Racism lurks in Canada’s immigration policies

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This article was published 27/09/2019 (2377 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau struggles to put behind him accusations of being racist because of costume party antics in his youthful past, he asks us to look at his present stances. Fair enough. So what about the racism that still lurks in his government’s immigration policies?

Still, to be fair, Canada’s governing party has been Liberal or Conservative for 100 years, tossing the winning ball back and forth and ensuring that the established order maintains control. Immigration policy only changes and develops in modest ways. The majority of Canadians don’t object. Racism has deep roots.

I tell people every day that Canada is a hard country to get into, because that is my job as I explain the strictures. We are a gated country and the primary goal of immigration policy seems to be to keep people out. We let them come in limited numbers that are only about one-third of real annual demand, all the while boasting of our openness to the world.

But is our policy racist? It certainly used to be when we kept out Chinese, people from India or Jews, as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights illustrates in its exhibits. What about now? We have certainly come a long way in eliminating overt racism, yet is there a lingering intention to slow the inevitable transition of Canada to a multiracial state to a speed that the Canadian majority will tolerate?

Controlling the numbers plays a part. Nowadays, the primary sources of immigrants are not white-majority nations; Europeans no longer want to come here as in the past. The Cold War has ended, and Europe is a nice place; the Balkan war has ended, so that source dried up. Was our generosity to the Syrians somehow tinged? Most immigrants these days are coming from Asia, the subcontinent and Africa.

When we restrict immigration, we slow the country’s colour change. Is that racism? There are more obvious examples. When Europe became a less-consistent source of refugee immigrants, a Conservative government cut the number of government-sponsored refugees in half, with the remaining refugee millions being mostly Africans and Latinos. That’s where those numbers basically remain today.

Most immigrants who come to Canada are related to someone already here, although we force them to qualify in various silos that ignore the pull of family — which historically was the way this country was largely settled. As the immigrant majority shifted into the non-white category, a Liberal government removed the assisted relative class that had been a mechanism for bringing in brothers and sisters. Conservative and Liberal governments since have left this amendment unchanged. Is this racism?

While successive governments have trumpeted their commitment to family immigration, and produced figures that show abundant family class arrivals, they hide the fact that the bulk of these numbers count the families that accompany independent class immigrants who wouldn’t come in the first place if they couldn’t bring their families with them.

The remaining family class category covers just the immediate family — spouse, kids under 22 (which the Conservatives cut to 19), parents and grandparents.

Parents and grandparents are restricted to 20,000 a year (against an estimated demand of 100,000). In January, 27,000 applications were filed online in 11 minutes; since the majority of immigrants are now non-white, guess what these folk are. Is this racism?

The only door left open for family reunification is the one available for sponsoring refugee relatives, in one of three ways. Canada’s sponsorship agreement holders (there are about 112, mostly mainstream religious groups or ethnic associations) used to be able to sponsor in unlimited numbers. The last Conservative government almost stopped this by putting low-numbers caps on each sponsor’s allowance, and the Liberals have continued this policy. Since most refugees come from non-white countries, you know the question.

The other two ways to sponsor a refugee family are by groups of five or community sponsoring. For these, the government has devised an ingenious tripwire, a required document unavailable in predominantly Muslim and Arab countries that lack a United Nations Refugee Agency presence. Again, the question: is this cleverly disguised racism?

Immigration is being avoided as a topic by the main contending parties in the federal election, yet racism is alive and well-hidden in Canada’s immigration policies.

Tom Denton is an executive director of Hospitality House Refugee Ministry.