frick

The news about whats happening down south is overwhelming. there are folks trying to compile resources for people looking for passage up north - hopefully that will be ready soon (including translations).

What I want to offer here is five things I think are useful context particularly for Canada:

1) While Trump is announcing the executive orders including the 90-day ban on entry (include approx 500,000 US visa-holders and also Canadian dual citizens), it was actually Obama who came up with the list of the seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. [Obama and the US govt have bombed five of these seven countries and the other two were subject to heavy sanctions]

“Obama restricted visa waivers for those seven Muslim-majority countries - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen - and now, Trump is looking to bar immigration and visitors from the same list of countries.” This isn’t to belabour whether Obama was ‘just as bad’ or not - but to highlight the banality of bureaucracy intentionally masks violence. And that nothing is entirely ‘sudden’; rather, it escalates most recently in the context of sixteen years of the War on Terror.

2) There has been less attention on the refugee ban than the visa ban - both operate in tandem, of course. Trump has also ordered a halt to the Syrian refugee program indefinitely as well as a 120-day pause on ALL refugee admissions. In the context of the global refugee crisis, this is horrendously racist and violates the basic legal and moral obligations to support asylum seekers. Despite the fact that the US and the West welcome a small majority of the world’s refugees (most are hosted in the global South), this anti-refugee rhetoric mobilizes austerity logic of scarcity, the logics of 'terror’ and 'criminality’ (always racialized) and white/settler colonial entitlement to Indigenus lands to fuel border panics.

On the same day as Trump’s executive order, Trudeau also quietly issued a notice through Citizenship and Immigration Canada ending the policy to sponsor Syrian and Iraqi refugees by Groups of Five and Community Sponsors, stating that basically the 'quota’ was full - a more 'polite canadian’ way of spewing a similar racist exclusionary agenda.

3) For refugees in the US, the Safe Third Country Agreement remains the primary barrier to making claims in Canada. This Agreement signed in 2004 disallows a majority of refugees in or traveling through the US to make a refugee claim in Canada. At one point, estimates were that over 40% of refugees trying to come to Canada were unable to make a claim as a result of the Safe Third Country Agreement. This is Canada’s own Wall or Fortress. Trudeau must revoke Safe Third Country Agreement immediately.

4) For US citizens wanting to claim refugee status in Canada (war resisters, Black/Muslim/POC citizens, women, queer and trans folks, dissidents), the Designated Countries of Origin (DCO) list means that those seeking refuge from the US and 40+ other countries are deemed to be 'safe’ - making it essentially impossible to seek asylum in Canada regardless of one’s individual circumstances. In July 2015, the Federal Court of Canada ruled that this was discriminatory and Trudeau campaigned on the promise to scrap it, but of course hasn’t yet. Trudeau must also scrap the DCO list immediately.

5) Trump has ordered these decisions under the guise of “extreme vetting”. Without engaging in a politics of equivalency, it is vital that Canadians not be smug about this. In addition to the above policies (just two in a matrix of dozens of exclusionary policies atop daily practices of detention and deportation), Canada’s recent regimes of Security Certificates, Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, Leith’s proposal for Canadian Values test and more operate in and escalate a similar Islamophobic, anti-Black, anti-migrant culture.