Canada's recurring refugee debate ignores our historical experience

With the recent increase in refugee claimants crossing unannounced into our country from the U.S., Canada’s approach to refugees is once again being hotly debated.

While there is a commonly held view amongst Canadians that we have been, and continue to be, a very welcoming country when it comes to refugees and other immigrants, the reality is that over the last 150 years nearly every large wave of immigration has faced significant resistance. And, in pretty much every case, the arguments against allowing in whichever group it is at the time have largely been the same.

Our lack of historical memory concerning our often-conflicted attitude toward immigration prevents us from learning from the past and leads us to keep repeating the same tired debate over and over again.

When a boatload of desperate Tamils arrived off of Vancouver’s shores in 2010, the Harper government declared it a national emergency, recalled parliament from summer recess, passed new laws and argued that the 400 or so bedraggled people posed a significant threat to our security.

Canada had virtually the same reaction in 1939 when a boatload of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution on the MS St. Louis tried unsuccessfully to land in Nova Scotia, and in 1914 when the Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver waters carrying Sikhs.

Sikhs on-board the Komagata Maru

Like many Canadians, I have always been proud of the role that Canada played in providing sanctuary to African Americans fleeing slavery via the Underground Railway. However, at the time, many of our ancestors viewed the fleeing slaves as “illegals” who, because they were not properly screened, represented a potential security threat and integration challenge. Sound familiar?

Exactly the same arguments are now being used against the few hundred poor souls that are currently crossing our borders each month fleeing persecution in the hope of finding a better life.

What is interesting is that over the years, the reasons cited by those opposed to each major wave of immigration and refugee resettlement have almost always been the same. They have argued that immigration from this particular group should be minimized because these people have a different culture, a different system of values and beliefs; that they won’t be able to integrate; that they will be a drag on our economic resources; that there are too many and as a result that they will swamp our society and change our national identity. That they are a security threat.

In the early 1900s immigration from China was resisted since there was a fear that numerically they would swamp us and that our security was threatened by the Asian diseases they would bring with them.

Chinese labourers detraining camp, Petawawa, ON.Credit: Meredith, C.P./Library and Archives Canada

From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s there was considerable hostility to Irish Catholic immigration. For many, the Irish represented an undesirable cultural group whose allegiance was more to Rome and the Catholic Church than to Canadian laws and values.

Leading up to and during the Second World War practically no Jewish refugees were allowed into the country because, it was argued, they had different religious and cultural beliefs and practices, which would make it hard for them to integrate. And once again, the security concerns were raised — how could we be sure that no German agents were hiding amongst the valid Jewish refugees, ready to attack our country once they were resettled into Canada?

Given that the same alarmist, anti-newcomer arguments have proven, in every case, to be invalid over the last 150 years, perhaps it’s time that we acknowledge there is nothing to fear from these waves of immigration. Instead, let’s recognize that, as in the past, each new wave does in fact end up integrating into our society and contributing to making this country the vital, culturally rich and economically strong mosaic that it is.

Canadians should have greater faith in the overarching strength and resilience of our Canadian identity and the universal appeal of our values when concerns about newcomer integration are raised. We have a wealth of historical experience to show that this faith would be well-founded.

This opinion article by RRP chair Andrew FitzGerald was first published in the Toronto Star, May 16, 2017

Toronto Star: Citizens step up where city fails

Toronto Star, September 23, 2015

Citizens step up where city fails refugees

Ripple Refugee Project is made up of average Torontonians resolved not just to sponsor Syrian refugees arriving here but to befriend and aid them once they’re here.

“Where is the heart?”

That’s what exasperated Mayor John Tory wanted to know this week when some members of his executive committee questioned spending $600,000 to welcome Syrian refugees to Toronto and help them settle. That money is just a drop in the city’s $10-billion bucket. We have cash to drag Muskoka chairs and planters onto John St., and spurt water from underground fountains in Nathan Phillips Square, but not to welcome people who arrive to our city with nothing but bruising memories and loneliness?

“Where is the heart?”I’ll tell you where it is. It’s beating around kitchen tables across the city.
In the past three months, more than 220 groups have formed and signed up with the fledgling organization Lifeline Syria to personally sponsor refugees. Most have committed to raising $27,000 — the minimum required to support a refugee family of four for a year. They’ve promised to prop that family up onto its feet for a year, setting up the basics — a place to live, furniture, OHIP cards, English lessons . . .

And they’ve pledged to be their first friends, for life is more than basics. It is walks along the boardwalk and visits to the museum, and learning the difference between Vietnamese pho and Chinese ramen.
Most of these people are average citizens, like you and me. They haven’t done this before. They are learning, as they go. They are sure, only, that this is the right thing to do.

“We needed to do something,” said Andrew FitzGerald, an online art-gallery owner who organized a meeting at his Riverdale home in May. Around 35 people crammed into his living room for tea and presentations from three experts on the practicalities and emotions of sponsorship.
Eight people signed up that day. Over the next few weeks, another eight people joined, “most of them, I didn’t know,” FitzGerald said.
They call themselves the Ripple Refugee Project.

“I couldn’t walk around another day. Here I am getting Americanos and people are drowning,” said Dr. Raghu Venugopal, an emergency-room doctor who has volunteered on five missions to war-torn African countries with Médecins Sans Frontières. You’d think all that life-saving would exempt him from feelings of guilt stirred up by that photo of little Alan Kurdi, lying on the Turkish beach as though he was napping. Not so.

“You have to ask yourself, do you really believe in the notion that all life is equal?” said Venugopal, 41.
When his colleagues inside University Health Network’s emergency rooms heard about Ripple, they pledged $41,000 in a single week. Add emergency rooms to the list of places where the city’s heart resides.

Over the past few months, this group of strangers-becoming-friends have grappled with some of the same issues stumping politicians. Is it really their role to do this? What kind of precedent would it set? What if the family they sponsor has diametrically different values to theirs?
“They’ll be worrying about their children and schooling, finding jobs, getting a family doctor and finding food they like. The shared humanity that comes out of it will quickly overcome the surface differences between our two groups,” said FitzGerald, 52.

A couple weeks ago, Venugopal got a call from Alexandra Kotyk, project manager of Lifeline Syria. She told him about a Syrian family, approved by the Canadian government as refugees, Ripple could sponsor.The hitch — it has eight members, double the number they were expecting.They would need double the manpower, double the money and double the heart. Plus, the grandfather has health challenges. He is in a wheelchair.

The group’s response was summed up by Nancy Graham, a public health nurse: “We’ve struck gold.”
Using your heart feels good.This week, Ripple members drafted an agreement with the Christie Refugee Welcome Centre to formally sponsor the family, and Ryerson University which has offered logistical support and its charitable status.
Kotyk plans to submit all the paperwork to Citizenship and Immigration Canada next week. It will be Lifeline Syria’s second formal application.

The group expects to welcome the three generations of this Syrian family within weeks. They are now frantically sourcing furniture and rental housing.

Helping just one family seems like a drop in another bucket. More than four million people have fled Syria’s civil war. But they called themselves Ripple for a reason. They hope to inspire other groups of regular Torontonians to follow suit — with money, sweat and yes, heart.
“There’s another ripple effect,” says FitzGerald. “When you change someone’s life for the better, that reverberates through society.”

Catherine Porter can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca