REFUGEES WELCOMED BY CANADA,BUT NOW STRUGGLES WITH BACKLOG.
REFUGEES WELCOMED BY CANADA,BUT NOW STRUGGLES WITH BACKLOG.
A wave of asylum seekers entering Canada this year has exacerbated a backlog
of refugee claims that the government is struggling to manage, leaving tens of
thousands of people stuck in bureaucratic limbo even as they try to build new
lives.
Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board says it has a backlog of 40,700 cases. More than 10,000 asylum seekers have
crossed illegally into Quebec from the United States since July alone. But the
board has the money and staff to process just 24,000 cases a year, meaning that
many people will have to wait around 16 months for their case to be heard.
“The
strain on the organization to handle this many people’s hearings is enormous,”
Shereen Benzvy Miller, the head of the board’s refugee protection division,
told a parliamentary immigrations committee this month.
“The math
is clear,” she added. “Unless you put more resources to this problem, then it
takes longer time to schedule, so there will be longer wait times.”
The delay also increases the amount of money Canada spends on
asylum seekers’ medical care, education and public assistance, said Richard
Kurland, a former national chairman of the Canadian Bar Association’s
citizenship and immigration section. “The longer they stay, the more Canadians
pay,” he said.crossed illegally into Quebec. By the end of September, the task
force had finalized around 300 claims, rejecting about 50 percent of them.
That acceptance rate is below the
national norm of 65 percent, which could bode poorly for migrants who came to
Canada on the basis of economic opportunity rather than a well-founded fear of
persecution, as is legally required for refugee protection.
The board
hopes to pick up its pace of reviewing claims, and expects the task force to
hear 1,500 claims by the end of November, Ms. Benvy Miller said.
Yet more
people keep coming in, about 1,400 a month since April. And a government review
of the asylum processing procedures, begun in June, will not be completed until
next summer.
Most of
the 8,500 asylum seekers who walked into Quebec from New York State
in July and August were Haitians fearing deportation from the
United States and seeking to benefit from a loophole in a treaty between the
two countries that allows people to make refugee claims in Canada if they do
not arrive at legal ports of entry.
As daily arrivals soared into the hundreds,
the Quebec provincial government turned the Montreal Olympic Stadium into a
temporary shelter with space for 1,500 beds.
Once asylum seekers have been screened for
security risks and make a refugee claim, they are given a monthly stipend and a
work permit, and their children are allowed to enroll in school. But this gives
many a false sense of security, immigration lawyers say.
With civil war raging in his native Yemen and
his Saudi Arabian residency expiring after 16 years, Sami Alromi, 40, a
clothing salesman, made a desperate decision to fly to the United States with
his pregnant wife and daughter in February, leaving behind three other
children.
Just weeks earlier,
President Trump had tried to introduce a travel ban on people from Yemen, which
Mr. Alromi said left his family with only one option: Canada.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada
had recently tweeted “those fleeing
persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your
faith,” so the Alromi family crossed on foot into Quebec in March and made
refugee claims.But their hearing was indefinitely postponed in April.
His
wife gave birth in Canada, and ever since their hearing postponement they have
been consumed by fear that their other children, whose Saudi Arabian residency
permits have expired, will be deported to Yemen, where teenagers are used as soldiers and
diseases like cholera are rife.
“Being here I can’t do anything for my kids over
there,” Mr. Alromi said in a phone interview from Montreal, adding that his
wife had become so depressed over their plight that she had to go to the
hospital and take medication. “If they are deported to Yemen, I don’t know what
I’m going to do.”
This month, the immigration board sent word that
Mr. Alromi’s claim would go through expedited processing under a new policy that allows the
authorities to review claims
without a hearing for people from Yemen and several other countries.
But Mr. Alromi doesn’t know whether his
claim will be accepted. “Waiting is very hard,” he said.
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