Remain vigilant on our borders
Dear Editor: There’s quite an uproar over the U.S. decision to temporarily suspend travel from seven selected countries. This doesn’t affect people travelling on Canadian passports, but that doesn’t seem to stop the tongue clucking and outrage over another country’s business.
Emotions have displaced reason and facts and many have chosen to portray this as a world-wide discriminatory act against Muslims. But it’s business as usual for predominantly Muslim countries like Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey and Indonesia where civil structure remains in place with a possibility of performing security checks on visa applicants with a reasonable degree of confidence.
The seven countries which the U.S. has put on a temporary visitors ban are those where chaos prevails or where terrorist activity and hostile sentiments are widespread and there is little chance of conducting any kind of meaningful security check before issuing visas to potential visitors. While these countries do have majority Muslim populations, the suspension applies equally to non-Muslim segments of their populations.
A heightened degree of circumspection is certainly justified for travellers from countries where terrorism has free play and where mobs are frequently seen chanting “Death to America” in the streets.
We might want to examine our own government’s screening actions under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Last year 1.4 million visa applications to our diverse, inclusive and welcoming land were rejected, mostly on the grounds of untruthfulness. Of these, 139 applications were denied as security threats by reason of involvement in terrorism and espionage, subversion, committing war crimes or crimes against humanity, or as a threat to Canada.
While it’s comforting that we did manage to screen out a number of security threats, it’s disquieting that an unknown number of undesirable people may well have managed to get through by various forms of misrepresentation. No system is airtight.
We need to maintain a rigorous policy on visitor screening, both for our own sake and to allay US concerns about hostiles using Canada as a springboard to enter the US. We don’t need any border restrictions because of US perceptions of negligence on our part. All it takes is one incident.
Prime Minister Trudeau has been surprisingly restrained on this, other than for one Twitter bleat to signal our relative virtue on the matter of refugees and immigration. The smart strategy is to stay off our soapboxes, tend to our own garden and remain vigilant on our borders. John Thompson
Kaleden