Immigration: Independent Immigrants

Southeast Asian Countries Dept: The English-language leaders debate not only failed to address key issues but exposed the fact that some of the participants didn’t even understand the basic terms involved. Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, for instance, passionately defended family-class immigration and used the example of his own family’s entry into Canada decades ago. The fact is, however, that family-class immigration didn’t exist in the 1920s when the Ignatieffs came to Canada and, had the current immigration categories been in place, the family would have entered as independent immigrants i.e., on their own merits rather than family-class immigrants who are sponsored by relatives already here , according to Globe And Mail. What he apparently didn’t bother to find out was that, by all international standards, the two groups do fall into quite different categories. The Indochinese boat people made their way to Southeast Asian countries, where they were accommodated in refugee camps by the United Nations, and we then selected and assisted large numbers of them to resettle in Canada and this is clear from the fact that those who’ve arrived in recent years have had a much weaker economic performance and higher poverty rates than either those born in Canada or newcomers who came here before 1980. There’s particular concern in larger cities, where pressures on the education and health-care systems and the problems of congestion, integration and cost to taxpayers are most obvious. Despite this, however, no major party has shown itself prepared to call for lower immigration levels – in fact, the Liberals, NDP and Greens want to raise them even higher. Bloc Quecois Leader Gilles Duceppe revealed an even greater degree of ignorance when he railed against the government for establishing two classes of refugees because it took a tough line with the Tamil boat people who arrived last year compared with our generous treatment of boat people from Vietnam and Cambodia several decades ago. As reported in the news.
@t family class immigrants, gilles duceppe