On the subject of welcoming refugees
by Robert LaFrance
I think we should
bring in all the refugees we can, period.
We all have to
remember these two things first: (1) The people risking their lives crossing
the Aegean or some other often unfriendly sea to try and make their way to
somewhere safer are fleeing the type of ‘people’ who did all the killing in
Paris, and (2) this is Canada, a land of refugees. Other than First Nations
people, who unwisely welcomed people like us, we are all refugees from
somewhere.
Many people
objecting to the idea that Canada will soon welcome thousands of people might
do well to use some imagination. Rather than sitting in front of their
computers and checking on the latest Facebook revelation, perhaps they (and we
all) could picture themselves in a leaking dangerous boat being bounced around
on the Aegean Sea.
“We can’t see
land and a storm is building up to the east. We’ve already had one 4-year-old
boy drown when he fell off the inflatable raft and disappeared. We escaped from
Syria with our last bit of jewelry that paid our passage on this boat and if we
ever reach the island of Lesbos (Greece) we hope to get some food and get some
country to take us in. We have no money left. Maybe Hungary will take us in, or
Serbia.”
No, one of the young men on the boat has
a smartphone and said that the Hungarians had put up a 175-kilometre razor-wire
fence along its border with Serbia and the Serbian government is building one
on its other border. This is to keep tens of thousands of refugees – some
starving and many sick, lots of children – from crossing their countries to get
to Germany, Austria, Sweden and other countries. Think of the number of
refugees all that money spent on fences could have fed and clothed.
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The slaughter of
all those innocent people in Paris couldn’t have come at a worse time. Not that
there’s a good time for terrorism.
Within hours of
these attacks in France, dozens of governors in U.S. states declared that they
would not allow any of the Syrian refugees settle there, not in their state.
Several European leaders with short memories declared the same, and the Premier
of Saskatchewan, displaying Stephen Harper DNA, said Canada should step back
from its promise of bringing in 25,000 refugees before 2016.
I looked around
in my head – often a barren cupboard – to try and find an analogy to this and
finally came up with one, a poor effort, but you will get the point.
Bank robbers go
into the National Bank of Tilley, shoot a group of innocent bystanders, and
escape. The police come along and arrest the bank employees. That’s what it
must seem like to the Syrian and other refugees who are now crowded into camps
in Jordan, Lebanon, and other countries.
It’s true that
one or more of them might be ISIS suicide bombers, but we here in Canada take a
chance every day that some nut case is going to bring a rifle into a campground
and kill a dozen people, or shoot a soldier stationed at the War Memorial in
Ottawa. So what do we do? Put all Canadians in jail?
It’s going to be
hard work to arrange all the things the refugees will be needing – like the
learning of English, unless New Brunswick’s Language Commissioner, Mme.
d’Entremont, makes a complaint about that, but this is NB and it’s time we put
aside our real fears that there might be a terrorist among the refugees we
welcome, though it’s possible.
New Brunswick needs immigrants, but
that’s not the real reason we should welcome refugees. They left everything
behind in Syria and many thousands of others lost their lives in the Aegean,
Mediterranean, and other seas. These people are fleeing ISIS and in some cases
the Syrian government.
One argument I’ve heard from the
anti-refugee folks is that they will take jobs away from Canadians and go on
welfare. I’m not sure they can do both at the same time. Canada’s experience
with refugees (Hungary 1956, the Vietnamese Boat People, etc.) shows that they
not only are hard-working people, but they themselves often create businesses
and therefore jobs.
Sure it’s possible that a terrorist
could be among the refugees, but terrorists could be in that next car that
comes across the U.S. border, and we’re not going to shut down that
‘undefended’ border are we? We listen to the national news and find that a Muslim
woman, a Canadian citizen, in Toronto, going to pick up her kids at school, was
beaten – knocked to the ground and
kicked – by two men because she was
wearing a niqab.
Come on, let’s be Canadians.
-end-
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