Canada welcomes refugees, but shuts the door on asylum seekers: Vic Satzewich

2017/08/10 Leave a comment

A reminder to those critical from the right of the Liberal government’s approach of the alternative critique from the left, suggesting that the Liberals remain in the centre:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen sound a lot like former Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenney these days when it comes to immigration. Last Friday the Prime Minister said, “Protecting Canadians’ confidence in the integrity of our system allows us to continue to be open, and that’s exactly what I plan to continue to do.” Over the weekend, both the Prime Minister and the Immigration Minister counselled Haitians thinking about crossing the U.S. border into Canada to stay where they are and make their refugee claim in the United States. Many of Mr. Kenney’s public comments about changes to the immigration system introduced under his watch were also peppered with references to the need to maintain the integrity of, and public confidence in, the immigration system.

Maintaining the “integrity of the immigration system” is in part the shared code language for how our governments (Conservative or Liberal) think about asylum seekers. Canada may love refugees like Syrians who are selected and screened abroad before they set foot in the country, but the same cannot be said about asylum seekers who wash up on our shores in boats, or who walk across our border with the U.S.

Canada’s approach to asylum seekers pokes holes in the image of the country as inherently welcoming to immigrants and refugees. The fear and panic Canadians expressed about the arrival of 174 Sikhs off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1987, the arrival of “ghost ships” from Fujian, China in 1999, and 492 Tamils aboard the MV Sun Sea in 2010, bear little resemblance to Mr. Trudeau’s tweet in January where he told the world that, “To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you.” Indeed, a 2015 Environics poll found that nearly half of Canadians believe that refugees coming to Canada do not have a legitimate claim.

Though the policy climate in the United States toward immigrants and refugees is changing for the worse, I am not optimistic that the Liberals will do much to make it easier for Haitians and others to make a refugee claim in Canada.

The immigration department is obsessed – and this is not too strong a word – with preventing the arrival in Canada of “jumpers” (their shorthand for “queue jumpers.”) One of the responsibilities of a visa officer is to try to predict whether a person who applies for a visitor visa will make an asylum claim after they arrive. If they think a person might “jump,” they can refuse to issue a visa. Even though making an asylum claim in Canada is not illegal, Canadian authorities dislike it when individuals use the visitor visa system to get to Canada to make a refugee claim.

Nor am I optimistic that the Liberals will rescind the Safe Third Country Agreement. Doing so would be a slap in the face to American authorities because it would send a very clear message that Canada does not have confidence that U.S. authorities can deal fairly with asylum claims. Some might say that with the current chaos in the White House, the U.S. will not notice, but at a time when there are heightened tensions about immigration in that country, you bet they will. I also doubt whether the Liberals are going to want to muddy the waters as we renegotiate NAFTA.

Nor is the government likely to close the “loophole” in the Safe Third Country Agreement that allows individuals to make an asylum claim if they cross into Canada outside of an official port of entry. To do so would involve an unprecedented militarization of the Canadian border and most Canadians are not ready to see the spectacle of the RCMP or CBSA officials physically preventing asylum seekers from crossing into Canada. We would look a lot like Hungary and its approach to preventing the arrival of asylum seekers.

The government of Canada has benefited more from the Safe Third Country Agreement than the United States. The two countries entered into the agreement for different reasons. For the U.S., it was part of a post-9/11 effort to enhance security. For Canada, it was an effort to stop asylum seekers from entering from the United States. One study found that before the Safe Third Country Agreement was put into effect, between 8,000 and 13,000 refugee claimants entered Canada annually from the United States. During the same period (1995-2001), only about 200 refugee claimants entered the United States from Canada.

The sad reality is that Canada’s welcoming approach to immigrants and refugees comes at the expense of asylum seekers.

Source: Canada welcomes refugees, but shuts the door on asylum seekers – The Globe and Mail

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Kellie Leitch misses the point about immigration: Vic Satzewich

2016/11/14 Leave a comment

Worth reading in its entirety. Point regarding some of weaknesses of standardized language testing also relevant to citizenship:

It is gratifying to know that Kellie Leitch has read my book Points of Entry: How Canada’s Visa Officers Decide Who Gets In, holding it up and referring to it in Wednesday night’s Conservative leadership debate and featuring it on her website. She focuses on two of several findings from my research: that visa officers conduct very few face-to-face interviews and that they are under pressure to meet processing targets. But she missed the broader point of the book, which is pro-immigration.

Her interest in creating policy to screen immigrants for Canadian values sounds like a return to a time when visa officers assigned points for what was then called “personal suitability.” But there was little consistency in how immigration officers assigned such points.

Not surprisingly, applicants and their immigration lawyers and consultants appealed refusals because they felt those points were inappropriately assigned and, during the 1980s and 90s, the Federal Court was clogged with hundreds of appeals.

By 2002, the difficulty of defending those appeals was so high that judgments about personal suitability were taken out of the assessment. Senior officials within the immigration department were also uncomfortable with the lack of consistency and transparency by which those points were applied. There is little reason to believe that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada will be better positioned to standardize what they look for when it comes to screening for conformity with “Canadian values.”

Even if it were practical to screen for “Canadian values,” coming up with a universal set of our nation’s values would be impossible.

The French had considerable difficulty doing this in 2009 when Nicholas Sarkozy launched a “national identity” debate. After three months of divisive debate that involved more than 100 townhall-style meetings, no consensus emerged. The only concrete policy recommendation that resulted from the debate was that the French flag ought to be flown in schools.

Likewise, interviewing every applicant for a visa would bring our immigration system to a grinding halt because interviews take time and resources. The immigration processing system is already slow, and to interview the 1.3 million people who apply every year for a visa to test for Canadian values would be a logistical nightmare.

Do I think we need more and better screening of immigrants and should we do more interviews with visa applicants?

In my research I did find it surprising that we do not interview many visa applicants any more. In some cases, more interviews would be useful, but not as a blanket policy, and not as a way to screen for Canadian values.

One place where interviews might be useful is with language assessment. The immigration department has yet to find the perfect mechanism to assess language skills. Today, it uses standardized language tests administered by third parties. Whether a passing grade on such a test gives a true indication of English or French language abilities is of some debate. Language skills make an obvious difference in terms of how successfully individuals make out in the job market and in school. Can interviews with applicants be used to help inform decisions about an individual’s language abilities? Perhaps, but even that has its pitfalls when it comes to transparency and consistency of decision-making.

One thing that the immigration department does not do very well, however, is to prepare newcomers for life in Canada, particularly in terms of how difficult the first few years will be.

We select immigrants for high levels of education and training and they come already prepared to work hard to achieve their dreams, but we do a woefully bad job telling them how difficult it will be to get a job that they are trained to do once in Canada.

Interviews with skilled worker applicants could have value if those interviews focused on giving detailed and practical advice and directions about how to negotiate the credential recognition process and the vagaries of the Canadian job market.

What Ms. Leitch is proposing is a solution in search of a problem. I would encourage her to read more academic research by social scientists, and even “commit sociology.” If she does, she will find that there is considerable evidence that immigrants do actually integrate into Canadian society.

Source: Kellie Leitch misses the point about immigration – The Globe and Mail

And a good interview with Satzewich in iPolitics:

Author cited by Leitch torpedoes her pitch for immigrant ‘values’ screening

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