Prime minister Stephen Harper says Canada can’t simply open its doors to the the flood of refugees fleeing the violence and chaos of Syria. Not without screening them first.
And of course, screening them will seriously begin whenever he says it will seriously begin. This is after all, a rule-of-law democracy and Harper believes he is elected to run it on his own terms.
Canada has formally committed to taking 10,000 refugees from Syria over the next three years. So far, 2,300 have been settled here, and a great many of them will have their lives tangled in bureaucratic red tape for years, if not decades. Retired Canadian general Rick Hillier says that number should be boosted to 50,000, and they could all be safely in Canada by the end of December.
But we all know that’s not going to happen, no matter how guilty we all might feel right now after seeing the photo of the drowned boy lying face down in the surf.
Chris Friesen of the Immigration Services Society of B.C. told reporters this week that there are close to 400,000 people on the continent of Africa alone, who are refugees waiting to be processed. Some have been waiting in refugee camps for as long as 30 years. There are 21 countries in Africa alone who are churning out refugees like it’s their main national export.
According to the United Nations, one of every 122 people on Earth is either a refugee, or a person internally displaced in their home country with no place to go, or someone seeking asylum.
We can set targets for as many thousands of Syrian refugees as we want, and each one of them we process will push an existing refugee application to Canada from all these other countries that much further down the list.
Nancy Caron, of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, told CBC News that efforts are being made to streamline the application process, and that Syrian resettlement cases to Canada are all being processed within a year.
But private sponsors for refugees from other countries where the regimes are just as violent and just as brutal as either side fighting in Syria’s civil war have been waiting two and three years to see any evidence of progress in applications they themselves have put money and effort into moving forward.
I can tell you from personal experience that there is nothing as frustratingly slow as watching the bureaucracies of two countries handle one simple visa application for residence. For a person whose identity and history can easily be screened in minutes, if someone would just get off his bureaucratic butt and do it.
Now try it with someone who fled his home with nothing but spouse and children and the clothing on his back. From a country where nobody knows what tribal hatreds might be packed in his pockets.
My heart goes out to them. Some Syrian refugees who have gotten resettled in Europe are beginning to tell their stories. They are university-educated in some cases, multilingual, leaving cities that once had Western standard power and water services, civil infrastructure, a working market economy — but which are now bombed-out pockets of rubble, patrolled by heavily-armed insane people.
They have much to offer any country who would take them in.
Harper says Canada’s response must include adding to the rubble. That’s a far more expensive option than throwing some drowning people a lifeline. It may not help for the other 400,000 people are also looking for a lifeline, but it beats simply watching them drown and hoping that among them weren’t too many people who were not just, you know … Muslim terrorists.
Like that little boy in the photo.
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