Syrian refugees in Canada: Ethical Dilemmas
The other day I watched a television interview with
a Syrian refugee stranded in Greece as a result of Macedonia’s closing of its
borders. He was a man in his late 30s or
early 40s; he spoke good English and he was very angry. He told the interviewer that his
five-year-old daughter and his wife had both been killed in the war. He asked why Western countries would not help
him, specifically mentioning Canada.
Since Canada’s new Liberal government took power in
November 2015, Canada has been engaged in a self-congratulatory love-fest about
its acceptance of 25,000 Syrian refugees (and counting), fulfilling a promise the
Liberals made before they took power. Some
of them have been directly financed by the government, which provides them with
enough money to live for one year at local welfare rates. Others are financed
by private Canadian citizens, groups of people who get together to raise funds
and provide support of various kinds. Both sets of Syrian refugees are also
given immediate permanent residence status and health care. It costs about
$Can30,000 to sponsor a family of four for one year; for each extra person, you
have to budget about $Can7,500.
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| John McCallum, Canada's Minister of Immigration |
The newspapers are full of pictures of the Prime
Minister and the Minister of Immigration greeting arriving Syrians. There are heart-warming
stories of Vietnamese-Canadians, whose families were sponsored as refugees in
the 1970s, now sponsoring Syrians. Other heart-warming stories feature Jewish
and Muslim Canadians working together to sponsor refugees.
I am glad that Canada is accepting so many Syrians,
but the man I watched on television the other night won’t be one of them. Like
everyone else, Canadians are worried about security risks. One way to lessen them, the government has
decided, is to accept only complete families or vulnerable people, such as
mothers and children. Gay men are also acceptable as they are considered—and
probably are—extremely vulnerable in macho Middle Eastern cultures. But single
men, such as the Syrian man I watched on television, widowed and childless as a
result of the war, are not.
I am part of a group sponsoring one Syrian family:
we are waiting for it to be cleared for immigration at the moment. Our group
has raised $40,000. My husband contributed to his church’s fund; they have
raised another $40,000 for a family that has already arrived. Across the street
from my husband’s church, yet another church is sponsoring another family,
probably raising about the same amount. And the synagogue group down the street
has raised about $60,000 for a large family.
So between these four groups, people of my
acquaintance have raised $180.000. But what else could have been done with this
money? People still in refugee camps in
Jordan, Turkey or Lebanon are without heat, without schools, without enough
food. How far would the $180,000 these
four groups have raised go toward shelter, schools, or food, if we’d given it
to UNICEF instead?
There’s also the problem that Canada is
discriminating in favour of Syrians and against other refugee groups. Appallingly,
the Canadian government forces refugees to pay for their own transportation
costs to this country. Once they get here they have to agree to pay back the
loan; even with low interest rates, that’s a considerable burden for people who’ve
just arrived, have to find work, and often can’t speak the language. Recently
Canada has decided to waive the fee for Syrians but not for other refugees.
Then there’s the decision to have a massive airlift
of refugees from Syria but not from other countries. As Kamal Al-Solaylee, a
Yemeni-Canadian whose autobiography I reviewed on this blog on January 18, 2103 (https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6700283514603333187#editor/target=post;postID=3825731743685667926;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=71;src=postname)
has pointed out, 2.3 million Yemenis are
internally displaced and 1.3 million children are at risk of malnutrition (out
of a population of 26.5 million). (See Al-Solaylee’s article, “Suffering’s Second
Act, in the Canadian magazine The Walrus, March 2016 https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Suffering%27s+Second+Act). And then there are the South Sudanese,
suffering malnutrition, displacement, murder, torture and rape at the hands of
their feuding leaders, who brought them independence from Sudan proper in 2011
only to fight among themselves.
Europeans are doing the same thing. Syrians are
acceptable as refugees en masse, but other groups aren’t. But to deny
individuals refugee status merely because they come from the “wrong” country, or
from countries where there is not a horrible civil war at present, is against
international law. Under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees,
receiving countries have to assess whether as individuals, potential refugees
have a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion,
nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”
(Article 1, A, 2). You can’t just exclude individuals when they come from the
wrong country.
But how do you assess the millions of people
flocking to Europe at the moment not only from Syria and Afghanistan, but also
from North Africa, sub-Sahara Africa, and Pakistan? Even if Canada, with a
population of about 35 million people, eventually doubles its own intake to
50,000, it won’t have taken in proportionately near as many refugees as
Germany, which with a population of 80 million, has now accepted over 1.1
million refugees. Germany is taking ten times as many.
And then there’s bureaucracy. A 16-year-old Syrian
male (legally a child, under Canadian law) was recently detained in solitary confinement
for several weeks by the Canadian Border Services Agency. His crime was
entering Canada from Buffalo in the
United States, with which we have a Safe Third-Country Agreement, which means
that he should have claimed refugee status there. His parents had heard about Canada’s
plan to accept Syrians and given him instructions about how to go to Canada.
Fortunately activists and the press got wind of this young man’s situation, and
he has been released from detention. (see https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Ottawa+lifts+deportation+order+for+Syrian+teen
(. But one wonder how many other Syrians—or other young people who are legally
children—find themselves in the same situation.
I don’t know the answers to all these questions, but
they worry me.
