienced anything like this. We’re drowning in a sea of kindness at Romero House.”

She congratulated them on leading by example. “As members of faith communities you can encourage others to act even though they don’t think they’re ready. These refugees are summoning us to act together for the sake of others.”

And she told them not to be cowed by presumed experts. “For many refugees therapy is useless. What they need to heal is an opportunity to contribute, get involved in a parents’ group or play in a band. One day the universe will turn upside down and they’ll say: I could really like it here.”

Source: Wise counsel for first-time refugee sponsors: Goar | Toronto Star

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Europe’s New Normal – The New York Times

2016/01/23 Leave a comment

Sylvie Kauffmann, the editorial director and a former editor in chief of Le Monde, on the challenges in Europe:

Soul-searching is not the order of the day; liberal intellectuals have been incensed by recent remarks by Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who equals “explaining” jihadism with “wanting to find ways to excuse it.”

The Germans are equally torn. Since the ghastly New Year’s Eve in Cologne, the celebrated Wilkommenskultur toward refugees has given way to serious doubts about how to integrate mass male migration, and to serious accusations against the police and the media. The cultural gap between a liberal, wealthy, secular Europe and a patriarchal, conservative, Muslim society has widened to an ocean. How long will it take to bridge it? How do you ensure that hard-won women’s rights and freedom are not endangered? How do you teach cultural norms?

These are difficult questions — and they are being asked all over Europe. There are no easy answers, only a few predictions: Jihadism will not be defeated in 2016, and war and misery in the Middle East and Africa will send ever more people across the Mediterranean — around 2,000 still arrive in Europe by sea every day.

So we’d better work together, set up common policies to secure our borders, fight terrorism, relocate refugees, and promote daring ideas for integration that will avoid ghettoization. The only response has to be a joint one: working separately would be foolish. If a 28-member European Union can’t do it, then let’s set up smaller groups. There is no more time to waste.

Source: Europe’s New Normal – The New York Times

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Ottawa will seek to settle more Syrians in French communities, says McCallum, Overall settlement challenges

2016/01/20 Leave a comment

Challenge has shifted to bring refugees here to settling them:

Immigration Minister John McCallum says the federal government is looking to settle newly arrived Syrian refugees in more French-speaking communities across the country.

McCallum says more than 90 per cent of refugees that have arrived in Canada speak neither English or French.

That creates what he calls a blank slate for refugees and provinces to teach newly arrived Syrians either of Canada’s two official languages.

McCallum says where refugees end up living will depend on which communities have the resources to resettle the 10,000 that have arrived since November — and 15,000 more that are scheduled to arrive by the end of February.

The Liberals promised during the election campaign to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of 2015.

Once in office, they changed that goal, citing the realities of moving all those people in a short period of time, including inclement weather that didn’t always make flights possible.

The last of the first 10,000 Syrians arrived about a week ago; McCallum says the government will “easily” hit its deadline of bringing a further 15,000 refugees into the country by the end of February.

“We can deliver one, two, three, four, even five flights per day so the challenge is no longer to get the refugees here,” McCallum said.

The new issue facing the government is to resettle those Syrians into Canadian communities, he added.

“The challenge today going forward is to receive them well, to help them find a place to live, a job, language training, all of those things and that involves working with provincial governments and municipalities on the settlement side.”

Further indications of the shifting nature of the challenge:

As Ottawa places thousands of Syrian refugees in hotels and shelters while they hunt for permanent housing, private sponsorship groups are clamouring for families to help.

The disconnect, say critics, is a disservice to the government-assisted families cramped inside the not-so-welcoming temporary accommodation and to the eager community volunteers who have raised the money and have everything ready to receive the newcomers for a new life in Canada.

“The sponsorship group I chair has been ready since mid-December, but there had been no offers. My group is one of 18 affiliated with the Rosedale United Church. No one is getting any referrals,” said former Toronto Mayor John Sewell.

“I suspect there are three or four hundred sponsorship groups in Toronto who are ready to take families, if the government will only refer them to these groups.”

On Tuesday, two cities — Vancouver and Ottawa — said they are halting their reception of government-assisted Syrian refugees as settlement agencies there try to work through housing bottlenecks.

Syrian refugees eligible for resettlement to Canada must first be vetted by the United Nations refugee agency before being referred to Canadian officials abroad and assigned to the three different streams: fully supported by the federal government, private sponsors and the blended class with responsibilities shared between the two.

The government gets the first dip into selecting the eligible refugees recommended by its visa posts and the leftovers are then put into a pool of profiles for the selection of the 100 faith and community groups that hold refugee sponsorship agreements with Ottawa.

Local sponsorship groups that were formed after the Liberal government launched the massive Syrian resettlement plan in November, must partner with the sponsorship agreement holders.

According to Brian Dyck, chair of the Sponsorship Agreement Holders’ Association, some 300 Syrian refugee profiles have been posted since the beginning of January and they were quickly snapped up by his members.

“The matching system was designed for small-scale sponsorship interest. To adapt it to the current public interest is a big challenge,” Dyck explained.

Refugees wait in hotels while sponsorship groups clamour for families to help

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Syrian Family’s Tragedy Goes Beyond Iconic Image of Boy on Beach – The New York Times

2016/01/18 Leave a comment

Syrian_Family’s_Tragedy_Goes_Beyond_Iconic_Image_of_Boy_on_Beach_-_The_New_York_TimesA good in-depth profile of the extended Kurdi family and how they have been dispersed as Syria fell apart:

When Alan Kurdi’s tiny body washed up on a beach in Turkey, forcing the world to grasp the pain of Syria’s refugees, the 2-year-old boy was just one member of a family on the run, scattered by nearly five years of upheaval.

As a Turkish officer lifted the boy from the shallow waves at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, one of Alan’s teenage cousins was alone on a bus in Hungary, fleeing the fighting back home in Damascus.

An aunt was stuck in Istanbul, nursing a baby, as her son and daughter worked 18-hour shifts in a sweatshop so the family could eat. Dozens of other relatives — aunts, uncles and cousins — had fled the war in Syria or were making plans to flee.

And just weeks after Alan’s image shocked the world in September, another aunt prepared to do what she had promised herself to avoid: set sail with four of her children on the same perilous journey.

“We die together, or we live together and make a future,” her 15-year-old daughter said, concluding, as have hundreds of thousands of other Syrians, that there was no going back, and that the way to security led through great risk.

This image of Alan’s body washed up on a beach in Turkey led to an outpouring of concern for Syrian refugees. Since then, at least 100 more children have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Nilufer Demir, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

Alan, whose mother and brother drowned with him, belonged to a sprawling clan from Syria’s long-oppressed Kurdish minority. But for most of his closest relatives, that identity was secondary to the cosmopolitan ethos of the Syrian capital, Damascus, where they grew up. They barely spoke Kurdish, identified mainly as Syrian and joined no faction.

So when war broke out, and political ties, sect and ethnicity became life-or-death matters, they were on their own.

Interviews with 20 relatives, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in Istanbul, in five German towns and by phone in Syria, tell a story of a family chewed up by one party to the Syrian conflict after another: the Syrian government, the Islamic State, neighboring countries, the West.

Source: Syrian Family’s Tragedy Goes Beyond Iconic Image of Boy on Beach – The New York Times

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Germany’s Post-Cologne Hysteria – The New York Times

2016/01/15 Leave a comment

Good nuanced commentary by Anna Sauerbrey, an editor on the opinion page of the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel:

… precisely when the country needs a coolheaded conversation about the impact of Germany’s new refugee population, we’re playing musical chairs: Everybody runs for a seat to the left and to the right, afraid to remain in the middle, apparently undecided.

The irony is that the Cologne attacks, by highlighting the issue of refugees and their culture, raise an incredibly important question and at the same time make it almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation about it.

This isn’t the first wave of migrants to postwar Germany, and it’s not the first time that the left and the right have played their respective roles of under- and overestimating the challenges of integration.

The left has long ignored the established correlations between crime and the poverty and poor education that plague refugee communities; the right has long overestimated the link between the refugees’ culture and criminal activity, even when studies show no such link exists (excepting so-called crimes of honor, which are extremely rare).

The real question we should be asking is not whether there is something inherently wrong with the refugees, but whether Germany is doing an effective job of integrating them — and if not, whether something can be done to change that.

None of this, however, fits into a TV sound bite or a tweet. Even if it did, it would probably fail to reach its audience in the heated atmosphere of the moment.

Assumptions have replaced observation, assertion has replaced assessment, and ideology has replaced evidence. With its vision thus distorted, Germany is speeding toward a multicultural society, chased by the mob on the Internet, without any idea of what that society should look like.

We need to regain our sense of balance — or it’s just a question of time until we hit a wall.

Source: Germany’s Post-Cologne Hysteria – The New York Times

Much more nuanced than the Globe’s Margaret Wente:

Germany’s brutal immigrant awakening

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What the 10,000th Syrian refugee can expect from life in Canada

2016/01/14 Leave a comment

Good account of the welcoming process:

By the time 10,000 Syrian refugees have arrived in the country, Canadians will have fine-tuned their welcome act into a national ritual.

Tuesday was expected to be the day that the 10,000th Syrian refugee arrives in Canada. Two planes carrying 465 refugees were scheduled to arrive at Toronto Pearson International Airport sometime Tuesday, although it’s not known when they will land. Pearson reported some flight cancellations and delays due to snowy weather conditions earlier in the day.

A plane carrying 155 was also bound for Montreal.

When they land, hundreds of volunteers and aid workers will have already arranged shelter, food and clothing for their first night in Canada. Most refugees who land in Toronto will stay at a hotel such as the Toronto Plaza Hotel in North York, where they will find a hot meal and even winter coats.

From there, many will be picked up by volunteer private sponsors who have helped set them up with an apartment and guarantee their financial security for at least one year.

About half of the refugees who have arrived so far have been privately sponsored by groups such as the Armenian Community Centre of Toronto. Since Dec. 10, when the first plane arrived, the centre has accepted more than 700 refugees, says one of the refugee sponsorship organizers, Apkar Mirakian.

It was during that first arrival, Mirakian said, that the refugees started what became a kind of welcome tradition. Instead of bee-lining for the community centre, where they would meet their sponsor family, they headed straight to the adjacent church.

“They wanted to go to the church, because they had to thank God and Canada. God because he gave them an opportunity for living now, and Canada because it gave them an opportunity to live in Canada,” Mirakian said.

Source: What the 10,000th Syrian refugee can expect from life in Canada | Toronto Star

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ICYMI: Canada rejects African-American’s asylum claim

2016/01/13 Leave a comment

Expected:

A Canadian tribunal has rejected a claim for refugee status from an African-American man who said he feared persecution and police abuse in the United States based on his race, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada said on Friday.

While saying he did find Kyle Lydell Canty to have a genuine fear of returning to his home country, adjudicator Ron Yamauchi said that was not enough to grant asylum.

A string of shootings of black men by U.S. police over the past 18 months have led to widespread protests and the issue has fuelled a civil rights movement under the name Black Lives Matter.

“The Act does not protect claimants from every form of ill-treatment, suffering, and hardship,” he wrote in the decision, dated Dec. 3. “It is addressed at situations of persecution, which is serious harm, an interference with a basic human right.”

He added: “There are no substantial grounds to believe that his removal to the United States of America would subject him personally to a danger of torture.”

Source: Canada rejects African-American’s asylum claim – The Globe and Mail

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