Update May 11th: But, but, but ‘we will get back on track when we open a mission in Iraq’ says Kenney, here. Critics claim Kenney only wants the Christians, Kenney says, not true—we take Muslims!
Canada took less than 10,000 refugees in 2012 and the Canadian Council for Refugees, a leading pro-immigration advocacy group in Canada, is unhappy. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney blames the slowdown on the closure of their processing office in Syria and promises to do better this year.
Kenney critic Loly Rico of the Refugee Council of Canada
Despite its pledge to resettle more refugees, Canada granted asylum to the second lowest number of refugees in over 30 years according to statistics released by the Canadian Council for Refugees.The statistics shows a drop of 26 percent in the number of refugees resettled in the country from 2011 to 2012.
The Canadian Council for Refugees in a press release expressed its disappointment to witness the sharp drop last year.
“We very much regret that the Minister has not been able to keep his promise to increase the numbers, and that in fact last year fewer people were able to find safety in Canada in this way,” said Loly Rico, President of the Canadian Council for refugee.
“Canadians are proud to protect refugees through resettlement to Canada – but unfortunately the government has been closing the door on refugees,” said Loly Rico.
While commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Refugee Convention in Geneva December 2011, the Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney pledged to increase the number of refugees by 20 percent.
The immigration minister in recent days has blamed the closure of refugee offices in Syria for the sharp drop in the number of refugees resettled by the Canadian federal government.
[….]
Resettled refugees come in two streams: Government-Assisted Refugees and Privately Sponsored Refugees. Arrivals in both categories decreased dramatically in 2012. [The US does not have “privately sponsored refugees” except in a few small number of cases—ed]
According to the statistics, only 5,412 Government-Assisted Refugees were resettled – the lowest number since at least the 1970s, and only 4,212 refugees were received through Private Sponsored Refugees.
In a related story last week, we reported that Canada is speeding up asylum claims so that the citizens of Canada won’t have to support migrants who do not have legitimate asylum claims and need to be cared for sometimes for years as their claims are processed. That’s a good move and one we should be copying.
For new readers! Be sure to check our Canada archives, here, where we have 108 other posts about refugee problems in Canada.
My Canada stories are piling up, so I’m going to post three here in one post.
First is an update of the Sri Lankan boat people that we first reportedherein 2010. Seems that at least two men on the ship were wrongly given refugee status according to a Canadian Court. Pro-immigration lawyers had creatively argued that since the ship had been publicly identified with Tamil Tiger terrorists that none of the migrants could be returned safely to Sri Lanka without fear of persecution.
Sri Lankans are also traveling by boat to get into Australia as we reportedherelast week.
Police and military personnel wear surgical masks as they board the MV Sun Sea after it was escorted into CFB Esquimalt in Colwood, B.C. on Aug. 13, 2010. Jonathan Hayward / CP files
The Immigration & Refugee Board misinterpreted the law when it granted asylum to two Sri Lankans simply because they had traveled to Canada aboard the human smuggling ship MV Sun Sea, the Federal Court has ruled.
In a pair of decisions, the court weighed in on attempts by refugee lawyers to argue that, because the Sun Sea has been publicly linked to the Tamil Tigers rebels, its passengers faced persecution if Canada sent them back to Sri Lanka.
The latest cases involved two men who were not considered genuine refugees except for the fact they had been on board the Sun Sea. The refugee board ruled that made them members of a “social group” that faced persecution.
But this week, the court said it had used the wrong standard of proof to reach those decisions. It overturned both men’s asylum claims and sent the cases back for re-evaluation.
[….]
The Sun Sea arrived off the British Columbia coast in August 2010, carrying 492 Sri Lankan migrants. The voyage had originated in Thailand and was organized by a smuggling syndicate that charged hefty fees.
Although those on board claimed to be fleeing persecution, Justice Sean Harrington said B472 “was found to be a liar,” while B323 was not credible and did not face a serious chance of mistreatment when he had lived in Sri Lanka.
“The Sun Sea passengers had a myriad of motives to come to Canada,” he wrote in his ruling.
“Some were human smugglers. Some may well have been terrorists. Some were garden-variety criminals who wanted to escape justice. Some had serious reason to fear persecution in Sri Lanka and some, like Mr. 472, were economic migrants.”
Second story for today
Canada saving billions by fast-tracking asylum claimsfrom countries not considered to be producing legitimate refugees, including any who want asylum from the US! Thanks to a reader for sending this about a week ago.
Canada has seen a dramatic drop in the number of refugees seeking asylum here after Ottawa began fast-tracking applications from countries where it feels people are less likely to be persecuted.
Senior government sources say that on average, 164 foreigners are claiming asylum weekly in 2013, down nearly 70 per cent from the average weekly claim for the past five years, which was 537. This is based on data for the first seven weeks of 2013.
The plummeting figures show the impact of the changes that Immigration Minister Jason Kenney made to Canada’s refugee system in 2012 when he sponsored a bill that made this country a less welcoming destination for asylum seekers with shaky claims – those he called “bogus refugees.”
[…..]
Mr. Kenney’s legislation, now law, gives the Immigration Minister the power to designate which countries are less likely to be a legitimate source of refugees.
Changes last year designated 27 countries of origin – including the United States, most European Union member countries and Croatia – as places from which claims would be fast-tracked. Ottawa added eight more countries to this list this month.
Refugee claimants from countries on this safe list – those that Canada considers democratic states with a solid human-rights record and an independent judiciary – now have much less time to fight to stay here. [and thus do not need to be housed and fed at taxpayer expense—ed]
The third story in my Canadian troika today is this one about Immigration Minister Kenney traveling to Turkey and being criticized for not committing to take thousands of Syrians home with him. This is the story from the Edmonton Journal last week. Kenney did commit to resettle more Iraqis and Iranians.
OTTAWA – The NDP and a Syrian Canadian group are questioning why Immigration Minister Jason Kenney chose to accept Iraqi and Iranian refugees when he visited fleeing Syrians in Turkey last month.
They accuse Kenney of misleading the Canadian public by touting his visit as being in support of Syrian refugees, which currently number about 200,000 in Turkey, when Canada opted instead to take 5,000 Iraqis and Iranians.
But Kenney’s office says there’s a perfectly good explanation for the decision: Turkey won’t let any fleeing Syrians leave the country until the United Nations officially declares them actual refugees.
Kenney’s aides also say Canada is currently co-operating with the UN’s refugee agency, which doesn’t want to push the resettlement of the hundreds of thousands of fleeing Syrians just yet.
I had been wondering why Western countries weren’t dashing to Turkey to bring home refugees. The UN says it isn’t time yet. Watch for it! The Iraqis are getting boring to the US refugee contractors, Syrians will be next. As a matter of fact, I bet at this year’s State Department hearing for who to bring in 2014, the likes of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops will be asking for Syrians please!
Terrorists can come across the Southern Border and hardly anyone bats an eyelash, but will people pay some attention to the OTMs (Other than Mexicans) also coming across infected with deadly transmittable (and untreatable!) diseases?
The rate of active TB cases in the US is rising with the refugee/asylum seeker population. I first heardof the TB problem with refugees when Allen County (Ft. Wayne) Indiana was having a problem with all the cases among the Burmese. Here is one post I wrote in 2009 about active TB rates rising in Minnesota, and here is my post on a shocking video only watched by a few hundred people about refugees with active TB being readied to come to the US.
But, it’s cases like this Nepalese asylum seeker getting across the border into Texas (after traveling the whole globe) with the worst possible case of drug-resistant TB that gets the media’s attention. Imagine health officials trying to track all those he came in contact with!
Drug resistant TB clinic in the Philippines. Photo: Leah Mae Damazo/IRIN
In medical isolation in South Texas, 100 miles or so from Mexico’s border, is a man who embodies one of U.S. health officials’ greatest worries: He is the first person to cross and be held in detention while infected with one of the most severe types of drug-resistant tuberculosis known today.
His three-month odyssey through 13 countries—from his homeland of Nepal through South Asia, Brazil, Mexico, and finally into Texas—shows the way in which dangerous new strains of the disease can migrate across the world unchecked.
Tuberculosis, an ancient, fatal airborne disease, has been treatable for decades with a cocktail of drugs. However, shoddy medical practices world-wide have enabled the bacteria to mutate and, in some cases, become all but untreatable. In recent months The Wall Street Journal has exposed widening TB drug resistance in hot spots like India, and shown that the U.S. is surprisingly unprepared for the growing global problem.Most U.S. cases of drug-resistant TB occur in people who were born abroad, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Nepalese man detained at the U.S. border carries a particularly deadly strain—XDR, “extensively drug-resistant” TB. His TB is resistant to at least eight of the 15 or so standard drugs, according to a U.S. government description of the case reviewed by the Journal. His XDR strain has been seen only once before in the U.S., in another patient of Nepalese origin, according to the government description.
The Nepalese patient was taken into custody by the U.S. Border Patrol in late November as he tried to cross the border illegally near McAllen, Texas, according to Department of Homeland Security officials. The government declined to name him.
He was transferred five days later to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Los Fresnos, Texas, and put into “medical isolation” with suspected tuberculosis, according to ICE. He has since been moved to another ICE detention facility, in Pearsall, Texas, with more medical staff, ICE said. He is the first XDR-case in ICE custody.
[…..]
It remains unclear whether other people in custody with the Nepalese detainee might have been infected.By the time the Border Patrol learned of his infection, other people detained with him would have been transferred elsewhere, the CBP official said.
WSJ reporter Betsy McCay has other articles on the topic. At one point a month or so ago I thought the WSJ had a really great map of TB hotspots around the world. I recall South Africa was one of the hottest countries for the disease. But, I couldn’t find it just now so maybe it was at another publication.
For more information on TB, HIV, mental illness and other health problems related to refugees and immigrants generally, see our health issues category, here, where we have 144 previous posts archived.
The New York Times had an article yesterday about the UNHCR warning of dire consequences if the Syrian refugee tide continues to rise. I’ll be watching for the first sign that Obama wants to help his buds in Turkey by bringing Syrians to the US. Using the refugee program for other political purposes is one of the worst flaws in the flawed system.
In Turkey, 183,000 registered Syrians live in camps, and an estimated 100,000 unregistered Syrians live in urban areas. Iraq is now home to more than 100,000 Syrians, and Mr. Guterres said 37,000 Syrians had been registered in North Africa.
Holy cow! We have brought 6,030 Iraqis to the US in the first 4 months of this fiscal year (began Oct.1), here. I can assure you that most are not Christians! For readers concerned about the Iraqi Christians, although the State Department knows what percentage of Christians are in this group they do not tell the public, so we can only make assumptions.
And, by the way, the Iraqis arriving here aren’t finding work and are largely on welfare, here.
….until a female student was allegedly assaulted when a Sri Lankan young man entered her dorm room in the middle of the night.
There are lots of news stories from Sydney about the incident that at first was not blamed on one of the illegal alien boat people Australia is swamped with.
Here is an early account from ABC Australia on the 26th of February:
Macquarie University where asylum seekers were being housed while their asylum claims were being processed. Photo credit: ABC
There are claims security guards at a university accommodation campus failed to call police after a 20-year-old female was allegedly sexually assaulted last week.
Triple j’s Hack can also reveal that students are concerned the alleged perpetrator was an asylum seeker who was living at the accommodation, but that is yet to be proven.
The alleged attack happened at a Macquarie University student accommodation centre in Sydney.
[…..]
It is only since this incident that hundreds of residents at the village learned there were 80 asylum seekers living among them.
This was an arrangement struck between the Red Cross and Campus Living Villages, the company running the Macquarie Student Village.
Students at the village say they believe most of the asylum seekers are Sri Lankan men.
No-one connected to this incident has confirmed the alleged perpetrator was one of the asylum seekers but the alleged victim and lots of campus residents are suspicious.
Yup! An asylum seeker was arrested and demands soon followed that the program of granting “bridging visas” be halted.
Coalition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison has called for an immediate freeze on the provision of bridging visas for asylum seekers, after it was revealed a man released into the community on a bridging visa had been charged with indecent assault.
Mr Morrison said that a review was needed into the guidelines for how boat arrivals were released into the community.
He said that such a review must detail a “requirement” to notify police and neighbouring residents about people on bridging visas or community detention in their area and the establishment of “behaviour protocols … with clear negative sanctions for breaches of such protocols”.
Mr Morrison also called on Labor to suspend the further release of boat arrivals into the community on bridging visas and community detention, “in all other than exceptional circumstances”, while the review was under way.
He said the freeze should not be lifted until Immigration Minister Brendan O’Connor and his department could give the community a “clear guarantee” that there were safeguards in place.
His comments come in the wake of the arrest of a 21-year-old Sri Lankan asylum seeker, charged with indecently assaulting a student at Macquarie University last week.
Then here is the latest—this is fast—from The Australian on February 28th (LOL! tomorrow): Contract dumped!
A PRIVATE company that billeted dozens of asylum-seekers in student accommodation at two Sydney universities has terminated its contract with the Red Cross in the wake of an alleged sexual assault on a female student.
Campus Living Villages, a wholly owned subsidiary of infrastructure giant Transfield Holdings, had been providing temporary accommodation for the refugees on campus at Macquarie University and the University of Western Sydney.
This is crazy, I wonder whose bright idea it was to put young illegal alien men on college campuses?
And, by the way, I have other news about Sri Lankan boat people in an update from Canada—some are Tamil Tigers—tomorrow.
An afterthought: This is our 92nd post on Australia’s immigration/refugee problems, check it out here.
