Tag Archives: refugees

Canada has granted asylum to one of the refugee families who hid Snowden in Hong Kong

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But others who helped Snowden still waiting for a decision from Canada on refugee status, with one ‘unraveling’ mentally and hospitalized

Source: Canada grants refugee status to some asylum-seekers who hid Edward Snowden in Hong Kong | National Post

HONG KONG — Vanessa Rodel was so afraid to believe the news, she asked her lawyer to repeat it, five times.

But each time, the message she had longed to hear was exactly the same, and each time it was every bit as momentous: Rodel, a Filipino national, and her seven-year-old daughter Keana would finally be leaving Hong Kong for a new life thousands of kilometres away in Canada, ending a decade of suspended animation here…

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The others who helped Snowden — a Sri Lankan couple with two young children and another single Sri Lankan man — are still awaiting word on whether Canada will accept them as refugees. And the long years as second-class citizens in Hong Kong — with the ever-present threat of being returned to the countries they fled in fear — seem to be having a dire impact.

Supun Kellapatha, father of the two children, was hospitalized Friday due to increasingly fragile mental health; only his last-ditch court challenge now stands in the way of his being forced back to Sri Lanka.

 

Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. – POLITICO Magazine

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If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.

Source: Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. – POLITICO Magazine

Such an appeal to people like Stephen Miller and Trump is futile. They are unencumbered by the need for philosophical/moral/logical consistency. Hitler, when faced with the possibility that he might have Jewish ancestry, is said to have defined “Jewishness” in Nazi law to exclude himself specifically:

In 1933, the London Daily Mirror published a picture of a gravestone in a Jewish cemetery in Bucharest inscribed with some Hebrew characters and the name Adolf Hitler, but this Bucharest Hitler could not have been the Nazi leader’s grandfather. At the time, though, this picture sufficiently worried Hitler that he had the Nazi law defining Jewishness written to exclude Jesus Christ and himself.

The world is not awash in refugees: Open the gates – The Globe and Mail

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… the refugee flood is, in its origins and its greatest extremes, a European phenomenon. We Westerners have been refugees much more than we have been refugee’d upon…

Today we face the Syrian crisis. It is neither the largest nor the most unmanageable refugee flood of the postwar era, but it has arrived at a bad moment: first, because we have by now forgotten our own history as refugees; second, because an ugly politics of intolerance is influencing many Western governments; and third, because there is an unfortunate public belief that refugee tides are larger and more permanent than they really are.

The world is not awash in refugees: Open the gates – The Globe and Mail