Sears: Ottawa is backsliding on refugees. We cannot return to the contemptible policies of our past

2022/03/15 Leave a comment

A bit over the top, as he should understand some of the operational and considerations, even officials are overly cautious in their approach.

And fair or not, the Ukraine invasion and refugee flows are more fundamental, in terms of world and Canadian politics, than Afghanistan, where unfortunately all countries failed in getting peoples out quickly.

But of course, more should be done, and more quickly:

Canada’s nakedly racist immigration policies are not ancient history. It was only in the 1970s that they were finally wound down as policy, though the colour blindness of some immigration officials was never believable. The department is currently under investigation for allegations of years of systemic racism.

Canada had a racist screening system that was thinly veiled as “geographic” quotas only 50 years ago. Our quotas in those days permitted 1,000 immigrants per year from Asia — and one hundred times that from Europe. In recent years, we have won a global reputation for the openness and fairness of both our immigration and refugee screening processes. We have the most successful record in the world at immigration integration. But, occasionally some of the old impulses appear to push to the surface again.

The Trudeau government pledged that we would admit 40,000 Afghan refugees after the fall of Kabul last August. In the months since, we have welcomed less than 20 per cent of that pledge. Various bureaucracies have erected their usual obstacles when they are determined to slow walk a policy to failure. First they claimed they could not admit more of the desperate because they did not have screening facilities in Kabul. The EU removed that excuse by offering to share theirs.

The Department of Justice threw sand in the gears, as government lawyers do, saying, “Here’s why you can’t do that legally, minister!” Incredibly, they cited the prohibition on aiding “terrorism” if assistance were given to refugee claimants. It is absurdly transparent nonsense that several more expert Canadian lawyers have laughed at. Global Affairs and Public Safety, two ministries one would have thought had an important role, have been nudged aside by the intransigent foot draggers.

Of course we should open our doors to tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees as quickly as possible. However, where non-Muslim European refugees are concerned there appear to be different rules.

Ukrainians are being waved through because it is claimed they are “unlikely to stay.” Perhaps. But they will be welcomed into our vast Ukrainian Canadian community, and many may decide to stay. Many will bring skills and experience in high demand by employers. Few will need integration support, except perhaps in acquiring fluency in English or French.

But the stunning difference in political signalling by this government to one refugee community versus another is somewhat stomach turning. There have been half a dozen ministerial visits to Europe to ensure our aid flows in and their refugees can flow out.

The number of Canadian ministers who have gone to Pakistan to help speed up the transport and certification of Afghan refugees since the election? No prizes for guessing — none. The latest excuse for the tragic delay in getting Afghans who put their lives on the line to support Canadian soldiers, diplomats and journalists: “backlog.”

For decades, immigration departments have used the excuse that the years-long wait for refugees and immigrants to be processed is due to backlog. What would the response of a government be if, for example, the CRA said they could not get Canadians their tax reimbursement cheques out in less than 18 months because of backlog?

They would fix it: hire staff, whip the bureaucracy, and demand results or heads on a block. So why do we allow backlog to be the “dog ate my homework” excuse from immigration bureaucrats? Perhaps it’s because governments actually prefer their ability to choke the number of refugees — unless, of course, they’re from a country where millions of Canadian voters have roots and are demanding action.

So let us return to the days when ministers greeted refugees from war-torn hells at the airport, no matter which war had torn their lives apart. Let there not be even a scintilla of suspicion that we are sliding back to the contemptible refugee policy that we are so proud of having erased two generations ago.

Or we will wake up one morning to the news that the Taliban have murdered yet another Canada-bound refugee — one whose luck ran out after months of waiting for the silence from the immigration bureaucracy to finally end.

Source: Ottawa is backsliding on refugees. We cannot return to the contemptible policies of our past

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , ,

Ukraine: How citizenship and race play out in refugees’ movements in Europe

2022/03/14 Leave a comment

More nuanced explanation that in most articles:

As millions of refugees flee Ukraine as a result of the Russian invasion, one question that has been raised is: Why have Ukrainians been welcomed into eastern Europe, unlike Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and Eritreans? Is it because they are white?

Criticisms imply that the European Union treats refugees from the Global South differently, and that such treatment is based on race. Critics also highlight that Romania and Poland’s hospitality to Ukrainians stands in stark contrast to their past reluctance to accommodate refugees from Africa and the Middle East. Al Jazeera looks at the treatment of Black and Indian refugees at the Polish border.

Yet hasty interpretations that single out race as the primary force in refugee favouritism simplify geopolitical realities. They also ignore the EU legislative framework that produces categories of refugees based on nationality and citizenship.

Europe rests on a hierarchy of nations, with older EU members at the top of the pile followed by new members, and then countries being considered for membership in the EU. At the bottom of the pile is everyone else.

Geopolitics play a role

Commitments to welcoming one million Ukrainians to Polandand 500,000 to Romania are linked to these countries’ geographical proximity to the Ukrainian border.

Refugees usually head to the closest safe place. Think of the Syrian war: neighbouring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan resettled the largest number of Syrians. Turkey hosts close to four million, Lebanon over 800,000 and Jordan close to 700,000. 

Similarly, more than half of Eritrean refugees are in neighbouring Ethiopia and Sudan. Bangladesh also hosts the majority of Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar.

Ethnic composition and regional labour market flows also play a role. Poland is the primary EU destination country for Ukrainian migrants. By the end of 2020, a record number of a million and a half Ukrainians had migrated to Poland for work. 

In Ukraine, close to 160,000 people are ethnic Hungarians, and over 150,000 are of the Romanian minority. The Union of the Ukrainians in Romania is an ethnically based political party with a seat in the national parliament.

Ukrainians regularly cross regional borders for personal reasons, such as accessing medical care or visiting family.

Pre-existing affinities

Eastern Europe shares a common Soviet history and after the end of the Cold War in 1989, an anti-Russian sentiment. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, most eastern European states rejected communist ideas as being Russian-centric. Integration into the West and the adoption of liberal ideas of freedom, free market and democracy, have become synonymous with opposing Russian neo-imperialism.

Solidarity based on a similar history of oppression is common across the former Eastern Bloc countries (the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary). A shared memory of Russian aggression makes the pain of Ukrainians more intelligible to other eastern Europeans.

Linguistic similarities between Ukrainian and Polish make Poland more accessible to Ukrainian migrants. Both languages are Slavic and have long influenced each other. The Polish and Ukrainians close to the border largely understand what each other is saying.

Most countries from the former Eastern Bloc are Christian Orthodox. Not only is Christian Orthodoxy intertwined with national identity but Orthodoxy has also flourished since the fall of Communism. In Ukraine, about 39 per cent of the population self-identified as Orthodox in 1991 — by 2015, the number had doubled.

Ukraine’s position

Ukraine is not a member of the EU, but it is a signatory to the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the 2014 EU-Ukraine Association Agreement.

The 2014 Association Agreement was key in defining Ukraine as a European country with shared common history and values. It also paved the way for granting Ukrainians visa-free access to the Schengen Area, which comprises all the EU members except Ireland, as well as Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Lichtenstein, for up to 90 days.

Both agreements outline the foreign policy expectations of countries on the path to EU integration. These agreements legally produce different categories of migrants. Ukrainians are on the path to integration into the European labour market, unlike third-country nationals, defined as non-citizens without the right to free movement in the EU.

Through a budget of 15.4 billion euros, the ENP supports economic and social reforms for neighbouring countries of the EU including Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Moldova, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Tunisia and Ukraine. 

Since 2014, the ENP has funnelled more than 200 million eurosto help Ukraine’s path to EU integration. Ukraine has received over 17 billion euros in grants and loans, inclusive of financial supports for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fortress Europe

With central and eastern European member states joining the EU in 2004, 2007 and 2013, eastern Europe has became the bordering outskirts of the EU. And so recent refugee flows have to be managed in the peripheral east, now tasked with militarizing their borders and keeping refugees out.

In contrast to the warm welcome granted to Ukrainian refugees, Poland has recently let Iraqi and Afghani refugees freeze to deathat its eastern border. It was the EU that tripled the border management funds to Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to reduce access to asylum, and increase border push-backs and detentions. 

Citizenship or race?

The mistreatment of foreign nationals fleeing Ukraine has been attributed to race.

“Black people” and “African students” are terms interchangeably used to describe those being held back at borders or being prevented from boarding evacuation buses. 

Ukraine has continued the former Soviet tradition of regularly recruiting Global South students within the medical field. India, Morocco, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Nigeria, China, Turkey, Egypt, Israel and Uzbekistan are the top 10 countries of origin for international students in Ukraine. 

Much of eastern Europe is made out of racially homogeneous countries, where non-citizens are often visibly non-white. Using a racial lens to understand how borders respond to the attempts of international students to cross them diverts attention from citizenship regimes in allocating rights. 

It also minimizes the larger problem at hand — the precarious status of temporary residents, including international students, who inhabit a marginal position by bureaucratic design.

Citizenship becomes the primary basis of exclusion. It is a related phenomenon that citizenship gets descriptively associated with race.

We do not intend to legitimize the racist and discriminatory coverage that has surfaced in relation to the Ukrainian refugee crisis.

Race does matter in refugee favouritism. But the opening of refugee corridors to Ukraine’s neighbours has little to do with race and more to do with geopolitical and citizenship regimes that determine freedom of movement within Europe.

Source: Ukraine: How citizenship and race play out in refugees’ movements in Europe

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism, Racism, Refugees Tagged with ,

Cohen: Ukraine forces us to see the world’s problems more clearly

2022/03/11 Leave a comment

Agreed:

Over the last fortnight, the invasion of Ukraine has brought thousands of deaths, the decimation of the country’s industry and commerce, a plague of widespread homelessness and hunger, and the dislocation of some two million people.

If Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to destroy Ukraine to save it, he’s succeeding. With every advance, he tarnishes his prize and strengthens the resistance. He may raze Ukraine but he won’t beat it.

Welcome to the insurgency, Mr. Putin. This is your Afghanistan. Your victory, whenever you dare declare it, will be pyrrhic.

For the world watching in horror, two weeks of war is a hard shot to the solar plexus. It has winded us. But let’s be grateful: the conflict has become a moral struggle around the world that has forced us to see ourselves with refreshing clarity.

Suddenly, freedom looks different. Ukraine throws into sharp relief, for example, the cries of those protesters on Parliament Hill last month. Had the war broken out earlier, their big complaint would have been ridiculed rather than tolerated for as long as it was.

As Ukrainians hide underground from relentless shelling, as the heater dies, the line goes dead and the grocery shelves empty, their plight puts our grievances in new light. These grievances look petty, small and narcissistic; the “freedom from vaccines” that has roiled Canada suggests the paranoia of a snowflake society.

Note to anti-vaxxers: no one forced you to take the vaccine. You are not being sterilized like millions in India in the mid-1970s. Yes, vaccination was a condition of crossing the border in a truck, a job you were free to leave, in a near full-employment economy, for another line of work.

Ukraine reshapes the narrative of our little melodrama. The “occupation” of Ottawa? “Journalism under Siege” was a recent lively public forum in Ottawa that ignored the mortal danger to journalists in Ukraine. Well, it’s all relative, isn’t it?

Ukrainians understand freedom well: freedom from war, privation, starvation and death. They fight for the freedom to survive as an autonomous people. Their defiance is heroic.

Here, our shallow, showy discourse mocks freedom. MP Leslyn Lewis, a woman of colour who is a social conservative, rants about “a socialist coup” in Canada. With faux outrage, she claims the media is trying to “lynch me into silence” as she’s forced “to sit in the back of the bus.”

Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks understood freedom when they led a year-long boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, to avoid sitting in the back of the bus. Medgar Evers, Aaron Henry, Robert Moses and other brave Mississippians challenged a regime of lynching that killed Blacks in their state. From the comfort of Canada in 2022, Lewis looks woolly-minded.

Ukraine, and the horror it represents, clarifies everything. It gives moral licence to cancel culture. In Russia, we can cancel a leader and a country doing horrible things, and we should.

Putin’s war is a corrective to obsessions that have assumed outsized influence. When people are dying, assertions of “cultural appropriation” seem less outrageous, “trigger warnings” less urgent, “safe spaces” less necessary.

Will sensible Americans tolerate their representatives debating lifting “racist” names off schools in San Francisco (Abraham Lincoln, Robert Louis Stevenson and George Washington among them) when Russians are lifting the roofs off Ukrainian schools?

Already, Ukraine is changing perceptions of leaders. The war will probably rescue Boris Johnson, re-elect Emmanuel Macron, revive Joe Biden and most of all, deify Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Hell, it might even make a statesman of Justin Trudeau, Canada’s purveyor of “non-lethal weapons,” who has shown little interest in the world.

Why? Quite simply, because things that mattered before don’t matter now.

Ukraine marks the end of “the end of history,” the conventional wisdom of the 1990s. Ukraine is the revenge of history: a return to the Cold War after the collapse of Communism and the spread of democracy.

Now, as the threat of nuclear war returns, so does a more serious culture, rinsed of superficiality, self-indulgence and hyperbole.

Source: Cohen: Ukraine forces us to see the world’s problems more clearly

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Inside Poland’s Drastic Immigration Reversal

2022/03/10 Leave a comment

Sharp contrast but understandable:

For the largely Middle Eastern migrants arriving in Poland during the fall 2021 border crisis with Belarus, the reception was chilly – in more ways than one. After trudging through freezing temperatures, many were met at the Polish border by armed soldiers who pushed them back, at times violently.

Following the crisis, in which Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko enticed thousands of Middle Eastern asylum seekers into his country and then funneled them west, the Polish government started construction of a fence spanning 115 miles along the Polish-Belarusian border.

The moves to strengthen the border were largely supported by the Polish public, which has generally opposed resettling Middle Eastern refugees in the country. In 2015, during the Syrian refugee crisis, thousands of Poles marched through Warsaw’s streets, chanting, “Today refugees, tomorrow terrorists!” In 2016, 73% of the Polish population said they viewed refugees from places like Iraq and Syria as a “threat to their country.”

Now, during the second full week of Russia’s invasion into Ukraine, Polish rhetoric surrounding refugees has taken a dramatic turn.

“We will do everything to provide safe shelter in Poland for everyone who needs it,” Poland’s interior minister, Mariusz Kaminski, said to journalists at the beginning of the crisis.

Poles have similarly lent their voices and even homes to support the roughly 1.2  million Ukrainians who have poured into their country. They have distributed food, raised funds, and organized medical convoys to give aid to their besieged neighbor and its residents.

In fact, relative to other EU member states – namely Italy, Germany, and Finland, France, Romania, and Sweden – Poland citizens indicated the greatest willingness to host Ukrainian refugees, according to a poll taken by the European Council on Foreign Relations in late January.

Why the radical shift? Experts attribute Poland’s initial embrace of Ukrainian refugees to the pre-existing Ukrainian population in the country, as well as to historical and cultural ties. In other words: proximity and similarity.

Despite the recent virulence aimed at Middle Eastern refugees, experts say anti-immigration attitudes aren’t long-standing in Polish society and have roots in the Syrian refugee crisis that shook the European Union just seven years ago.

“If you look at the 1990s and early 2000s, migration was not a politicized topic… At that stage, Poles were getting more and more open toward other nations,” says Marta Kindler, a sociologist and research fellow at the University of Warsaw’s Center of Migration Research.

Then came the 2015 migration crisis and the election the same year of Poland’s current right-wing, populist Law and Justice Party, whose platform stoked the flames of nationalism and xenophobia with alarmist tales of “severe diseases” from non-European migrants.

Following the party’s significant victory, Kindler says that “hostile attitudes, especially toward Muslim migrants” were allowed to openly proliferate among Poles, resulting years later, during the Belarusian conflict, in what she believes to be “racism at the border.”

The current migrant crisis, of course, is sending thousands of mostly white, mostly Christian refugees to the border. And while several factors are likely contributing to the warm embrace Poles are giving to Ukrainian refugees, race is likely one of them, Kindler says.

“It is clear that this is unfortunately on a racist and ethnic basis,” she says. “This is an issue that I think is right now really striking.”

Poles are fairly accustomed to seeing Ukrainians inside their borders, and experts say that familiarity as well as the cultural similarities shared by the countries may be the driving forces behind the altruism exhibited by Poles this time around.

Though Poland remains a fairly homogenous society, Ukrainians make up the largest group of foreigners in the country, at 57%. The Polish government says 300,000 Ukrainians currently hold residence permits in the country. However many more are likely in Poland through the visa-free agreement between the two countries. The New York Times put the total number of Ukrainian citizens in the country before the Russian invasion at around 1 million.

Many came for economic opportunities following the fall of the Iron Curtain. At the time, Poland in particular had developed a reputation as a country with ample economic opportunities and higher wages relative to some of its neighbors.

“[During the 1990s] the situation in Ukraine was very poor,” Kindler says. “It was not so much that people were unemployed in Ukraine, but that they earned so little that they were not able to support their households.”

Ukrainians once again set out for Poland in large numbers in 2014 and 2014 as a result of their country’s economic and security situation. The two countries also have some linguistic overlap. As of 2020, at least a third of Ukrainians had at least a basic command of the Polish language, according to a survey.

Another factor likely influencing how Poland is reacting to Ukrainian refugees is the shared concern both countries have about Russian expansion.

“There’s also the geographical proximity to the current events in Ukraine, which makes people also feel personally threatened,” says Hanne Beirens, a director at the Migration Policy Institute Europe. “There’s explosions only 70 kilometers away from the Polish border. I think that’s also feeding into how people are responding.”

For many Poles, the specter of Soviet oppression still takes a toll on the collective psyche.

“There’s also a historical dimension that weighs in into this, which is the memory of suffered repressions of Polish citizens [in the days of the Soviet Union]. So that’s very much still alive in the collective memory in Poland,” Beirens says. “Hence, there’s this kind of sympathy or empathy with what Ukrainians are experiencing at this very moment in time.”

But as the crisis continues to unfold and the numbers swell, many wonder whether the goodwill will persist.

Despite the current rapport between the countries, the relationship between them has historically been fraught. Tensions were briefly reignited in 2016 following a decision by Poland to label the killings of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during World War II as a “genocide.” During 2016 and 2017, violence against Ukrainians escalated, with more than 44,000 cases of hate crimes against Ukrainians in a single Polish region.

“I’m just hoping for society in general, this solidarity that is being shown right now will not be temporary, and that it will not fade away,” Kindler says.

Source: Inside Poland’s Drastic Immigration Reversal

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with ,

ICYMI: Nawaz-The freedom convoy, and now Putin, are making Muslims look good

2022/03/08 Leave a comment

Of note:

Over the past few weeks, I watched the siege of Ottawa along with millions of Canadians. Trucks choked the downtown, crowds waved giant Canadian flags, firecrackers went off at night, men lounged in hot tubs and hot dogs were grilled on the BBQ, all against a backdrop of incessant, deafening honking. It was like witnessing a block party, crashed by middle-aged white men with a penchant for military fatigues and giving the occasional sieg heil.

I never thought I’d live to see the day when words generally ascribed to Muslims would be used to describe white people. I could hear the incredulousness in reporters’ voices, because for them, it was the first time the narrative of who is dangerous was changing.

I was incredulous, too: Listening to flabbergasted news pundits using phrases such as “radicalized,” “domestic terrorists” and “threat to democracy,” while expressing fear that they were going to influence others to destabilize countries around the world, shocked and surprised me.

Why? Because diversity and inclusion are finally being extended to the world of terrorism.

Newspapers used to be filled with stories about radicalized young Muslims streaming into Syria to join ISIS. People want to believe that Muslims naturally gravitate toward violent groups, turn to anarchy and try to destroy democratic institutions. As Azadeh Moaveni writes in Guest House for Young Widows, her seminal book about political machinations in the Middle East: “Slowly ISIS became, in the Western imagination, a satanic force unlike anything civilization had encountered since it began recording histories of combat with the Trojan Wars.” 

And then Donald Trump was elected president. Overnight news stories involving Muslim terrorists were replaced with stories about QAnon and the Proud Boys. It was as if our brown fairy godmother waved her magic wand and said, “Muslims will no longer dominate the headlines.” We had done our time. Media were breathlessly covering white men in buzz cuts roasting marshmallows over a burning cross. For the first time, I could point to white extremists, such as those who helped hold Ottawa hostage for weeks, not to mention the rioters who, a year ago, ransacked Capitol Hill, leaving five people dead.

White supremacists are changing the global mythology that has always pitted people of colour against the forces of civility and order. When the media used words such as “insurrection” and “occupation,” for the self-described “freedom convoy,” I was astonished. I’ve never lived in an era when white people were watching other white people behaving badly on a such an epic scale. They were making Muslims look good.

It’s a relief because study after study has shown that terror attacks by Muslims receive far more attention than those by non-Muslims, which in turn fuels Islamophobic hate crimes. Canadian Muslims are all too familiar with what happens with such oversaturated coverage.

In 2017 Alexandre Bissonnette, a young, radicalized Quebecker, went on a shooting rampage in Quebec City’s largest mosque, killing six men. He said in court that he wanted to save Canadians from Muslim immigration and was visibly taken aback when the interrogating officer mentioned that he might be charged with terrorism. Just last year, another white man, 20-year-old Nathaniel Veltman, hit with his truck a Muslim family taking a walk in London, Ont., killing four of its members.

I am often asked if I thought that creating Little Mosque on the Prairie would help humanize Muslims. This question has always rankled me. Muslims are already human, so why do we need to prove it?

But it turns out we do. Sohad Murrar, an assistant professor of psychology at Governors State University, organized a study where one group of people watched six episodes of Little Mosque while another group watched episodes of Friends. Dr. Murrar said that those who watched my show “were a lot more positive towards Muslims both on explicit and implicit measures of prejudice” – results that remained true weeks afterward. Unsurprisingly, the control group that watched Friends showed no change in bias against Muslims.

This bias plays out in the way white Ukrainian refugees are being treated. “These are not the refugees we are used to,” said Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov earlier this week. “These people are intelligent, they are educated people. This is not the refugee wave we have been used to: people whose identity we are not sure of, people with unclear pasts, people who could have been terrorists.” 

We have seen media reports on how Black and brown refugees are being pushed back at border crossings to leave Ukraine, denied food and water, and sleeping outside in the cold, while white Ukrainians are given priority on trains and buses. This give credence to how non-white migrants are seen as a threat. The hashtag #AfricansinUkraine and social-media handles such as @blackpeopleinukraine have sprung up to highlight these double standards.

As pundits talk about the dangerous rise of white nationalism in Canada, and how Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion has destabilized the world in a way that no other conflict has threatened to do in recent memory, I hope this is an opportunity for people to reflect on how Muslim people have been treated. My greatest hope is that despite the differences in colour and faith, we begin to see each other as people deserving full and complete humanity, willing to give everyone the refuge and support they need.

Zarqa Nawaz is a writer and filmmaker who created Little Mosque on the Prairie. She is the author of the new novel Jameela Green Ruins Everything.

Source: The freedom convoy, and now Putin, are making Muslims look good

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Globe editorial: Three things Canada must do to help Ukraine, and Ukrainians [immigration section]

2022/03/05 Leave a comment

The Globe, long an advocate for increased immigration and supporter of the Century Initiative and Business Council of Canada and other advocates, becomes realistic in noting that large scale increases in Ukrainian temporary and permanent immigration should be within the current high levels, not additional to them:

… Immigration: Unless by some miracle the war ends soon, a flood of refugees is coming. As of Thursday morning, the United Nations estimated that a million Ukrainians had left the country. The UN says as many as four million may leave – though if this war is anywhere near as destructive as in Chechnya or Syria, that is likely to be an underestimate.

In response, Canada must be generous and smart.

The Trudeau government said on Thursday that it will create a new visa category, allowing an unlimited number of Ukrainians to come to Canada to live, work or study for a period of up to two years. The government said it will also create an expedited immigration process for Ukrainians fleeing the country, and who have family in Canada.

Some have urged the government to simply drop the visa requirement and allow anyone from Ukraine to buy a plane ticket to Canada, no questions asked. That would be a mistake. The government says it worries about nefarious actors, including people who fought in pro-Russian militias, taking advantage of a zero-security approach. It’s right to worry.

Canada only allows visa-free travel for people from a limited number of countries where the risk of a vacationer choosing to overstay is low. But this program is not about Ukrainians holidaying in Canada – obviously not. It is about allowing people who are basically refugees to come to Canada for two years, after which, depending on the situation back home, many will surely apply to become refugee claimants or immigrants.

Canada always vets people before allowing them to relocate, temporarily or permanently, from overseas. There’s no reason to abandon that approach here.

In terms of immigration and refugee application made directly from Europe, Canada can and should welcome a large number of Ukrainians in the months to come. It’s a chance to make some lemonade, for Canada and Ukrainians, out of this lemon of a situation. However, given Canada’s housing crisis, and already high immigration levels, a big jump in immigrants from Ukraine should be counterbalanced by a temporary lowering of arrivals from other sources.

Canada should also do everything it can to entice the most educated and skilled Ukrainian exiles to choose our country. That would be good for us, and for them. More on all of this, next week.

Source: Globe editorial: Three things Canada must do to help Ukraine, and Ukrainians [immigration section]

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Federal government warns Canadians against fighting for Russia in Ukraine

2022/03/05 Leave a comment

Of note. Apart from some of the legal issues raised in the article, always felt from a citizenship perspective that taking up arms for another country suggested a higher loyalty to that country than Canada (which country are you willing to die for?). The citizenship oath requires one to “faithfully observe the laws of Canada,” which again, as noted by the experts cited in the article, have considerable ambiguity.

And of course, there are differences in terms of which military one fights for (formal allies such as NATO members or informal ones such as Ukraine and more arguably Israel) or whether, more questionable, fighting for foreign brigades or irregular forces (fighting for a listed entity like ISIS would be in contravention of Canadian laws):

Ottawa is warning that Canadians who decide to fight for Russia in Ukraine could face severe consequences, even as it acknowledges for the first time uncertainties about whether it is legal to bear arms for the Ukrainian side.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland delivered the warning to anyone contemplating joining the Russian military invasion of Ukraine on Thursday as she announced more Canadian sanctions on Moscow and support for Kyiv in response to that attack.

Asked at a news conference whether Canadians who pick up arms for Russia would be prosecuted, Freeland said: “We are very clear that this war is illegal. And Canada will take a very appropriately severe view of anyone who is fighting this war.”

Yet federal ministers appeared less confident about the legality of fighting for Ukraine, whose government appealed last weekend for foreign volunteers to join an “international brigade” to help defend the country from Russia.

Numerous Canadians have since said they plan to answer the call to arms, with some having already flown overseas.

Appearing alongside Freeland, Defence Minister Anita Anand told reporters that while she understood the desire that many Canadians have to bear arms for Ukraine, “the legalities of the situation … are indeterminant at this time.”

The federal government had previously avoided directly addressing the legality of Canadians fighting in Ukraine, or whether it supports those who want to do so. Federal ministers instead couched the issue as a matter of personal risk.

That stood in stark contrast to the United Kingdom and Australia, whose governments have noted the potential legal issues that their citizens could face if they fight in a conflict that does not involve their countries.

Anand instead encouraged people to enlist with the Canadian Armed Forces, which has launched a new recruitment drive as it struggles with a shortfall of thousands of active service members while facing growing demands at home and abroad.

“If there are Canadians who are interested in the Armed Forces, the Canadian Armed Forces is currently recruiting,” said Anand, who worked as a lawyer and legal scholar at the University of Toronto prior to entering politics.

“And we would very much welcome applications from across the country to the Canadian Armed Forces, where we have had a training mission in Ukraine since 2015 and have trained over 33,000 Ukrainian soldiers.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau later sidestepped a similar question about the legality of Canadians fighting for Ukraine, referring back to the government’s previous warnings about the risks of travel in Ukraine before adding that he was not a lawyer.

While Freeland did not say whether Canadians who fight for Russia could be prosecuted, author and historian Tyler Wentzell suspected federal lawyers are now taking a hard, long look at the Foreign Enlistment Act and how it can apply today.

Passed in 1937, the act was intended to keep Canada neutral during the Spanish Civil War and basically banned joining a foreign military to fight a country Canada considers “friendly.” Those who violate the law can face a fine of up to $2,000 and two years in prison.

But exactly what counts as a friendly country is not defined, and Wentzell noted the act specifically gives cabinet the power and flexibility to determine which foreign conflicts are allowed or banned.

“They can issue regulations that unequivocally say: You can’t join the Russian Armed Forces,” said Wentzell, who has studied Canadians’ involvement in previous foreign conflicts and written a book on Canadians fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

“They can also issue regulations that say: We will not prosecute anyone, or we require ministerial authorization to prosecute anyone for the following offences.”

Some experts have noted that certain paramilitary units in Ukraine, and even some segments of the Ukrainian military, have been linked to far-right extremism and hate, and even accused of past war crimes.

That has raised concern about Canadians who decide to fight against Russia either knowingly or unknowingly becoming involved with such units and becoming complicit in such activities and later held to account.

Wentzell said it is noteworthy that the government is not only discouraging Canadians from fighting in Ukraine, “they’re not promising anything. In fact, what they’re really saying is that they’re not promising anything.”

Source: Federal government warns Canadians against fighting for Russia in Ukraine

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Nicolas: Le choix des mots

2022/03/04 Leave a comment

Another good column on the differences on how groups are portrayed differently, particularly Ukrainian compared to other refugees:

L’invasion de l’Ukraine par la Russie n’a débuté qu’il y a une semaine. L’issue de la situation demeure incertaine. Toutefois, il apparaît déjà clair qu’il s’agit d’un conflit pas comme les autres, et surtout d’un conflit dont on ne parle pas comme les autres.

D’abord, on assiste à un mouvement de solidarité quasi unanime envers le peuple ukrainien. Au Conseil des droits de l’homme de l’ONU mardi, la presque totalité des diplomates a quitté la salle lorsque le ministre des Affaires étrangères russe a commencé son allocution. Des manifestations en appui aux Ukrainiens sont organisées partout dans le monde, et la colère face à l’invasion de l’armée russe semble tout aussi forte même au Canada. Un sondage de la firme Maru publié cette semaine montre que 91 % des Canadiens sont en « opposition totale avec la tyrannie de la Russie de Vladimir Poutine ». J’aurais du mal à nommer une autre situation de guerre où l’opinion publique mondiale s’est montrée aussi campée, aussi rapidement, contre une agression armée. Il semble plus simple de décrire l’horreur d’une bombe qui tombe sur des civils innocents lorsque cette bombe n’est pas, par exemple, américaine.

Ensuite, la vague de solidarité pro-ukrainienne ne semble pas, du moins pour le moment, se traduire en tsunami de haine envers le peuple russe ou les personnes d’origine russe. Plusieurs leaders importants ont donné rapidement le ton, à commencer par le président ukrainien lui-même, Volodymyr Zelensky, suivi par la vice-première ministre du Canada, Chrystia Freeland, aussi d’origine ukrainienne. Tous deux ont lancé des messages au cours des derniers jours pour marteler que le conflit en cours n’est pas avec le peuple russe, mais avec le président Vladimir Poutine et son entourage. On relaie également des images de manifestations antiguerre dans les grandes villes de Russie — des rassemblements qui seraient certainement encore plus importants si ce n’était de la violence de la répression policière dans ce pays. À la télévision, on semble éviter d’utiliser des formulations comme « les Russes » pour désigner des responsables de l’agression militaire, préférant parler de Vladimir Poutine lui-même ou de son régime.

Cette conscience du poids des mots et du risque de dérapage est rafraîchissante. On sait que les débuts de la pandémie dans la région de Wuhan et que les relations diplomatiques pour le moins tendues avec la Chine ont donné lieu à toutes sortes de commentaires sur « les Chinois » et à une montée des crimes haineux envers les personnes d’origine asiatique.

On sait aussi qu’un nombre déplorable de nos concitoyens n’hésitent pas à dériver d’une critique du régime saoudien ou d’un groupe comme Daech vers des généralisations sur « les Arabes » ou sur « les musulmans ». Pas plus tard que l’été dernier, des imbéciles ont aussi commis une série d’actes antisémites dans l’arrondissement de Saint-Laurent, comme s’il s’agissait là d’une manière de critiquer l’État d’Israël. Et on se rappelle que, durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le Canada a notamment cru bon d’interner ses propres citoyens d’origine japonaise.

Puisque la liste de tristes précédents est longue, le souci actuel des mots détonne. Je ne vois personne de sérieux lancer l’hypothèse que l’autoritarisme de Poutine trouverait ses sources dans une tare particulière de la religion orthodoxe ou que la culture russe prendrait ses racines dans un éloge unique de la violence. L’analyse porte surtout sur les enjeux politiques, économiques et humanitaires. Enfin, croisons les doigts pour que ça dure.

Finalement, des réfugiés ne se sont pas présentés comme des menaces à refouler aux frontières. Le président de la Bulgarie, Roumen Radev, a peut-être eu la déclaration la plus candide à ce sujet. « Ce sont des Européens », a-t-il lancé plus tôt cette semaine. « Ces personnes sont intelligentes, éduquées… Ce ne sont pas les vagues de réfugiés auxquelles nous sommes habitués, des gens à l’identité incertaine, aux passés incertains, qui auraient même pu être des terroristes. » Des commentateurs, des experts et des journalistes ont aussi parlé de leur choc devant la guerre touchant le monde « civilisé » — omettant de transmettre du même coup une liste des régions du monde « barbares ». Cette nouvelle ouverture aux victimes de la guerre semble donc venir de l’identité des Ukrainiens : on leur ouvre les portes au nom de leur européanité et non de leur humanité. Le mauvais traitement réservé aux Africains et aux Asiatiques résidant en Ukraine à la frontière polonaise, dénoncé mardi par le Haut-Commissariat aux réfugiés de l’ONU, vient d’ailleurs démonter cette nuance importante.

L’humanisation particulière du peuple ukrainien joue un rôle positif très important dans le sort de cette population. Il y a la guerre, les blessés, la mort, les familles déchirées. Il y aura encore peut-être la faim, le manque d’eau et de ressources, et on ne sait quoi encore. Aucun individu ne devrait avoir à endurer ces horreurs, déjà. Il est encore plus abject d’avoir à affronter en plus, au milieu de ces tourments, l’indifférence du monde, ou son hostilité. Pour le moment, le respect de la dignité de la population ukrainienne semble être une préoccupation centrale d’une grande partie de la planète. Espérons que ça durera et que d’autres victimes des guerres contemporaines pourront bientôt en bénéficier.

Je ne veux pas ici faire un portrait jovialiste de la couverture de la guerre en Ukraine. L’actualité des dernières semaines est très difficile, ses implications sont historiques, et les défis qu’elle implique sont nombreux. Cela dit, j’ai rarement vu un souci d’humanisation aussi généralisé des parties prenantes d’un conflit, et je crois qu’il est important de le souligner. Plusieurs semblent regarder ce qui se passe dans l’est de l’Europe en se disant : « Ces gens sont comme moi, ça pourrait être moi. » La vérité, c’est que chaque être humain est en bonne partie comme soi, et qu’il offre un miroir de soi. C’est une chose de le dire, et une autre de transformer son regard sur les nouvelles internationales à partir de ce principe.

Source: Le choix des mots

Filed under Multiculturalism, Refugees Tagged with ,

Mood shifts in Polish border town as alt-right supporters go after dark-skinned refugees from Ukraine

2022/03/04 Leave a comment

Sigh….:

The Przemyśl train station is a spot that’s come to be known in the last six days for its heartwarming scenes of volunteers welcoming tired and hungry refugees with a cup of hot tea and a smile. On a grey Wednesday morning, however, under a brooding, overcast sky, tension is building on the ground.

Yellow-vested volunteers, who days before held their positions alone outside, are now crowded out by a heavy police presence. Officers in green and blue uniforms pace through the parking lot of the square, and tall guards frame the entryway to the platforms, scanning everyone who makes their way in and out of the building.

“It’s really scary now,” says Soufiane, an Algerian volunteer who’s been offering translation services in Arabic, French, English and Polish. The change, he explains, was the immediate result of the actions carried out the night before by a group of alt-right supporters targeting refugees who fled the Russian invasion.

Tuesday evening, a Polish outlet shared video footage of a dozen black-hooded men descending on the train station. Their targets, explained the reporter who was quick enough to pull out her phone when she saw the men rushing the station, were the arriving refugees. But, she adds, only the ones who “looked like they weren’t Ukrainian.”

“They began shouting at the group of three Indian men, ‘go back to the railway station, go back to your country,’ ” says Anna Mikulska, a reporter with oko.agency.

Among hundreds of thousands of refugees from Ukraine arriving in Poland are Africans, Indians and others lacking Ukrainian passports. Some reported racist treatment by officials on the Ukrainian side.

Around the same time that night and a bit further down the road, a similar scene, albeit more contained, began playing out in the parking lot of the relief centre in the town of Medyka. There, we saw a similar group of balaclava-clad men prowling the aisles where volunteers were offering free food and clothing while a determined line of police followed closely behind.

While there were no reports of anything serious happening at Medyka, the same cannot be said for Przemyśl.

“We were just going to our car … when we were stopped by some people,” starts one of the three German men in the video captured by OKO. “They slapped us and tried to hit us.”

The group of Germans came to Poland with the NGO Humanity First to assist with volunteer efforts. The attacking football hooligans — as they’re called locally here — appeared to mark them because of their skin colour.

“We’re just trying to find another way to get to our car,” says the German man, timidly.

Football hooligans, Przemysław Witkowski tells me the morning after the incident, are called that because they’re all fans of specific teams. “But they all share similar affiliations of nationalist and anti-refugee sentiment,” says the academic, who specializes in studying the far right in Poland.

“These people represent a small minority of the Polish people,” he underscored. “But they’re still out there.”

Groups like these organize primarily on platforms like Facebook groups to communicate. In recent days, they have begun using the social media tool to co-ordinate street patrols.

“Two beige on beige walking down the street,” reads one of the posts uncovered by a freelance Polish journalist who specializes in tracking the movements of these groups.

This kind of sentiment isn’t new, Witkowski explains. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine prompted masses of people to arrive on Poland’s doorstep, these groups were rife with anti-refugee sentiment.

The recent violence can be traced back to a series of social media posts that began making the rounds in the last few days. The tweets and Facebook posts falsely allege that women and children are being targeted by those who had recently arrived from the Przemyśl train station.

“They then see it as a call to arms, to protect their Polish women,” says Mikulska, the reporter. The pressure from these posts eventually prompted the local police to issue a tweet to dispel the rumours.

The tweet says there is “false information in social media that there have been serious criminal offenses in Przemyśl and border counties: burglaries, assaults and rape. It’s not true. The police did not record an increased number of crimes in connection with the situation at the border.”

Some are attributing this flurry of fake news accounts to a Russia-fuelled disinformation effort. Witkowski agrees that, while he can’t confirm these specific stories were plants, that kind of strategy has been used in the past by the Kremlin and would be advantageous to them now.

“Presenting Poland as racist and aggressive towards other countries is exactly the kind of soft power that Russia could wield to destabilize the country’s standing on the global stage,” he said.

Indeed, later that day, Witkowski sends along the latest figures from the Polish Institute for Internet and Social Media Research, which found more than 120,000 attempts at disinformation in Poland under the hashtags #Ukraine, #Russia and #war in the last 24 hours. Much of the content related to fuelling anti-refugee hysteria.

The trains are still arriving in Przemyśl — 47,000 people in the last 24 hours, Soufiane tells me — but the feeling on the ground has certainly shifted. Blanket-huddled figures are now being quickly shuffled onto buses to their next destination and volunteers are encouraging people to move onto bigger cities like Warsaw and Krakow instead of lingering.

“I’m afraid today because I’m thinking: what if they think I’m a refugee?” Sanoufie tells me as we jockey between two officers in their own blue balaclavas. He’s been living in Poland for seven years, and this is the first time such thoughts have entered his mind.

“I took the bus home last night. Walking just didn’t feel safe.”

Source: Mood shifts in Polish border town as alt-right supporters go after dark-skinned refugees from Ukraine

Filed under Racism, Refugees Tagged with , , ,

Wagner: Work permit change urged for Afghans now needed for Ukrainians to come to Canada

2022/03/04 Leave a comment

More pressures:

Many thousands are leaving Ukraine with heartbreaking separations from spouses, parents and homes. Meanwhile, in Canada, a single change to work permits can support people in far larger numbers to come here after being forced from their homes. That change is waiving a rule that requires someone to prove they can leave Canada again.

All applicants to temporary visas must demonstrate their ability and willingness to leave Canada by showing they have somewhere else to go, even if they already applied for permanent residence, or intend to.

This is an old rule that predates Canada’s goal of retaining its international workforce, once they arrive, through permanent residence programs. If it’s arcane for others, it’s absurd and prohibitive for those in refugee circumstances.

Among the Afghans who left as the Taliban took power in August were lawyers, cooks, electricians, and software developers — skills needed across Canada — yet so many are in a humanitarian queue instead of here on work permits. The same barrier faces Ukrainians.

In effect, Canada’s largest immigration option is closed as soon as someone needs it most. In 2019, before the pandemic, Canada welcomed over 404,000 people on work permits, many of whom go on to become permanent residents. For comparison, the refugee resettlement target the same year was 46,450.

blob:https://multiculturalmeanderings.wordpress.com/27e4c896-162d-472c-8c0f-cf96eb3fe425

Only recently has the idea of using skilled immigration as an additional option to refugee resettlement gained traction globally and in Canada. Canada first launched the Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot in 2018 as a test to help people in refugee circumstances, who got job offers in Canada, to work through barriers, such as needing a valid passport and police certificates, which are impossible for many in displacement to get.

The test cases were a runaway success. But for all the pilot’s innovation, its main drawback is significant. The flexibility introduced, like accepting expired passports, only applies to permanent residence pathways and not to work permits and the barriers that come with them.

This disadvantages displaced talent for two main reasons: A lack of speed and space. Skilled immigration largely relies on a job offer and most employers can’t hire someone on a permanent residence timeline, which is eight months or longer. And only a portion of skilled immigration space is left open when work permits are off the table.

We analyzed 66 permanent residence pathways and found just 15 are free of a requirement for in-Canada work experience or points systems that reward it. In other words, 77 per cent of these pathways are either inaccessible by or disadvantageous to displaced applicants who can‘t access work permits.

Many people displaced by conflict have in-demand skills and, despite the timeline, incredible Canadian teams are already hiring and relocating them. More companies want to. We need to unlock these opportunities.

Work permits promise speed and scale. By waiving a single requirement and extending the flexibility now in place for displaced applicants under an innovative pilot, Canada can open a major route to safety and opportunity for Ukrainians, Afghans and others before them.

Dana Wagner is co-founder and managing director of TalentLift, a non-profit talent agency.

Source: Work permit change urged for Afghans now needed for Ukrainians to come to Canada

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , , ,

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