How Syrian refugees arriving in Canada became ‘extras’ in their own stories

2016/02/23 2 Comments

Academics! Miss the point that maintaining public support for refugees is equally important, and making Canadians feel good about themselves is part of that.

Media coverage that I follow has included a fair amount of stories about the refugees themselves and the challenges they face.

And Al-Solaylee, the academic quoted, does not base his critique on a rigorous, quantitative analysis of media coverage:

When he saw images of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne greeting some of the first Syrian refugees to arrive in Canada, Kamal Al-Solaylee was overcome with pride. After all, 20 years ago, he was the one arriving in Canada.

“My initial feelings were of euphoria and happiness. This is a great country, this is a very welcoming country,” says Al-Solaylee, a journalism professor at Ryerson University and the author of the 2015 Canada Reads finalist Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes.

But as he saw more and more news stories about sponsors hugging refugees in airports and Canadians knitting toques to keep refugees warm during their first Canadian winter, he began to feel uncomfortable.

“The story is changing. It’s no longer about them, it’s about us as Canadians,” Al-Solaylee says. “The gaze turned inward instead of outward.”

He points to CBC’s “Open Arms” project, which highlights the “outpouring of Canadian generosity and support” towards refugees, as an example of how the conversation has shifted to place the focus on Canadians.

Al-Solaylee says he understands why stories about acts of kindness and refugees’ first visits to Tim Horton’s resonate with journalists and their audiences. However, he worries feel-good stories are “suck[ing] the oxygen” out of important stories about what life in Canada is really like for immigrants and refugees after the welcome is over.

“The truth is a lot of these immigrants will struggle, initially and probably for a long time. They will not be able to find jobs that call on their qualifications or experience. They will end up doing the kind of work that Canadians no longer want to do,” he says.

Source: How Syrian refugees arriving in Canada became ‘extras’ in their own stories – Home | The 180 with Jim Brown | CBC Radio

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Liberals restoring refugee health benefits cut by previous government

2016/02/19 Leave a comment

Fully expected: in the Liberal platform and Minister McCallum’s mandate letter. Another commitment met, another Conservative policy undone:

The Liberal government has restored refugee health-care benefits cut by the previous Conservative government.

Speaking at a joint announcement Thursday, Immigration Minister John McCallum and Health Minister Jane Philpott said the Interim Federal Health Program, which provides health-care coverage for asylum claimants and refugees, will be fully restored to pre-2012 levels.

“All refugee claimants and refugees will now be covered,” Mr. McCallum told reporters in Ottawa. “The system had disintegrated into something of such enormous complexity that it was virtually unmanageable.”

The Conservative government scaled back refugee health-care benefits in 2012, arguing that the cuts would deter “bogus” refugees from coming to Canada and save taxpayers money. The Federal Court eventually found that the changes were unconstitutional and ordered the government to reinstate the benefits, leading the Conservatives to restore some. The Tory government launched an appeal of the court’s decision, which the Liberals eventually dropped.

Before 2012, refugee claimants had their health-care costs covered by the federal government until their application for status was decided or they became eligible for provincial health-care coverage.

The health-care benefits will be fully restored as of April 1, according to Mr. McCallum. The coverage will include hospital and physician services, while coverage for supplemental services, such as vision, urgent dental care and prescription drugs, will be similar to what provinces and territories provide to Canadians on social assistance.

Dr. Philpott said the return to the pre-2012 program will “simplify everything.”

“There will be one path. Refugees, … whatever category they will fall into, they will be eligible for the basic levels of care in addition to some supplementary levels of care. And this will help refugees, it will help health-care providers and it will help Canadians,” she said.

The government’s announcement comes months after it committed to resettle tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, who were already receiving health-care coverage. An exemption in the 2012 law ensures that refugees being settled as a “result of a public policy or humanitarian and compassionate considerations on the minister’s own initiative” receive full access to health-care benefits.

The government also announced an expansion of the program to cover certain services for refugees who have been identified for resettlement before they come to Canada. Starting April 1, 2017, those services will include coverage of the immigration medical examination, pre-departure vaccinations, services to manage disease outbreaks in refugee camps and medical support during travel to Canada.

Source: Liberals restoring refugee health benefits cut by previous government – The Globe and Mail

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‘Can I get a tax receipt?’: Tax confusion muddles Syrian refugee sponsorship efforts

2016/02/17 Leave a comment

Interesting wrinkle and will be interesting to see how it is resolved:

As the Toronto office of Lifeline Syria scrambles to accommodate thousands of refugees, the question the charity’s chair Ratna Omidvar and her team hears most often is: “Can I get a tax receipt?”

In many cases, the answer is no.

Canada has so far welcomed more than 13,500 refugees since the Liberal government’s program began last November. Of that total, close to 5,000 have been supported by private sponsors.

Refugee support initiatives such as Lifeline Syria say allowing donors to receive a tax receipt when they are donating to a registered charity and suggesting a particular family to receive support would encourage more donations, ease the government’s burden and make integration easier. Currently, charities can issue tax receipts to donors who indicate they’d like their donation applied to a specific area of interest, such as refugees, but not when the donation is directed to a particular family.

“The more Canadians step up and promote charities, the less the government is going to have to do these things,” says Estelle Duez, a tax lawyer at LaBarge Weinstein in Ottawa.

“As Canadians, we are used to the notion that when we make a charitable donation, (we) will get some kind of tax relief,” says Paul Clarke, executive director of Action Réfugiés Montréal. He says despite the extraordinary support Canadians have shown for Syrian refugees to date, questions around tax deductibility dissuade some people from sponsorship.

Mark Blumberg, a Toronto lawyer who specializes in non-profit and charity law, says the Canada Revenue Agency could make donating and sponsoring easier by clarifying the rules. Although money given to a registered refugee charity is normally tax deductible, Blumberg says the situation becomes more tricky when a donor instructs the money should go to a specific person or family, sometimes referred to as a “general direction” or “directed gift.”

The CRA’s position is that “All decisions regarding use of the donation must rest with the charity.” In other words: it cannot issue a tax receipt if a donor wants the charity to give the funds to a specified person or family, because “such a gift is made to the person or family and not to the charity.”

Exceptions add to the confusion. For example, a “general direction” to use the gift for a “particular program” is acceptable, provided “no benefit accrues to the donor” and the gift “does not benefit any person not dealing at arms’ length with the donor.”

If the CRA provided greater leeway, “there’d be more people making donations,” says Blumberg. He cites the partial receipting of tuition costs at religious day schools.

Source: ‘Can I get a tax receipt?’: Tax confusion muddles Syrian refugee sponsorship efforts

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ICYMI – 2016: A Record-Setting Year for Refugee Resettlement in Canada?

2016/02/12 Leave a comment

Good background brief on refugee acceptance patterns and history by the Conference Board’s Kareem El-Assal, in preparation for their April Immigration Summit:

Should Canada meet its Syrian refugee pledge, we can expect to see several interesting developments in 2016. Canada’s combined intake of refugees across all categories and source countries will likely exceed 30,000 for the first time since 2006, and could surpass 40,000 for the first time since 1992, which would mark only the fifth such occasion since 1979. Canada’s intake of resettled refugees in 2016 is set to exceed 20,000 for the first time since 1992.

Another noteworthy statistic: should Canada meet its pledged amount of 23,000 Syrian GARs in 2016, it will result in the largest number of refugees arriving to Canada through government assistance in a calendar year since 1957, when Canada helped land over 32,000 Hungarian refugees.

While the number of Syrians arriving will likely fall short of the number of boat people resettled between 1975 and 1980, the total of Syrian refugees admitted into Canada by December 2016 could well surpass the Hungarian arrivals in 1956–57 as Canada’s second-largest post-Second World War resettlement effort ever, underscoring the historical magnitude of Canada’s Syrian refugee commitment.

On April 4–5, 2016, in Ottawa, we will be discussing refugee settlement and integration, and other pressing immigration issues, at The Conference Board of Canada’s 2016 Immigration Summit.

The Summit will engage participants in thought-provoking dialogue, and share national and international best-practice solutions to the challenges we face in improving our immigration system. Click here to become involved.

Source: 2016: A Record-Setting Year for Refugee Resettlement in Canada?

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ICYMI: ‘We did not come to be a burden.’ Belgian artists mail letters from migrants to an uncertain public | Toronto Star

2016/02/11 Leave a comment

Creative approach:

It’s not a letter home, but a letter of introduction to a new home.

Amid the increasingly xenophobic political rhetoric in Europe, a pair of Belgian artists is sending letters written by recently arrived migrants to local residents.

“Moving Stories” is a public art project that seeks to break down the invisible barriers between the migrants and those who have, somewhat reluctantly, welcomed them into safety.

“We wanted to invite people to get in touch with each other and talk to each other instead of about each other,” said the artists’ agent, Anouk Focquier. “That’s what’s missing in this entire debate.”

Dirk Schellekens and Bart Peleman got 13 migrants living in a Red Cross shelter in Antwerp to pen letters explaining why they left their homes in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and how they arrived in Belgium. The letters were then translated from the migrants’ mother tongues into Flemish and copied 166 times — one for each of the nationalities present in the city.

On Friday, the missives and their translations were put into envelopes and posted to random addresses across the Antwerp, along with return postcards inviting the recipients to send back a response.

The messages, written in Arabic, Kurdish, French, Russian and English, describe persecution at the hands of Al Shebab in Somalia, domestic abuse in northern Mali and forced conscription in Syria — not to mention hardships endured on the journey to Europe.

Focquier said the artists asked the migrants to use pen and paper in order to undermine the knee-jerk opinion forming that takes place on social media.

“When you write a letter, you sit down and think. And we wanted to slow down the process of forming opinions because that’s going really fast right now.”

Schellekens & Peleman, as the artists are collectively known, have focused their recent work on the European refugee crisis, floating a six-metre inflatable sculpture of a migrant on a small boat through Venice, Italy in November.

The “Inflatable Refugee” sculpture is made from the same materials as the boats that transport migrants across the Mediterranean Sea — “too fragile to withstand the waves,” the artists write.

“Do we see him as a human or as a problem? Is his presence an opportunity or a threat, devoid of human characteristics?”

Source: ‘We did not come to be a burden.’ Belgian artists mail letters from migrants to an uncertain public | Toronto Star

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Young refugees offered pop-up classes while awaiting homes | Toronto Star

2016/02/10 Leave a comment

Good initiative:

A string of pop-up classrooms arranged to give young refugees a taste of school while they wait for new homes delighted Syrian families Monday at the west-end Toronto Plaza Hotel.

“A-B-C! — happy!” said a beaming 12-year-old Dalaa al Sarji, who, like most Syrian refugee children arriving in Canada, hadn’t been in a classroom in more than two years.

She and her six siblings — from 3-year-old Hussein to 14-year-old twin brothers — were among some 75 children living temporarily at the Plaza who hopped on school buses Monday in an unusual pilot project to give these uprooted children a feel for the routine of school in satellite classrooms, while they wait to find out where their new homes, and permanent schools, will be.

Hussein al Sarji, 3, is the baby of the family.

LUCAS OLENIUK/TORONTO STAR

Hussein al Sarji, 3, is the baby of the family.

“We did reading — and the teacher was so pretty,” reported brother Said through an interpreter. Noted 14-year-old Ahmad: “I like school in Canada so much; everyone makes us welcome.”

Concerned that housing delays were leaving refugee children with no way to start integrating into Canada — the average hotel stay has been about four weeks — Toronto’s public and Catholic school boards scrambled together last week to find empty classrooms and hire supply teachers and Arabic interpreters to run two-hour morning classes for children while they’re living at the hotel. The costs, including buses, will be covered by the province’s newcomer program.

Walaa al Sarji, 6, can’t wait to play football and hockey in school.

“It’s the right thing to do; you can’t promise people a new life and not prepare them for getting an education,” said Karen Falconer, the Toronto District School Board’s executive superintendent of Continuing and International Education.

Some 265 refugee children are living at the hotel at the moment. Only 75 took part in the morning programs Monday, although twice as many have signed up for Tuesday.

Ahmad al Sarji, 14, feels more welcome here compared to the school experiece in Lebanon.

“I understand why many of these parents aren’t comfortable at first with the idea of putting their kids on a school bus and letting them go,” said Falconer. “We have to build trust.”

Source: Young refugees offered pop-up classes while awaiting homes | Toronto Star

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Danish Communities Integrate Refugees As Politicians Debate Limits : NPR

2016/02/08 Leave a comment

More positive stories of integration than normally heard in Denmark:

KALLESTRUP: Most of the people here quickly realized – yes, this is going to happen – so now it’s a matter of making the best out of this. We need to get these people properly integrated into the Dane society.

NELSON: He says they greeted the first arrivals with Danish flags, flowers and home-baked bread. These days, weekly coffees are held at the mansion, during which the refugees catch up with their Danish neighbors. Many do so in Danish, including Khaldoun Freha, a Syrian house painter who also dabbles in poetry. He’s had 8 months of language lessons paid for by the government and talks to me about his new life in Danish.

KHALDOUN FREHA: (Speaking Danish).

NELSON: The neighbor, Kallestrup, praises Freha.

KALLESTRUP: Your Danish is good, you know? And we can have a conversation in Danish without any problems.

NELSON: Refugees like Freha can spend up to 3 years at the government’s expense integrating into Danish society. But the efforts of the volunteers here at Sunny Mountain have some residents, like Rashid Rishou, ready in a matter of months.

RASHID RISHOU: (Speaking Danish).

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking Danish).

NELSON: The Aleppo native, who has found full-time work as a carpenter, chats with family and friends about his new apartment, which he is planning to furnish with used items he’s found for sale online. Haifaa Awad says the sort of interactions seen at Sunny Mountain is vital to the successful integration of refugees. The Danish-Syrian anesthesiologist was born in Damascus and came to Denmark with her family as a refugee when she was 6. She says one of the brighter moments for her was joining her Danish youth soccer team.

HAIFAA AWAD: So it’s like all these small things that we often don’t think about. These are what makes us feel connected or less alienated as kids. And if we can try to build on that instead of building on what’s so different between us, I think we could move the debate to a whole new scale, especially now that it’s become – the debate has become so polarized.

NELSON: Opposition MP Pernille Skipper agrees, but says new laws to deter migrants threaten to scuttle Danish integration efforts. She’s especially critical of the measure that requires refugees to wait at least 3 years before applying to bring their families over.

PERNILLE SKIPPER: Because – you can imagine, you come to a new country and you sit for years and years and wait for your family to come, maybe they will die in the time passing. And what do you do? Do you concentrate on learning a new language and get a job, get an education – for integration to work, that’s going to be very, very difficult.

NELSON: Back at Sunny Mountain, Freha says he worries about the new law, too. He’s waiting for the government to grant his mother permission to come to Denmark, which even under the old law will take at least a year. He tells me in English, I miss my mom. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Copenhagen.

Source: Danish Communities Integrate Refugees As Politicians Debate Limits : NPR

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What distinguishes the Syrians arriving in Canada from those in Europe? – The Globe and Mail

2016/02/08 Leave a comment

Good analysis by Mark McKinnon:

Statistics compiled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees show 57 per cent of the just over one million people who have arrived on the islands of either Greece or Italy since the start of last year were adult males, versus 17 per cent women and 27 per cent children. Strip out the under 18s, and 77 per cent of the adults who made “irregular entries” to Europe were men (compared with 66 per cent in 2012, before the refugee crisis began in earnest).

Those numbers come with unpredictable consequences. In Sweden, the country that has received the highest per capita number of asylum applications, The Economist magazine forecast that the country’s gender ratio would tip from 105 to 107 men per 100 women if all the new arrivals were allowed to stay. Among 14- to 17-year-olds – where new arrivals are overwhelmingly male – the figure would rise from 106 to 116 per 100 women. A country that stands as a world leader in gender equality may soon have an imbalance similar to China’s.

Canada, in contrast, will have very different, but equally challenging, integration issues. The bulk of the 25,000 Syrians that the government and private sponsors are in the midst of resettling have almost nothing in common with the refugee population arriving in Europe.

Europe is chaotically receiving the youthful cream of the crop. Canada, by relying on the UNHCR to lead its selection process, is receiving Syria’s poorest and most vulnerable. Where Europe is receiving too many young men, most of those Canada is resettling are families, often with female heads of households, the men often having died in the war.

I’ve interviewed large numbers from both refugee pools. Those I’ve met waiting on the beaches of Turkey hoping to cross to Greece, or walking through the Balkans as they broke borders on their way north, have been predominantly men. But while that was unsettling – where were the women and children? – many had impressive skill sets. I’ve met refugees who were lawyers, engineers and university professors back home before the wars.

Languages were another asset. If I was speaking to a group of six or seven Syrians, Afghans or Iraqis, at least one or two of the group usually spoke some English. I’ve met asylum-seekers who spoke French and German too.

The 25,000 refugees Canada is importing contrast with Europe’s new arrivals in almost every way. Generally speaking, they were the most economically vulnerable of the Syrian refugees living in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon because they hadn’t been affluent before the war either. It’s simple math: Those who were poor in pre-war Syria ran through their savings before rich refugees did.

As international aid dwindled – last year the world funded just 40 per cent of an $8.4-billion United Nations appeal for Syria – they were the ones who suffered most from declining food stipends and dwindling school spaces. They were the ones who couldn’t even contemplate paying a smuggler thousands of dollars to take them to Europe.

They were Syria’s olive farmers and shopkeepers before the war, not its university graduates. Of the dozens of refugees headed to Canada that I met (and I was focused on the government-selected pool, rather than private sponsorships), I can remember only one who spoke passable English.

Many of their kids, worryingly, had been out of school for years.

Our challenge, then, will be completely different than Europe’s. Don’t look to Cologne and shudder. Look instead to the alienated suburbs of Paris and Brussels, where the children of Muslim immigrants were allowed to grow up as angry outsiders within French and Belgian society. Look to Canada’s own native reserves, where a community that started behind was allowed to fall even further behind.

Source: What distinguishes the Syrians arriving in Canada from those in Europe? – The Globe and Mail

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Needs of some Syrian refugees higher than expected, analysis finds

2016/02/04 Leave a comment

While this data is not totally surprising, it does highlight the integration challenges being faced by some refugees:

While the report says the government doesn’t foresee the need for widespread changes to existing programs, here’s a look at what it found, and some of the implications for resettlement providers.

  • Government-assisted refugees have bigger families: 53 per cent of approved cases listed five to eight people on the application, compared with seven per cent of privately sponsored cases. This highlights the current housing crunch — it’s harder to find apartments to accommodate that many people within available budgets.
  • They’re younger: 55 per cent of approved applicants were 14 years of age or younger, compared with 27 per cent of privately sponsored ones. The report notes that services directly targeted at children will need to be stepped up and the report notes they’ve often only gone to school in Arabic.
  • They speak little English or French: 67 per cent of approved applicants reporting speaking neither language, compared with 37 per cent of privately sponsored ones. Resettlement agencies have previously highlighted that in some cities, wait lists for language training are over a year long.
  • How much education they have is unclear: The analysis says anecdotal reports suggest the average level of schooling for adult Syrian government-assisted refugees is six to nine years. Of cases coming from Jordan, 90 to 95 per cent have not finished high school. The report notes that many kids are also a year or two behind their peers, putting new demands on the school system.
  • Their most recent jobs may not reflect their skills: Many refugees can’t legally work in their host countries, and often find general labour jobs. “Anecdotally, reports from visa officers abroad indicate that work experience is largely low-skilled and almost entirely limited to males,” the analysis said.
  • They are generally healthy: The brief says the health of refugees runs from entirely health to those with severe diseases such as cancer. But only 12 per cent of the medical assessments had at least one condition listed. The most common were hypertension, diabetes and vision or hearing impairment. “While mental-health issues were not identified as one of the most frequent conditions at the time of the (medical exam), it is a condition that can arise soon or several months after arrival in Canada,” the brief says.

The data shows that 15,157 Syrians landed between Nov. 4 last year and Jan. 31 this year. Of these, 8,767 were government-assisted, 5,341 were privately sponsored and 1,049 are part of a program that combines the two.

Source: Needs of some Syrian refugees higher than expected, analysis finds – The Globe and Mail

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The right way to settle refugees: Dench and Douglas

2016/02/02 Leave a comment

Janet Dench and Debbie Douglas on supporting the government’s decision not to convert government-assisted refugees into privately-sponsored refugees:

We are fortunate to be in a situation in Canada where so many citizens want to sponsor refugees. This current reality is almost beyond the most optimistic dreams of refugee advocates just six months ago. It is important that this energy be harnessed, to provide solutions for as many refugees as possible and to reinvigorate a private sponsorship program that has been in decline recently, weighed down by barriers and delays.

The sudden emergence of so many would-be sponsors has also created challenges, as the structures are not in place to orient and support them, nor are there adequate mechanisms ready to connect them with refugees in need of sponsorship. Experienced private sponsors, settlement agencies, members of the Syrian Canadian community and government officials have been working day and night for months now to respond to these new sponsors. The Syrian Family Links initiative, announced last week by the federal government, fills a gap by connecting sponsors with Syrian refugees who have family in Canada. It should be noted, however, that this role is already being played effectively by settlement agencies and private sponsorship groups in many regions of the country. The private sponsorship route is well-adapted to supporting people in Canada trying to reunite with their families overseas caught in dire situations and in need of protection.

If sponsors take over responsibility for government-sponsored refugees already here, that may very well result in the abandonment of refugees with family in Canada.

We must also remember that there are other refugee populations whose needs for protection are just as great. They should not be forgotten in the focus on the Syrian refugee crisis.

Source: The right way to settle refugees – The Globe and Mail

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