DEALING RATIONALLY WITH REFUGEES KEEPS THEM FROM BECOMING A CRISIS
My family members were refugees during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. My mother was just a child with no understanding of why, one morning, her family left their home, their belongings, their entire lives to make a perilous journey with only the clothes on their backs. The kindness of strangers on the other side allowed them the opportunity to make a home for themselves in Pakistan. Had my mother lost her life as a nameless refugee along the way, I would not have existed.
In this context, the continuous debate in Canada on refugees and asylum seekers rings hollow. Even on the numbers, the lack of perspective we have is staggering.
Europe is hosting more than one million refugees, mostly in Germany. Turkey has 3.5 million; Jordan, 1.4 million; Kenya, almost 500,000. Even Pakistan hosted more than three million Afghan refugees in the late 1980s.
And Canada cries foul over the roughly 30,000-plus who have crossed the U.S. border since last year. Good thing we have oceans separating us from the hordes of misery elsewhere.
But the fact is, those refugees such as the Rohingya, or in the African Sahel, Congo or Yemen, belong to regions where the conflict is so complex and barbaric, solutions seem almost futile. The neighbouring countries to all these communities of conflict are either too illequipped to handle the scale of the issue; are the cause of the issue; or are simply politically averse to dealing with it.
Canada will never see floodgates of horror and misery on the scale of what faces Europe and Africa (unless a U.S. president pushes the red button), simply by virtue of its unique geographical location. So for us, even debating whether to support those who flee for their lives is akin to a human rights failure.
So is marketing refugees as if they were commodities that will eventually turn a profit, in order to gain public support. We saw this with the Syrian influx: policymakers consistently touting the monetary benefits of refugees for the benefit of the host nation.
Accepting refugees does not need evidence of a longterm return on investment. It simply needs an organized and scientific response. It will only become a crisis if it is not managed.
While Canada cannot realistically accommodate everyone, in today’s world of epic fallouts to major world events, refugees nevertheless are a reality we must expect and prepare for. And there are certain things we can do. We can further adjust the annual intake of regular versus irregular migrants — i.e. refugees. In 2017, only 14 per cent of total permanent resident cases belonged to the humanitarian and refugee class, while 58 per cent belonged to the economic class. This gives us a wide berth to work with, without compromising the regular immigration stream.
Given our knowledge of conflict zones, we can forecast where the displaced will potentially come from by increasing coordination with multilateral agencies such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and International Organization for Migration. Venezuela is a case in point, not too far away. We can accordingly estimate the resources required for housing and social services, over the next few years.
We can assess appropriate locations here that cannot only offer them services, but that also need human resources for their economy. Unlike regular immigrants who can afford to be selective, and hence put pressure on only select urban centres, refugees simply require a space that is safe and organized, in order to make their way.
We can distinguish between the sudden mass influx of refugees and those individuals who are fleeing targeted persecution over time, and have a plan in place for both — including beefing up resources to process refugee claims.
And if we do not want to invest in refugee management domestically, then we should choose to systematically support those developing countries that host 85 per cent of the total refugee population worldwide.
Decades ago, the Indian subcontinent did not have any system to manage the millions of involuntary refugees on either side, such as my family. Everyone simply had to cope, and build two new countries from scratch.
Canada is not in that position. Let’s keep that in mind and focus on planning for the future, not politicizing it.