Refugee issue now defines federal race

A chilly welcome is probably better than no welcome at all. However, a warm welcome makes all the difference in the world. This is the simple insight of Dr. Morton Beiser in his book Strangers at the Gate, a study of the resettlement of the Vietnamese boat people in Canada. It bears repeating as we prepare for the arrival of the long-awaited Syrian refugees and as we consider what is at stake in the October federal election.

Beiser’s study documents how a warm welcome was even more significant than other factors such as housing, funding, language classes and employment in determining the success of a refugee’s resettlement. Where Vietnamese refugees were treated with respect and welcomed with warmth, they usually flourished. Without that sense of welcome, they tended to flounder.

This insight is so simple as to be astonishing. However, we know it is true from our own experience. When we are treated with respect and trust, we flourish and do our best. But if we are surrounded with suspicion, questioned at every turn, we shrink and shrivel into our lesser selves.

I have seen this again and again in my 25 years of living with refugees. When they are treated with respect and dignity, they respond in kind. When they are welcomed with trust, they become trustworthy. When they are asked to contribute, they become confident and generous.

However, when they hear ministers of immigration describe them as “frauds,” “bogus” or even “potential terrorists,” they want to fold into the furniture and become invisible. They feel they must apologize for wanting to live.

This is called social cruelty and it has almost become normal in Canada.

Over the last 25 years I have watched as successive governments have justified chilly welcomes and closed doors for refugees. It has taken the picture of a small dead boy on a beach to expose the ocean of indifference that has separated us as human beings.

Alan Kurdi shattered the facile stereotype of a refugee as a fraud, a cheat, a terrorist. He was just a kid, innocent and vulnerable. It has been a heartbreaking, eye-opening moment for our country.

That a refugee child would become an issue in this election was unimaginable two months ago. No party wanted to make the pressing plight of Syrian refugees an election issue. However, how we respond to this crisis is now the very crux of the choice before us.

No other issue in this election so clearly asks us to define our meaning and purpose as a country. No other issue is so clearly a measure of our morality. Are we here simply to be prosperous and safe? Or do we want also to be good?

Now more than ever we think of ourselves as taxpayers and consumers rather than as citizens and human beings. This process did not begin with the government of Stephen Harper but he has accelerated it greatly.

We now live in a country where the threads that bind us together are very thin indeed. At times it seems that all that holds us together is a real or perceived or constructed fear: fear of great socio-economic forces over which we have no control, fear of terrible people called terrorists.

The outpouring of concern in response to Alan Kurdi suggests that there is still another way. We are not always grasping and mean. All of us are capable of decency and tolerance.

I see this every day in my work. Once people see the face of a refugee and learn their name and story, most Canadians do not see only potential terrorists. They see neighbours and fellow workers, children who will become fellow citizens.

We Canadians may not aspire to imperial greatness but that does not mean we must opt for a politics that is shrivelled and mean. We are a country that is capable of moral leadership, as we have shown before.

If the refugee issue has come to define this race it is because of what it represents: our country’s fraying moral fabric and an urgent, widespread sense that it must be repaired.

All of us can be grounded in gratitude for this land, this place which we share and for which we are all responsible. Here there is still room for goodness and gratitude. In spite of or perhaps because of the cold, we do understand that the warmth of the welcome matters.

Mary Jo Leddy is the founder of Romero House for Refugees and a Member of the Order of Canada.