ABSTRACT
Having probed and problematized the ways in which long-term displacement is managed and produced by states, we come full circle to analyze the unsettling outcomes of resettlement for refugees who have found permanent residence in the global North, specifically Canada. Canada is just one of the major resettlement countries, along with the US, Australia and Sweden, but it provides a focus for examining, first, how resettled refugees are preferred over asylum seekers, and second, how resettlement operates as a “solution” to long-term exile. Resettlement does little to solve the conundrum of extended displacement from a geopolitical perspective, and yet it offers concrete protection on a permanent basis to people who have little. In Canada, refugee resettlement has been used by the government to justify more exclusionary measures towards asylum seekers, who have been cast as riskier, uninvited and less legitimate (Chase, 2013).2 After a brief critical assessment of resettlement as a “durable solution,” we shift our focus to responses collected from Afghans and Somalians who have settled permanently in Canada after enduring prolonged displacement as refugees. The statistics are damning-about 1 percent of refugees worldwide are able
to leave camps and other locations for resettlement in “safe third” countries (UNHCR, 2015c).3 Refugees selected to come to Canada are considered among the “lucky few” who are granted permanent legal status upon arrival, and yet the prospect of starting over in a completely new society is no easy task. Despite the rise in global demand for refugee resettlement, Canada fell short of its own targets in bringing people in during both 2013 and 2014. Furthermore, in 2013 asylum numbers worldwide climbed 28 percent, largely due to displacement from Syria, but Canada’s asylum total plummeted by more than 49 percent (UNHCR, 2014a). In 2013, Canada dropped to 16th place, from second and third places in 2008 and 2009, respectively, as a destination for asylum seekers. Canada’s share of applications fell from 10 percent of the total in 2008 to 2 percent in 2013 (ibid.). The good news is that Canada still has a decent refugee resettlement program,
one that has enjoyed a good reputation of generosity and hospitality for many decades. The number of resettled refugees rose steeply at the end of 2015 and in 2016, when a new Liberal government enacted an election pledge to
resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees in Canada by February 2016. Many more refugees were in the processing pipeline, with an estimated total of 50,000 resettled Syrians by the end of 2016 (Government of Canada, 2016). Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is so far following in his father, Prime
Minister Pierre Trudeau’s footsteps, who in 1972 invited some 6,000 Asian Ugandans fleeing Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda to find sanctuary in Canada. In the late 1970s, as part of the Comprehensive Plan of Action in Indochina, the Canadian government brought some 60,000 refugees to Canada in an 18-month period, from Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos. Most of these refugees were supported through private sponsorship (Goodspeed, 2014).4 Critical to the success of this massive resettlement program was the serendipitous alignment of Soviet-era geopolitics, Canadian public opinion (actively shaped by the politicized media coverage of the conflict in Southeast Asia), and pro-refugee government policy (Hyndman et al., 2014). Until the new Canadian government’s surge in late 2015, early 2016, refugee resettlement of this magnitude had been unprecedented, as the end of the Cold War dampened Canada’s and the rest of the world’s enthusiasm for refugee resettlement. Canada continues to open its doors in the last few decades, resettling
people fleeing persecution and violence from all over the globe: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Burma, Bhutan, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and many other refugeeproducing states. Yet, government-assisted refugees fell from a high of 14,000 annually in the early 1990s to fewer than 7,000 in 2013.5 In 2014, the former Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada gloated that Canada accepted one of every ten refugees resettled globally (DFATD, 2014). The bad news is that until the autumn of 2015, Canada had all but closed
its doors to those asylum seekers arriving at Canadian ports of entry to make a refugee claim, rather than being “selected” as resettled refugees abroad (Hyndman et al., 2014). Recent exclusionary changes to Canada’s asylum and refugee determination policies are not unique to this country and have been enacted by both Liberal and Conservative governments. In 2004, under a Liberal government, Canada adopted a safe-third country agreement with the US, a practice borrowed from the United Kingdom, which ensures that asylum seekers in the US cannot cross a land border into Canada to make a claim there. They must seek asylum in the US.6 In 2012, this time under Conservative rule, the Canadian government implemented mandatory detention policies for “irregular migrants” arriving in Canada without an invitation, a policy derived from Australian practice. In 2013, Canada adopted the requirement of submitting biometric data, specifically fingerprints, in addition to obtaining a visa for people applying to come to Canada from any of the world’s major refugee-producing countries (in all 29 states and one territory). This enables Canada to screen fingerprints through a five-country database (Canada, US, UK, Australia and New Zealand) of prints to see if a person has sought asylum elsewhere, a practice used in the European Union (EU) (EURODAC) and the US for some time. Alongside these exclusionary
measures, a discursive shift also took place: from the “refugee claimant” or “asylum seeker,” to the “irregular migrant” or “bogus refugee” who is cast as a threat to a national security and economy.
