As Canada tightens asylum rules, refugees reuniting with family say they were turned over to ICE and jailed for months after failed border claims
Refugees like Appolon attempt to claim asylum in Canada through an exception to the country’s Safe Third Country Agreement with the US. Under the agreement, refugees must seek asylum in the first “safe country” they arrive in.
But legal experts argue that the US should not be considered a safe third country. They argue that the country’s long-term detention of those seeking refuge and threats to deport asylum seekers to countries where they could be harmed or killed indicate that the US is not safe.
Meanwhile, Canada is tightening its own asylum system. New legislation enacted in March has created further ineligibility rules for refugee claimants, prompting critics to accuse Mark Carney’s government of introducing Trump-style immigration policies.
Refugees like Appolon remain jailed in the US “because Canada conducted proceedings at the border in a manner that was rigid and, frankly, unfair”, said Simpson.
And all the people that die every year trying to cross the Mediterranean is sane? The massacre at El Tarajal beach in 2014 is an isolated incident that doesn’t represent a larger problem with how Europe treats African Immigrants? The UK leaving the European Union, largely on worries about immigration, doesn’t represent a homebrewed fascist threat from across the pond?
So many voters think harsher immigration control is something we should all just get on board with. We should just throw those people to the wolves and appease the reactionaries. If you collaborate with them on this, surely they won’t still claim that you’re letting migrants stream into your country, right?
Immigration has been a defining issue in far right movements gaining power across Europe, and liberals ceeding the narrative is a powerful tool in their moment’s arsenal. First they come for the immigrants, and you do not speak out for you were not an immigrant. Demand France and Britain and all the empires that fucked over Africa to right their past wrongs, or hold your tongue.
As a person with their head squarely on the chopping block for my ethnicity, gender, and political views, it insults me that you think I’m sane washing America. It disgusts me that you somehow think European politics aren’t at risk of heading the same direction as our own. It’s pathetic that you refuse to consider how common and popular assumptions might be fundamentally flawed.
More so than the actual Nazis in my country, it’s your counterparts who make me most hopeless for our future.
I’m really not sure why you’re trying to demonize me and make assumptions about every view I could possibly have, without any evidence.
All I have said is that roving armed patrols, putting people in death camps and forcing them to drown at your border is not the same as legal, written and enforced policy, and that it’s dangerous to liken one to the other.
You’re free to attack immigration policy. I do too. Its simply maddening to me that we’re allowing the media to muddy the waters with right wing ideology in every conversion, normalizing it for the masses. The more we do that, the less we get to argue about actual policy decisions.
You are quite literally harming your cause, both by attacking an ally over pedantics and allowing immoral rhetoric into the conversation.