Immigration

Through film, U of T grad aims to help STEM-trained immigrant women overcome barriers

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 15:05:57 +0000

Through film, U of T grad aims to help STEM-trained immigrant women overcome barriers

geoff.vendeville Wed, 06/08/2022 - 11:05

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Library and archives grad Elizabeth Kalbfleisch says her film is meant to be a conversation starter, helping draw attention to the challenges immigrant women with STEM credentials face in Canada (photo courtesy of Kalbfleisch)

Ann Brocklehurst

Convocation 2022

Graduate Stories

Faculty of Information

Immigration

As a master's student in the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information, Elizabeth Kalbfleisch teamed up with a professor and an entrepreneur to help communicate their research through a short animated film.

Kalbleisch remembers being angered by the findings of a report by Professor Nadia Caidi and Saadia Muzaffar, founder of TechGirls Canada, that focused on 74 STEM-educated, immigrant women who were unable to find work in their fields due to obstacles facing them in the job market – although they were actively recruited as highly trained workers.

“The results were so stunning to me,” says Kalbfleisch who took Caidi’s course on communities and values during her first semester in the fall of 2020. “I wanted people to know about this and not for it to roll over as just another headline about the challenge of the immigrant experience.”

A grant from the Mitacs Accelerate program enabled Caidi and Muzaffar to hire Kalbfleisch to share the story of their research beyond the traditional academic channels. Together, they settled on making an animated film.

“We thought if we could make something beautiful, it might grab people’s attention,” Kalbleisch says. “The film is meant to be a conversation starter, a way to get people talking about these issues. For many people watching a five-minute video online is easier than reading an 80-page report.”

Elizabeth Kalbfleisch and animator Dani Elizondo (bottom right) worked together online to workshop a scene from the film.

Aesthetics were hugely important to Kalbfleisch, who has taught art history and worked in the museum and cultural sectors. She also wanted the video to convey the message of the research in a nuanced way.

To find an animator, she put out feelers to her network, sending inquiries to everyone she knew, and found Dani Elizondo last summer. “Dani connected with the issues in the film,” says Kalbfleisch, explaining that the two worked closely together to develop the collage look used in the film and to create Maia, its main character. Doing the animation took several months. “It was so painstaking and time-consuming for Dani to do. The labour she put into this was extraordinary,” Kalbfleisch says.

When Kalbfleisch presented the finished product, titled We Were Here All Along, to Caidi’s class in March, it inspired the students to think about what’s known as “arts-based knowledge translation” as another option in their information toolkits. It was also the first time Caidi and Kalbfleisch had met in person despite having interacted virtually every week for months.

The plan now is to use the film to raise awareness and to complement other forms of research dissemination. Its target audience includes employers in STEM industries, immigrant settlement agencies who support newcomers, civil servants and analysts who are designing immigration policy, and information professionals who work at the community level and the broader public.

In their study, Caidi and Muzaffar identified many intertwined issues that are sketched out in the video. “Employers need a better understanding of what their own hiring practices are. Settlement workers are really well -ntentioned but their focus is often ‘let’s get a job’ even if it’s not necessarily the right fit,” says Kalbfleisch. “From an information perspective, something is broken in the transmission of information. It does not take into account the variety of contexts that the women operate in.”

As the film is rolled out, Kalbfleisch is working on another project with Caidi, funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada, which looks at COVID-19 vaccination and misinformation on digital platforms used by newcomers to Canada.

With convocation just around the corner, Kalbfleisch is excited that her two daughters will be able to watch her receive her degree. She's also looking forward to embarking on an exciting career. “Working on this project showed me that I can do something else with these skills other than working in an archive or a library,” she said. “I have a more open mind towards the kind of opportunities I’m looking for than when I came in.”

Researchers examine impact of immigration status and racism on child welfare system

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 15:55:16 +0000

Researchers examine impact of immigration status and racism on child welfare system

geoff.vendeville Wed, 03/02/2022 - 10:55

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Rupaleem Bhuyan is co-leading a collaborative research project looking at the impact of immigration status and systemic racism on child welfare policies and practices (photo by Harry Choi)

Topic

Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work

Immigration

As someone who works with women and children who have experienced domestic violence, Shaoli Choudhury sees how difficult it can be for them when the child welfare system becomes involved in their lives. If those families are also newcomers to Canada, more problems often arise.

“They worry about having their children taken away, but also about increasing their risk of deportation,” says Choudhury, who oversees three transition houses for YWCA Metro Vancouver. “There’s a lot of uncertainty for immigrant families – and for those of us working in the field.”

To help reduce that uncertainty, she’s partnering with Bordering Practices: Systemic Racism, Child Welfare and Immigration, a collaborative research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and led by Rupaleem Bhuyan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, and Mandeep Kaur Mucina, an assistant professor at the University of Victoria’s School of Child and Youth Care.

Shaoli Chaudhury

The initiative involves community partners in both Toronto and Vancouver who are working together to better understand the roles that immigration status and systemic racism play in child welfare policies and practices – especially if one or more family members has precarious status.

“My colleagues and I recognize that there’s a knowledge gap in terms of how the child welfare system interacts with immigrant families,” says Choudhury. “By offering our perspective and learning from the researchers and other service providers, we’re hoping to help bridge that gap and better support families.”

Bhuyan says there are very few guidelines on how to manage immigration status in child welfare. “As a result, the level of awareness about immigration issues varies widely among frontline workers and decision-makers,” she says. “In Ontario and British Columbia, most child welfare policies don’t even use the word ‘immigrant.’”

When it comes to immigrants with precarious status – which can include anyone who is not a Canadian citizen, documented or not – there are even fewer resources.

Travonne Edwards

The absence of language in provincial legislation recognizing the issues that impact immigrant families is comparable to the lack of specific language acknowledging the existence of anti-Black racism for Black families, says Travonne Edwards, a PhD student in social work and a member of the project’s advisory board. He works closely with the Black Community Action Network of Peel as part of his research with the Youth Wellness Lab, which is examining the over-representation of Black families in Ontario’s child welfare system.

“This silence directly influences child welfare practice,” he says. “It allows for ambiguity in interpreting policies and prevents a more critical and nuanced understanding of the issues impacting Black and racialized families that are dealing with precarious status.” Research by Edwards and colleagues has led child welfare agencies to pay closer attention to racial disparities experienced by Black children. He says this project aims to produce a similar evidence base to spark action and reform.

A growing number of people living in Canada are racialized immigrants with precarious status as temporary workers, international students, refugee claimants or non-status residents. “It’s impossible to know the true number, but rough estimates run up to 1.6 million including undocumented immigrants,” Bhuyan says. “These individuals and families confront multiple barriers to accessing social services and experience economic hardship and racism – all factors that affect their interactions with the child welfare system.”

In the project’s title, “bordering” refers to the political and social processes that differentiate groups by race, gender and immigration status. “Lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ determines who belongs and who has rights in everyday life” says Bhuyan, “so [bordering] shows up all the time in the everyday life of immigrants.”

Working in partnership with community-based researchers and advocates in Toronto and Vancouver, the Bordering Practices research team – with co-investigators Bryn King, an assistant professor in the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, and Rhonda Hackett, of the University of Victoria, are taking a multifaceted approach to establish a baseline understanding of how federal and provincial policies shape risk assessment for child abuse and neglect among racialized immigrants.

In addition to policy analysis, the project is committed to advocacy. Last October, the research team and the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario submitted a formal response to proposed changes to Ontario’s Child, Youth and Family Services Act. “We urged the government to provide better guidance for social workers on cases involving children and families with precarious immigration status and recommended an ‘Access Without Fear’ policy, which safeguards people with precarious status against detention or deportation when they’re accessing essential services,” says Bhuyan.

Keisha Facey

The project is rooted in community participation across the fields of child welfare, immigrant services, anti-Black racism and gender-based violence. The aim, says Edwards, is to break down the silos between these sectors and forge connections that will lead to meaningful change for immigrant families in the child welfare system. “There are people in all of these areas doing amazing work, but it’s disjointed. We’re creating opportunities to bring our work into harmony.”

These opportunities include ongoing focus groups with people at various vantage points within the system – from policy-makers and child welfare managers to frontline workers and child welfare advocates – and community forums, where stakeholders can gather to discuss common concerns and goals. The first community event, Silos and Silences: A Forum Shedding Light on Child Welfare and Immigration Status, will take place this Friday.

“Our primary goal is to raise awareness and share knowledge,” says Keishia Facey, a project partner from the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies (OACAS) who will moderate the forum’s panel discussion. She is the manager of the OACAS’s One Vision One Voice program, which addresses anti-Black racism experienced by African-Canadian families in the child welfare system. “There’s no single, accepted way of protecting the rights of children and families with precarious status, and being part of this project allows us to use our platform to say this needs to change.”

Chizara Anucha

Facey’s colleague, Chizara Anucha, a U of T master of social work graduate and community engagement specialist at One Vision One Voice, will lead a workshop following the panel discussion on child welfare risk assessments for Black immigrant families. In another workshops, Choudhury will consider how social workers can manage the immigration status of women experiencing domestic violence when there’s a likelihood of child welfare involvement.

“This research is only meaningful if it includes people who are directly impacted by it,” says Bhuyan, adding that another phase of the project will collect stories from families with precarious immigration status who have been involved in the child welfare system. “We’re creating spaces for conversation so we can continue to build this knowledge together.”

U of T’s Citizen Lab, international human rights program explore dangers of using AI in Canada’s immigration system

Romi Levine — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 13:26:07 +0000

U of T’s Citizen Lab, international human rights program explore dangers of using AI in Canada’s immigration system

Romi Levine Wed, 09/26/2018 - 09:26

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Researcher and co-author of a report on AI uses in Canadian immigration, Petra Molnar, in the international human rights program office (photo by Romi Levine)

Romi Levine

Topic

Global Lens

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Artificial Intelligence

Research & Innovation

Canada is fast becoming a leader in artificial intelligence, with innovators across the country finding new ways of using automation for everything from cancer detection to self-driving cars.

According to a joint report by the international human rights program (IHRP) in the Faculty of Law and Citizen Lab, based in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, the Canadian government is beginning to embrace automation too, but if used irresponsibly, it can trample on human rights.

The report looks at the ways the Canadian government is considering using automated decision-making in the immigration and refugee system, and the dangers of using AI as a solution for rooting out inefficiencies.

“The idea with this project is to get ahead of some of these issues and present ideas and policy recommendations and best practices in terms of, if you're going to be using these technologies, how they need to accord to basic human rights principles so they do good and not harm,” says Petra Molnar, one of the authors of the report and a technology and human rights researcher at IHRP.

Read the full report

Read Petra Molnar's op-ed in the Globe and Mail

Molnar, along with co-author Lex Gill, who was a Citizen Lab research fellow at the time, found that the Canadian government is already developing automated systems to screen immigrant and visitor applications, particularly those that are considered high risk or fraudulent.

“But a lot of this is being talked about without definitions,” says Molnar. “So what does high risk mean? We can all imagine which groups of travellers would be caught up under that. Or fraudulent – how are they going to determine whether a marriage is fraudulent or not or if this child is really your child? There are no parameters.”

The report includes a taxonomy of immigration decisions. "We take the reader through what it would look like if you are applying to enter Canada – all the different considerations you have to think about," says Molnar. "Each section is broken down by applications and questions of how these technologies might actually be impinging on human rights." (Illustration by Jenny Kim/ Ryookyung Kim Design)

Finding concrete information about government practices has proven to be tough. Molnar says the research team filed 27 access-to-information requests but were still awaiting response as of writing the report.

The problem at the core of automation, says Molnar, is that algorithms are not truly neutral.

“They take on the biases and characteristics of the person who inputs the data and where the algorithm learns from,” she says. “The worry is it's going to replicate the biases and discriminatory ways of thinking the system is already rife with.”

Read about the report in The Toronto Star

The authors also looked at case studies from around the world of governments using AI for immigration-related decision-making.

“No one has done a human rights analysis of these technologies, which to me is kind of bonkers,” says Molnar. “How are these technologies actually going to impact people’s daily reality? That's where we come in.”

The report highlights international cases of algorithms failing to protect the rights of the people affected by immigration decisions. This included the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) setting an algorithm to justify 100 per cent detention of migrants at the border, and the U.K. government wrongfully deporting over 7,000 students who they claimed cheated on English language equivalency tests that were administered using voice recognition software. The automated voice analysis was proven to be incorrect in many of the cases when compared to human analysis.

“There are all these ways the algorithmic decision-making tool can be just as faulty but we view them with perfection so without realizing, we risk deploying them irresponsibly and ending up where possibly we were better off with human decision-makers,” says Cynthia Khoo, Google policy fellow at Citizen Lab and one of the reviewers of the report.

(Illustration by Jenny Kim/ Ryookyung Kim Design)

The report offers a list of recommendations the authors hope will be adopted by the Canadian government, including the establishment of an oversight body to monitor algorithmic decision-making and informing the public about what AI technology will be used.

The research team hopes to update the report once the access-to-information documents are received and to continue its work on automation by looking at other uses of AI by the federal government, including in the criminal justice system, says Molnar.

For both IHRP and Citizen Lab, the nature of this report is unusual – focusing on potential harm and not existing violations of human rights, says Samer Muscati, director of IHRP.

“This gives us great opportunities to have impact right from the start before these systems are finalized,” he says. “Once they're in place, it's much harder to change a system than when it's actually designed.”

Ahead of the report’s publication, IHRP and Citizen Lab met with government officials in Ottawa to present the report.

Muscati hopes beyond these meetings, the report can make a real difference.

“It's when we see practices and policies being changed – that's when we know we're having some impact."

Drugging detained children is like using a chemical straitjacket

noreen.rasbach — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 16:11:05 +0000

Drugging detained children is like using a chemical straitjacket

noreen.rasbach Thu, 09/20/2018 - 12:11

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Sirley Silveira Paixao, an immigrant from Brazil seeking asylum, kisses her 10-year-old son Diego Magalhaes, after he is released from immigration detention in Chicago on July 5 (Charles Rex Arb/AP)

Topic

There are almost 13,000 detained migrant children in the United States, according to several recent news reports. This number has increased six-fold since 2017, despite the successful reunification of some families.

You might remember the horrifying images of children inside chain-link fences with flimsy aluminum foil blankets from earlier this summer. Digital media and cable news broadcast close-ups of these children’s faces, tears streaming down their cheeks; these same images were then shared millions of times on social media.

While the number of children detained in this way is shocking, the mistreatment that many face after being forcibly removed from their families is even worse. One of the least visible and most potent forms of abuse is the use of medication to forcibly sedate them.

‘Pharmaceutical violence’

As researchers who investigate incarceration and mental health, we have studied the patterns of psychotropic medication use in prisons and detention centres in the U.S. to control the behaviours of youth.

Preliminary findings from this research show the negative effects of coerced medication, or what we describe as “pharmaceutical violence.”

Recently, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee ruled that the government broke the law when officials in Texas sedated children who had been separated from their migrant parents. We applaud her recent ruling even as we remain concerned about the recurrence of such a practice.

We are also concerned about the fate of the approximately 13,000 migrant children who have not yet been reunited with their parents, especially as the Trump administration works to replace the Flores settlement which limits the length of time children can be detained.

A chemical straitjacket

While the Trump administration’s forced separation immigration policies have since been suspended, and some of the children returned to their families, the long-lasting impacts of such treatment remain troubling.

Gee’s recent decision mandates that the government must obtain consent or a court order in order to administer psychotropic medications to children, barring an emergency. She also ruled that officials must tell children in writing why they are in a secure facility.

Migrant children walk in a line outside the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children, a former Job Corps site that housed them on June 20, in Homestead, Fla. (photo by Brynn Anderson/AP)

Her ruling was in response to a lawsuit launched by the Centre for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. According to the lawsuit, the medications serve as a “chemical straitjacket.” In other words, officials were sedating children who had no existing psychological conditions.

According to several reports, children at Shiloh Treatment Facility in Texas have been given up to 15 different pills a day. Those who refused were threatened with further time in confinement. Moreover, children in other locations who complained about missing their parents, begged to leave or who staff deemed to be a “problem,” were sent to Shiloh to be medicated.

Detention drugs lead to street drugs

Sadly, we’ve seen this dynamic in the past. Detention centres are infamous for overly medicating incarcerated individuals in order to obtain their co-operation.

Ethnographic studies of American prisons, from the 1940s up until the present day, reveal the misuse of medications by detention staff as a common problem.

In a milestone case, Walter Harper sued the Washington State government arguing that they could not medicate him without his consent. This led to the Washington v Harper Supreme Court ruling in 1990 that allows detention centres to medicate incarcerated individuals.

While conducting fieldwork with incarcerated young women in southern California recently, we discovered a similar pattern. Officials in detention centres were dosing women in their care.

These young women were diagnosed with mental health disorders and compelled to take drugs while in detention. They became chemically dependent. Upon leaving prison, they were barred from access to the medications they had in custody, leading them to take street drugs, drink and engage in other high-risk behaviours.

Most young women reported feelings that prison staff prescribed psychotropic medication to regulate their actions, behaviours and personal freedom. In other words, these detainees, many of whom were Latina, were fitted with the same “chemical straitjackets” used on migrant children today.

Medication of detained children must stop

It is imperative to limit the detention of migrants and to immediately end the use of psychotropic medications on children.

Furthermore, qualified medical staff must be present in centres where children are housed.

Detention centres, funded by tax dollars, must be open to public scrutiny. As the public continues to bear witness to new images of imprisoned children, people should examine the misuse of medical technology that confines not only the bodies but the minds of those made to inhabit these places.

Additionally, we need to stop incarcerating children.

Jerry Flores is an assistant professor of sociology at U of T Mississauga. Kati Barahona-Lopez is a PhD candidate in sociology at University of California, Santa Cruz.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article, including their disclosure statements.

U of T expert on how Canadian politicians are playing a dangerous game on migration

noreen.rasbach — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 18:02:11 +0000

U of T expert on how Canadian politicians are playing a dangerous game on migration

noreen.rasbach Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:02

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An asylum-seeker saying he’s from Eritrea is confronted by an RCMP officer as he enters Canada from the United States on Aug. 21 (photo by Paul Chiasson/CP)

Craig Damian Smith

Topic

City & Culture

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Canada has joined the club of states embroiled with irregular migration. But our challenges are not unique, and we have two decades of European misadventures with irregular migration to guide our response. Unfortunately, Canadian politicians are following a well-rehearsed script in which crisis responses to anti-refugee sentiment undermine liberal values, limit policy options and open us to blackmail by hostile neighbours.

I have spent several years studying Europe’s relationship with irregular migration, most recently on a six-week trip that included looking at the Italian government’s hardline policies.

Interior Minister Matteo Salvini came to power on a promise to expel 500,000 migrants, and has spent his short tenure repealing services, criminalizing migrant rescue NGOs, fostering xenophobic nationalism and undermining European solidarity.

Salvini attends a news conference after meeting Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Milan, Italy, in August (photo by Luca Bruno/AP)

Salvini, also serving as deputy prime minister, blames migrants for longstanding Italian social problems like youth unemployment. In June, Tito Boeri, head of the Italian pension agency, clashed with Salvini on a very simple point that immigration was needed in light of an aging workforce. Salvini responded by stating that the tenured economist “lives on Mars” and that evidence-based arguments about demographics “ignored the will” of Italians.

This kind of populism has troubling parallels in Canada. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has blamed asylum-seekers for longstanding affordable housing challenges and ended co-operation with the federal government on the issue. His stonewalling and scapegoating to foster a crisis in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election are well-worn tactics.

Fears trump facts

Anti-immigrant populism trades on two interrelated trends. First, facts matter far less than voters’ feelings; second, as Daniel Stockemer from the University of Ottawa puts it, scapegoating migrants pays off at the ballot box. Ruling parties are caught in a bind since governments that want votes should be responsive to their citizens. But responding to anti-immigrant sentiments means policies with negative economic, social and security outcomes.

Ruling parties in Europe have tried to thread the needle by getting tough on irregular migration while maintaining open asylum systems. They must show voters that they’re doing something when their political challengers claim they have lost control of borders and undermined public safety. Statements by Michelle Rempel, the Conservative Party of Canada’s immigration critic, about irregular migration are thus wholly unoriginal.

Xenophobia fosters false opinions. Many Italians believe foreigners comprised 26 per cent of the population, when in reality it is only nine per cent. Similarly, a recent Angus Reid poll found Canadians overestimated the number of asylum-seekers by almost 60 per cent. The majority said Canada was too generous, and that the current situation represented a crisis despite the swath of Liberal ministers and range of credible experts saying the opposite.

Crises demand action

Crises demand extraordinary measures. Seventy-one per cent of respondents in the Angus Reid survey would devote resources to border security if they were in charge. Only 29 per cent said they would focus on assisting arrivals. Respondents were more aware of the asylum issue than any other in 2018. But as in Europe, Canadians’ strong opinions are based on feelings rather than facts.

The federal Liberals have reacted by shuffling the cabinet and appointing a tough-on-crime ex-police chief to oversee the issue. But Bill Blair has been named minister of border security and organized crime reduction. While this might seem like a savvy move, bundling migration with security narrows the range of options to reactive and counter-productive policies that exclude economic and social interventions. When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Not to be outdone, the Conservatives would extend the Safe Third Country Agreement to the entirety of the border, meaning asylum-seekers could be turned back anywhere.

Securitizing borders is expensive, rarely works for long and undermines refugee protection. It also results in more criminality. Prohibition in the face of high demand fosters black market supply. Illicit economies and more dangerous routes also make migrants vulnerable to human trafficking.

What’s more, criminalizing migrants reduces policy options. Politicians in Europe are obsessed with “breaking” smuggling rings, with little interest in the supply/demand logics that drive them. Irregular migration becomes more spectacular, offering politicians fodder to escalate the response. This leads to right-wing parties framing migration as a civilizational threat, the starkest examples of which can be found in Austria, Hungary and Italy.

Maxime Bernier’s tweets about “extreme multiculturalism” and the “cult of diversity” were cribbed from European populists. His break from the Conservative Party in favour of forming an intellectually and morally authentic right-wing party was right on script.

Despite Conservative attempts to brush off Bernier’s defection at the party’s recent policy convention, a far-right fringe party could bleed voters. If Europe offers any lessons, the Conservatives will likely mimic Bernier’s arguments.

That both Andrew Scheer and Michelle Rempel supported far-right activists to score points against Justin Trudeau is telling. So is the fact that Conservative delegates voted for ending birthright citizenship based on apocryphal stories of citizenship tourists.

Scheer speaks at the Conservative policy convention in Halifax in August, where delegates voted in favour of ending birthright citizenship (photo by Andrew Vaughan/CP)

Canadians like to believe we are exceptionally tolerant. Environics pollster Michael Adams argues that Canada is particularly resistant to xenophobic populism, partly because of our immigration history. But the current situation reveals a different story: Canada’s openness is more about exceptional geography.

In a 2017 study, Michael Donnelly from the University of Toronto found that Canada is no more tolerant than similar countries, and argued our resistance to populism is because we’ve been spared migration crises. That’s no longer true.

Fraying the social fabric

What can be done? The government inherited a broken refugee system from Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, but the Liberals must address unsustainable backlogs in asylum processing, which cascade through the system and decrease people’s trust in its efficacy. Conservatives must ask whether scapegoating asylum-seekers for votes is worth the cost. It frays the social fabric, and will leave them holding the bag if they win the 2019 election.

Political discourse matters. The migrants and asylum-seekers I interviewed this summer told me time and again that Salvini ascension had changed the mood. People routinely approach them in the street to tell them that their time is up and they’ll be expelled to Africa. Italian nationalists have shot migrants in the street. Recall that the Québec City mosque shooter was motivated by xenophobic nationalism. It can, and has, happened here.

All of this might sound like the moralizing of a university researcher (from Toronto, no less), so I will conclude with a national security rationale. Canada’s 2019 federal election campaign will coincide with dates for ending Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of migrants in the United States. While some might choose to come here, the more troubling option is that Donald Trump could send them our way.

Beggar-thy-neighbour policies can be used to exacerbate migration crises, and Trump is nothing if not a zero-sum thinker. As Kelly Greenhill from Tufts University has shown, states routinely use “engineered migration” to coerce or deter their rivals. Turkey did it to Europe in 2016, securing an extra three billion Euros with a threat that it would allow hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers into Europe.

It would take a profound willed ignorance to assume Trump is beyond engineering a migration event to deflect public opinion at home, influence the Canadian elections or leverage trade concessions. Politicians from across the spectrum have a duty to ensure Canada is not exposed to that kind of blackmail, particularly not for gains at the ballot box. That means de-escalating the rhetoric and co-operating to ensure we have our house in order.

Craig Damian Smith is associate director of the Global Migration Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Why the U.S. detainment of asylum-seekers and other migrants is a disgrace: U of T expert

noreen.rasbach — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 17:44:52 +0000

Why the U.S. detainment of asylum-seekers and other migrants is a disgrace: U of T expert

noreen.rasbach Mon, 07/16/2018 - 13:44

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Javier Garrido Martinez holds his four-year-old son during a news conference in New York on July 11. The pair were reunited after being separated for almost two months when authorities stopped them at the U.S. southern border (Photo by Robert Bumsted/AP)

Stephanie J Silverman

Topic

The Donald Trump administration is continuing its “zero tolerance” approach to Central Americans seeking asylum at the southern border of the United States.

Despite no evidence that the approach deters asylum-seekers, the administration is prioritizing the use of immigrant prisons or detention centres in their attack.

As a detention expert, I argue that we must not lose sight of how the administration is steadily expanding its detention arsenal under the cover of massive changes to its immigration and asylum architecture.

The mind boggles at the scale and speed of the rollbacks to accessing asylum, humanitarian protection and residence rights, among them:

Withdrawing “temporary protected status” protections against deportation for 200,000 Salvadorans, plus Haitians, Sudanese and Nicaraguans, living in the United States.
Intervening to undermine asylum protections for women and others fleeing persecution at the hands of non-state individuals, including abusive spouses.
Stepping up prosecutions of unlawful entries across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Turning back asylum-seekers at ports of entry.
Hollowing out protections for children not at immediate risk of human trafficking for sexual, forced labour or other forms of exploitation.
Prosecuting parents who pay agents to bring their children to the U.S.
Prosecuting everyone who enters the U.S. without preauthorization.

The most shocking of these recent changes is perhaps the Trump administration’s now-revoked order to deliberately remove children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Again, this action was enabled through expanding the uses – and moral and legal thresholds – of immigration detention.

Long-lasting trauma

How did this work? U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents arrested the parents and transferred them to detention centres operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.).

Their approximately 3,000 kids became “unaccompanied minors” in the custody of the already under-resourced Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. This ripping apart and subsequent detention of family members in separate facilities has caused long-lasting trauma and anguish, the depths of which we are only beginning to grasp. Psychologists are flagging the lifelong “toxic stress” that has now infected these children's minds and bodies.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly memorably waved off the outcry and moral culpability for this pointless and needless trauma: The parent-less babies, toddlers, children and youth would “be taken care of – put into foster care or whatever.”

The HHS has found the “whatever” for these asylum-seeking children: facilities ranging from foster homes to blacked-out floors of corporate buildings, a disused Walmart, a Texan tent city, “icebox” cages and plans to detain children and families on military bases, among them.

Lidia Karine Souza hugs her son Diogo De Olivera Filho at a news conference in Chicago on June 28. A federal judge ordered the immediate release from detention of the nine-year-old Diogo, who was separated from his mother at the U.S.-Mexico border in May (photo by Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)

The breadth of the Trump administration’s recent expansion of its detention architecture is stunning: The federal government is operating at least 100 detention sites with or without the local co-operation of municipalities.

Detention has flown under the public radar for too long. Warnings and protests from current and former detainees, civil society and researchers have not been widely heeded.

The U.S. is flouting international and domestic rules on detention. It engages in co-mingling of children and adults in detention and prisons, and won’t reunite all of the “tender age” kids – those under five years old – with their parents outside of detention.

The American immigration detention system must be called what it is: abusive, racist, sexist and haphazardly implemented with a dysfunctional but financially profitable bail system. The system is designed not to administer asylum claims, but to punish and even terrorize people attempting to realize their rights.

Pilot projects show that asylum-seekers with proper legal, social, health and other supports will appear for their court hearings; there is no need to detain them or, as we do in Canada too, shackle them with remotely controlled surveillance tools.

Let us not forget that the Trump administration ended the family case management program, an alternative that would have kept families together, and for less money.

The Trump administration is now working to exploit a legal loophole to keep children and their parents in detention together past the 20-day limit set by the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement. They are asking for “consent” for indefinite detention together and offering deportation to parents as the alternative.

Under cover of massive curtailment of protections extended to asylum-seekers and other migrants, the Trump administration is trying to normalize detention for children and adults alike, a truly reprehensible agenda.

Stephanie J Silverman is an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Finally, some changes to health-based discrimination in Canadian immigration law

noreen.rasbach — Mon, 14 May 2018 20:09:56 +0000

Finally, some changes to health-based discrimination in Canadian immigration law

noreen.rasbach Mon, 05/14/2018 - 16:09

Cutline

A rally on March 12 at York University called for the repeal of Section 38-1-C (photo by Laura Bisaillon)

Topic

Research & Innovation

U of T Scarborough

Subheadline

The Conversation with U of T's Laura Bisaillon

As it stands, there is health-based discrimination in Canadian law. The system disadvantages the diseased and disabled.

Restrictions preventing people with disease and physical or mental challenges from permanently immigrating are longstanding features of how Canadian borders have been and are enforced. Applicants for permanent immigration are ineligible if state-employed physicians anticipate their care and treatment to be above $6,655 a year.

On April 16, federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen announced that there will be three adjustments to Section 38-1-C of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), the section of the law that deals with “medical inadmissibility due to excessive demand.”

The three changes are:

The financial threshold for excluding applicants was increased to $20,000 a year.
Speculated future cost of care on public social services no longer applies.
Applicants with certain health conditions might now find it possible to permanently immigrate.

For years in Canada there has been collective mobilization to repeal Section 38-1-C. To date, there have also been two Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ challenges aimed at eradicating health-based discrimination in Canadian immigration law.

Work on this issue has accounted for thousands of working hours for persons directly affected by exclusions, their allies and civil servants. In late 2017, a government standing committee recommended that medical inadmissibility within the IRPA be repealed.

Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Ahmed Hussen stands during Question Period in the House of Commons in Ottawa on May 7 (photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

While the government of Canada publicly agreed with this position, it decided against full repeal. The country is thus not compliant with its domestic and international human rights obligations, including Article 18 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which deals with human mobility.

My decade of researching and teaching about medical inadmissibility has been illuminating. I have learned that we teach immigration history so poorly that year after year, students arrive in my classes unfamiliar about how the Canadian immigration system works.

This is not entirely surprising because the system is an immense bureaucracy. We know that bureaucracies are organizationally perplexing for all, even for people working within them.

Immigrating to Canada is an expensive, time-consuming and emotionally high-stakes investment.

Respecting human rights is good policy

Less frequently addressed in headlines is that the immigration system provides a steady source of income for professionals inside and outside Canada. Lawyers, doctors and administrators benefit from a system that is simultaneously opaque and structured to depend on their professions. In fact, removing Section 38-1-C would curtail sizeable and ongoing legal, medical and administrative costs.

Newcomers to Canada with whom I have talked about medical inadmissibility are animated when discussing their experiences with lawyers and doctors associated with the immigration system. However, the public is generally poorly informed about how the system works, including how much money it costs people to immigrate.

Ethical and moral forms of reasoning chronically have a hard time competing with economic imperatives. But for a fiscally concerned Canadian public interested in weighing in on anticipated future costs of caring for and treating people, whether immigrants or otherwise, we must remember to see whose interests are served by the current law.

That is, we must not reinforce the binaries of economic imperatives and morality. They are false. Respecting human rights and working for social justice are and have been shown, time and again, to be sound public social and health policy-making. Furthermore, people with disease and disability contribute to all societies everywhere in qualitatively and quantitatively measurable ways. This is indisputable.

We might stop and reflect on the circumstances of our own families. We are endowed with road maps for how to quantify human contributions.

Take, for instance, domestic labour. Work in the home is taken for granted unless we make it visible. Seeking to make gendered work count in market terms led to New Zealand public policy professor Marilyn Waring becoming a pioneer in feminist economics. Her research shows not only how to monetize domestic labour, but also convincingly argues that tallies of a country’s national revenue are imprecise unless domestic labour contributions are incorporated.

Rethinking health and illness

New lines of advocacy for repealing the IRPA Section 38-1-C are needed. Within disability studies, ideas about people with disease and disability, who have long been portrayed as “other” and as vulnerable, have been eclipsed and replaced by more accurate conceptions.

Looking at health and illness as tentative, conditional, as a matter of geography, is helpful. For one thing, this compels us to reflect on how we think and talk about people with disease and disability. It channels us towards a reflexive stance, and offers us the opportunity to consider how we all experience vulnerability.

New approaches to assessing immigrant applications are needed. First, the diseased and disabled should not be pre-judged or ruled out for admission to Canada based on economic assessments alone; instead, their vulnerability should be considered a skill and a coveted source of strength.

In this way of thinking, vulnerability is tantamount with “openness, susceptibility and receptiveness,” not with weakness.

For example, refugee applicants, in particular, settle after enduring and overcoming chronic existential uncertainty and protracted material depravity. They have acquired skills that make them resilient and hard-working.

These are exactly the human attributes that Canada wants in prospective immigrants through its immigration program. Going forward, most Canadians will have settled in Canada using the immigration system.

The Canadian public surely must be curious about how immigration works. We should know more about what our fellow Canadians had to do permanently settle here. We have much to learn from would-be immigrants and their experiences.

What are next steps? Collective action to repeal the IRPA Section 38-1-C will continue. We will resume generating scholarly and experiential evidence to support a full repeal. It is not a matter of if a full repeal will happen, but rather when this will occur.

Laura Bisaillon is an assistant professor of health studies at University of Toronto Scarborough.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A ray of hope on World AIDS Day for Canadian immigrants

rasbachn — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 15:45:38 +0000

A ray of hope on World AIDS Day for Canadian immigrants rasbachn Fri, 12/01/2017 - 10:45

Cutline

Candles are placed around an AIDS symbol on World AIDS Day in Quezon city, Philippines in 2016. (photo by Aaron Favila/AP)

Topic

Subheadline

The Conversation with U of T's Laura Bisaillon

It’s World AIDS Day and this year, I am moving beyond remembering loved ones. I am shifting to a forward position and a distinct political hopefulness.

My wish on this World AIDS Day is for Canada to change how HIV is dealt with in its immigration system. Specifically, I would like to see the nation change how it makes inadmissibility decisions about people with HIV who apply to live in Canada.

This would be done through the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. It would involve changing specific institutional practices, including the collection and circulation of HIV-related data from prospective immigrants.

The imperative for my research is to demystify social institutions like immigration so that we can explore and understand how things happen. As an interdisciplinary professor in health and social justice, and as a former social worker in a woman’s sexual health communitiy, I work to detect institutionally arising inequities.

For the past 15 years, I have been involved in AIDS work. I have worked in the Horn of Africa and parts of Canada in direct support. My life and lives of people I care about, some of whom cannot immigrate to Canada because of their HIV status, are deeply affected by this infection and its unfortunate pernicious social standing. I work with teams to use creativity and critique in equal measure to produce do-able ideas for remedying some of these inequities.

Using creativity and critique

This is precisely what I have done for Canada’s mandatory immigration HIV testing policy. The policy was enacted in 2002, but not ever reviewed until my work.

The policy acts as a filter. It screens for HIV and sorts people with HIV out (with some exceptions). HIV is discovered in the medical examination that all applicants for permanent residency must undergo at regular intervals. Most of these exams happen outside of Canada in contexts that Canada cannot monitor.

My motivation for assessing how this policy functions in everyday lives was because of the disconnect between immigrant people’s everyday social experiences through Canada’s imposed HIV testing, and the official representations of these experiences.

I formed alliances with racialized women with HIV from the Global South coming through the Canadian refugee ajudication system. Through them, I learned of the contrast between what actually happened in their lives with immigration medical processes and what is officially understood to have happened as documented in national government reports.

I set out to understand how this dissonance was happening. All persons aged 15 years and older who request Canadian permanent residence, such as refugees and immigrants, are required to undergo HIV testing. Tuberculosis and syphilis are the two other conditions for which people receive mandatory screening.

I produced the first social science exploration and critique of the medical, legal and administrative context governing the immigration to Canada for people with HIV. I identified both inequities and levers for change by using a feminist ethnographic policy analysis.

An immigration HIV test catalyzes the state’s collection of medical data about an applicant. These are entered into state decision-making about the person’s inadmissibility to Canada.

The good news on HIV policy

As it turns out, the HIV policy and mandatory screening ushers in a set of institutional practices that are highly problematic for prospective immigrants with HIV infection, the Canadian state and what is means to be Canadian more broadly. Avoidable inequities have been happening for 16 years, and they are ongoing.

The good news is that policies can be adjusted.

People with disease and disability, and their advocates, recently met with Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen to discuss and plan a future course of action.

And we have recently learned that Hussen has said “current medical inadmissibility rules for newcomers are out of touch with Canadian values and need to be reformed.”

Canada’s Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen says current medical inadmissibility rules for newcomers are out of touch with Canadian values and need to be reformed (photo by Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

It was acknowledged that the ways in which medical inadmissibility decision-making is informed and practised are outdated. This certainly applies to HIV/AIDS, a chronic and manageable disease and an episodic disability, in the Canadian context.

We see that HIV infection is scrutinized more and differently than any other health condition through the immigration process, where we see layers of institutional directives, guidelines and practices in place governing HIV/AIDS. A core problem with the HIV testing policy is that it’s not informed by or reliant upon the most up-to-date scientific knowledge..

Democracy depends on how we talk to each other. Research on the social determinants of health shows us that we all live better lives in egalitarian societies. Part of how to achieve such societies is how we talk and listen to each other.

What sort of public spaces can we create to hear and be heard on matters related to the Canadian immigration system and medical inadmissibility decision-making? Opportunities are preciously few.

A roundtable on immigration and disease is needed

I propose a roundtable on immigration, disease and disability in which I bring to the table the most up-to-date scientific knowledge about immigration and HIV. We could invite Harvard’s Professor Michael Sandel to join, because he also asks critically important questions about immigration (and sparks debate to collectively contemplate answers), as well as my colleagues at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. When can we meet to discuss immigration and HIV?

The World AIDS Day flag flies on Parliament Hill in Ottawa last Dec. 1 (photo by Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

Together in class, students and I have used the research record to examine the human rights implications of mandatory immigration HIV testing in Canada. We have done the same regarding the ethical and material consequences of medical doctors being asked to work in ethical problematic ways within Canada’s immigration system.

Just as other immigrants to Canada do, those with HIV will contribute to our society in myriad ways. Having interacted with thousands upon thousands of people with HIV over time and across space and place, they are among the most resilient and hard-working people I have met, which I attribute to the experience of personal suffering and knowledge of the larger social and political history of HIV/AIDS, not to mention their place within it.

This is precisely the sort of immigrant that Canada wants and indeed welcomes.

I am committed to a process in which we can talk with and listen to each other on matters of immigration and disease as they relate to HIV/AIDS. The moment is upon us to work with the most up-to-date scientific evidence to produce a medical inadmissibility decision-making system unfettered by inducing harm.

Laura Bisaillon is an assistant professor in the health studies program of the department of anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

As migrants die in detention centres, U of T experts ask: When will Canada act?

rasbachn — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 19:59:52 +0000

As migrants die in detention centres, U of T experts ask: When will Canada act? rasbachn Thu, 11/16/2017 - 14:59

Cutline

Two refugee children from Eritrea sit in the back of a police cruiser after crossing the border from New York into Canada in March 2017, near Hemmingford, Que. (photo by Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press)

Petra Molnar

Stephanie J. Silverman

Topic

Global Lens

Faculty of Law

Immigration

Subheadline

The Conversation with U of T's Petra Molnar and Stephanie J Silverman

Lucia Vega Jimenez, 42, Mexico.

Jan Szamko, 31, Czech Republic.

Melkioro Gahungu, 64, Burundi.

Abdurahman Hassan, 39, Somalia

And at least 11 more.

Earlier this month, an unnamed 50-year-old woman died while being detained in a maximum-security provincial jail in Ontario. She did not commit any crimes, but was imprisoned because of her immigration status.

Since 2000, at least 16 people have died while incarcerated in Canada’s system of immigration detention, with a shocking four deaths since March 2016.

The mounting death toll leads us to ask: Do certain deaths matter less than others? And for that matter, are some lives more imprisonable than others?

Our research examines the socio-legal ins and outs of immigration detention, a shadow penal system allowed to grow under the auspices of it being a form of administrative – not criminal – law.

In this parallel system, the government of Canada is locking up migrants and refugee claimants, not for any crimes committed under the Criminal Code but for immigration-related reasons.

Isolated from support system

Many are held in immigration holding centres, facilities akin to prisons but exclusive to immigration detainees, but a third are transferred to maximum-security jails far from where their friends, family and lawyers live and where they are forced to interact with the convicted population.

Also, it’s important to remember that we are dealing with a highly traumatized population, often suffering serious mental health issues as a result of fleeing their countries and arriving in Canada. When migrants are isolated and further traumatized by being detained, it becomes difficult to gather evidence for their refugee cases, to retain lawyers and to attend advice sessions.

Detention creates profound access-to-justice concerns and has a significant impact on the way a detainee’s case is treated in Canada’s immigration system.

We have found that the immigration detention population feels the sharp edges of the law most acutely. You may have read about Australia’s offshore detention centres, or the expansive and expanding system of draconian and punitive tent cities and prisons for immigrants in the United States, but do not be fooled by matters of scale: Canada is also engaged in this practice of incarcerating people.

Affects mental health

Detention is profoundly harmful: It negatively impacts the mental health of detainees, separates family members, and prevents detained people from adequate access to counsel, community supports and psycho-social counselling.

Unlike in the criminal system where all prisoners know the length of their sentences, there are no time limits on Canadian immigration detention. There are also no rights to a lawyer, translator or outgoing phone calls. This prevents detainees from being able to exercise basic procedural justice rights.

Lucia Vega Jimenez is shown in a coroner’s inquest handout photo released in September 2014. Jimenez died in hospital days after she was found hanging in a Canada Border Services Agency holding cell at Vancouver’s airport in December 2013 (photo by The Canadian Press)

We are also learning that detainees may be placed in solitary confinement, also known as segregation. Some are confined for prolonged periods of time. For example, Kashif Ali was isolated for 103 consecutive days without review, access to counsel or ongoing medical assessments.

There are also documented cases of Syrian youth being placed in solitary confinement for up to two weeks, resulting in increased post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and exacerbation of the past trauma associated with fleeing war.

Various international mechanisms recognize solitary confinement as a form of torture. Detainees themselves recognize the brutal nature of this practice and hunger strikes have broken out among immigration detainees in Ontario prisons over Canada’s segregation practices.

No insight over segregation decisions

In our study on segregated immigration detainees in Ontario prisons, we are finding shockingly little oversight of solitary confinement decisions on both segregation and release.

In a shadowy world of arbitrary, opaque and unaccountable decision-making, there is no clear pathway out from solitary – let alone from detention. Segregation is a legally recognized form of torture and must end.

We do not yet know why or how the latest death in detention occurred, but we do know that Canada continually falls short of international standards on the detention of children and the mentally ill. While there are review mechanisms in place, they are cursory at best, and Canada is one of the few countries without limits on time spent in detention. Canada’s immigration detention regime, overall, raises serious access-to-justice concerns.

A recent Ontario Superior Court decision labelled the system “Kafkaesque,” an “endless circuit of mistakes, unproven accusations and technicalities,” and “a closed circle of self-referential and circuitous logic from which there is no escape.”

Ultimately, Canada’s immigration detention regime is a costly, ineffective and discretionary system that violates the human rights of migrants, including the right to a fair trial, the right not to be arbitrarily detained, and the right to life, liberty and security of person.

How many more people have to die before the government of Canada acts?

Petra Molnar is a lawyer with the International Human Rights Program at U of T's Faculty of Law. Stephanie J Silverman is a postdoctoral researcher at U of T.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

U of T students dig into library archives, team up with Toronto Ward Museum for exhibit on Canadian migration

Romi Levine — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 20:49:08 +0000

U of T students dig into library archives, team up with Toronto Ward Museum for exhibit on Canadian migration

Romi Levine Tue, 07/18/2017 - 16:49

Cutline

U of T's Jessica Svenningson, who is pursuing a master's degree in museum studies, is exploring Japanese-Canadian history at the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library (photo by Romi Levine)

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

City & Culture

Cities

Libraries

Faculty of Information

Immigration

A postcard of Union Station from 1909, a menu from Banff Springs Hotel from 1946 and a photograph of Japanese-Canadian protesters from 1988 – all help chronicle the sometimes ugly history of migration in Canada.

They are just three of 54 objects in an online exhibit by the Toronto Ward Museum, called “Finding Myself in The Archives,” a collaborative project between the museum, University of Toronto students from the Faculty of Information and six U of T libraries.

Irina Mihalache, an assistant professor of museum studies and the project's supervisor, asked students to pick an object from a curated selection, research its cultural context and significance, find a personal connection and put all of that into writing.

“Because I work with the U of T archives, I know what type of wonders exist there that never get to the public eye,” she says. “I thought this would be a good opportunity to see what kind of objects they have that might speak to this broad topic of migration.”

A1909 postcard depicting Toronto's Union Station (courtesy of John M. Kelly Library's Plowman family postcard collection)

Inspired by the postcards she exchanged with her grandmother, Maeghan Jerry chose to highlight the Facebook-style correspondence taking place by mail at the beginning of the 20th century.

“What I really liked about this project is we were using things that were available to every U of T student,” Jerry says. “The stories were there, but people don't look for them. People don't tell them.”

The exhibition is part of a longstanding partnership between the Ward Museum and U of T. They've previously collaborated on a number of projects, including Dishing Up Toronto, which explores the culinary history of the city and taps into the expertise of faculty at U of T Scarborough's Culinaria Research Centre.

“A lot of our work in the past year and a half would not have been possible without the support of U of T faculty, staff and students,” says Gracia Dyer Jalea, Ward Museum’s founding executive director. “Having them there to support our work and to help us create content really has been instrumental in getting us to the place where we are currently.”

Many of the exhibition’s micro-stories told through archived objects are counter to the positive narrative often told of Canada’s past – especially around its sesquicentennial celebrations.

Jessica Svenningson chose to focus on how the Japanese-Canadian culinary experience changed after the B.C. government confiscated Japanese fishing boats during the Second World War, and the impact of internment camps on later generations – told through a photograph of protesters demanding redress in the 1980s.

“It’s about finding a way to connect [the object] to an audience so that you as a researcher can say this happened, but this is why it's important to the greater community and particularly to you as an audience member,” says Svenningson.

For Julia Zungri, the discrimination faced by Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War really hit home.

“Growing up, I heard my family's stories about when they first came here and their experience of discrimination – especially my mom being German,” says Zungri. “When she was younger, there was this phobia, people would call her a Nazi.”

A photo accompanying a newspaper article from 1942 (courtesy of Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library)

Zungri looked at newspaper clippings describing the expulsion of Japanese, German and Italian Canadians from the West Coast in 1942, as well as news photographs of white Canadians taking over Japanese-owned shops.

“It wasn't just top down, you had everyday acts of discrimination by everyday people,” she says.

“Paranoia and discrimination in times of conflict still takes place with the rise of Islamophobia now – it's relevant today as much as it was relevant back then so it's ever more important to tell those kinds of stories.”

While the stories told in the exhibit are fascinating, the Ward Museum's Jalea says that, for students, the most valuable takeaway from the project is the act of putting it together.

“Fifty-plus students have walked away from this process and can apply it to their future work, and think more critically about the stories they're telling and the complexity in which they're telling them,” she says.