Thread: Trump, Trudeau, and Immigration Board: Purgatory / Ship of Fools.


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Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on :
 
More refugees flee US for Canada

Trump wants to admit fewer refugees into the United States, stop illegal immigration completely, and likely reduce the levels of legal immigration as well. Trudeau wants to welcome refugees and immigrants. Looks like there is an obvious solution. Canada can accept refugees from Trump's America. The US can even give illegal immigrants the option of being deported to their nation of origin or immigrating to Canada instead. Trump wins. Trudeau wins. Plus, we get to test the conventional wisdom about mass immigration and multiculturalism.
 
Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :
 
quote:
Trudeau wants to welcome refugees and immigrants.
Thing is, if we're talking about refugees, the ones making it to Canada under that label would still have to prove that they're refugees, ie. that they're being persecuted in their homeland. And, as far as I know, "I wanna live in the US but Trump won't let me" doesn't count as persecution. You'd have to show that, after being deported back to your country-of-origin, you'd be faced with threats to your well-being. (And no, dismal economic prospects don't cut it)

Of course, if the US is taking in ABSOLUTELY NO REFUGEES, and Canada(as is true) allows refugee claimaints a certain period to make their case to the government, than moving to Canada might be a better prospect, in the event of Trump's ban staying in place forever.

The question then becomes(and I think this is where you were mischieviously leading us, god bless your heart) will most Canadians be happy about such an influx? Hard to say. I think a lot would depend on what sort of people are coming up, and what perception the public has about how much control the government has over the influx.

When Canada agreed to take in all those Syrians last year, the government followed what is apparently UN protocol and only admitted people who were tied to families, ie. no single males(with an exception for persecuted gays). I heard at least one Canadian say "I didn't like the idea at first, but when I saw that they weren't taking single men, I changed my mind. Now I think it's cool". Maybe the government was just following UN protocol, but I think they were happy to have the perception float about that they were deliberately keeping out big, bad, dark, middle-eastern males.

[ 21. February 2017, 16:19: Message edited by: Stetson ]
 
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 
For the sake of clarity, a "refugee", under the Convention (1951) and Protocol (1967) Relating to the Status of Refugees, is a person who:

quote:
. . . owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.
So five basic components:

Just so we're clear on terminology.
 
Posted by Augustine the Aleut (# 1472) on :
 
The Syrian intake was not based on a UN protocol, but on a Canadian government determination that it would accept families and single males only when there was a clear risk of persecution. Most Canadians were happy with this and the UNHCR happy as punch that somebody was taking any Syrians.

The situation of claimants arriving from the US is problematic as we currently have this "safe third country" agreement with the US. While I'm not certain I would have agreed with this, having seen how US domestic politics entered into refugee determination in the 1980s and 1990s, my US activist friends tell me that there is a much more robust immigration courts structure than in the past.

To what extent these claimants have: a) a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries under the Convention, and b) a well-founded fear that the US is not living up to its responsibilities under the Convention, are both questions to look at. For b), just because President Trump would rather not be decent does not mean that this has become reality.

In the meantime, it gives us some Norman Rockwell videos of US Border Patrol agents handing baby carriages over the line to Mounties.
 
Posted by Anselmina (# 3032) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Beeswax Altar:
Trump wins. Trudeau wins. Plus, we get to test the conventional wisdom about mass immigration and multiculturalism.
So long as vulnerable needy refugees win, that would be the main thing. Trump, of course, would be depriving his nation of the blessing of welcoming refugee input and along with it God's blessing, too, for fulfilling His will. But I doubt if Trump is too worried about seeking God's blessing on any part of his already gilt-edged life.

As for experiencing the realities of mass immigration and multi-culturalism. Unless history has been re-written, I would've thought the USA was already a prime example of what happens when huge numbers of foreigners from across the globe occupy the same land-mass. The land-mass becomes a huge world-power and occupies a massive political and economic presence on the world stage. That's how it worked for Britain, too, again unless history has re-written itself.

The problems with multi-culturalism and immigration only seem to kick in when we ignore historic lessons, begin to think of ourselves as somehow separate from our past and and separate from the people who put us here; and refuse to integrate sensible and inclusively.
 
Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :
 
Augustine wrote:

quote:
The Syrian intake was not based on a UN protocol, but on a Canadian government determination that it would accept families and single males only when there was a clear risk of persecution. Most Canadians were happy with this and the UNHCR happy as punch that somebody was taking any Syrians.
That's interesting. I had some conversations with Liberals on-line, in which they claimed that the exclusion of single men was just in line with normal UN priorites, not an attempt by Trudeau to pander to public fears(as some had argued). I also seem to recall finding an article(now unlocatable) in which some Liberal spokesperson said the same thing, but only AFTER that idea of men being deliberately excluded had been allowed to waft about the media for a few days.

I'll take your analysis over that of partisan Liberals, though. Thanks for the clarification.
 
Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :
 
Anselmina wrote:

quote:
As for experiencing the realities of mass immigration and multi-culturalism. Unless history has been re-written, I would've thought the USA was already a prime example of what happens when huge numbers of foreigners from across the globe occupy the same land-mass. The land-mass becomes a huge world-power and occupies a massive political and economic presence on the world stage. That's how it worked for Britain, too, again unless history has re-written itself.

The problems with multi-culturalism and immigration only seem to kick in when we ignore historic lessons, begin to think of ourselves as somehow separate from our past and and separate from the people who put us here; and refuse to integrate sensible and inclusively.
I think it might be helpful to clarify what is meant by multiculturalism in the varioius contexts here. In Canada, it doesn't simply mean having different cultures existing and flourishing within one country. It means an official government policy of actively encouraging and assisting people to continue practicing the cultures that they or their ancestors might have "brought over" from their countries of origins.

So, not just(for example) samosas being served at restaurants in neighbourhoods with large Indian populations, but state funding for someone to run a samosa-making workshop at an Indian community centre.

The problem is, though, in everyday parlance, Canadians use "multiculturalism" to mean everything from the aforementioned state-funded samosa classes, to turbans in the RCMP, to stores saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, to compensation for ethnic groups wronged by the government, to Chinese lettering on signs in the lower mainland, and so on and so forth, even though more often than not the issues being discussed are unrelated to official multiculturalism.

[ 21. February 2017, 18:19: Message edited by: Stetson ]
 
Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on :
 
quote:
originally posted by Anselmina:
As for experiencing the realities of mass immigration and multi-culturalism. Unless history has been re-written, I would've thought the USA was already a prime example of what happens when huge numbers of foreigners from across the globe occupy the same land-mass.
Exactly...Canada should have no problem welcoming not only refugees but all immigrants from the US affected by Trump's increased enforcement of US immigration law. She will be a world power in a few decades. Perhaps, Canada will then takeover the US job of policing the world and guaranteeing the security of Europe.
 
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
I think it might be helpful to clarify what is meant by multiculturalism in the varioius contexts here. In Canada, it doesn't simply mean having different cultures existing and flourishing within one country. It means an official government policy of actively encouraging and assisting people to continue practicing the cultures that they or their ancestors might have "brought over" from their countries of origins.
In typical U.S. parlance "multiculturalism" typically means "different cultures existing and flourishing". Despite Anselmina's rose-tinted historical analysis this is actually a relatively recent development in America. Decrying "multiculturalism" in an American context is usually just a backhanded way of endorsing the prior system: white supremacy.
 
Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on :
 
Yeah but we are evil.

Now Canadians...
 
Posted by Sober Preacher's Kid (# 12699) on :
 
are paragons of virtue? [Roll Eyes]

We have enough of our own sins.

It's more that the US has gone all nutty. And we've just been more generous than usual for the last few decades.
 
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
You aren't all evil.

Now Texans ...

Spawn of Satan.
 
Posted by Augustine the Aleut (# 1472) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
Anselmina wrote:

quote:
As for experiencing the realities of mass immigration and multi-culturalism. Unless history has been re-written, I would've thought the USA was already a prime example of what happens when huge numbers of foreigners from across the globe occupy the same land-mass. The land-mass becomes a huge world-power and occupies a massive political and economic presence on the world stage. That's how it worked for Britain, too, again unless history has re-written itself.

The problems with multi-culturalism and immigration only seem to kick in when we ignore historic lessons, begin to think of ourselves as somehow separate from our past and and separate from the people who put us here; and refuse to integrate sensible and inclusively.
I think it might be helpful to clarify what is meant by multiculturalism in the varioius contexts here. In Canada, it doesn't simply mean having different cultures existing and flourishing within one country. It means an official government policy of actively encouraging and assisting people to continue practicing the cultures that they or their ancestors might have "brought over" from their countries of origins.

So, not just(for example) samosas being served at restaurants in neighbourhoods with large Indian populations, but state funding for someone to run a samosa-making workshop at an Indian community centre.

The problem is, though, in everyday parlance, Canadians use "multiculturalism" to mean everything from the aforementioned state-funded samosa classes, to turbans in the RCMP, to stores saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, to compensation for ethnic groups wronged by the government, to Chinese lettering on signs in the lower mainland, and so on and so forth, even though more often than not the issues being discussed are unrelated to official multiculturalism.
Ummm.... having worked in the area of mkulticulturalism IRL, I would have described this differently. The policy arose from the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission in the 1960s when German and Polish community groups said that they were being left out of the definition of Canadian. From that, we had Pierre Trudeau's 1971 definition-- simply, no single culture defines Canada. Some of these cultures connected directly to countries of origin and some had become distinctly domestic (lots of interesting stuff here). In the policy, these Canadians were to integrate fully into Canadian society, but not assimilate (unless they felt like it) and was not so much as to encourage people to practise cultures as such, but to not marginalize those who did.

Almost all of the funding was for community development (women's leadership training, family violence initiatives etc) and integration of newcomers. Perhaps 7% went to heritage culture, mainly in Canadianizing language teaching material. I can assure Stetson that as far as I am aware no samosa workshops, nor anything like it, were ever funded by the federal government.
 
Posted by sonata3 (# 13653) on :
 
I have been working for some nine months with refugee resettlement in the US as a volunteer. In the particular city in which I live, the refugee community is largely Congolese. Can someone clarify a couple of things for me. (1) I have been told that there are two differences between refugee policy in the US, as opposed to Canada or Australia: there are much more stringent requirements as to language fluency in Canada or Australia, and these two countries still take in far more refugees (as a percentage of population) than the US does.
(2) Basic support for refugee families in the US ends at 3 months (sometimes extended to six). How does this compare to Canada or Australia?
 
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :
 
Canada and Australia already have both have significantly larger percentages of foreign-born people than the USA. America's peak as a place to immigrate to was about a century ago, maybe a little more.
 
Posted by Augustine the Aleut (# 1472) on :
 
Refugee admission in Canada and language fluency has no connexion. For permanent resident or skilled worker visas, language capacity is a positive points factor -- 16 to 28 points depending on fluency in either English or French, and a further 4 for a second official language; and it is necessary for citizenship unless you are a senior citizen. Language classes are provided on arrival for the first year-- after that, they are expected to continue improving their skills, either through immigrant settlement and assistance agencies or volunteer groups, or through provincial programmes.

Convention refugees, IIRC, receive up to 12 months support from their arrival.
 
Posted by Og: Thread Killer (# 3200) on :
 
My experience from the last decade when it came to cooking classes would lead me to believe a samosa workshop being done at a settlement agency in order to teach people how to cook in Canada ("So you want to make what you normally make at home? OK, here's how you do it here")

But that would take about an hour out of a weekly cooking program that focused more on making sure people didn't blow lots of money on MacDonald's and crap food.

And everything I saw like that here in Toronto was either provincially or city funded and thus came under the terms of health or public health.
 
Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :
 
This article from The Indo-Canadian Voice mentions "events such as festivals and community forums" as things that are funded under "multiculturalism grants", the aim of which is to "promote diversity". This is probably the sort of thing I had in mind with my "samosa making" class synechdoche.

Mind you, that's provinical funding. I guess it's possible that the type of funding I was thinking of is all done at levels below federal?

The article also mentions that "Canada was the first country in the world to adopt multiculturalism as an official policy", which of course happened at the federal level. That reference might be another example of how these things kind of get blurred in the discussion of multiculturalism in Canada, ie. an article extolling provincial funding praises a federal policy.
 
Posted by Augustine the Aleut (# 1472) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
This article from The Indo-Canadian Voice mentions "events such as festivals and community forums" as things that are funded under "multiculturalism grants", the aim of which is to "promote diversity". This is probably the sort of thing I had in mind with my "samosa making" class synechdoche.

Mind you, that's provinical funding. I guess it's possible that the type of funding I was thinking of is all done at levels below federal?

The article also mentions that "Canada was the first country in the world to adopt multiculturalism as an official policy", which of course happened at the federal level. That reference might be another example of how these things kind of get blurred in the discussion of multiculturalism in Canada, ie. an article extolling provincial funding praises a federal policy.
In my former RL I once had to work on a repertoire of similar provincial, municipal, and charitable foundation funding in the area and the exercise drove two of my colleagues to the madhouse. Our intent was to jprovide a way to reduce duplication, etc, and we found out that it was a patchwork designed by Salvador Dali on a bad day, and that everybody liked it that way. Much of the federal programming was integration and social development stuff, so it is likely that festivals benefitted by municipal or lottery funding.

Canadians, as you suggest, are cheerfully blithe about the level doing the funding or what the policy, exactly, might be. IMHO the policy has been pretty succesful, partly because we never really developed a national myth very succesfully, so there was less pushback. The RCMP turban issue of the 1980s and the Québec values issues are perhaps the most notable exceptions.

In any case, my friends working with Syrian refugees report to me that their charges are quite startled by the visible diversity about them, but seem comforted by it, in that with so many odd bods about, there might be space for them. We'll see how it goes.
 
Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :
 
Augustine wrote:

quote:
Much of the federal programming was integration and social development stuff, so it is likely that festivals benefitted by municipal or lottery funding.
The funny thing is, if what you're saying is correct(and I don't doubt it is), most of the federal effort in multiculturalism went toward assimilationist projects(eg. language training), or at least stuff not really connected to the active promotion of minority cultures(eg. women's leadership training).

Whereas the provinces and municipalities were funding the stuff that actually encouraged people to go out and indulge their interest in country-of-origin cultural practices(eg. Heritage Days in Edmonton, to take just one example with which I have direct experience).

But, according to the paranoid right-wing champions of old-stock Canada, it was the FEDERAL government who were supposedly forcing everyone to renounce Christianity and wear turbans. At least in Alberta, you almost never heard anyone complain about provincial or local support for multicultural groups, events, or initiatives.

Turbans in the Mounties were an exception I guess, since that was, by definiton, a federal policy. But I sometimes wondered how many of the people who wailed against that really had any pre-existing attachment to the supposedly tradtional uniform. If you've spent your whole life in even a medium-sized Canadian city(outside Ontario and Quebec), it's quite possible that you would only have seen someone wearing an RCMP uniform a small handful of times, if at all. Much less the "musical ride" outfit that's really what people are thinking of when they wax sentimental about "our traditions".

[ 22. February 2017, 17:33: Message edited by: Stetson ]
 
Posted by Augustine the Aleut (# 1472) on :
 
I entirely agree with Stetson's reflections but on a minor terminological issue, which must be arcane to anyone outside the field (mind you, given the number of shipmates learned in maniple placement and the use of rose vestments....). Language training is not assimilationist, that is, bringing us into one-ness with the Borg of Canadianness, but is intended to integrate people and equip them with the ability to function in Canadian society.

Somehow, people blame things with which they were unhappy on the federal government, and other levels, usually responsible, were calmly regarded. A friend in a newly-elected NDP MP's office once frightened diners in a very nice Kerala restaurant by fulminating about the calls her boss was receiving about snow removal. "Don't they f***ing know that Parliament is not in charge of snow ploughs!!" "Nope," I responded, reaching for another poppadum.

And to continue with the anecdotes.... at the time of the swearing-in of the ministry, I was sitting in a restaurant (Italian, this time) with the now-disabled officer who had churned out the better part of a file drawer of memoranda on the RCMP turban as he spoke of watching Colonel Sajjan in full Sikh gear take his oath of office as Minister of Defence. We both remembered rooms full of delegations fulminating about betrayal and sessions of tortured redraftings...
 
Posted by Sober Preacher's Kid (# 12699) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by sonata3:
I have been working for some nine months with refugee resettlement in the US as a volunteer. In the particular city in which I live, the refugee community is largely Congolese. Can someone clarify a couple of things for me. (1) I have been told that there are two differences between refugee policy in the US, as opposed to Canada or Australia: there are much more stringent requirements as to language fluency in Canada or Australia, and these two countries still take in far more refugees (as a percentage of population) than the US does.
(2) Basic support for refugee families in the US ends at 3 months (sometimes extended to six). How does this compare to Canada or Australia?
Fluency yes, but not the way you expect. Canada is the only country I know of that operates two distinct immigration programmes (not refugees, where language doesn't enter in), the Federal one and the Quebec one. I know of no other country that consciously has two doors open instead of just one, and two lines.

Quebec prioritizes French language fluency and it is a shorter line. Canny immigrants such as a Cuban couple of passing acquaintance will go for Quebec selection, touch down in Dorval and then drive to Toronto. Which is completely legal.
 
Posted by Og: Thread Killer (# 3200) on :
 
My, again Toronto 10 years ago, experience of people taking language training was they were either desperate to get to a level that would allow them to get a job at (usually people in the Federal programs known as LINC) or wanted to be able to converse with their kids and the neighbours (usually people in provincially funded ESL although some there were people who never took language classes when they first came because they got a job which didn't require English).

LINC classes were more structured, with smaller class sizes and focused on moving people up the capability ladder. ESL was more nebulous as the people in them had a greater span of goals. I once sat in an ESL class of over 50 people.

Ultimately, its hard to suggest to people they can't learn English once we bring them here or learn English once they have been here for awhile. Its just something necessary. NOW, what both could have done better and were starting to do when I left the social agency field was actually teach English that helped people converse in the workplace.


The best way to help a person was to help them get a job.

Coming back to the OP, as far as I know, ESL classes are open to refugee claimants while LINC classes are not.
 
Posted by Soror Magna (# 9881) on :
 
It's too early for me to make a birthday wish, but it would sure be nice if people would be specific about whether they're talking about refugees, immigrants, or asylum seekers. And while I'm sure there are militant or criminal refugees, real terrorists have the tradecraft and resources to go wherever they want, whenever they want. They're not going to sit in a lousy refugee camp for 5 years only to end up in Sweden. Much easier for a group of Saudis to enter the USA on student visas for flight schools, and we all know how that turned out.
 
Posted by sabine (# 3861) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Soror Magna:
It's too early for me to make a birthday wish, but it would sure be nice if people would be specific about whether they're talking about refugees, immigrants, or asylum seekers. And while I'm sure there are militant or criminal refugees, real terrorists have the tradecraft and resources to go wherever they want, whenever they want. They're not going to sit in a lousy refugee camp for 5 years only to end up in Sweden. Much easier for a group of Saudis to enter the USA on student visas for flight schools, and we all know how that turned out.
As a refugee worker, I am so glad you pointed out these distinctions. I don't know how many people I talk to who feel that 1) refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers are all the same category, 2) terrorist acts in the US have been done by refugees, and 3) it is easy to be a refugee.

They forget that (at least for the US) to be designated a refugee requires going to a second country and waiting (up to two years) in a refugee camp or derelict housing situation for UN/US vetting that is extremely strong.

ISIS or al-Queda or al-Shabab operatives can more easily get into a country.

And some refugees don't really want to come to the US; few of them have a choice in the matter. A would-be terrorist taking the refugee route might well end up in some other country.

sabine

[ 23. February 2017, 14:58: Message edited by: sabine ]
 
Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on :
 
Canada will not halt illegal border crossing

Trudeau gets a C on this response. One on hand, I applaud his willingness to keep accepting refugees from the US. It is meet and right so to do.

However...

quote:
Trudeau said:
"One of the reasons why Canada remains an open country is Canadians trust our immigration system and the integrity of our borders and the help we provide people who are looking for safety,"
Worrying about border integrity is nativist and xenophobic. I'm disappointed. Next he will be calling refugees rapists and murderers.

quote:
Trudeau continues:
"We will continue to strike that balance between a rigorous system and accepting people who need help."
A rigorous system? Those refugees have already been extremely vetted by the US State Department. Is Trudeau implying the need for more extreme vetting? If so, that would be clearly racist.

quote:
from the article:
Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen also said Canada would continue to honor the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, which requires it to turn back refugees if they make asylum claims at Canadian border crossings with the United States.
Doing this will only encourage refugees from the US to risk their lives crossing the border illegally. The Canadian border with the US can be ever bit as treacherous as the US border with Mexico. Why not welcome all refugees fleeing the cryptofascist regime of Donald Trump?

quote:
from the article:
The influx is straining resources in the western prairie province of Manitoba and in Quebec
Really? Already? Yep...this will be interesting. Trudeau lionized Fidel Castro. He wouldn't object to something similar to the Mariel boatlift would he?
 
Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :
 
Just out of curiousity, Beez, have you recently had encounters with some smug, sanctimonious Canadaians who went on and on about how much better their counrry is than the USA? I'm just trying to come up with some context for your sudden interest in a thread-long retort to the typical soft-left Canadain-nationalist boilerplate.

Not that I'm complaining. I'm not personally a Liberal supporter, and I've never bought the idea that Canadians are inherently morally superior to Americans. I think a lot is influenced by accidents of geography(climate inhospitable to large-scale agrarian slavery), sometimes mixed with socioencomincs(little movement into Canada of impoverished migrants).

And yes, it will be interesting to see how JT manages to balance his applause-jonesing Liberal idealism with what MIGHT turn out to be the reality of large-scale movement of the uninvited destitute across our southern border. Even more interesting to see how the archetypically smug Canadian soft-nationalists will respond.

But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. So far, talk of a northward exodus is mostly theoretical, and I'm not even convinced that all the folks of Trump's hit-list will want to come, much less making any solid predictions about how the government or the citizenry will respond.
 
Posted by Augustine the Aleut (# 1472) on :
 
More terminology stuff- "refugee" can mean: a) somebody who thinks they are, b) someone preparing to make a claim under the Convention, c) someone who has made a claim under the Convention, d) someone whose claim is under adjudication, e) someone whose claim has been rejected, and f) someone whose claim has been accepted. They all have a different legal status in the US, and it's not the same as their status in Canada.

Convention refugees in the US (f) have been very thoroughly vetted (sometimes by the Department of State, sometimes by the Immigration and Naturalisation Service). The others may or may not have been. Canada and the US are among those few countries which allow Convention refugees to obtain permanent resident status and citizenship (but not quite in the same way).

I've only been working from media reports and have not spoken with anyone dealing with them, but these migrants seem not to have gone through or completed the US process, and are worried that given the various comments on Muslims and refugees, they might not be. The US administrative situation is still in flux (a polite term) and so we really don't yet know where this is going.
 
Posted by Og: Thread Killer (# 3200) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Soror Magna:
It's too early for me to make a birthday wish, but it would sure be nice if people would be specific about whether they're talking about refugees, immigrants, or asylum seekers.
When I was a service provider, we didn't use those terms, nor did we care about status.

Everybody was just a newcomer.


There were some programs where if you were a refugee claimant, you didn't get in yet. But, by and large, nobody asked about status.
 
Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on :
 
My understanding is that people illegally crossing from the US into Canada are actual refugees from one of the nations on Trump's list. Manitoba being one of the areas experiencing an influx suggests Sudanese refugees. So, the state department would have vetted them.

Still, immigrant versus refugee versus asylum seekers is all a distinction without a difference in the way the issue is being framed in the United States. Only racists have a problem with mass immigration legal or illegal period. So, I can't see why Canadians would have a problem welcoming anybody from the United States that wants to come. Trudeau could even get Trump to pay for a yuge statue to be placed in the St. Lawrence River welcoming citizens of the world to Canada. It would be the best statue in the world. You would love it!
 
Posted by Og: Thread Killer (# 3200) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Beeswax Altar:
Canada will not halt illegal border crossing

Trudeau gets a C on this response. One on hand, I applaud his willingness to keep accepting refugees from the US. It is meet and right so to do.

However...

quote:
Trudeau said:
"One of the reasons why Canada remains an open country is Canadians trust our immigration system and the integrity of our borders and the help we provide people who are looking for safety,"
Worrying about border integrity is nativist and xenophobic. I'm disappointed. Next he will be calling refugees rapists and murderers.
Uh, he just said Canadians trust the integrity. And no, that might be code word for YOU as nativist but up here, that is not the case.

Are we going to have to provide you with a Canadian to (insert where you are from) translation system? ;-)


quote:
Trudeau continues:
"We will continue to strike that balance between a rigorous system and accepting people who need help."
A rigorous system? Those refugees have already been extremely vetted by the US State Department.
quote:



Quite the opposite - these people who are coming across from the US to Canada are by all accounts illegals in the US.



quote:
from the article:
The influx is straining resources in the western prairie province of Manitoba and in Quebec
Really? Already? Yep...this will be interesting. Trudeau lionized Fidel Castro. He wouldn't object to something similar to the Mariel boatlift would he?
If that happens, a limit will be reached.

Just as it is in every other country in the world.

One of the difference might be we don't go looking in hospital beds for "illegals" like has been reported in the US.

We will see.

Still rather be an imperfect Canada then a Brexit UK or the US right now or Australia with its camps or...lets face anywhere else in the world but my country. Imperfect and all...its still trying.
 
Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :
 
Beeswax wrote:

quote:
Still, immigrant versus refugee versus asylum seekers is all a distinction without a difference in the way the issue is being framed in the United States. Only racists have a problem with mass immigration legal or illegal period. So, I can't see why Canadians would have a problem welcoming anybody from the United States that wants to come. Trudeau could even get Trump to pay for a yuge statue to be placed in the St. Lawrence River welcoming citizens of the world to Canada. It would be the best statue in the world. You would love it!
As interesting as I do find the overall topic(seriously), given the current venue, your whole approach so far strikes me as a bit of a strawman. It's not like Ship Of Fools is overrun with Canadians bragging about how open and tolerant their country is. So, it's not exactly clear to me what sort of response you're hoping to provoke with your sarcastic rendering of a shallow nationalist myth.

Yes, it's funny when someone's grandiloquent rhetoric isn't matched by their actions: as you might have seen, I got a chuckle out of the way American right-wingers, after screaming at the top of their lungs about the obligation of private institutions to host even the most outrageous opinions of Milo Yiannopoulos, suddenly decided that, actually, no, some of his opinions really don't deserve the benefit of someone else's platform. But I'm not gonna start a whole thread, baiting Breitbart afficianadoes(very few of whom are reading the Ship) about that, post after post.
 
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :
 
Beeswax, your continued mischaracterisation of why people - thinking people, people who understand how legal processes around immigration and visas and refugee applications works - actually had a problem with Trump's executive order does you no favours whatsoever.

Feel free to continue knocking down straw men of your own making. They're much the same straw men that the Trump administration itself created, issuing statements about the importance of immigration control that (1) no-one actually disagreed with, and (2) didn't actually reflect what the executive order had done.

To put it bluntly, most of the justifications that were offered reflected what had already been happening under Obama. They didn't reflect the confusion, chaos and reversal of existing rights that the executive order reflected.

I for one won't have the slightest problem if Trump manages to put together a new executive order that takes into account legal advice and actually contains a vetting policy.

[ 23. February 2017, 21:11: Message edited by: orfeo ]
 
Posted by sabine (# 3861) on :
 
Link to the current vetting process

The most robust in the world.

sabine (refugee resettlement worker for over 10 years)
 
Posted by Gramps49 (# 16378) on :
 
This is very unfortunate. Refugees who were originally admitted into the US are now fleeing to Canada. Over a thousand have crossed the border into Canada. Most have crossed over in unguarded areas (that is quite a large area) and are unprepared for the crossing. They have been experiencing frostbite. I believe the Canadian Parliment is now looking at opening border posts to such refugees to avoid having people freeze to death during a crossing.

This is such a black eye for the United States.
 


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