Refugee policy should provide refuge (not assimilation).

there were a lot of fundamental
questions about Immigration and Refugee policy that neither get asked by the left wing nor the right wing I was in a classroom not too long ago with a professor whom I would characterize as having a left-wing extremist position on these issues and you know she would say positive things about the situation for Cambodian refugees in California or in Canada she would make her argument that unlimited numbers of these people should be allowed to stay for unlimited amounts of time that anything else was literally a crime against humanity there was a violation of their of their human rights to ask them under any circumstances to return to Cambodia even if they had committed serious crimes such as joining a gang getting involved with drug dealing and murder those were case studies we were studying in that class so she was directly commenting on this that it was crime against humanity to ask a refugee to return to Cambodia decades after the war had ended there decades after they've had peace and stability and rapid economic growth I would raise questions that had simply never arisen before that were shockingly original her such as well your position is it really what's best for Cambodia she never thought about that her left-wing position she only thought in terms of can't even say Canada's self-interest in terms of this assumption that the role of the Western world is to receive and absorb infinite numbers of refugees and migrants the more the merrier and to point to often very incoherent economic arguments that this creates more jobs that this is economically positive for Western countries where they talk about England or Canada or Germany or or what-have-you and you just ask something as simple as that well is that what's economically good for Cambodia there's stumps and this is a life long specialist this is one with a PhD who goes to someone who goes to international conferences on these issues and she had absolutely never looked at the issue from that perspective this is not the only exam full of a debate I had with her during that semester I did a lot of the talking it was a year-long symposium so the students were supposed to be talking for several hours but very few of the students had anything to say sever myself very few of the self-confidence to stand up to a frankly hysterical left-wing extremist professor on those issues but I did have a lot to say and not all of it in disagreement with her but very very often so it's easy to get a white Western liberal to recognize that brain drain is a problem brain drain for example a small country like Jamaica generation after generation has its most highly educated people running away to work in Toronto and Toronto benefits from it now you may be a left-wing liberal who simply wants to celebrate this is it isn't it great that Toronto has a big Jamaican community I used to live just down the street from a huge Jamaican community in Toronto Jamaicans on one side and Brazilian Portuguese in the other I grew up in an intensely multicultural society but if you simply ask oh but is this good for Jamaica what are the impacts for Jamaica already you've shifted the nature of the conversation a very fundamental way now the economic arguments in favor of unlimited labor mobility unlimited acceptance of new immigrants at limited acceptance of new refugees they tend to distract you from the parasitic role this puts wealthy Western countries in why is it so economically productive for Canada to have nurses arrive and work in Canada from the Philippines the Philippines being a a much poorer country well the Government of Canada doesn't have to pay for their education the Government of Canada doesn't have to pay for their health care during their birth and early years of life a Government of Canada doesn't have to pay for their retirement benefits they get in effect from the government's perspective in terms of the public purse Canada is in a parasitic relationship to the Philippines and we are siphoning off a lot of their most highly educated most up early mobile people to come and contribute to our economy it's still instead of the Philippines economy so yeah this is a problem for Jamaica this is a problem for the Philippines this is a problem for Cambodia this is a fundamental problem in the nature of how Liebherr markets link the first world to the third world right and Refugee policy only makes it more extreme Singapore is a very wealthy country I mean certainly by Asian standards about international standards also in principle under our 1951 United Nations Convention on refugee policy every single homosexual in Singapore homosexual lesbian etc has the right to immediately relocate to Canada and live in Canada in perpetuity permanently because they are refugees because the government of Singapore persecutes them has refused they do not have sufficient human rights in Singapore and we could also choose Saudi Arabia as an example okay so Canada could very easily absorb all of the homosexuals from Singapore where we have a big country and were also I mean culturally in terms of the level of education it's much much easier for a Singaporean refugee to integrate into Canada's economy than it is for an Afghanistan refugee or what have you or Cambodian and I just gotta say I'm choosing examples here so far where I actually if anything of a positive bias towards them I rather like Singaporeans I rather like Cambodians I used to live in Cambodia myself and so on it's not the case that I'm against the Cambodians living in Canada I'm really questioning the fundamental assumptions that are basically on challenge today by the entire establishment whether neoliberal neoconservative or indeed left-wing extremists they all share fundamental set of assumptions that I think are fundamentally wrong is it in Singapore's best interest for all of these dissidents all of these people who might as artists as intellectuals as political leaders challenge and change Singapore's government is it in Singapore's interest for all of them to escape to Canada to form an émigré community a refugee suburb of Toronto do we want to do that with the whole world because those are the laws we have in the books right now now there are other factors in selecting who actually makes that trip and who doesn't with the Syrian refugee crisis the average refugee is every call was earning about two thousand US dollars per year now again this is partly because the value of those earnings would be much much greater in the local economy than when they're converted into US dollars and made to buy foreign services the cost of getting on a Smuggler's boat to try to make the crossing from Syria to Europe about six thousand dollars on average US dollars okay so you're not getting a random sample of Syrian refugees arriving in France or Germany or Italy or Greece or what have you all right you are not getting a random sampling of Cambodians who turn up in Canada not getting random sampling of lotions you're not getting a random sampling of Burmese refugees those are all groups I've known face to face those are languages I've studied and spoken to varying census their people have interviewed face to face we refugees for those communities these are things that was really interesting for many many years and the things I've read about in formal reports studies research what have you so so many so many countries if anything I'm positively biased in these examples I'm choosing but the policies we have in place are still disastrous and they're disastrous for the people themselves if the Canadian government wanted to help refugees from Myanmar Burma what everyone say you can set up and operate a camp right on the edge of Burma the Thai Burmese border on any other borders and provide those people with food and shelter and medical care that doesn't divorce them from their native language their native economy their native Society and leaves them poised in a place to move back to their homeland the minute political conditions allow it and of course that is the traditional refugee the internment camp such as now surrounds Syria I mean Jordan and Lebanon and what have you if you have this humanitarian impulse to help refugees that's where you do it as close to the crisis as possible and all the while enabling those people to militate for political change to remain a part of that social networks of family you know yeah if you divorce people even from the family they grew up in whether it's in Cambodia or Singapore or Syria forced them to learn a totally new language you force them to join your economy at the lowest rung this misrepresentation that you're you're really helping people by recruiting them into being um you know illiterate hotel cleaners in California remember reading one account of a Cambodian refugee who was shuffled off to do the lowest level of factory labor in New Zealand you know he didn't speak a word of English she was put in an airplane and found himself in this alien country speaking in alien language and he was earning okay money he was set up with a job of the New Zealand government by the refugee board working and uh working in a factory he was resentful as hell he didn't regard to positively regarded as a pretty awful experience he was made into a member of the oppressed proletariat that the left-wing are supposed to care about right recruiting Cambodian refugees and Syrian refugees and what-have-you into the lowest rung of your economy as a developed Western nation to be exploited in a society that they don't really understand in a legal system they don't understand where they don't have the same rights they don't even have the same ability to complain but someone born and raised do just this is not a morally good thing and the simple way the left-wing represents it to be now whether they can even find employment is another matter I just saw statistic that I believe 90s sorry sir sorry I think was 86 percent yeah 86 percent of the Afghan refugees in Germany never found employment remain permanently employable they were there assess for memory but anyway I did you see that stat recently many of them of course failed find employment and failed integrative introduced what they wanted to do but yet the purpose of refugee policy under the 1951 UN Convention wasn't to integrate people it wasn't to employ them in your factories it wasn't to employ them mopping the floors of a hotel lobby the point of refugee policy was to provide refuge and that really is a high and pure moral cause that governments the world ought to care passionately about but again if you want to provide refuge really think about the meaning of the word refuge refuge is not an airplane ticket to Los Angeles it's not refuge really is setting up a camp with medical care and food and shelter and education for children right on the Syrian border right on the Cambodian border right on the Burmese border wherever the crisis is that people are fleeing from right and it's it's providing them with that refuge so they can return to that Society and so they still engage there remain engaged with that society and their prospects in terms of their employment their education their language the point is not to assimilate them into Western society that's ultimately a very strange kind of capitalist predatory behavior of hey let's set up a bunch of recruitment camps around the world so that the poorest and you know poorest and weakest you know most helpless people can be recruited to be less than minimum wage laborers in Western countries and the way they're recruited this is the criteria this led by is bizarre and of course when you leave the selection up to instead we're gonna recruit refugees on the basis of whoever can pay the most in bribes to illegal you know human smuggling rankness the results you get are even worse of course that's not the case with an example like Singapore it wouldn't be the case with homosexuals fleeing from Saudi Arabia either if every homosexual in Singapore flees to Canada which they have the right to do and there are it's not a hypothetical example II do have homosexuals in Canada or Singaporean citizens who came as refugees for this reason which is a fascinating case study again okay they transform Singapore by their absence they have subtracted themselves from the social struggle in a way there's tremendous long-term consequences there have been periods of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar where the government of Myanmar was basically trying to exterminate a whole ethnic group of people should Canada on mass receive those people into Canada find them factory employment or other minimum wage or worse the men would try and integrate them into Canadian society believe it or not we would then be participating in genocide we would be assisting the government of Myanmar in making that ethnic group disappear really think about it that's not refuge and I know you may think it's helping them yes on a person-to-person basis they will thank you they will say well I'm so happy I now have this apartment in Canada instead of either being homeless or fleeing into the jungle or being in a ravine I recognize that but you have to think about the meaning and purpose of refugee law and how it's supposed to help the countries these people are fleeing from all right you're not going to help a persecuted ethnic minority by wiping them out of the history of the country they're they're fleeing from and you're not gonna help homosexuals militate to transform the society they're fleeing from whether that Saudi Arabia or Singapore by in this sense giving them refuge where we don't mean refuge we mean immigration with a mask put on it we mean integration and assimilation into a totally foreign society and totally foreign economy for reasons that have nothing to do with helping that cause or helping those people or helping the future of that country all right now my heart goes out to anyone who's bothered to engage in this debate one of those I said my first day in that class was that I felt that this was a black box issue this was an issue sorry black boxes an image comes from aircraft this is an issue that in a democratic society we had proved we were incapable of debating we were we were incapable of discussing publicly and so democracies had basically taken up undemocratic positions on this issue most Western democracies have a more or less covert system of points for how they select who becomes an immigrant's who becomes a refugee and what benefits they received and this is kept out of the public's attention and kept away from parliamentary decision-making to the greatest extent possible because it's at the end of the day we literally have Christian missionaries standing around in a refugee camp in Myanmar selecting who's gonna live it who's gonna die it's really odious and nobody wants to think about it again whether it's Myanmar or Africa I'm using examples I'm more familiar with and we do have situations where we have oppressed groups within Canada who are in much much worse conditions than refugees who've arrived from foreign countries I met and interviewed a family from Myanmar so they were persecuted ethnic minority so they're not Burmese but they're from Myanmar and they were in Canada and they had lived there long enough to know in the park and I was living in a Saskatchewan the most hated ethnic group the group that had to face the most racism from taxi drivers and employers and over the site were our native people the Cree the Egypt why the den a with several other groups there but our our First Nations are American Indians as Americans would say right and I was asking them you know their whole story how they got selected out from the camp put an airplane end up in Canada and of what benefits that were and they were getting real benefits handed out to them by the Canadian government free education and a free house gabbert Canada literally gave them a house in downtown Regina the capital of the province were course they had access to education and employment and all these benefits but the house was free now not only is the case that native-born Canadians do not get these amazing social services that were given to these Burmese migrants for no reason they for reasons they couldn't explain themselves I mean they themselves puzzled that they sat there and talked about they said yeah it's a strange system isn't it you had to look across the train tracks to the situation of our own native people or indigenous people and the terrible struggle they've been in to have any land of their own to have any access to education or opportunity or employment their own and I asked them I asked these refugees face to face in this interview I said well how do you feel but the fact that you know we have poor people here we have poor native people who've been here for thousands of years before there were any white people in this country and our government doesn't give them the opportunity that our to you the government gave you better opportunities better benefits than we ever give our own native people if we handed out free houses in the capital cities of our country to our native people instead of doing what we did to them over the last 50 years if we gave them the benefits of a refugee policy over a period of 50 years their whole socio economic position in the country would be fundamentally different radically indescribably different from from what it is today in Canada right some of you know what I'm talking about some of you don't and it was a really strange moment to sit there with this person who'd benefited so much from the largesse of Canadian refugee policy and hear him just say sadly I don't know I don't understand it it makes no sense okay so even the people who benefit most from this have to sit there sadly and say yeah this is really kind of a twisted lottery that doesn't make any sense now the other the other concerns that are expressed by both the traditional left the traditional right some of them I do share having next-door neighbors who are Cambodian or Lotion both being Buddhist cultures or majority Buddhist cultures is not the same as having neighbors from Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia it's not there are differences having neighbors who are Chinese is not the same as having neighbors who are Iraqi it's not.you know there's no point in pretending that it's the same simply because they may all legally fall under the heading of refugees or they may legally fall under the heading of migrants of immigrant policy right one of the things that haunts me most about this in a country the size of Canada is that you see the people in our own government don't have any of the expertise they need to handle these issues they don't know Laos and Lotion culture and the Lotion language the way I do they don't know Cambodia the way I do and you know if you just spend a little bit of time and I spent years doing raising this stuff you know the people who were chosen to come back from those conflicts they're not normal people they're not an average or cross section of the Lotion population of the Cambodian population disproportionally they're people who rolled up their sleeves and did killing for us meaning the CIA you know that if you just spend some time hanging out of lotion buddhist temples again the political profile of who came back and it still talked about a kind of coded way on cbc radio you know a large number of these refugees being resettled from afghanistan are people who were translators or assistance or mercenaries or killers who worked with the american side who worked with the canadian side in our long or decade-long conflict in afghanistan right so it's not a random selection and again this gets at fundamental ethical problem of the meaning of refuge itself refuge is not supposed to be a reward for military service right it's not supposed to be integration into canada for everyone who proved they were willing to kill on behalf the CIA or do the translation welcome behalf of the CIA or whatever their job was in america's never ending wars overseas and again those people transform their country by their absence the fact that we take away from Jamaica and the Philippines and all these other countries they're most highly educated people and in many cases the people who are most inclined to be dissonant the people are most inclined to militate for real cultural and political change to transform the societies they're from we are transforming those societies in in a different way we're changing the fate and future of those countries by integrating those people into the suburbs of Toronto instead of leaving them to work for a better and brighter future in their own country and of course we are in a very real sense neglecting the opportunity and I think the moral obligation to present meaningful economic development and opportunity to oppressed and downtrodden groups within Canada such as our First Nations we situation in Victoria where we had Filipino immigrants being brought in to work just at a donut shop in a coffee shop and the newspaper started complaining about it because you look at the actual laws the laws are supposed to prevent that we're not supposed to be bringing in unskilled labor for that level of job were supposed to be giving those jobs to Canadians and there are elements of racism and they're elements of authoritarianism in the workplace to put it that way the fact of the matter is that most Canadian employers who might own a small donut shop or coffee shop they know that if they bring over a Filipino who just barely speaks English and doesn't know how to exercise their rights they're going to be an almost silent and unquestioning employee and it'll be a very different challenge of employer to employee to go out and recruit people from a native Reservation to go out and recruit people who've born and raised in Canada know their rights and have some sense of the dignity in the workplace they deserve and what have you right so the concept of providing refuge to people in need is so morally pure that nobody wants to question it and yet if you actually go and visit a refugee camp it's filthy and hopeless and sorted and don't even get me started I could talk for another 30 minutes and if you look at the actual system of how people are selected out of those camps and end up being integrated in a Canadian society that's even more disturbing so we have a situation to say it's a black box situation where I think nobody on the left and nobody on the right wanted to really look at how these systems work and what the implications are for destination countries or source countries in immigration or refugee policy nobody wants to take responsibility for it and on the contrary what has emerged is a really insincere economic rationale which is simply that accepting refugees increases GDP or accepting new immigrants increases GDP this is true but simply having more human beings increases GDP right the this is really fallacious reasoning and I've heard that presented at London School of Economics lectures with no sense of humor to an audience where I think 90% of the people in the audience know just how insincere it is say oh well more migrants and more refugees means more GDP therefore it's justified yeah this is actually a completely fallacious argument but it's true too that the basic standards and practice of refugee policy emerged after the shock of the Holocaust as I called the big UN declaration is 1951 the main policy on that then the post-world War two period they were really just thinking of a circumstance such as the rise and fall of the Nazi Empire which was brief and of populations like the Jews of Europe that were being persecuted but that were almost an invisible minority within Europe who could as vary who could as easily move from Germany to Denmark and be a part of that economy and and so on who could escape persecution and then after the presumed oppressive regime collapses in a few years go back again okay this was never thought of this was never conceived of the issues were never thought through on a global scale and it was neither thought through in terms of what is the benefit for destination countries such as Canada nor what really is the interest for source countries whether that's Singapore Saudi Arabia or Cambodia