{"id":40,"date":"2017-10-30T09:18:49","date_gmt":"2017-10-30T13:18:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/?p=40"},"modified":"2017-10-30T09:29:14","modified_gmt":"2017-10-30T13:29:14","slug":"of-course-everybody-wants-to-come-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/2017\/10\/30\/of-course-everybody-wants-to-come-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Of course everybody wants to come here"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Allison Light<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s gonna take a while for Canada to be the generous liberal Canada it once was,\u201d said Mr. Khan, the Immigration and Refugee Law Barrister and Solicitor. This stuck with me as an overall takeaway from our dinner conversation \u2013 that on this trip we may not find exactly the forever-immigration-friendly northern neighbor we might\u2019ve arrived expected. He explained that Canada, like the US and other Western countries, is currently drifting towards the right \u2013 going through a \u201cbig change in its identity,\u201d as he put it.<\/p>\n

One of the points he made about the issue of all the Haitians crossing over stuck with me, which is the line drawn between refugee\/human rights work and compassionate humanitarian aid. Since their original displacement was due to natural disaster, they are not qualified for refugee status, in the same way that conditions of poverty in Central America aren\u2019t officially grounds for their resettlement as refugees either. A country can\u2019t offer another country\u2019s population protection from poverty or disaster, but can from civil war and specific persecution. But what\u2019s the difference, if both groups\u2019 lives are constantly on the brink of ruin?<\/p>\n

While talking about that number after dinner, we couldn\u2019t help but think: of course <\/em>people are coming here, of course <\/em>they\u2019ll keep coming as TPS runs out for selected populations next year. With numbers like that? We would try too. It reminds me of the mare nostrum<\/em> conundrum, where refugees would of course attempt to cross the Mediterranean when they thought there was someone waiting on the other side to help. Then again, we\u2019ve also seen multiple narratives where people crossed knowing their chances were slim to none \u2013 the story about Bambino, for example, where 500 men threw themselves at a fence hoping one might successfully make it across. Maybe that\u2019s a better representation of the experience of the Central American applicants he mentioned, with a 95% rejection rate but with at least some who will still continue to try.<\/p>\n

The conversation made me realize that I need to understand a little bit better how my own country deals with resettlement claims and asylum seekers in order to fully appreciate how Canada\u2019s system differs. The picture Mr. Khan painted of this video-chat where a refugee\u2019s fate is determined by a board one province over (a board that doesn\u2019t even have to consist of mostly lawyers) was fascinating, and so different from my understanding of how the US does it. I predict that I\u2019ll learn as much about how US resettlement works as how Canadian resettlement works on this trip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Allison Light \u201cIt\u2019s gonna take a while for Canada to be the generous liberal Canada it once was,\u201d said Mr. Khan, the Immigration and Refugee Law Barrister and Solicitor. This stuck with me as an overall takeaway from our dinner conversation \u2013 that on this trip we may not find exactly the forever-immigration-friendly northern<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":418,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/418"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/55"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}