25,000 syrians: Are we ready?
Finding homes for refugees just the beginning
As the first of 1,600 Syrian refugees destined for Calgary arrived at the city’s international airport this week, well- wishers held up signs with the idealistic Beatles lyric, “All you need is love.” If only it were that simple. The Liberal government is organizing the “orderly” airlift of 25,000 refugees. There is $ 678 million set aside for “Operation Syria.” There are thousands of private sponsors and volunteers. But whether even that is enough remains to be seen.
Many agencies tasked with settling the biggest influx of refugees they’ve seen in 30 years have gone through years of cuts. And logistics and immediate support is only the first step. The biggest stakes rest on the long, slow process of integration — not only for the refugees, but the generation after their arrival.
We know t hat doing it wrong can lead to alienation, i solation, and i n extreme cases, may contribute to the radicalization at play in the Paris attacks earlier this month. And despite the near mythic power we ascribe to Canadian multiculturalism, a soon- to- be- published study of 4,000 i mmigrant and refugee children shows that it’s not the trauma experienced in refugee camps that affects their risk for aggressive behaviour — it’s discrimination once they get to Canada.
That aggression can begin and end with destroying other kids’ things or defacing walls with graffiti but can also be a precursor to violence, says the team’s leader Dr. Morton Beiser, a Toronto psychiatrist and professor who has studied refugees from the Vietnamese “boat people” of 1979 to the recent arrival of Tamils.
Worse, he says he hasn’t seen such xenophobic attitudes among some Canadians in the last 30 years. So, are we really ready? Logistics are the first challenge. Toronto and Montreal are set to take in nearly twothirds of the Syrian refugees arriving by the end of the year. Of the 10,000 Syrians coming in the first wave, families, church groups and community organizations will be privately funding about 8,000.
The government says it will cover the resettlement costs of the second wave of 15,000 refugees coming in the New Year. But the Liberals haven’t indicated which of the 36 cities tagged as “destinations” they will go to, or where they will f i nd accommodation other than what they say will be “last- resort” temporary lodgings at military bases.
Advocacy groups, meanwhile, say they are still waiting to hear how much of the $ 678 million promised by the government will be made available to support the extra people needed to help coordinate the response.
While not all provinces have felt deep cuts, “overall, the sector is extremely underfunded,” says Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees. “People are used to doing things with very little money, but it’s difficult to squeeze even more water out of dry stems.”
And while cities have begun setting up registries of people offering vacant rooms and apartments, in some places “it’s already a struggle to find affordable housing,” says Dench, and “that difficulty is going to multiply when you have a lot of people arriving at once.” Alberta is already seeking $ 5 million from the government for refugee housing assistance.
Longer- term housing may also be an issue. Developers are offering reduced rents in destination cities like Edmonton, Red Deer, Alta., Regina and Montreal, but observers worry a one- or two- year discount may not be enough.
Next on the list is education. An estimated 40 per cent of the refugees will be children. Many will have been out of school for years, working to help “put food on the table,” says Ratna Omidvar, chair of Lifeline Syria and executive director of Ryerson University’s Global Diversity Exchange. “The sheer idea of sitting in class — of being with a group of other children who are just learning and playing and laughing — I think that will come as a bit of a shock,” she says.
But some schools in B. C., Ontario and Quebec, already grappling with an increase in student population, have warned that they will need more English as a Second Language teachers and other resources than they currently have to make that happen. “School boards are saying yes, we want to receive more refugees, but we’re already stretched to the limit in terms of capacity. How can we take on more?” says Dench.
Getting enough ESL instructors is critical for adults as well, says Susan McGrath, of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University in Toronto. Not only is it the biggest barrier to employment, “Language prevents you from communicating with your neighbour; it prevents you from talking openly to your doctor. If your child is having difficulty in school, how do you explain to this teacher that your kid saw a grandparent killed, or saw bombs dropped in the neighbourhood, and is fearful of loud noises?”
There’s also the support refugees need as they face their sheer unfamiliarity with Canada — the weather, the landscape, the social customs. When the Somalis came to Canada in the 1990s some children were sent to school with their snowsuits on and were puzzled when told to take them off. They had only their underwear on underneath.
But Stephanie Bangarth, an associate professor of history at the University of Western Ontario, seems confident about what’s ahead. “We’ve done this before,” she says. For example, between 1979 and 1980, more than 60,000 “boat people” found refuge in Canada after the communist victory in the Vietnam War. While they struggled initially with unemployment and the language, within a decade, the refugees living in Vancouver were more likely to be employed than other people of their same age. They didn’t drain the health care system and were less likely to be using social assistance, Beiser’s research shows.
Private sponsorship helped. But Beiser says it also created unforeseen problems. Forced to rely on the kindness of absolute strangers, something completely foreign to their culture, some of the refugees felt they owed something to their sponsors. In particular when it came to religion.
“Some of it was innocent,” says Beiser, founding director of the Toronto Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement. “The sponsoring group would take them to a celebration at the church, not to convert them but to involve them socially.” But there was also frank proselytizing. And that’s something we need to deal with, because these are vulnerable people, they are grateful and they are easy targets in a sense.”
One of the biggest challenges to any large and rapid settlement, though, is employment — particularly meaningful employment. Rima Berns-McGown, a lecturer at University of Toronto, points to her work with Somali- Canadians. “You had men who had been professional men, businessmen who used every penny they had to get here,” she says. But that experience was dismissed as not being “Canadian.” Instead, they were forced into lowpaying menial jobs, like parking lot attendants “that were demeaning and insulting and didn’t help pay the rent.”
That kind of discrimination could f uel l ong- term feelings of alienation.
“We need to make sure we don’t do that this time,” says Berns- McGown, adding that this means government collaborating with the private sector to say, “Here’s how we’re going to help you hire new Canadians.”
There will also be pressure on mosques and faith communities, as well as the Syrian-Canadians already in Canada. McGrath and others say it’s important to help the refugees connect with those left behind too — older family members who refused, or couldn’t, leave. “Relationships also form in the camps,” she says.
After so much t rauma, trusting anyone here may be difficult for the Syrian refugees at first, says McGrath. “They have no reason to trust anybody right now. They’ve had to flee the country. They could have been attacked by different militias.”
But to really i ntegrate, trust is what matters most. Physically and psychologically, says Beiser, their past has been cut off from refugees. “We have to be able to tell them, ‘ This is your new home, you’re part of us.’ ”
He a nd others worr y that sense of home could be undermined by anti- refugee sentiment in Canada, especially in the wake of the Paris attacks. Soon after, a fire was set a mosque in Peterborough, Ont., and a Muslim woman in Toronto was allegedly attacked while picking up her children from school.
Much of this is fear: A recent Ipsos poll for Global News suggests that of the 1,000 or so questioned, 75 per cent believe terrorism in Canada is a real threat. And, while this may have diminished since the Liberals pushed back their deadline, about six in ten of those polled disagreed that Canada should accept up to 25,000 government- sponsored refugees by the end of 2015.
The government’s plan acknowledges the need for “messaging” around public fears about moving so many refugees outside normal immigration procedures, as well as increased risk of infectious diseases ( experts say these are not expected to be a problem). The government is even prepared for unions that may fear Syrians taking jobs from t heir members, t he same kind of sentiment the “boat people” who arrived in rusting ships experienced four decades ago.
Refuting those concerns is vital. “The suspicions about refugees, this kind of conflation of refugees being terrorists or queue- jumpers — the refugees feel it, the kids feel it and it’s very destructive to this whole idea that we want to be able to provide them with the feeling they are going to become part of us,” Beiser says.
For all that, there has also been an unprecedented outpouring of support for Syrian refugees — entire cities declaring they want to welcome them, knitting bees in Edmonton where volunteers are making toques and mitts, furniture drives in P.E.I.
Now it’s a matter of making that welcome stick long after the rush of humanitarian action is over.
But as McGrath says, “We have seen Syrians walk across Europe trying to get to safety. We’ve seen children drown trying to get to safety. For the most part, the best part of us is coming out and saying, ‘ We need to do something.’”
There was also frank proselytizing. And that’s something we need to deal with, because these are vulnerable people, they are grateful