Email to Ms. Eaves (Forbes article further below), regarding her article:Ms. Eaves,
Hi. If impartiality means anything to you, perhaps next time you write an article on South Africa, you may wish to actually consider implementing some impartiality into your article, by doing a little bit of research; unless of course you know better what people in South Africa should think, and you really couldn’t give a flying rats ass what they really do think.
If so, would you kindly just have the decency, integrity and honour to inform your readers, that you are not remotely inteested in what people in south africa really think, because you have decided for them what they should think.
Mr. William Davis may have a canadian conscience, it appears yours is on holiday or AWOL.
Respectfully
Lara Johnstone
Why We Are White Refugees
http://why-we-are-white-refugees.blogspot.com
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A White Refugee From Racism?
Elisabeth Eaves, 09.04.09, 12:01 AM EDT
Political asylum and the Canadian conscience.
 Between 30 and 40 newspaper clippings were presented as evidence of life in South Africa. “One article exhibited was published in [the Daily Sun in 2004] by Africa Ka Mahamba. [It was] entitled ‘Taking from whites is not a crime’,” Kaplan said. The article quotes the leader of the “Uhuru cultural club” as telling youngsters who attended a Human Rights Day celebration to steal from whites because “it is the right thing to do”. |
Canada is generous in accepting refugees. In fact, it admits about half of all its applicants, the highest rate in the world. (The U.S. accepts 32%, Italy 16.3% and France 13.3%).
As in all nations that welcome refugees, the goal is to grant admission to those--and only those--who, if returned home, would find themselves threatened on account of "race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion," in the words of the U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. It's a simple, noble idea, akin to the invitation to the huddled masses in the Statue of Liberty inscription. It's not so simple in practice.
Canadians were already getting fed up with an overburdened system that sometimes made dubious calls--for instance, admitting a mentally ill South Korean woman on the grounds that psychiatric patients and their families are ostracized back home. Then last week the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) granted refugee status to a white South African man, Brandon Huntley, on the grounds that he faced persecution by blacks.
While Canadians sighed with exasperation, South Africans were outraged. The ruling African National Congress is pushing for Canada to overturn the decision, which may happen. Canadian federal lawyers are now reviewing the decision by the IRB, which operates independently of the government.
In making his case, Huntley claimed that he had been violently attacked seven times and called a "white dog" and a "settler," and that he never reported the attacks to the local police because he distrusted them. The Canadian tribunal that heard Huntley's case found his fear of race-based persecution credible, and felt he had presented convincing proof of the South African state's inability or unwillingness to protect him.
Huntley's alleged attacks occurred during attempted robberies and muggings. Many South Africans quickly pointed out that Huntley was not the victim of racism but rather of a serious crime problem--and that, in sheer numbers, it is poor blacks in South Africa who are the most frequent victims of violence
So what's Canada going to do, let in every crime victim?
This kind of question is rearing its head in refugee courts across all the Western immigrant nations. Some parts of the world are so malgoverned, crime ridden or war torn that practically every citizen would qualify as a refugee under contemporary human rights standards.
In 2007, Canada granted permanent residence to Oumou Touré, a 24-year-old Guinean woman with a 2-year-old daughter, because the daughter would likely be forced to undergo genital mutilation if they returned to Guinea. It wasn't the first time Canada recognized female genital mutilation, a tradition that often involves hemorrhaging and infections as well as excruciating pain, as grounds for asylum. And it fits the legal bill more plausibly than Huntley's case: Membership in a "social group"--that of the female--subjects victims to grievous harm. And yet literally millions of girls across sub-Saharan Africa could reasonably claim to be at risk.
The Canadian government has granted asylum to women fleeing forced polygamous marriages. It has also heard, but not yet recognized, claims based on domestic violence. Meanwhile, claimants of both sexes from Mexico and Central America have increasingly made the case that they are victims of rampant gang violence. In fact, the huge volume of refugee claims by Mexicans, and the low rate at which they have been found valid--11%--are the reason Canada just slapped a visa requirement on all Mexicans entering the country.
Being gay in a country that persecutes homosexuals has long been grounds for refugee status, in the U.S. as well as Canada. There's a marvelous scene in Before Night Falls, the biopic about Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, where an immigration official asks Arenas, played by Javier Bardem, to walk "like a homosexual"--to show the credentials, as it were, that would have made him a target of Fidel Castro's war on gays. In today's immigration hearings, homosexuals use their Facebook pages to prove orientation.
Homosexuals, crime victims, women: It adds up to an awful lot of potentially qualified refugees world wide.
It may be that Canada's refugee system is simply ill-equipped for an age of cheap jet travel, in which the physical act of getting from West (or South) Africa to Toronto is more frictionless than ever before. An open refugee policy naturally ends in a kind of free market for citizenship, and that's what Canada is facing.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. In the U.S. and Canada refugees, who make up a small sliver of total immigrants, have by and large been energetic and enterprising new citizens. Meanwhile, pressure is put on sending countries. The loss of one carnival worker--Huntley's employment the first time he visited Canada--may not cost South Africa much, but there is no better monitor of good or bad government than outflows of people.
Which is probably why, in its response to the Canadian Board's decision, the ANC focused heavily on its commitment to fighting crime. From Ottawa to Pretoria, everyone seems to agree that the board's finding of racial discrimination was ludicrous. But the other point the decision made, that the South African government cannot protect its people from crime, is a more serious charge.
Canada can't take in every victim of bad things. But the existence of alternatives--the possibility that some citizens will vote with their feet--may be, in some small way, a healthy check to governments around the world. Huntley faces the prospect that the IRB decision will be overturned, and that he will be returned to South Africa. But South Africa will have had a new discussion--not so much about race as about crime.
Source: Forbes
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