THE INTERNATIONAL REFUGEE CRISIS

Transcription

1 THE INTERNATIONAL REFUGEE CRISIS

2 Also by Vaughan Robinson ETHNIC SEGREGATION IN CITIES (edited wit" Cni Peac" and Susan Smith) THE ISLE OF MAN (edited wit" Danny McCa"oll) TRANSIENTS, SETTLERS AND REFUGEES

3 The International Refugee Crisis British and Canadian Responses Edited by Vaughan Robinson Senior Lecturer in Geography Migration Unit Department of Geography Universi!? College of Swansea in association with the Palgrave Macmillan

4 Refugee Studies Programme 1993 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WI P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1993 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. \

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6 Contents Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors x Xl PART I INTRODUCTION: NEEDS AND RESPONSES The Nature of the Crisis and the Academic Response 3 Vaughan Robinson PART 11 GETTING IN: POLICY AND PRACTICE The Official View 2 The International Refugee Crisis: the Canadian Response 17 Stanley B. Knight 3 Refugees: The Responsibilities of the UK Government 26 Timothy Renton The Societal Context: Attitudes to Immigration, Immigrants and Refugees 4 Refugees and Ethnic Relations in Canada Norman Buchignani 35 5 Migration to Britain: Racism, State Regulation and Employment 57 Robert Miles and Paula Cleary The Development of Policy towards Refugee Movements 6 Canadian Refugee Policy to 1980: Historical Overview Irving Abella 77 vii

7 viii Contents 7 Refugees in Twentieth-century Britain: A Brief History 95 Panikos Panayi Current Legislation and its IrnpleDlentation 8 Refugee Status in Canada 115 Julius H. Grey 9 A Review of the Politics of Canadian Refugee Selection 132 Tanya Basok and Alan Simmons 10 Current Law and Practice ill the UK Ian Macdonald 158 Resisting the Law 11 Sanctuary in Canada Charles Stastny and Gabrielle Tyrnauer 12 Sanctuary in Britain Paul Weller PART m GETTING BY: PEOPLE, POLICY AND PROBLEMS The Refugee Experience: Adjustment and Mental Health 13 After the Door Has Been Opened: The Mental Health ofimmigrants and Refugees in Canada 213 M orton Beiser Reception and Resettlement Programmes 14 The Spirit of the Gift and the Politics of Resettlement: Canadian Private Sponsorship of South East Asians 229 Doreen M. Indra 15 Host Groups: Public Meets Private C. Michael Lanphier 255

8 Contents ix 16 The Reception and Resettlement of Vietnamese Refugees in Britain 273 Samantha Hale ResettieDlent Experience and Issues 17 The Marginalisation of South East Asian Refugees 295 Gertrud Neuwirth 18 British Policy Towards the Settlement Patterns of Ethnic Groups: An Empirical Evaluation of the Vietnamese Programme, Vaughan Robinson Index 355

9 Acknowledgemen ts This book developed from a conference convened in Oxford in 1989 by the Refugee Studies Progamme, Oxford University. The editor wishes to thank RSP for organising this conference, those bodies which funded the conference, and all of those who submitted their conference papers to be considered for publication. Also I would particularly like to thank Tim Farmiloe of Macmillan and Barbara Harrell-Bond of RSP for their patience during the prolonged gestation of this volume. And last, but not least, I am very grateful to Glenys and Mary for their spirited assistance in producing the finished manuscript. V AUGHAN ROBINSON x

10 Notes on the Contributors Irving Abella is Professor of History at York University, Toronto. His most recent books include A Coat of Many Colours: Two Centuries of Jewish Life in Canada, and None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, Tanya Basok is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor, Canada. She is also a Fellow of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean. Morton Deiser is Professor and Program Head ofa new research programme entitled Culture, Community and Health Studies at the University of Toronto, Department of Psychiatry and the Clarke Institute. He received his MD from the University of British Columbia, following which he pursued further training at the Duke University Medical Centre, North Carolina, and in Duke University's Sociology Department. Dr Beiser then served as a Fellow in Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Corn ell University Medical Centre, New York. From 1966 to 1975 he was on faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he became an Associate Professor. From 1976 to 1991, he was Professor and Head of the Division of Social and Cultural Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. Norman Bucbignani is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. He is the author of Fijian Indians in Canada: The Structural Determinants of a New Communiry and co-author of Continuous Journey: A Social History of South Asians in Canada. Paula Cleary is a postgraduate student at the Research Unit on Migration and Racism at the University of Glasgow. She is currently researching racialisation processes in Britain since Her previous research includes work on refugee admission xi

11 xii Notes on the Contributors policies in the UK, political discourse and migration in Europe, and racism in Scotland. Juliul H. Grey is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, McGill University. He is also an active advocate. He has authored a text, Immigration Law in Canada, and many articles. He is former President of the Canadian Human Rights Foundation and current President of the Taskforce on Canadian Federalism. SlUDaDtha Hale was a postgraduate student in the Migration Unit of the Department of Geography, University College Swansea. She has co-authored a number of articles on various aspects of Vietnamese resettlement in the UK. Doreea M. Indra is an Associate Professor of Anthopology at the University of Lethbridge. Her publications include Continuous Journey: A Social History of South Asians in Canada (co-authored); several edited books, including Uprooting, Loss and Adaptation: The Resettlement of Indo-Chinese Refugees in Canada and Ten rears Later: Indo-Chinese Communities in Canada, and many academic articles. Stanley B. Knight recently retired as Assistant Deputy Chairman (Senior Immigration Judge) of the Pacific Region for the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. Dr Knight is a specialist in the design, implementation and evaluation of education and community service programmes. He has served as the President of Vancouver MOSAIC (a multicultural immigrant and refugee service agency), the Vancover Refugee Council and the United Nations Canadian Refugee Task Force. c. Michael Laaphier is Professor of Sociology and Research Director, Centre for Refugee Studies, York University, Toronto. An Associate Editor of International Migration Review, he is a frequent contributor of articles and chapters on Canadian and comparative refugee resettlement, Canadian refugee policy and world refugee flows. In 1987 he was appointed Master of McLaughlin College, York University. Robert Miles is Reader in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He has written extensively on migration and racism

12 Notes on the Contributors xiii and his previous books include Racism and Migrant Labour, Capitalism and Unfree Labour, Racism and (co-authored with Diana Kay) Refugees or Migrant Workers? His next book, After 'Race Relations', is forthcoming. lan Macdonald, QC, is a barrister and President of the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association. He gained his MA and LLB from Clare College, Cambridge. He has held posts at Kingston Polytechnic and Income Data Services. He has authored Race Relations and Immigration Law, Race Relations: The New Law, The New Nationality Act, Immigration Law and Practice and Murder in the Playground. Gertrud Neuwirth is Professor of Sociology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She is also Director of the Research Resource Division for Refugees, which she established in 1985 as part of Carleton's Centre of Immigration and Ethno-Cultural Studies. Her research has focused on settlement issues of Southeast Asian, and more recently, Ethiopian and Salvadoran refugees. Panikos Panayi is a Lecturer in History at Leicester Polytechnic, and has published widely on the history of national and racial minorities. His first book appeared in 1991 as The Enemy in Our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War. During he was Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Institut Fuer Migrationsforschung and Interkulturelle Studies at the University of Osnabrueck in Germany. Timothy Renton was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a degree in history. Between 1954 and 1974 he worked in industry before becoming the Conservative Member of Parliament for Mid-Sussex, a seat he has held since Between 1985 and 1987 he was Minister for State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. When he drafted the speech upon which his chapter was based he was Minister for State at the Home Office. He is now Minister for Arts. Vaughan Robinson is Senior Lecturer in Geography at University College Swansea and is also Co-Director of the University's Migration Unit. He was previously a Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and has also held fellowships at Wolfson

13 xiv Notes on the Contributors College, Oxford, and at the Universities of Warsaw, Adelaide and Khartoum. Dr Robinson has authored or edited four other books on ethnic relations and refugee studies. MaD B. SbnmoDs is a Member of the Centre for Refugee Studies and Fellow of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, both at York University in Toronto. He is also a member of the Department of Sociology, where he teaches on social dimensions of international inequality and population movements. Charles Stastny is Director of the Refugee Research Project and Co-Director of the Frontier Institute of Vermont, which works closely with the Vermont Refugee Assistance organisation. He holds a PhD in political science and international relations from Harvard University, where he was a fellow of the Russian Research Center. His recent research and publications have focused on sanctuary and human rights. GabrieUe Tyrnauer is a Research Associate in the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Concordia University, Montreal, and is also Associate Director of the Refugee Research Project located at McGiII University. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and is currently writing a book about Gypsy survivors of the Holocaust. Paul Weller is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Religious Resource and Research Centre at Derbyshire College of Higher Education. Until recently he was a member of the joint European Churches Working Group on Asylum and Refugees of the Conference of European Churches and the World Council of Churches.