Tristin Hopper: This is what actual, real-life cultural appropriation looks like

2015/12/18 Leave a comment

Tristan Hopper provides some guidance on what is and what is not cultural appropriation:

In a world littered with iffy accusations of culture-theft, this is the real deal. A white-guy equivalent would be the Ontario descendant of a United Empire Loyalist waking up to discover their family crest had been slapped on the crotch of a new line of designer panties. Or the son of a war casualty finding that Dad’s service portrait was being used in a Chinese ad for shampoo.

The Inuit generally have no problem with people paddling kayaks or wearing parkas, both of which they invented.

And when an Inukshuk was picked as the symbol for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, the choice got the endorsement of both the government of Nunavut and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the body representing Canada’s 55,000 Inuit.

But Kokon To Zai didn’t design a sweater that took a few Inuit design cues or made a subtle reference to Arctic culture; all scenarios that, in other circumstance, might have spurred more dubious accusations of “cultural appropriation.”

“This is a stolen piece … there is no way that this fashion designer could have thought of this exact duplicate by himself,” Awa told CBC.

Tellingly, KTZ fessed up to the deed almost immediately. It pulled the item from its catalogue, issued a public apology and delivered the requisite lines arguing they were just trying to “celebrate multiculturalism” and that they have all kinds of “ethnic backgrounds” on their staff.

But the lesson of the KTZ fiasco is that before sounding the trumpets of cultural appropriation, consider the following:

Is it a blatant and verifiable copy of something exclusive to that culture? A feathered headdress is obviously a Plains First Nations thing, but dying your hair blonde and braiding it doesn’t mean you’re ripping off the Scandinavians.

Does it have sacred or religious meaning? Recreationally wearing a yarmulke, for instance, is a bit different than eating a latke.

And is the person raising the complaint part of a group that is directly affected by the alleged culture crime?

If the answer to any or all of the above is yes, you may be looking at a bona fide case of insensitivity to an important element in a recognized culture. If the answer is “no,” then think twice before crying wolf about cultural appropriation.

Source: Tristin Hopper: This is what actual, real-life cultural appropriation looks like

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Kelly McParland: Refugee hysteria reaches a new low with plan to search migrants for jewelry

2015/12/18 Leave a comment

Contrast with Canadian approach striking, as is sad state of conservatism:

Perhaps it had to come to this.

In the squalid competition for the most wretched position on Middle East refugees, Denmark can claim a new low. Having already placed an ad in Lebanese newspapers making clear to asylum-seekers they weren’t welcome, the Danish government is debating a new measure: it wants to seize their jewelry.

In an email to the Washington Post, the Danish integration ministry said the bill — which is expected to pass — would empower officials to search the clothes and luggage of asylum-seekers “with a view to finding assets which may cover the expenses.” Authorities would allow claimants to keep “assets which are necessary to maintain a modest standard of living, e.g. watches and mobile phones,” or which “have a certain personal, sentimental value to a foreigner.”

It is only looking for items with considerable value: for example, the minister of justice said on TV, refugees arriving with a suitcase full of diamonds.

One wonders why a person with a suitcase full of diamonds would need to plead for a place to live, especially one as distant and chilly as Denmark. And while they’re at it, why not search their teeth for gold fillings? But the abject assault on people fleeing the chaos of Syria and Iraq isn’t troubled by simple logic. It’s all about fear, bias and discrimination. Unfortunately, it’s also a cause that has been taken up with enthusiasm by right-wing politicians and ultra-conservative governments, who see political gain to be had in spreading hysteria.

Akos Stiller/Bloomberg

Akos Stiller/BloombergHungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban

Conservatism is not about hate, bigotry or exploiting the needy. But its brand is in danger of being permanently tarred by the outspoken braying of demagogues like Donald Trump, or small-minded governments like those in Denmark, Poland and Hungary. The Hungarian government’s response to the flood of people fleeing Syria was to erect a razor-wire fence, accompanied by Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s declaration that Muslims were not welcome and his rejection of European Union resettlement quotas. Hungary’s fence forced others to soon erect their own, as each sought to direct asylum-seekers elsewhere.

The ugliness of discrimination is not lessened by the political gains it sometimes brings.

Poland’s newly-elected right-wing government announced it would refuse to accept the 4,500 refugees assigned it under the quota system, reversing the acceptance of the previous government.

Trump, of course, has assured himself the attention he so openly craves with increasingly loathsome remarks about the purported threat of the refugee hordes. His proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. — even though the U.S. has millions of honest and patriotic Muslim citizens – has been overwhelmingly denounced, but succeeded in cementing his runaway lead in the Republican presidential sweepstakes.

The ugliness of discrimination is not lessened by the political gains it sometimes brings. The more Trump is attacked, the more support he seems to gain. Orban’s policies were initially reviled, but have been highly popular in Hungary and are now being quietly studied across the EU. Poland’s government was elected on the back of anti-immigrant fervour, and includes a stark anti-Semitic streak.

It’s a trend that should be roundly condemned, and resisted at all costs.  The new Liberal government, of course, has begun accepting — indeed, welcoming — refugees to Canada, and has pledged more aid for those still overseas. Canada’s interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose has made clear her party welcomes refugees and will continue Canada’s tradition as “a compassionate country and … compassionate people.” The point can’t be made strongly enough, and whoever succeeds Ambrose as leader should ensure it is a bedrock of future policies. There will come a time when the hysteria will subside and people will look back in embarrassment at the ugliness of the debate it has inspired. Canadians should ensure that when that time comes, they won’t be among those with something to regret.

Source: Kelly McParland: Refugee hysteria reaches a new low with plan to search migrants for jewelry

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Douglas Todd: Richmond toughens stance on Chinese-language signs

2015/12/18 Leave a comment

Finding the balance:

After years of dismissing residents’ worries about the expansion of Chinese-language signs in Richmond, the city is hiring a new staff person to press for more signs to include English.

Richmond last week quietly posted a full-time job for a sign inspector. The inspector’s duties will include educating business owners about the city’s policy, which says signs should contain 50-per-cent English lettering.

“I think the issue is being taken more seriously than it once was,” Councillor Alexa Loo said this week.

Loo, who was elected to council in the fall of 2014, had previously said it was “ridiculous” that Chinese-only signs were on the rise in Richmond, despite ethnic Chinese now making up one out of two residents.

Richmond’s current council, Loo said, is slowly becoming convinced that community “harmony” is threatened by a proliferation of signs that cannot be read by those who do not read Chinese.

The city’s decision to hire someone to educate businesses about English on signs is a significant change.

Only a few years ago former Richmond city bylaw manager Wayne Mercer said every month he would tell yet another “anxious and insecure” Richmond resident that the city correctly intended to do “nothing” about Chinese-only and Chinese-dominant signs.

Joe Greenholtz, a member of Richmond’s intercultural advisory committee, also brushed aside the concerns of people who felt alienated by Chinese-only signs.

Longtime Richmond residents who complain about signs, Greenholtz wrote in 2012, are simply “feeling the pain of being irrelevant in their own backyards for the first time.” At the time, Greenholtz, an immigration consultant, argued the sign issue was solely a matter of commerce, but more recently he acknowledged community cohesiveness is also at stake.

The city’s records show Richmond residents were going to council to express concerns about Chinese-only signs as far back as 1997.

In was only in recent years that some residents became more vocal, launched petitions and eventually brought international attention to Richmond, whose population is 62-per-cent foreign born.

The tide began turning late last year when retiring Richmond councillor Evelina Halsey-Brandt admitted she had been mistaken in believing the sign controversy would “solve itself.”

Halsey-Brandt urged the new council to find a way to ensure that a large portion of the 200,000 residents of Richmond don’t end up “feeling that they don’t belong in their own city.”

Between 1981 and 2011, Statistics Canada figures show the ethnic Chinese population of Richmond expanded by 80,000. In the same period, the white population had a net loss of 28,000 people.

In response to increasing debate, a group of prominent Metro Vancouver Chinese business leaders gathered in Richmond in May and urged all immigrants to “follow Canadian customs” and include English in their signs.

For his part, Richmond Councillor Chak Au says he has been waiting for years for other council members to come around to his viewpoint.

“I was the only one four years ago who was saying we should go to bilingual signs,” Au said.

“In the beginning, the others didn’t want to do anything.”

Many Richmond residents remain disappointed the city’s new inspector is being asked only to “encourage” business owners to make signs 50-per-cent English.

Richmond activist Kerry Starchuk, who has been interviewed by media outlets across Europe and Asia, said this week the city and province aren’t being nearly proactive enough.

“This is just as minimal as what can be done,” she said. Without enforceable municipal and provincial legislation, Starchuk believes, almost nothing will change in regards to the proliferation of Chinese-only or Chinese-dominant signs.

For their part, Au and Loo want to avoid formal sign bylaws. They believe it’s more “harmonious” to have a staff member try to persuade businesses to include English, to improve cross-cultural communication.

Au and Loo also worry Richmond could open itself up to a charter challenge if it requires English. Even though the province of Quebec has laws preserving the French language in signs, Loo said Quebec has more constitutional authority than B.C.

The executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which has threatened to take Richmond to court over the sign issue, told The Vancouver Sun in July that individual rights trump community concerns. Some BCCLA board members, however, have since questioned Josh Paterson’s position.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/douglas+todd+richmond+toughens+stance+chinese+language+signs/11597065/story.html#ixzz3uff8Oi1uSource: Douglas Todd: Richmond toughens stance on Chinese-language signs

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Tories call for probe of public servants who aided report on tax agency

2015/12/18 Leave a comment

Valid concerns regarding the breach of the impartiality of the public service, not just leaking of documents (which also is problematic):

The Conservatives are calling for an investigation into claims that Canada Revenue Agency employees teamed up with an advocacy group for a report that alleges mismanagement and political interference in tax investigations that cost billions in uncollected revenue.

Conservative MP Ziad Aboultaif, the party’s national revenue critic, said the involvement of public servants in such a report during an election is “disturbing” and shouldn’t be ignored just because a new government was elected.

“I would hope that the Minister of National Revenue realizes the seriousness of this and is investigating the supposed wrongdoing, not ignoring it because the incident took place under the previous government,” said Aboultaif.

“There is a principle involved here; it is not about party politics. Canadians expect their public service to be both professional and neutral.”

The report, by Canadians for Tax Fairness, was based on 28 interviews with former and current auditors and other tax specialists. They alleged the agency is mismanaged, undermined by major budget cuts, and that it targets ordinary taxpayers over the “big-time tax cheats” hiding money offshore.

Public servants are supposed to be non-partisan and loyal to the elected government. They face even stricter limits on their behaviour during an election.

Aboultaif argued neutrality is part of the job and that public servants give up the right to criticize government policies when they join the public service.

“Public servants take an oath of office and agree to abide by a code of ethics while employed in the civil service,” he said.

….So far, the Canada Revenue Agency has rejected the report’s allegations as unfounded. It said it was unable to determine if the ethics code was breached because it didn’t know who the employees were.

Donald Savoie, Canada Research Chair in public administration and governance at the University of Moncton, has written books on how the traditional “bargain” or relationship between public servants and politicians is broken. He says this case is one of the most blatant violations yet.

“If public servants become political actors, which is what is happening here, that is just not how the Westminster system was conceived. We are reshaping fundamental tenets of the system on the fly without any reflection or debate.”

Savoie argued this is an issue that warrants the attention of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to clarify what is expected of public servants today.

“This is a government issue, not a CRA issue. It should be raising alarm bells in the Privy Council Office and Treasury Board because it goes to the heart of the fundamental role of the public service.

“I think the prime minister, cabinet and head of the public service should be responding.”

Source: Tories call for probe of public servants who aided report on tax agency | Ottawa Citizen

The earlier article ICYMI:

Source: Public Servants ‘blow the whistle’ on tax system shortfalls | Ottawa Citizen

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ICYMI: Abigail Fisher deserves an ‘F’ for her race-baiting Supreme Court case aimed at boosting subpar white students – Salon.com

2015/12/17 Leave a comment

The latest court case around affirmative action:

Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in what is easily the most baffling case it’s going to hear this session, yet another attack on affirmative action policies at state universities, in this case the University of Texas at Austin. If ever there was a case that has no business in front of the high court, it is this one. The suit is a nuisance suit, it’s poorly argued, it’s disingenuous, it’s been heard before and, to make everything even more bizarre, the plaintiff’s claim to injury is demonstrably untrue. This is a case that should have been laughed out of court years ago, but instead, this is the second time — second time! — it’s being presented in front of the Supreme Court.

 At stake is the claim made by Abigail Fisher, now 25, who hails from a wealthy suburb of Houston called Sugar Land, that she was deprived of her rightful admission at UT Austin because, in her view, some person of color who didn’t deserve it stole it from her.
Throughout her now seven-year campaign to make the school pay for not letting her in, Fisher has never been able to produce any evidence that the school tossed her application to make room for a less qualified minority applicant. That’s because, as UT Austin has maintained throughout this ordeal, Fisher was never getting in to their school. Fisher’s GPA and SAT scores weren’t high enough, and she didn’t have enough external accomplishments to convince the school to give her a shot otherwise. As Pro Publica explained at the time:

It’s true that the university, for whatever reason, offered provisional admission to some students with lower test scores and grades than Fisher. Five of those students were black or Latino. Forty-two were white.

Neither Fisher nor Blum mentioned those 42 applicants in interviews. Nor did they acknowledge the 168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher’s who were also denied entry into the university that year.

Fisher’s case only makes sense if you assume that people of color are inherently less worthy than white people. How else do you justify an argument that assumes that every white person should have been given a shot before minority students do?

This assumption of the inherent superiority of white people, even above those people of color who have more appealing applications, was reflected in Antonin Scalia’s remarks during today’s case.

Instead of telling her where to shove it, the Supreme Court sent Fisher’s case back to the appeals court. Now she and her lawyers are back again. This time, they’ve tweaked their argument a bit, trying to argue that diversity itself is an illegitimate goal for schools and, to add a bit of extra nastiness sauce to it, they’re claiming that diversity is bad for students of color.

In other words, Fisher and her lawyers are concern-trolling the Supreme Court.

Most of UT Austin’s admissions are on the basis of high school class standing — about 80 percent of its class in the year that Fisher applied. But the other 20 percent are determined in a holistic fashion, by looking at grades, extracurricular activities, test scores, writing samples, the usual stuff. Because of the school’s commitment to diversity, race and class background is also taken into consideration. Someone who shows potential but faced some obstacles gets a closer look than someone who hasn’t had similar obstacles.

When you read about this case, it quickly becomes self-evident why the admissions committee didn’t think Fisher had some hidden potential that wasn’t reflected in her grades. Fisher, however, has decided her unparalleled genius is going unnoticed because of the notorious racism against white people. But since that argument hasn’t gotten her very far, her lawyer, Edward Blum, is now trying a different tactic to argue that schools should admit mediocre white people over talented students of color: His claim is that  giving students of color an opportunity somehow hurts them.

Source: Abigail Fisher deserves an ‘F’ for her race-baiting Supreme Court case aimed at boosting subpar white students – Salon.com

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Sri Lanka: Moving from nationalism to multiculturalism | Daily News

2015/12/17 Leave a comment

Not sure how realistic this vision is, and multiculturalism only came about in Canada when immigration ‘diluted’ the basic anglophone/francophone duality:

Who would doubt that we, as a nation, would be better off if we could engage with one another in a less polarized manner? We cannot get “beyond” these oppositions to achieve national unity, however, despite our desire to do so. Indeed, this desire is a large part of the problem – or, depending on how one views it, the solution – because attempts to transcend the oppositional character of these debates tend to reinforce them. The national unity question that drives our conversation makes it futile, lost in the very terms of the quest. But to the extent that our dialogue continues, those that participate are at least united in their oppositions. This is the bind that ties.

Multicultural society

If the majority of us can agree on a path to achieve national unity, it will eventually lead our country into a solid multi-cultural society. In such a society the different cultures are made inclusive, tolerated and accommodated, and these trends are institutionalized in legislation. Canada, Australia and other western countries, where multiculturalism is the national policy, respect religions, ethnicity and cultures of different communities and their cultural rights, while a secular law common to all protect their human rights. They are not allowed to have a legal system (e.g. Sharia law) or practices (e.g. animal sacrifices) that are contrary to the laws of the country.

Canada, for instance, has, a Multiculturalism Policy from which the plethora of new immigrant communities has benefited in more ways than one. For instance, I know of many Sri Lankans who own their own properties in salubrious neighbourhoods in Canadian Capitals. The key to that effort lay in the fact that all three levels of government – Federal, Provincial and Municipal – provided that immigrant community with the means of generating the revenues not only to purchase a substantial building but to continue to maintain their cultural identity in that city.

Source: Moving from nationalism to multiculturalism | Daily News

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Canada’s Growing Jihadi Cancer: Unbalanced but captures one perspective – The Daily Beast

2015/12/16 Leave a comment

Dana Kennedy, former correspondent at ABC, Fox News and MSNBC, presents a one-sided account of perceived ‘jihadi cancer,’ citing the usual suspects (Farzana Hassan, David Harris, Tarek Fatah, Raheel Raza), with no attempt to balance that with other views, apart from Mubin Sheikh.

It appears her views reflect more her experience at Fox than the other networks:

The usual Canada’s new telegenic Prime Minister Trudeau, 43, the ultimate anti- Donald Trump, was pictured last week warmly greeting the first of an estimated 25,000 Syrian refugees arriving between now and March 2016. (Canada’s population is about one-tenth of the United States, so that’s as if 250,000 Syrian refugees were arriving in the U.S. in the space of just four months.)

But some worry that the feel-good photo op for Trudeau and his Liberal Party could portend trouble for Canada.

“In a technical briefing for journalists this week, Canadian immigration officials said not a single applicant has been rejected yet,” right-wing activist and lawyer Ezra Levant told The Daily Beast.

“This is a national security threat to Canada, and to the United States, which shares the world’s longest undefended border with us,” said Levant. “The Islamic State has repeatedly named Canada as a target; dozens of Canadian Muslims have gone to Syria to become terrorists. And yet Canada is rushing refugees through, far in excess of our capacity to properly vet them. We simply don’t have sufficient intelligence personnel, let alone those who function in Arabic.”

Toronto attorney and human rights activist David Harris said the new influx of Syrian refugees is part of a “gigantic and overly generous immigration policy,” coupled with a lax vetting process and a philosophy of encouraging newcomers to retain their cultural traditions, that has negative connotations for Canada.

“It’s very interesting to see how the deteriorating situation in Canada and the implications for northern America border security has not been recognized,” said Harris.

“Massive immigration here has created an immigration-industrial complex with all sorts of publicly funded language schools, settlement organizations and lobbying groups that have sprung up like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” said Harris. “Because Canada is so much smaller in population, there are areas of the country starting to resemble tribal homelands and the loyalty is not to Canada. Canada is extremely vulnerable to extremism and terrorism.”

“This is all a Saudi-funded cancer spreading across the world.”

Brian Levin, a former NYPD officer turned counter-terrorism and extremism specialist at San Bernardino State, concurred.

“People talk about Mexico,” said Levin. “They totally overlook Canada. Nobody has any idea what’s going on up there. In my opinion it’s a bigger threat than Mexico.”

Given Prime Minister Trudeau’s good looks, his political pedigree, a one-time TV-anchor wife who the New York Post called “the hottest First Lady in the world,” and his headline-making cabinet featuring many women and minorities, he recently scored a spread in Vogue.

But he’s come under fire at home for what some see as pandering to the Muslim vote and an extreme political correctness. He has said he will revamp aspects of C-51, the controversial anti-terrorism bill that the Conservative Party enacted this year.

Trudeau visited mosques all over Canada as part of his political campaigns leading up to his recent win. He visited a notorious Montreal mosque in 2011, a month before the U.S. classified it as an al-Qaeda recruitment center. He addressed a mosque with ties to Hamas and, unlike his Conservative Party predecessor, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he defends the right for Muslim Canadian women to wear the niqab, a veil covering the face, when they take their citizenship oaths.

In 2011 Trudeau objected to the word “barbaric” in a Canadian citizenship guide for new immigrants that included the passage: “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, honor killings, female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence.”

“There’s nothing the word ‘barbaric’ achieves that the words ‘absolutely unacceptable’ would not have achieved,” said Trudeau, who later retracted his statements after a Twitter firestorm.

…But, at least so far, homegrown attacks in Canada are fairly rare.

Mubin Shaikh, a former Muslim extremist turned counter-terrorism operative who went undercover for Canadian intelligence to infiltrate the Toronto 18, says the low incidence of terror attacks is precisely because of Canada’s policy of multiculturalism.

“Our multiculturalism is a protective factor and one of the reasons why Canada has seen lower numbers [of terrorist incidents]is largely due to the fact that Muslims are treated very well,” Shaikh told The Daily Beast.

“This is the whole point, that when you actively prevent isolation and marginalization, so too do you see a low level of extremism,” said Shaikh. “The problem in the UK is that although there is multiculturalism, there is a colonial history that grievances-centered people can take advantage of.”

Others disagree and say multiculturalism has spawned a more subtle type of fundamentalism taking over some communities to the point where they look like areas of the Middle East with a corresponding mind-set—and dangers.

“If you’ve been out of Ottawa for just two months, you’ll come back and be astonished at how many more hijabs and niqabs you see on the street in just that short amount of time,” said attorney Harris. “There’s a significance and symbolism to that whether you believe it or not.”

Source: Canada’s Growing Jihadi Cancer – The Daily Beast

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with , , , ,

US Sikhs feeling vulnerable amid anti-Islam rhetoric, but joining Muslims to fight backlash | Fox News

2015/12/16 Leave a comment

Have not heard of recent similar attacks here on Sikhs but likely that there are some:

Pradeep Kaleka spent several days after 9/11 at his father’s South Milwaukee gas station, fearing that his family would be targeted by people who assumed they were Muslim. No, Kaleka explained on behalf of his father, who wore a turban and beard and spoke only in broken English, the family was Sikh, a southeast Asian religion based on equality and unrelated to Islam.

But amid a new wave of anti-Islamic sentiment since the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Kaleka is vowing to take an entirely different approach.

“For us it does not matter who they’re targeting,” said Kaleka, a former Milwaukee police officer and teacher whose father was one of six people killed in 2012 when a white supremacist opened fire at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. “This time we cannot differentiate ourselves; when hate rhetoric is being spewed we cannot be on the sidelines.”

Across the U.S., Sikhs and Muslims are banding together to defend their respective religions. Someone bent on harming Muslims wouldn’t understand — or care — about the distinction between the two faiths, they say, and both also deserve to live in peace.

So they plan educational sessions and rallies. They successfully pushed the FBI to track hate crimes against Sikhs. They speak to lawmakers and support each other’s legal action, including a lawsuit filed over a New York City police surveillance program targeting New Jersey Muslims.

“We are in this fight together,” said Gurjot Kaur, a senior staff attorney at The Sikh Coalition, founded the night of Sept. 11.

Sikhism, a monotheistic faith, was founded more than 500 years ago in Southeast Asia and has roughly 27 million followers worldwide, most of them in India.

There are more than 500,000 Sikhs in the U.S. Male followers often cover their heads with turbans — which are considered sacred — and refrain from shaving their beards.

Reports of bullying, harassment and vandalism against Sikhs have risen in recent weeks.

Last week, a Sikh temple in Orange County, California, was vandalized, as was a truck in the parking lot by someone who misspelled the word “Islam” and made an obscene reference to ISIS.

Source: Sikhs feeling vulnerable amid anti-Islam rhetoric, but joining Muslims to fight backlash | Fox News

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China’s ‘hidden generation’: plea to give citizenship to stateless children of trafficked North Koreans | South China Morning Post

2015/12/16 Leave a comment

Under-reported:

Campaigners have urged Beijing to give citizenship to a “hidden generation” of stateless children born to trafficked North Korean women forced into marriage or prostitution in China.

They said an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 children born to North Korean women in China have no nationality and therefore cannot access education, health care and basic rights that most people take for granted.

If their mothers are deported, they are often abandoned by their Chinese fathers, leaving them effectively orphaned, according to the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea.

Thousands of North Koreans have fled hunger and oppression in the secretive state since a famine in the mid-1990s. Many are in hiding in neighbouring China, which considers them illegal migrants.

The plight of their children is outlined in a report by the rights group co-authored by Yong Joon Park, a teenager now living in Britain who grew up stateless in China.

They treated him badly. His life was worse than the starving children in North Korea. His mother, Jihyun Park, said traffickers sold her as a wife to a poor Chinese farmer after she fled North Korea in 1998.

When their son was five in 2004 she was reported to the authorities and deported back to North Korea.

There she was sent to a labour camp where she endured “horrific conditions” and prisoners were “worked harder than animals”.

“All I could think of was seeing my son again,” said Park, who eventually managed to escape and return to China.

She found her son, but barely recognised him. His skin was filthy and flaking, and when he was hungry he was sent outside to pick up grains of rice from the ground.

“They treated him badly. His life was worse than the starving children in North Korea,” she said. “The Chinese government does not give children like my son a nationality so they cannot go to school.”

She and her son managed to cross the Chinese border into Mongolia and later moved to Britain and were accepted as refugees.

“When my son arrived in the UK he was nine. It was the first time he had a nationality and the first time he went to school.”

Now 16, he scored straight As in his exams this year and is hoping to go to university to become a lawyer.

Source: China’s ‘hidden generation’: plea to give citizenship to stateless children of trafficked North Koreans | South China Morning Post

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Refugees and the long political journey: Martin Patriquin

2015/12/15 Leave a comment

A reminder, as if needed, just how much can change with new political direction, and the ideology and values of the previous government’s restrictive approach. Must read:

Given all this, I asked Vassallo, a 27-year CIC veteran, why the Canadian government took so long to get comparatively few suffering souls to this country. “I can’t answer that, it’s a political question,” he said, with a hint of a smile.

Unfortunately, Vassallo is right, and his non-answer is a reminder of what happens when a life-or-death issue of refugees gets fed into the cauldron of partisan politics, then further distilled by an at times ugly election campaign. In a sense, the machinations by which potential refugees are sorted and selected should be as apolitical as, say, getting one’s license renewed. Yet as the previous Conservative government demonstrated, there was a distinct attempt to shape and direct the work of its civil servants here and overseas when it came to the victims of the crisis in Syria.

Last January, Stephen Harper’s government announced plans to bring in 10,000 Syrian refugees over three years. Yet several months later, only about 10 per cent of this number had been admitted—in part, it seems, because of a directive from Harper’s office itself that attempted to halt the screening process. At the time, it was presented as a security measure “to ensure the integrity of our refugee referral system,” as Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander put it at the time.

Numerous sources, including one with first-hand knowledge of the processing of refugees, said the directive was less about security than about ensuring that Christian minorities took precedence over Muslims. “You got the feeling they were trying to cherry pick religious minorities,” one source said. (Syria, which is majority Sunni Muslim, has a sizeable Christian minority.)

It took the picture of Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach, for the government to slacken the reigns somewhat. Because Kurdi’s family was trying to reach Canada, the political intonations on the Harper election campaign were profound. On Sept 10, eight days after the picture made headlines worldwide, the government waived the stipulation that “resettlement candidates” must provide information regarding why they fled their country of origin.

“Going forward, unless there is evidence to the contrary, visa officers will be able to presume those fleeing the conflict meet the definition of a refugee, which will make processing faster,” reads a CIC briefing document.

There is a certain irony in this. The  government to first make a significant security-related change to the processing of refugees—arguably making it easier for Syrians and Iraqis to make it to these shores—was that of the ostensibly security-first, tough-on-terror Stephen Harper. And he did so as a political calculation, out of fear of losing an election.

Meanwhile, the “security concerns” that supposedly prevented the Harper government from increasing the numbers of refugees brought to Canada were seemingly a partisan mirage. “There have been no shortcuts to the process. They’ve accelerated it in the sense that they’ve sent over additional personnel,” Tim Bowen, chief of operations for Canadian Border Services Agency, told me. According to CIC staff, this includes the addition of some 500 officials deployed overseas to help with the effort, including between 50 and 70 visa officers.

Thankfully, there is a happy ending. First and foremost, refugees are finally arriving. Secondly, the Conservatives are critiquing the effort exactly as they should: on purely financial grounds. The refugee resettlement program will cost $671 million. It is a huge amount of money, and Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel promised to hold the government to account. “It is one thing to inspire Canadians, it’s another thing to be accountable to them,” she said.

That Rempel said as much without a fear-mongering whisper about “security concerns” shows how far the party has come in two months.

Source: Refugees and the long political journey – Macleans.ca

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