Refugee response: anger and fear, or compassion and grace?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/08/2024 (660 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“We just want people who will fit in.”

I’ve heard this said countless times around the dinner table and the outdoor firepit over the last several months. People will clutch their imaginary pearls and talk earnestly about “those people” seen protesting the war in Gaza or attempting to find homes after fleeing war in Syria.

Those are just the polite barbs — the microaggressions about not fitting in.

The more sinister ones can be seen on social media from those more emboldened by anonymity. Muslims and Arabs branded as terrorists, dangerous rapists just by virtue of their country of origin or religion.

Of course, the Liberal government is roasted for allowing even more of “them” to come into the country.

That two men have recently been arrested and charged with multiple terrorism offences in Toronto late last month has only fuelled that flame.

Nine charges, including count each of conspiracy to commit murder for the benefit or at the direction of a terrorist group — namely ISIS, a Sunni Muslim militant organization — have been laid against a 62-year-old and his 26-year-old son.

Conservative House Leader Andrew Scheer wants to know how these men were allowed into the country as the Tories go for blood with polling numbers heavily weighted in their favour.

Maybe it’s time for them to dust off failed leadership candidate Kellie Leitch’s idea to run an RCMP tip line to report barbaric practices. Anything to get folks up in arms about the current government. Stoke the fires.

There has been widespread rioting and numerous injuries in the U.K. fuelled by anti-immigration sentiments. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer denounced “far-right thuggery” as responsible for the attacks on a hotel housing asylum-seekers.

At least 10 police officers have been injured facing a barrage of missiles made up of bits of wood, chairs and fire extinguishers as the attacks have continued in numerous locations.

The assaults follow fake news on social media suggesting that the man charged with killing three girls at a dance recital in Northern U.K. was a Muslim asylum seeker.

In fact, the man charged was born in the U.K.. Protesters taking part in the melee could be heard shouting: “Save our kids”, “We want our country back” and “Stop the boats.”

In Canada, we did stop the boats, literally. We were so afraid of allowing in people who did not look like us, our government prevented “those people” from taking over our country, our schools, our government.

In 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized for the actions of the Canadian government that stopped a boat filled with 900 European Jews escaping Nazi Germany from landing in Halifax.

The MS St. Louis sailed from Germany to Cuba in 1939 but was refused entry, despite having proper documentation. Both the U.S. and Canada then denied then passengers safe haven.

It was forced to return to Europe and from there, 254 of its passengers died in Nazi concentration camps.

In his apology, Trudeau pointed out that “Bitter resentment towards Jews were enshrined in our policies.”

In fact, Canada accepted fewer Jewish refugees than any other Western nation during the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 with none-is-too many, a phrase, attributed to Mackenzie King’s attitude to Jewish immigration while prime minister. Jews were not considered assimilable.

It was a different response to a different kind of boat that won Canada recognition for service to refugees from the United Nations.

When thousands of refugees left Southeast Asia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of them arrived in Canada, thanks to the introduction of a new policy allowing private sponsorship of refugees.

Winnipeg-born Senator Peter Harder was part of that experience as the founding executive director of the Immigration and Refugee Board and a former deputy minister of Immigration.

He spoke about the significance of the signing of that agreement for the sponsorship of refugees with the Mennonite Central Committee on its 40th anniversary in 2019.

As Harder pointed out, private sponsorship “allowed individual Canadians to put into action the compassion they felt when faced with the horrific plight of desperate families in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, risking everything to flee to safety in small boats that were anything but safe.”

Two different stories of refugees to this country with so many more stories to tell.

How do we want this latest chapter to read?

Canadians can fall down the rabbit hole and feed anger and resentment of the unknown by scapegoating Muslims and Arabs, believing that they are taking our jobs and depriving our children of safe housing (all empirically untrue) and they are unsafe.

Or there’s the compassionate alternative to act with grace.

More grace in our response to refugees could go a long way to making sure that they “fit in” with the rest of Canada, whatever that means.

Shannon Sampert is a lecturer at RRC Polytech. She was the politics and perspectives editor at the Free Press from 2014-17.

shannon@mediadiva.ca