New Directions for Refugee Policy: Of Curtains, Doors, and Locks

Abstract

the country of asylum could actually benefit from the infusion of more people. Although Canada appears less draconian than some nations in dealing with claimants who actually arrive within its borders, it has also pioneered many deflection strategies. Moreover, Canada’s relatively remoteness from the major refugeeand migrant-producing regions of the world means that (despite media reports to the contrary) it receives few undocumented migrants and refugee claimants in relative and absolute terms. The embargo on refugees is accomplished in several ways. Refugees are excluded physically through interdiction and non-entree policies, and discursively through their demonization as criminals and illegals. Restrictive eligibility requirements and narrow interpretations of the convention further limit access to refuge protection. Detention and limited assistance (or no assistance at all) while refugee determination is pending operate to socially marginalize refugee claimants within host countries. These themes are repeated, with local variation, in legislation and institutional practice in the nation-states of North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. In Canada, incremental changes in migration legislation since the mid-1980s were punctuated by judicial pronouncements demarcating the scope of fundamental rights available to non-citizens under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In the mid-1990s, momentum began building toward an overhaul of Canada’s Immigration Act. In late 1997, a government-appointed legislative review committee issued a report entitled Not Just Numbers, whose tone and recommendations for reform reflected the neo-liberal discourse of economic globalization, privatization of the Halfway through the last century, Winston Churchill presaged one of the most profound transformations of the modern political map with the warning that “an iron curtain has descended” on Europe. This potent metaphor conjured up an impenetrable partition holding citizens of Eastern Europe captive to Communist regimes, depriving them of basic liberties. Subsequently, the Berlin Wall became the physical representation of the abrogation of the fundamental right of exit for the people of Eastern Europe. Five years after Churchill’s speech, the 1951 un Convention relating to the Status of Refugees entered into force. The convention’s initial geographic limitation to Europe revealed the West’s cold-war preoccupation with citizens under Communism. If they could escape—breach the wall, pass through the curtain— they were virtually assured of asylum. In February 2001, on the eve of the 1951 convention’s fiftieth anniversary, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers ironically (if inadvertently) recalled Churchill’s metaphor. In response to the question of whether the European Union was doing enough to grapple with the problem of refugees, Lubbers replied, “No . . . We are closing the curtains . . . and saying there is no real problem there.” Fortress Europe has supplanted the Berlin Wall, and the locks barring exit from the east have been switched to bar entry to the west. In North America, Australia, and New Zealand the pattern is the same. The world’s wealthiest nations want to prevent refugees from crossing into their territory uninvited, no matter where they come from, why they fled, or even whether the demographic self-interest of