Refugees and Migrants

Brought together by shared passion and commitment for inclusivity, youth empowerment and human rights, the Local Organizing Committee for the 2018 Canadian Council for Refugees’ Youth Action Gathering (YAG) is working to bring together immigrant and refugee youth from across Canada to share, learn and network on strategies to address common challenges. The Local Organizing Committee consists of a partnership between York University’s  Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS) and Syria Response and Refugee Initiative, Amnesty International at York and the World University Service of Canada’s (WUSC)  Keele Campus Committee. All of them have been active long term participants in the York U Refugees Welcome Here! Campaign.

By Rebecca Ma, Associate Campaigner, Amnesty International USA

For the past three years, fourteen-year-old Astrid and her father Arturo were living an ordinary life in Easton, Pennsylvania. She was in the eighth grade, studying at Easton Area Middle School, where her favorite subject is Math.

Less than a month before the much anticipated quinceañera celebration of her fifteenth birthday, life as Astrid knew it was turned upside down.

On February 20, at approximately 5:00 AM, Astrid was asleep in her room when she was awoken by six male Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) armed agents standing before her bed and yelling: “IMMIGRATION — GET UP!” They ordered everyone in the house into a room and asked them for identification. The ICE agents did not show a warrant or say why they were there.

Traumatized, exhausted, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are living out another chapter in their painful history as an unwanted people. Amnesty’s Deputy South Asia Director, Omar Waraich, joined a research mission to document their experiences in Cox’s Bazar, a district shaped by the sufferings of Rohingya people over centuries.

On 6 November 2017, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale released new directions aimed to keep children out of Canada's immigration detention system.

“The key objective of the Ministerial Direction is to – as much as humanly possible – keep children out of detention, and keep families together. The Ministerial Direction makes it clear that the Best Interests of the Child must be given primary consideration. This will be achieved by actively and continuously seeking alternatives to detention when unconditional release is inappropriate.”

The directive is welcome; detention is never in the best interests of children and it is shocking that children are detained for immigration purposes in Canada, even for short periods of time.

Amnesty International and many other human rights groups in Canada have actively campaigned to keep children out of immigration detention. Several thousand Amnesty International members and supporters signed petitions and called on the Minister to stop detaining children for immigration purposes.

Today, we want to hear from you. We’ve told you people’s stories and shared lots of ideas on how you can make a difference.

But you’re the expert - you’re the one with the interest in and knowledge of your own community. So tell us, what do you think you, or others, could do to welcome refugees?

Are there things we haven’t thought of that you think could work? Have you seen an initiative in your local community that you think is interesting or different?

Please share these ideas and thoughts with us. We definitely don’t have all the answers, and to make this work, we need action and input from people like you.

Thank you once again for all your support.

Today it’s time to show the world that you welcome refugees.

You have read and heard so many stories, and seen the many different, simple ways you can help refugees. But if you feel happy to do so, telling people you welcome refugees could well inspire others to join you.

You can make it a post on social media, or you can order I Welcome doorhangers and buttons from the online shop.

Show the world that you are someone who welcomes refugees and see if others follow your lead.

It’s great to find businesses that support refugees and refugee issues. But that is certainly not how all businesses behave.

For more than 1,000 refugees and people seeking asylum, the small pacific state of Nauru is an island of despair they’ve been deported to simply for seeking refuge in Australia. But for Spanish multinational Ferrovial, Nauru is a treasure island from which it is making millions of dollars.

The system that Australia has set up on Nauru for refugees and people seeking asylum, including children, involves deliberate cruelty and amounts to torture. They are subject to humiliation, neglect and abuse, leading to poor physical and mental health.

Ferrovial is the sole shareholder of Broadspectrum, the Australian company that runs refugee “processing” centres on Nauru as well as Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, and facilitates this abusive system.

Please take action today and tell Ferrovial to end its operations on Nauru.