Spinning Immigration
By charlie smith
Straight.com
Publish Date: 25-May-2006
On May 23, hundreds of people met at Lumberman’s Arch to commemorate a major event in the history of Canadian immigration. The group gathered on the 92nd anniversary of the arrival of the Komagata Maru into Burrard Inlet.
Even though the 376 South Asian passengers were British subjects, they encountered a hostile reception. Under the law of the day, immigration officers could refuse entry to anyone who did not arrive in a continuous journey from his or her country of origin. The Komagata Maru remained in the harbour with the passengers, mostly Sikhs, before being sent back to India on July 23, 1914.
For several years, the Prof. Mohan Singh Memorial Foundation has been seeking a federal-government apology for the Komagata Maru incident. Spokesperson Jasbir Sandhu told the Georgia Straight that he hoped the May 23 event in Stanley Park would get the attention of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, because Harper sidestepped a question about the Komagata Maru during a recent visit to Vancouver. “This issue is not just for the Indo-Canadian community,” Sandhu said. “We live in a multiethnic, multicultural city.”
This isn’t the only immigration-related issue facing the Harper government. As the Straight went to press, the B.C. Federation of Labour and human-rights groups were scheduled to hold a May 24 news conference to highlight the plight of a Mexican migrant worker, José Marcos Baac. His lawyer, Zool Suleman, claimed that his client lost his job and was told he must go back to Mexico. Suleman told the Straight that many farmworkers, including Baac, have voiced concerns about working conditions with that employer in the Fraser Valley.
“The issue that we wish to raise is what happens to migrant Mexican workers who come here when they have disputes with their employers,” Suleman said, adding that the employer was responsive to many of the workers’ concerns. “There is no proper, impartial, transparent dispute-resolution process.”
At 2 p.m. on Saturday (May 27), human-rights activists are planning a third immigration-related event for the Conservative government. They are joining a “National Day of Action” with a protest at the Vancouver Art Gallery for hundreds of thousands of people who live without legal status in Canada. It will coincide with protests across the United States on the same day on behalf of undocumented workers.
One of the organizers of the Saturday event, Harjap Grewal, told the Straight that there is a “crackdown” on immigrants taking place in Europe, the U.S., and Canada. He cited recent roundups and deportations of workers in Toronto, which included enforcement officials visiting schools. “The tactics are becoming very similar to what they’ve been doing in the United States,” Grewal said.
Since the January election, Harper and the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Monte Solberg, have tried to portray themselves as supporters of immigration. In speeches posted on his ministry’s Web site, Solberg has explained that he lives in Brooks, Alberta, which is home to 1,200 former Sudanese refugees. On more than one occasion, Solberg has noted that his government pumped more than $300 million into settlement funding and committed $18 million to hasten the recognition of foreign credentials. He did not make himself available for an interview with the Straight.
“There’s no question that Canada has the most wide-open and compassionate immigration system in the world,” Solberg said in one of his speeches. “But that doesn’t mean we can sit on our hands: we’re going to make it even better.”
At the same time, Solberg has also claimed that Canada’s refugee-determination system is “complex, slow, costly, and inefficient”. In a May 10 presentation to a parliamentary committee, Solberg claimed that “significant resources are spent on claims made within Canada by individuals who do not need refugee protection”.
Earlier this month, Harper gave a speech in Ontario, surrounded by nonwhite faces, in which he noted that the government had cut the permanent-residence fee in half, to $490. Harper also announced that foreign kids adopted by Canadian parents would gain citizenship with minimal hassles.
Grewal told the Straight that he thinks it’s “disgusting” that nonwhite “community leaders” would pose for Harper photo ops, considering the Conservatives’ stance on guest workers and Harper’s recent decision to arm border guards. Grewal described the federal government’s live-in caregiver program and the seasonal agricultural workers’ program as “being the equivalent of the slave trade”. He said the government wants to bring in labourers but deprive them of their human rights. Last year, more than 95,000 foreign workers came to Canada under the Temporary Foreign Workers program.
“If you put them under a guest-worker program, you don’t have to give them full rights or full standards of employment in Canada, which basically allows it to be a more exploitable labour market,” Grewal said. “It’s a very tactical way of allowing for a flexible labour market, which can reduce wages and increase profits for some companies.”
Some of Solberg’s right-wing supporters, how?ever, would like the guest-worker program expanded. In a paper published last year for the Fraser Institute, economist and former Reform MP Herb Grubel proposed a new immigrant-selection process: foreigners would enter Canada on renewable, temporary work visas. They could only do this if they had a valid employment contract. These temporary visas could lead to permanent immigration status.
“Unemployed holders of temporary work visas would face deportation,” Grubel recommended in the paper. “Private firms in a public-private-partnership arrangement would collect and maintain information needed by government to enforce the regulations. As taxpayers, the holders of temporary work visas are entitled to all government benefits available to Canadians.”
Grubel, who once sat in the same caucus as Harper and Solberg, recommended that the government issue temporary work visas over two-year periods at Canadian embassies abroad. After four years in Canada, these workers could obtain permanent immigration visas. Their spouses and families could be admitted under “family work visas”, which would enable them to work. Those who lost their jobs would have to find another job or leave the country within three months.
Grubel cited four problems associated with allowing people to come to Canada under the “family class” to be reunited with relatives. He claimed that parents were unlikely to find jobs because of their advanced age and language difficulties. He added that parents who come sometimes have young unmarried children who “can also become immigrants without having to pass the points test applied to economic immigrants”. Then he cited Fraser Institute researcher Martin Collacott’s contention that these children, once in Canada, marry spouses overseas who sponsor their parents. Finally, Grubel claimed, sponsors do not keep “a substantial proportion” of their commitments to guarantee that immigrants won’t become a burden on the public treasury.
Burnaby-Douglas NDP MP Bill Siksay told the Straight that he was troubled that Solberg didn’t emphasize family reunification during the minister’s recent appearance before the Commons citizenship and immigration committee. “It’s a concern of thousands of Canadian immigrants right now who are trying to have family members join them, and lots of other Canadians who want family members to join them as well,” Siksay said. “To leave it out of the overall characterization of the immigration system, I think, was significant.”
Siksay claimed that family-class immigrants usually have an easier time adapting to Canada because they don’t have as high expectations as economic-class immigrants. Meanwhile, Liberal MP Andrew Telegdi told the Straight that he is concerned that Solberg has abandoned the traditional practice of setting annual immigration levels. “One of the key things for Canada is that immigration has been in the past and will continue to be in the future the lifeblood of our country,” Telegdi said. Both Telegdi and Siksay also criticized the Conservative government for not creating a refugee-appeal division.
Even though approximately 60 percent of immigrants came in under the “economic category” in 2002 and only 28.5 percent were in the family class (just 9.8 percent were parents and grandparents), Grubel still expressed concerns about immigrants bypassing the “points” test, which is based on such factors as age, education, language proficiency, and so forth. Grubel also claimed that the live-in caregivers “typically have low educational achievements and their work experience does not qualify them for high-paying jobs”. He provided no evidence to back this up.
Charlene Sayo, an organizer with the Philippine Women Centre, strongly rejected Grubel’s contention that live-in caregivers have “low educational achievements”. She claimed that many are extremely well-educated in the Philippines.
“It’s quite erroneous for Herbert Grubel to say they have low education,” Sayo told the Straight. “It’s just not true.”
Collacott, also a senior fellow of the Fraser Insti?tute, claimed in a 2002 paper that immigrant-service organizations have “played a significant role in opposing reforms and in lobbying for changes that drive policy even further away from serving the interests of the country and, in some respects, from those of the immigrants themselves”. He cited their opposition to proposals that newcomers have a working knowledge of French or English. “They might have added (but did not), that if immigrants already possessed such skills when they arrived in Canada, the services of such organizations would be in less demand and they would stand to lose a good deal of their government funding,” Collacott wrote.
He also warned of the impact of Sikhs exerting their political influence on the Liberal Party of Canada. “In response, there are rumblings in the Chinese community in Vancouver over the success of Sikhs in extending their political influence far beyond their numbers; questions are being raised about whether the Chinese should not also consider voting as a block in order to serve more effectively their community’s interests,” Collacott wrote, without documenting this particular claim. “In the event the Chinese were to respond by themselves resorting to block voting, it is not inconceivable that people of European origin would eventually follow suit in order to ensure their interests received sufficient attention.”
Collacott’s recommendations included the following sentence: “Immigration should only be used on an exceptional basis to meet such shortages where they are particularly severe and the market cannot rectify them in the short term.” He also called for restrictions on the family class to one’s immediate family.
When Harper was the Reform party’s policy director in its early days, it opposed affirmative action for minorities and opposed allocating any government funds for ethnic groups. Sponsorship would be limited to immediate families and major changes to immigration policy would be dealt with in a national referendum.
Over the years, Harper and Solberg have reflected the views of the Fraser Institute on many economic issues. However, they haven’t publicly reflected Grubel’s and Collacott’s more recent recommendations on immigration.
Suleman, a veteran immigration lawyer, said he thinks the new Conservative government will stay the course on immigration, though he senses a slight tightening on humanitarian cases. Suleman suggested that as long as the Conservatives remain in a minority in Parliament, he doesn’t anticipate major changes on the enforcement side.
“I think people want to see a bogeyman where there may not be one,” he said. “In all due fairness to this government, I have not seen anything in my practice to indicate that things are harsher or worse due to this government.”
However, Suleman added that if the Conservatives ever form a majority with a longer mandate, he would expect to see “fairly significant” changes in immigration policy. As long as Solberg continues dodging interview requests, the public will not be able to find out if those changes could include adopting Grubel’s controversial recommendations on guest workers.
Straight.com
Publish Date: 25-May-2006
On May 23, hundreds of people met at Lumberman’s Arch to commemorate a major event in the history of Canadian immigration. The group gathered on the 92nd anniversary of the arrival of the Komagata Maru into Burrard Inlet.
Even though the 376 South Asian passengers were British subjects, they encountered a hostile reception. Under the law of the day, immigration officers could refuse entry to anyone who did not arrive in a continuous journey from his or her country of origin. The Komagata Maru remained in the harbour with the passengers, mostly Sikhs, before being sent back to India on July 23, 1914.
For several years, the Prof. Mohan Singh Memorial Foundation has been seeking a federal-government apology for the Komagata Maru incident. Spokesperson Jasbir Sandhu told the Georgia Straight that he hoped the May 23 event in Stanley Park would get the attention of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, because Harper sidestepped a question about the Komagata Maru during a recent visit to Vancouver. “This issue is not just for the Indo-Canadian community,” Sandhu said. “We live in a multiethnic, multicultural city.”
This isn’t the only immigration-related issue facing the Harper government. As the Straight went to press, the B.C. Federation of Labour and human-rights groups were scheduled to hold a May 24 news conference to highlight the plight of a Mexican migrant worker, José Marcos Baac. His lawyer, Zool Suleman, claimed that his client lost his job and was told he must go back to Mexico. Suleman told the Straight that many farmworkers, including Baac, have voiced concerns about working conditions with that employer in the Fraser Valley.
“The issue that we wish to raise is what happens to migrant Mexican workers who come here when they have disputes with their employers,” Suleman said, adding that the employer was responsive to many of the workers’ concerns. “There is no proper, impartial, transparent dispute-resolution process.”
At 2 p.m. on Saturday (May 27), human-rights activists are planning a third immigration-related event for the Conservative government. They are joining a “National Day of Action” with a protest at the Vancouver Art Gallery for hundreds of thousands of people who live without legal status in Canada. It will coincide with protests across the United States on the same day on behalf of undocumented workers.
One of the organizers of the Saturday event, Harjap Grewal, told the Straight that there is a “crackdown” on immigrants taking place in Europe, the U.S., and Canada. He cited recent roundups and deportations of workers in Toronto, which included enforcement officials visiting schools. “The tactics are becoming very similar to what they’ve been doing in the United States,” Grewal said.
Since the January election, Harper and the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Monte Solberg, have tried to portray themselves as supporters of immigration. In speeches posted on his ministry’s Web site, Solberg has explained that he lives in Brooks, Alberta, which is home to 1,200 former Sudanese refugees. On more than one occasion, Solberg has noted that his government pumped more than $300 million into settlement funding and committed $18 million to hasten the recognition of foreign credentials. He did not make himself available for an interview with the Straight.
“There’s no question that Canada has the most wide-open and compassionate immigration system in the world,” Solberg said in one of his speeches. “But that doesn’t mean we can sit on our hands: we’re going to make it even better.”
At the same time, Solberg has also claimed that Canada’s refugee-determination system is “complex, slow, costly, and inefficient”. In a May 10 presentation to a parliamentary committee, Solberg claimed that “significant resources are spent on claims made within Canada by individuals who do not need refugee protection”.
Earlier this month, Harper gave a speech in Ontario, surrounded by nonwhite faces, in which he noted that the government had cut the permanent-residence fee in half, to $490. Harper also announced that foreign kids adopted by Canadian parents would gain citizenship with minimal hassles.
Grewal told the Straight that he thinks it’s “disgusting” that nonwhite “community leaders” would pose for Harper photo ops, considering the Conservatives’ stance on guest workers and Harper’s recent decision to arm border guards. Grewal described the federal government’s live-in caregiver program and the seasonal agricultural workers’ program as “being the equivalent of the slave trade”. He said the government wants to bring in labourers but deprive them of their human rights. Last year, more than 95,000 foreign workers came to Canada under the Temporary Foreign Workers program.
“If you put them under a guest-worker program, you don’t have to give them full rights or full standards of employment in Canada, which basically allows it to be a more exploitable labour market,” Grewal said. “It’s a very tactical way of allowing for a flexible labour market, which can reduce wages and increase profits for some companies.”
Some of Solberg’s right-wing supporters, how?ever, would like the guest-worker program expanded. In a paper published last year for the Fraser Institute, economist and former Reform MP Herb Grubel proposed a new immigrant-selection process: foreigners would enter Canada on renewable, temporary work visas. They could only do this if they had a valid employment contract. These temporary visas could lead to permanent immigration status.
“Unemployed holders of temporary work visas would face deportation,” Grubel recommended in the paper. “Private firms in a public-private-partnership arrangement would collect and maintain information needed by government to enforce the regulations. As taxpayers, the holders of temporary work visas are entitled to all government benefits available to Canadians.”
Grubel, who once sat in the same caucus as Harper and Solberg, recommended that the government issue temporary work visas over two-year periods at Canadian embassies abroad. After four years in Canada, these workers could obtain permanent immigration visas. Their spouses and families could be admitted under “family work visas”, which would enable them to work. Those who lost their jobs would have to find another job or leave the country within three months.
Grubel cited four problems associated with allowing people to come to Canada under the “family class” to be reunited with relatives. He claimed that parents were unlikely to find jobs because of their advanced age and language difficulties. He added that parents who come sometimes have young unmarried children who “can also become immigrants without having to pass the points test applied to economic immigrants”. Then he cited Fraser Institute researcher Martin Collacott’s contention that these children, once in Canada, marry spouses overseas who sponsor their parents. Finally, Grubel claimed, sponsors do not keep “a substantial proportion” of their commitments to guarantee that immigrants won’t become a burden on the public treasury.
Burnaby-Douglas NDP MP Bill Siksay told the Straight that he was troubled that Solberg didn’t emphasize family reunification during the minister’s recent appearance before the Commons citizenship and immigration committee. “It’s a concern of thousands of Canadian immigrants right now who are trying to have family members join them, and lots of other Canadians who want family members to join them as well,” Siksay said. “To leave it out of the overall characterization of the immigration system, I think, was significant.”
Siksay claimed that family-class immigrants usually have an easier time adapting to Canada because they don’t have as high expectations as economic-class immigrants. Meanwhile, Liberal MP Andrew Telegdi told the Straight that he is concerned that Solberg has abandoned the traditional practice of setting annual immigration levels. “One of the key things for Canada is that immigration has been in the past and will continue to be in the future the lifeblood of our country,” Telegdi said. Both Telegdi and Siksay also criticized the Conservative government for not creating a refugee-appeal division.
Even though approximately 60 percent of immigrants came in under the “economic category” in 2002 and only 28.5 percent were in the family class (just 9.8 percent were parents and grandparents), Grubel still expressed concerns about immigrants bypassing the “points” test, which is based on such factors as age, education, language proficiency, and so forth. Grubel also claimed that the live-in caregivers “typically have low educational achievements and their work experience does not qualify them for high-paying jobs”. He provided no evidence to back this up.
Charlene Sayo, an organizer with the Philippine Women Centre, strongly rejected Grubel’s contention that live-in caregivers have “low educational achievements”. She claimed that many are extremely well-educated in the Philippines.
“It’s quite erroneous for Herbert Grubel to say they have low education,” Sayo told the Straight. “It’s just not true.”
Collacott, also a senior fellow of the Fraser Insti?tute, claimed in a 2002 paper that immigrant-service organizations have “played a significant role in opposing reforms and in lobbying for changes that drive policy even further away from serving the interests of the country and, in some respects, from those of the immigrants themselves”. He cited their opposition to proposals that newcomers have a working knowledge of French or English. “They might have added (but did not), that if immigrants already possessed such skills when they arrived in Canada, the services of such organizations would be in less demand and they would stand to lose a good deal of their government funding,” Collacott wrote.
He also warned of the impact of Sikhs exerting their political influence on the Liberal Party of Canada. “In response, there are rumblings in the Chinese community in Vancouver over the success of Sikhs in extending their political influence far beyond their numbers; questions are being raised about whether the Chinese should not also consider voting as a block in order to serve more effectively their community’s interests,” Collacott wrote, without documenting this particular claim. “In the event the Chinese were to respond by themselves resorting to block voting, it is not inconceivable that people of European origin would eventually follow suit in order to ensure their interests received sufficient attention.”
Collacott’s recommendations included the following sentence: “Immigration should only be used on an exceptional basis to meet such shortages where they are particularly severe and the market cannot rectify them in the short term.” He also called for restrictions on the family class to one’s immediate family.
When Harper was the Reform party’s policy director in its early days, it opposed affirmative action for minorities and opposed allocating any government funds for ethnic groups. Sponsorship would be limited to immediate families and major changes to immigration policy would be dealt with in a national referendum.
Over the years, Harper and Solberg have reflected the views of the Fraser Institute on many economic issues. However, they haven’t publicly reflected Grubel’s and Collacott’s more recent recommendations on immigration.
Suleman, a veteran immigration lawyer, said he thinks the new Conservative government will stay the course on immigration, though he senses a slight tightening on humanitarian cases. Suleman suggested that as long as the Conservatives remain in a minority in Parliament, he doesn’t anticipate major changes on the enforcement side.
“I think people want to see a bogeyman where there may not be one,” he said. “In all due fairness to this government, I have not seen anything in my practice to indicate that things are harsher or worse due to this government.”
However, Suleman added that if the Conservatives ever form a majority with a longer mandate, he would expect to see “fairly significant” changes in immigration policy. As long as Solberg continues dodging interview requests, the public will not be able to find out if those changes could include adopting Grubel’s controversial recommendations on guest workers.
posted by Tina Kyrtsos and Mario Ferrer at 12:56 PM
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