‘Durable solution’ no solution for asylum seekers

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/08/2015 (3486 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Thus far, the focus of Canada’s election campaign seems to be upon the economy and security, as Conservative Leader Stephen Harper sets the agenda. Other topics are lost, but may eventually have more to do with Canada’s long-term survival. Things such as democracy and its nurturing; or immigration and its harvesting.

Two seemingly unconnected and current stories suggest an idea for a modest, compassionate and little-cost adjustment in the humanitarian category of Canada’s immigration policy. Perhaps this might find a place in campaign rhetoric.

Yahya Samatar swam into Canada on the Red River, creating a story that has spread worldwide. One asylum seeker amongst perhaps a hundred each year that reach Manitoba.

Europe is being flooded with asylum seekers like Yahya by the hundreds of thousands, refugees from the Middle East and Africa, as parts of the world experience horror and chaos. The total of displaced and desperate humanity has grown beyond 60 million.

Small Hungary alone reports 1,000 refugees a day (mostly Syrians) are slipping across its southern border from Serbia and Croatia. The flood of refugees into Italy is monumental.

It’s an international crisis from which Canada is largely insulated by geography and by immigration policy. All of Canada sees relatively few asylum seekers. We call them “refugee claimants.”

Most have escaped life-threatening situations that are all too real, although the Harper government tends to label them “bogus.”

The second reported story is about three African refugees in Malta, where Immigration Canada reversed its earlier decision that they had a “durable solution” (and could stay in safety forever in that tiny European island nation). After appeal, it is now allowing their sponsoring to Canada by Hospitality House of Winnipeg.

The durable solution argument reflects an old test now outmoded by events. It is rooted in the Geneva Convention on Refugees of 1951 that followed the huge displacements of the Second World War. Signers of the convention agreed to welcome refugees and accommodate them.

The convention has now been signed by 145 countries including pariah countries that produce refugees, others that merely accommodate refugee and a few that actually resettle refugees (such as Canada). It is a mixture of bad, tolerable, and good guys.

Canada ducks behind the durable solution excuse (like it first did in Malta) to refuse the resettling here of refugees sponsored out of convention-signing European countries such as Hungary and Italy. It frequently does the same in South Africa despite the horrific stories of refugee persecution there.

But it doesn’t use the excuse to stop refugees being sponsored to Canada out of Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan or Egypt, even though they too signed the Geneva Convention. There is clearly a conflicted and undisclosed standard, perhaps an issue for another day.

Rather than argue whether refugees do or do not have a durable solution in any particular country, Canada could simply bypass the issue entirely (as a reason for refusing a refugee’s application) when a sponsorship is in place from a Canadian private sponsor.

Refugees would still have to establish the veracity of their refugee claim, but they wouldn’t be stopped from coming to Canada by the use of the antiquated and mostly untrue durable solution device.

Refugees who would have been refused resettlement in Canada with the durable solution device in the past, have Canadian sponsors and former-refugee families here with whom they could be reuniting, families that would gladly bear the expenses and have networks available for facilitating resettlement.

Everyone wins in the potential of this situation. Families now doomed to perennial separation would be gratefully reunited. Canada would play a prideful role in assisting countries overrun with refugees, especially in Europe, to ease their burden. And refugees now without hope would look forward to a life with promise.

It is simply a matter of allowing a Canadian private refugee sponsorship to trump the durable solution argument, anywhere. And it poses no cost to the Canadian government beyond nominal paper-shuffling costs, because the private sponsors will happily provide the necessary support.

Perhaps during this election campaign the contending parties could spare a little time to consider a compelling moral issue: the plight of those stuck in the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time. And this modest proposal is at minimal public cost.

Tom Denton is the executive director of Hospitality House Refugee Ministry in Winnipeg.