Canada welcomes genuine refugees
Canada will welcome 50 Montagnard refugees who had fled persecution in Vietnam, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced Wednesday.
Montagnard hill tribespeople, who come from Vietnam’s Central Highlands, face reprisals in Vietnam because they fought beside the Americans and the Republic of Vietnam. This group fled in 2006 and crossed the border into Cambodia but had to be rushed to Canada because the refugee centre there is closing.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said the group was under risk of return to Vietnam. Kenney said he was pleased to welcome the Montagnard to settle in Quebec City. “Following the fall of Saigon in 1975, more than half a million Vietnamese fled Vietnam. Thanks to the outpouring of support from Canadians, we welcomed more than 60,000 refugees in two years from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia under the Private Sponsorship Program,” he said in a statement.
Kenney said Ottawa was committed to refugee protection and that the government had increased refugee settlement by 20 percent. He also took the opportunity to raise the issue of human smuggling, which he said is compromising the refugee system.
The Conservatives have introduced Bill C-49 to crackdown on fake refugees, but critics say it goes too far and blurs the lines between refugees and immigrants. Amnesty International takes exception with the bill’s mandatory detention provision which will see arrivals automatically detained if they come on ship that has been labelled as part of human smuggling event under the legislation.
Liberal Immigration critic Justin Trudeau says the Conservatives are using events like the arrival of the MV Ocean Lady, which brought Tamil refugee claimants into Canada, to create fear over fake refugees so they can get support for their legislation.
The government says the ship’s arrival was a human smuggling event and C-49 will take away the incentive for human smugglers to do something similar in the future. Kenney says the bill is needed to protect the integrity of the system and maintain popular support for immigration.
SOURCE
Most illegal immigrants arriving in Australia by boat win legal residency eventually
Nearly every asylum-seeker who arrived in Australian waters during the past three years was granted refugee status, according to figures released under Freedom of Information laws and reported on by The Australian.
According to the report, the figures show that the Immigration Department approved fully 94 per cent of all refugee claims from people arriving by boat between October 2008 and December 22 last year.
Compared with other forms of refugee claims, those seeking asylum by boat had a significantly higher success rate. The Immigration Department approved only 39 per cent of visa requests for non-boat asylum-seekers in the first half of the current financial year. In 2009-10, the department refused 49 per cent of non-boat asylum seekers, and rejected 55 per cent the year before.
Opposition politicians argue that overseas refugee smugglers are keenly aware of the success rate of those arriving by boat, and said the figures will only further contribute to the problem. A spokesman for Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said refugee claims are processed independently of how they arrived in Australia.
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Background
Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.
Why is "La Raza" the one Spanish term that is NEVER translated in the American mass media? Because translating it would make it a lot less respectable. It means "THE RACE" -- The mixed Hispanic "race" of Mexico. Racism is fine South of the Rio Grande only, apparently.
The "line" of this blog is that immigration should be SELECTIVE. That means that:
1). A national government should be in control of it. The U.S. and U.K. governments are not but the Australian government has shown that the government of a prosperous Western country can be. Up until its loss of office in 2007, the conservative Howard government had all but eliminated illegal immigration. The present Leftist government has however restarted the flow of illegals by repealing many of the Howard government regulations.
2). Selectivity should be based on "the content of a man's character, not on the color of his skin", as MLK said. To expand that a little: Immigrants should only be accepted if they as individuals seem likely to make a positive net contribution to the country. Many "refugees" would fail that test: Muslims and Africans particularly. Educational level should usually be a pretty fair proxy for the individual's likely value to the receiving country. There will, of course, be exceptions but it is nonetheless unlikely that a person who has not successfully completed High School will make a net positive contribution to a modern Western society.
3). Immigrants should be neither barred NOR ACCEPTED solely because they are of some particular ethnic origin. Blacks are vastly more likely to be criminal than are whites or Chinese, for instance, but some whites and some Chinese are criminal. It is the criminality that should matter, not the race.
4). The above ideas are not particularly blue-sky. They roughly describe the policies of the country where I live -- Australia. I am critical of Australian policy only insofar as the "refugee" category for admission is concerned. All governments have tended to admit as refugees many undesirables. It seems to me that more should be required of them before refugees are admitted -- for instance a higher level of education or a business background.
5). Perhaps the most amusing assertion in the immigration debate is that high-income countries like the USA and Britain NEED illegal immigrants to do low-paid menial work. "Who will pick our crops?" (etc.) is the cry. How odd it is then that Australians get all the normal services of a modern economy WITHOUT illegal immigrants! Yes: Before the pandemic, you usually COULD buy a lettuce in Australia for a dollar or thereabouts. And Australia IS a major exporter of primary products.
6). I am a libertarian conservative so I reject the "open door" policy favoured by many libertarians and many Leftists. Both those groups tend to have a love of simplistic generalizations that fail to deal with the complexity of the real world. It seems to me that if a person has the right to say whom he/she will have living with him/her in his/her own house, so a nation has the right to admit to living among them only those individuals whom they choose.
I can be reached on jonjayray@hotmail.com -- or leave a comment on any post. Abusive comments will be deleted.
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