Spreading Baseless Accusations About Tamil Refugees
September 2, 2010 | 2 Comments
This time, it’s not The Sun, it’s Adrian McNair at Libertas Post, and this idea about a secret government survey proving beyond mathematical certainty that the vast majority of Tamil refugees are scam artists keeps on rollin’.
This Toronto Sun article about Tamils doesn’t really surprise me a whole lot. The article cites a government survey which reveals that most successful Tamil refugee claimants return to Sri Lanka after receiving their papers.
Okay, again, no, the government “survey” reveals nothing much at all about the claims of Tamil refugees. It’s rumour, not evidence. However, I agree with Mr. McNair; I was none too surprised. The Sun, like many – if not most – media outlets, has a tenuous-bordering-on-imaginary grasp of anything at all relating to maths. Spreading more innumeracy is hardly shocking.
I will give Mr. McNair credit, though. He at least backs up baseless rumour with an anecdote:
Shortly after receiving his papers, my Colombian climbing partner returned to his homeland for a two-month visit and climbing trip. For him Canada was a safer place to live but it was by no means his salvation. There’s no question that his life was not in immediate peril in Colombia. He was no more likely to be kidnapped or murdered by FARC than any other resident of Colombia.
Not long after my friend won his bid to stay in Canada but after he had returned from his Colombian vacation, he moved to British Columbia where he would find new opportunities for rock climbing. This, he told me in 2002 before his claim was accepted, had been his ultimate goal. While being free from a vague threat of violence was a bonus, he was really in Canada for the rock climbing.
All right, so now we know that some unknown number of Tamil refugees may have traveled back to Sri Lanka and one Colombian refugee traveled to his home country between rock climbing expeditions in B.C. So, yeah fine, maybe we need to re-examine our refugee process (though Andrew Coyne’s bottom-of-a-boat screening process is pretty appealing), but that doesn’t mean we should spread untruths about people who have just landed from a country torn apart by civil war.
(On an unrelated note, this isn’t the first time I’ve written in opposition to something Mr. McNair has written, so in the interest of fairness, here’s a post I heartily endorse.)
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2 Responses to “Spreading Baseless Accusations About Tamil Refugees”
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September 3rd, 2010 @ 11:06 am
Disputing misinformation in articles/posts by Adrian McNair with an anti-immigrant bias could quite easily become a full time job Johnathan – he provides lots of material to work with.
I personally quit reading anything he had to say when he called for immigrants to be widely dispersed across the country as a condition of citizenship as opposed to being allowed to live where they want – often within cultural communities.
That said, anti-immigrant bias is trendy these days, especially anti-Muslim-immigrant bias and there seems to be a growing number of bloggers of a particular political bent riding that wave.
Unfortunately it is a type of bigotry that appears to carry with it no social stigma; something that should be of concern to all of us.
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September 3rd, 2010 @ 11:20 am
Perhaps this is a reflection on my blogosphere cred, but I haven’t read much by Mr. McNair on immigration (lots on foreign policy and politics). One thing I have found in the past is that he’s willing to engage people who disagree with him, rather than reverting to name-calling and slander as many other bloggers do, so I’m always willing to give him a read.
(Sure, there was that ugly spat with Dr. Dawg a while ago, but everyone gets one get-out-of-jail-free card.)
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