i personally think that the media should stop using 'canada' to refer to declarations made by stephen harper. as in 'canada is ambivalent about deploying an international peace force in the middle east.'
i'm sure stephen harper has stopped representing the point of view of a large number of us a long while ago.
that is, if he even represented us in the first place.
---
reading the paper this morning, i learned that our great country will only help its citizens evacuate lebanon. permanent residents left off to fend for themselves.
funny how a piece of paper can make a person's life worth something.
or not.
posted by cynicalcosmopolitan @ 6:48 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
hello,
i know im leaving a comment on a past log, but yest i saw this film called straight refugees. it was showing at the refugee film fest in tokyo, and knowing some people involved, i went. straight refugees is a documentary made by an australian director, about the cambodian refugees that came to the states after the khmer rouge genocide in late 70s. in 1996, the US passed (or expanded) laws that deports any non-citizen offenders back to their country. and after 9-11, it was enforced (i.e. Cambodia government agreed to accept such deportees), and Cambodian-American permanent residents that had a history of crime were deported, even if they had served their sentence, even if they had remained crime-free, even if their crime had been committed way before 1996.
to be quite honest, the movie is not all that well-made and i dont think its being distributed widely, but hearing the voices of these people left an impact.
one thing is that its a vicious cycle. these cambodian refugees were settled in the US at different points in their lives, (most of them were teenagers or younger), and they are often the minority asians in their neighborhoods, and hence the target of racism. which, then, leads them to life on the streets, school drop outs, gang members, etc. they are more likely to be involved in crimes.
yet at the same time, US is home to them. being deported all of a sudden under inhumane(?) conditions to unknown Cambodia, they are often stripped away from their families and are at loss. not knowing the language, the culture, they are at an disadvantage in "developing" Cambodia, their supposed "home". some of them are back in gang life, others survive, even manage to offer support to poverty-stricken kids of Cambodia.
i may sound naive, but how can something like this be allowed to take place?
being a permanent resident myself, it reminds me that anything can happen and nothing can be taken for granted. it seems like permanent residents win the right to remain in a country by giving up their right to be protected. (i guess it can be argued that their country of citizenship should protect them, but how useful is that when it means youre in some foreign land?)
...so hopefully by now, my comment has connected to this log, though noticing how long this has become, perhaps i should have just written in my own blog...gomenne.
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