Saturday 10 March 2012. Independent

Israel is to begin construction soon on a vast detention facility in the Negev desert to house the thousands of immigrants that cross illegally into Israel from Egypt every year. Human rights groups fear that the detention centre, the largest of its kind in the world, with a capacity to hold 8,000 migrants, will turn into a festering refugee camp, and deprive those escaping persecution at home of their rights to seek asylum in Israel. The project was approved by Israel’s right-wing government 18 months ago, but many Israelis are uncomfortable about spurning asylum seekers from war-torn African countries given their own history as a nation of refugees.

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Statement endorsed by No One Is Illegal Halifax, No One Is Illegal Toronto, and No One Is Illegal Vancouver Coast Salish Territories

Last week Minister of Censorship and Deportation Jason Kenney tabled Bill C-31, an omnibus Refugee Exclusion Act. This Act is racist.  It creates a two-tier system of refugee protection, increases incarceration, denies and revokes legal status, and violently targets and expels refugees and migrants from Canada.

Under the proposed Refugee Exclusion Act, the following provisions will be established:

– Conditional residency for accepted refugees: Asylum seekers who have already been accepted as refugees and have acquired permanent residency but not Canadian citizenship risk losing their status. If the Minister determines that certain refugees no longer need protection, their residency status can be revoked and they will face deportation even after having lived in Canada for years. This abolishes refugee protection and permanent status for refugees. Instead, it introduces the dangerous concept of conditional residence for refugees, whose lives are already marked by trauma, precarity, and instability. This bill also grants the state the right to retroactively strip refugees of their status.

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by Correy Baldwin, This Magazine

On August 13, 2010, a ship full of Tamil migrants arrived on the shores of British Columbia. There were 492 people on board, including 49 children, all seeking asylum after enduring a desperate, four-month voyage on a cramped, unsanitary ship. Even before the boat arrived, the Conservative government labeled occupants as “criminals” and “terrorists.” The ship was a “significant security concern,” and the government called in both the immigration minister and the public safety minister. This was the beginning of an aggressive campaign to rally support for harsh new anti-refugee legislation—a propaganda campaign built on disinformation, misleading rhetoric, disregard for the legal system, and some hefty stoking of public fear and misperceptions.

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Award-winning Mexican journalist and now whistleblower Karla Berenice García Ramírez, who writes under the penname Karla Lottini, fears for the safety of herself and her family – including her two young Canadian born daughters – as she awaits deportation orders. In a packed press conference on Thursday January 19, 2012 she made the following statement to the press:

I am here, in Canada, in front of you, Canadian, Latin American, and Multicultural journalists. I want to tell you that if I’ll be forced back to Mexico, my life and my family’s lives are at risk: we can be killed, harassed and even go to jail “for moral damage”.

Why? Because I had the “bad luck” to discover corruption in the most important cultural institution within the federal government that controls 49 cultural institutions and hundreds of programs in the whole country.

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By: Tamsyn Burgmann, The Canadian Press Posted: 01/19/2012 1:19 PM

VANCOUVER – Her voice is strained as Karla Ramirez recounts seeing the butt of a gun, a man telling her she’d better be careful or her body might turn up in an empty lot. Yet she proceeds to name names, defiantly alleging corruption in the highest echelons of a Mexican government ministry that she says she unearthed while working there as a journalist. “Names are here,” she said, thumbing through her book The Talent of Charlatans, at a news conference Thursday.

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