Canadian immigration minister, Jason Kenney, says he wants to reform the Canadian refugee program by getting rid of all the “fake” asylum seekers and taking more refugees that the UN wants to move out of camps around the world. Nice sentiment I suppose but I see some flaws in his thinking.
First, I see nothing mentioned in this story about sealing Canada’s borders which would be the only way to stop the asylum seekers from getting in, once in what does he propose they do with them? And, secondly, he places a lot of faith in the UN picking refugees for them. Here is the story.
As part of its efforts to reform Canada’s refugee system, the government wants to bring in more refugees designated by the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says.
This, he argues, would be a much more effective and efficient use of taxpayer dollars, benefitting people who are really facing persecution, instead of the thousands of “fake” applicants who apply within Canada each year.
In recent months, Mr. Kenney has spoken extensively about his desire to reform Canada’s refugee system. He has made it clear that he wants to lower the number of applications made within Canada, which has created a backlog of more than 60,000 applications and costs the government millions of dollars in social assistance while claimants await their hearings.
“My concern is more broadly with how easy it is to abuse Canada’s generosity and for non-refugees to immigrate to Canada through the back door of our asylum system using the long processing times and the…various levels of appeal, to string out a fake asylum claim to several years of residency in Canada and sometimes ultimately to gain permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds,” Mr. Kenney said in an interview last week.
The minister says resources aren’t properly spent the way the system works now, and that real refugees in desperate need of assistance are being allowed to languish in limbo as others take advantage of Canada’s system. He wants to see that situation reversed.
Interestingly I didn’t spot this story at its original source but got it from a Muslim Rohingya website, here. You can bet Mr. Kenney’s proposal makes their day at Rohingyas International.
Canada is accepting thousands of Bhutanese Hindu, Burmese Karen, Burmese Rohingya and Iraqi refugees, all of whom live in refugee camps, said Mr. Kenney.
The Conservative government, over the years, has made a point of highlighting the admittance of such groups into Canada whenever they have occurred, and Mr. Kenney said he would like to increase such intakes.
We have written a lot about Canada and I should have made a category for it but didn’t. Our search function is a good one, so just type in ‘Canada’ to learn more about refugee issues there.