[Reader-list] Rush to Canada/front page of nytimes
VinitaNYC at aol.com
VinitaNYC at aol.com
Tue Feb 25 22:44:27 IST 2003
Hi,
this morning's paper -- NYTimes seems to have caught up with the local Urdu Press in NY?
this was on the front page.
Vinita.
U.S. Crackdown Sets Off Unusual Rush to Canada
February 25, 2003
By SUSAN SACHS
BURLINGTON, Vt., Feb. 21 - Once Jalil Mirza decided to
leave the United States to avoid possible deportation,
nothing happened quite as he expected, not even goodbye.
As did hundreds of other Pakistanis fleeing a post-9/11
crackdown on illegal immigrants, Mr. Mirza quit his job,
packed up his possessions and headed north rather than face
a forced return to Pakistan.
After a 16-hour bus ride from Virginia with his wife and
seven children, he arrived at the Canadian border, hoping
to take advantage of Canada's political asylum law.
But besieged Canadian officials told him to come back in
two weeks. And when he dragged their suitcases back to the
American side, United States immigration agents promptly
arrested him and his two teenage sons, leaving the rest of
the family wailing in despair in the icy cold.
The Mirzas are part of an unusual and chaotic exodus that
has jammed land crossings from the United States into
Canada over the past two weeks, overwhelming immigration
officials and refugee aid groups on both sides of the
border.
It is an oddly reluctant migration toward a presumed safe
haven by people who say they do not really want to go but
feel compelled to for fear that they could be deported.
Prompted by rumors of dragnets and by new federal deadlines
that require male foreign visitors, principally those from
Muslim and Arab countries, to register with the government,
families that lived illegally but undisturbed in the United
States for years are now rushing to Canada. They get across
the border only to be bounced back into the hands and jails
of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Asylum applications to Canada have increased sharply since
the beginning of the year, according to aid workers and
officials on both sides of the border. Most of the
applicants are Pakistanis, who are required to register
with the American immigration service by March 21. Other
nationality groups also face various registration
deadlines, but have not noticeably flooded the border.
Many of the Pakistani asylum seekers said they decided to
flee to Canada because they knew that Canada was already
home to a large and growing population of Pakistani
immigrants, especially in Montreal and Toronto.
Even before the latest upswing this month and last month,
Pakistanis accounted for the largest number of asylum
applications to Canada, according to Citizenship and
Immigration Canada.
Refugee aid workers also speculated that the registration
requirement hit Pakistani immigrants harder than other
groups because more of them lived illegally in the United
States and had less time to legalize their status through
family ties or employment. A result is that hundreds of
would-be refugees, some from as far away as Texas, are now
camped out in Salvation Army shelters, mosques and other
lodgings along the border, waiting for appointments to
apply for asylum and struggling to find money to pay the
bond to get their male relatives out of immigration
detention.
Their common refrain, as was Mr. Mirza's, is that they love
America and do not want to leave.
A former restaurant manager in Virginia with four young
children born in the United States, Mr. Mirza, 45, managed
to scrape together the $4,500 he needed to get himself and
his older sons out of jail on bond. His family stayed two
weeks in a shelter in Burlington, until today when they had
an 8 a.m. appointment with Canadian immigration officials.
But Mr. Mirza wanted to show, one last time, that his
heart was in the United States. "I'm going to turn and
salute the American flag," he said as he approached the
border. "I love America."
Even that plan, though, went awry. In the most prosaic of
farewells, after filling out forms for eight hours he and
his family were driven straight to the Canadian post at St.
Bernard Lacolle, Quebec, early in the morning under a milky
overcast sky. No one bothered to stop him on the American
side, where the nearest flag hung limply on a pole in the
distance.
"This is one of the most tragic events I've ever witnessed,
seeing this exodus of good, hard-working families," said
Patrick Giantonio, executive director of Vermont Refugee
Assistance, which had found the shelter for the Mirzas and
dozens of other Pakistani families trying to reach Canada.
"It's a tragedy not just for their communities," Mr.
Giantonio added, "but for the American community."
Similar stories are playing out all along the northern
border.
At crossing points in British Columbia, some 70 people,
most of them Pakistanis, asked for asylum in January. In
all of 2002, officials said, only 36 Pakistanis made
refugee claims.
At land crossings into Ontario, 871 people applied for
asylum in January, double the number just two months
earlier. Last November, 5 percent of the asylum seekers
were Pakistani. Last month, 49 percent were Pakistani,
according to Canadian immigration officials in Toronto.
Freedom House, an immigrant aid group in Detroit, said that
since the beginning of the year it had registered 269
Muslim asylum seekers trying to reach Canada in advance of
their registration deadlines. Seven out of 10 are
Pakistanis, with the rest Arabs. Normally, the group
handles about 30 cases a month.
The surge of asylum seekers coincided with the start in
December of a new registration program for men over the age
of 15 who were in the United States on visitor, student or
business visas. Within days, it became clear to foreigners
that anyone registering who had overstayed a visa would be
immediately put into deportation proceedings.
Although the registration law, dating to 1996, applies to
all foreign visitors, the Department of Justice has put it
into effect only for men from 25 countries, all but one of
them Arab or Muslim nations. Of the 32,000 men who have
registered so far at immigration offices around the
country, according to officials, more than 3,000 face
deportation.
The choices for illegal Muslim immigrants, then, were
stark. If they had been in the United States for more than
one year, they no longer had the right to apply for asylum
here. So they could have ignored the registration and
risked deportation, registered and faced deportation or
gone back to Pakistan. Or they could try for asylum in
Canada by claiming they would face political persecution if
forced to return home.
They are not only overwhelming service agencies, but have
also proved an embarrassment for the Pakistani government,
which has been criticized at home for not demanding better
treatment for its expatriates in exchange for its
cooperation with the United States on fighting terrorism.
After the Pakistani foreign minister protested in
Washington this month against the registration requirement,
the deadline for Pakistanis was extended to March 21 from
Feb. 21. The change also affected men from Saudi Arabia,
who faced the same deadline.
But the extension is unlikely to stem the tide of people to
the Canadian border, which has always registered shifts in
immigration policy on either side with surges of people
seeking asylum in Canada.
The widely held perception is that Canada treats applicants
with more leniency, although its refugee approval rate of
57 percent is not much higher than that of the United
States, which approves 54 percent of asylum cases. Asylum
seekers in the United States are generally placed in
detention while their claims are assessed, however, while
those waiting for a decision in Canada are free to work.
Still, the latest tide of Muslim men and their families
took authorities on both sides by surprise.
Three weeks ago, Canadian border officials at the crossings
from northern New York and Vermont, said they did not have
enough workers to handle the numbers of people asking for
refugee status. They began giving applicants appointments
for several weeks later and sending them back to the
American side of the border.
In the past when unable to process people on the spot,
Canada asked for assurances from the immigration service
that those applicants would not be arrested after returning
to the United States to wait for their interviews. But last
month, Canadian authorities did not bother.
"We realized it was useless because whether or not we got
assurances, we could not process these people," said Rene
Mercier, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration
Canada.
The United States, in turn, placed dozens of people in
deportation proceedings even if they had documents showing
an asylum appointment with Canada. Others, caught on their
way to the border at counterterrorism checkpoints set up by
the United States Customs Service, were arrested on
immigration violations.
The arrests split families and left many women and children
to fend for themselves at isolated border posts in some of
the coldest weather in years. At least 50 people remain in
detention along the border, unable to post bond.
The immigration service said its agents were simply
following procedure. "Individuals who are illegally in the
U.S. are processed the same way we would process them if we
encountered them any other way," said Michael Gilhooly, a
spokesman for the agency.
But it is a shock for those at the border. "I am crying, my
wife is crying," said Samir Sheik, a Pakistani who had been
working as a street vendor in New York City and was
arrested at a checkpoint on his way to the Canadian border
for having overstayed his visa. "It's not fair because I am
leaving the country."
Mr. Sheik said that he could not return to Pakistan because
he and his wife married against the wishes of both their
families - "a love marriage," as he tearfully described it
- and that he feared his wife would be killed by her
father.
His wife, Erim Salim, shuffled silently around the crowded
Salvation Army center in Burlington, where they had been
reunited after she borrowed from friends and neighbors to
pay his $5,000 bond.
"She is sick now, mentally," said Mr. Sheik, nodding toward
her sadly. "Millions of people live here and are overstays.
Why is it only for Pakistanis and Muslim people that they
do this?"
Hiraj Zafer, a Pakistani cook from Salt Lake City who was
also trying to enter Canada, gave an answer. "After 9/11,
people hate us," Mr. Zafer said.
Mr. Sheik said: "Yes, they hate us. But we love America. We
feel free here."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/25/national/25DETA.html?ex=1047192140&ei=1&en=248c7e8d1d283574
HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters
or other creative advertising opportunities with The
New York Times on the Web, please contact
onlinesales at nytimes.com or visit our online media
kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo
For general information about NYTimes.com, write to
help at nytimes.com.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
More information about the reader-list
mailing list