With refugees worldwide today exceeding 50 million people, Canadians take pride in our programs, including one which has brought 40,000 Syrian refugees to our country since late 2015. Two of our former Governor Generals and Ahmed Hussein, our current immigration minister, were once refugees.
The new U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres has noted about the post-2012 period, “We are seeing here the immense costs of not ending wars, of failing to resolve or prevent conflict… Peace is today dangerously in deficit. Humanitarians can help as a palliative, but political solutions are vitally needed. Without this, the alarming levels of conflict and the mass suffering that is reflected in these figures will continue.”
While the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees, the ultimate goal is to help find durable solutions that will allow them to rebuild their lives. For several million asylum seekers and a greater number of internally displaced people, such solutions are nowhere in sight.
If more residents of the world’s prosperous countries could imagine themselves in the situations of displaced Syrian children and women, or the Christian and Yazidi women captured by ISIS, raped, beaten, and sold in markets as slaves, we could better understand the experiences of many refugees. Similar large victimization is occurring in other nations as well. At present, more than 20 million residents of four African countries are facing famine.
Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi enslaved by ISIS in 2014, last week attacked the U.N’s failure to bring ISIS fighters to justice. In a searing speech in New York, Clooney stated on behalf of Yazidi victims, “Don’t let this be another Rwanda, where you regret doing too little too late”.
Canada’s Immigration Minister Hussein added independently, “We are at a point in history when many countries are making the choice to close their borders to people, to ideas, to new ways of thinking. Other countries have their sovereign right to do what they want with their policies. In Canada, we made a different choice.”
A study for the Institute for Research on Public Policy a few years ago found that majority support across Canada for high levels of immigration continues, undergirded by pride in multiculturalism and a conviction that newcomers benefit our economy. Canadians were, however, negative about illegals and have major concerns about youths and adults brainwashed by ISIS and others who seek to perpetrate terrorism globally.
