Sean Rehaag, York University, Canada

Jokes about moving to Canada became common among progressives in the United States during Donald Trump’s presidential bid. When he won, a spike in U.S. citizens seeking information about how to relocate crashed Canada’s immigration website.

I’m a scholar of Canadian immigration law and will soon become the director of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University in Toronto. My friends and colleagues in the United States, who still make those jokes, are often surprised when I fill them in on how U.S. immigration patterns in Canada have changed during the Trump administration.

Overall, the number of U.S. citizens who have immigrated to Canada for any reason rose from 7,522 in 2015 to 9,100 in 2017. In contrast with this modest 21% increase, the number of U.S. citizens applying for refugee protection during the same two years spiked by more than 1,000%. It grew from 69 in 2015 to as much as 869 in 2017.

The more than 1,500 U.S citizens who have sought a safe haven in Canada are mainly the children of people fearing deportation due to a change of their immigration status after spending years in the United States. Even with the recent increase, they still account for a small share of total applicants for refugee protection in Canada – only 1% in 2018, for example. Nonetheless, the dramatic growth in the number of refugee claims by U.S. citizens illustrates some of the differences between Canadian and U.S. immigration policies.

Long history

People from the U.S. have been seeking asylum in Canada since at least the 18th century.

Fearing mistreatment in the newly established United States, and drawn by offers of free land, as many as 100,000 British Loyalists fled to what is now Canada during and after the American Revolution.

Many enslaved people seeking liberty via the Underground Railroad, prior to the Civil War, headed to Canada. Around 20,000 to 40,000 made lives for themselves there.

In the 1960s and 1970s, some 100,000 young U.S. men, many with wives and children, came to Canada during the Vietnam War to avoid being drafted into military service – or in some cases after deserting. Canada enacted a law that let these “draft dodgers” immigrate with lawful status. Even though President Jimmy Carter issued a blanket pardon for them when he took office, about half remained in Canada.

More recently, dozens of U.S. soldiers who had voluntarily enlisted in the military and served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sought asylum in Canada to avoid jail time when they deserted because they came to object to those wars. This time, the Canadian government denied most of their refugee claims, saying that they could have possibly qualified for conscientious objector status back home. However, the Canadian public expressed substantial support for these war resisters.

Change of status

The more recent wave of asylum applicants is related to changes in U.S. immigration policy.

Before Trump took office, the U.S. had granted hundreds of thousands of immigrants without papers from Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador and other countries temporary protected status. These policies protected formerly undocumented immigrants from deportation and let them work legally.

The Trump administration has tried to end temporary protected status for eligible immigrants of many nationalities, despite evidence that many of their countries remained dangerous or their economies were still too unstable for them to return.

For example, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous agency of the Organization of American States, asserts that Nicaragua operates as “police state” with government-sponsored repression that is resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries. The UN Refugee Agency estimates that 62,000 Nicaraguans have fled to neighboring countries in the past year.

For now, the fate of about 300,000 of these immigrants from multiple countries awaits resolution in the courts.

A big share of the families with U.S. citizen-children seeking asylum in Canada today are immigrants from Haiti and other countries who fear losing their temporary protected status. Some people with this status from Nicaragua and Honduras have had it since 1999. Qualifying Sudanese immigrants have been shielded from deportation since 1997. The U.S. granted 59,000 Haitians temporary protected status in 2010, following a big earthquake.

Canada will probably deny the refugee claims of the U.S. citizen children because the system requires applicants to prove a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin. In this case, that would be the United States rather than, say, Haiti, Sudan or El Salvador.

But parents who obtain refugee protection in Canada will be able to obtain permanent residence for their children as well, putting them on the path to citizenship in Canada. Many likely will succeed with their claims. Canada approved about half of the refugee claims made in 2018 after migrants crossed the U.S. border.

Indeed, some of the families with U.S. citizen children seeking asylum in Canada may figure that they are more likely to succeed in Canada than in the U.S. For example, Canadian refugee law is more permissive than U.S. asylum law for people fleeing gender-based violence or gang violence – both common types of claims for Central American asylum-seekers.

Different policies

Canadian and U.S. immigration policies have always been distinct but the contrast is becoming more stark.

Trump campaigned on an anti-immigrant agenda, while Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised voters he would increase the number of resettled Syrian refugees welcomed in Canada. On the same day that Trump first decreed a Muslim travel ban, Trudeau famously tweeted out his hospitality: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith.”

Under Trudeau’s leadership, the Canadian government has decided to boost the number of immigrants it grants permanent resident status yearly, from 286,000 in 2017 to 340,00 in 2020.

The U.S., with a population that is nearly nine times bigger than its northern neighbor, grants permanent resident status to 1.1 million newcomers. The Trump administration is trying to overhaul the nation’s immigration policy in ways that could cut that number considerably and it has slashed refugee admissions. In April 2019, Trump addressed the rising number of asylum-seekers arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. “We can’t take you anymore,” he said. “Our country is full.”

As long as these sorts of divergences persist, I believe that immigrants who have been living in the United States for years, some with children who are U.S. citizens, will keep coming to Canada seeking asylum.

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Sean Rehaag, Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada

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Maria Cheung, University of Manitoba

The clock is ticking on Canada’s chance to enact important measures against organ trafficking.

For the past two decades, the Chinese regime has been killing prisoners of conscience for their organs. The purchase and sale of human lives has become an industry, and Canada, among other developed countries, has been supporting it.

Bill S-240 seeks to put a stop to Canadian complicity by criminalizing organ tourism. The bill has received unanimous consent from both the Senate and the House of Commons, and is awaiting final Senate approval before the end of the parliamentary session before it can be passed.

This is a critical moment of decision for Canada.

As a member of the Canadian Committee of the International Coalition To End Transplant Abuse In China, I have been among those advocating for Bill S-240, an act that brings important changes to the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act in order to combat organ tourism.

Live organs on demand

Organ trafficking is a global phenomenon. However, forced organ harvesting deserves special attention in the context of the Chinese. In China, this practice is driven by the state.

It’s directed at prisoners of conscience to advance policies of genocide. Forced organ harvesting in China is carried out at such scale that it constitutes an industry.

Since the early 2000s, Chinese hospitals have been providing live organs on demand. Perfectly matched organs can be obtained in weeks or even days.

With an estimation of 60,000 to 100,000 major organ transplant cases per year in China, the availability of organs cannot be accounted for by the number of death-row executions and voluntary organ donations.

Falun Gong, Uyghurs, Tibetans targeted

The sudden boom in organ transplantation in China coincides with the start of the eradication campaign against Falun Gong. Since July 1999, Falun Gong practitioners have been incarcerated and tortured in massive numbers. During captivity, Falun Gong adherents have been singled out for organ examinations and blood tests.

As well as the Falun Gong, Uyghurs, Tibetans and some Christian sects are also being targeted. Forced organ harvesting is continuing despite China’s announcement that it’s going to stop the illicit practice.

Human Rights Watch reported in December 2017 that the Chinese government forcibly collected biodata, including DNA and blood samples, from 19 million Uyghurs that year under the guise of a free public health program in which all citizens are given physical examinations.

At the same time, the Chinese regime began mass arrest and incarceration of Uyghurs, with a million Uyghurs imprisoned in concentration camps. Meanwhile, a priority lane labelled as “special passengers/human organs transport lane” appeared in the Kashgar airport of Xinjiang Uyghur.

Canadians travel to China for illicit organs

For the past two decades, Canada, among other developed countries, has been a participant in this abuse. Dr. Jeff Zaltzman, the head of renal transplants at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, revealed in 2014 that he alone had at least 50 patients who had gone to China for transplants. Zaltzman has since advocated for changing legislation to address the issue of forced organ harvesting.

Canada has, in fact, been identified as one of the seven major organ-importing countries, alongside the United States, Australia, Israel, Japan, Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Barring a few exceptions, the Canadian Criminal Code only criminalizes acts committed in Canada. As such, it is currently legal for Canadians to travel abroad and obtain organs from illicit sources, because such acts do not take place on Canadian soil.

An extraterritorial offence

Bill S-240 recognizes the extraterritorial nature of organ transplant abuse. By making the purchase of organs, and obtaining organs without donors’ informed consent an extraterritorial offence, the bill creates important measures to stem the flow of organ tourism to countries such as China.

The proposed legislation would also bring Canada into further conformity with emerging international legal norms, such as the principle against transplant commercialism enshrined in The Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism.

Countries like Israel, Spain, Taiwan, Italy and Norway have already enacted similar legislation. The European Union and United States have issued a declaration and resolution respectively condemning the crime of forced organ harvesting.

On Dec. 11, 2018, the China Tribunal — an independent people’s tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, former deputy prosecutor who led the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia — stated the following in its interim judgment:

“The Tribunal’s members are all certain — unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt — that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practised for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.”

The final judgement is due to be released on June 17.

It’s vital that Canada ensures Bill S-240 is passed.

China plans globalization of mass murder

China has further ambitions to develop organ transplantation into an export industry as part of China’s “Belt and Road” initiative.

The industrialization and globalization of organ transplantation is the industrialization and globalization of mass murder. If this practice is allowed to take root in human societies, ever more vulnerable populations would be sacrificed in the pursuit of a healthy life by the powerful and the rich.

The cost of inaction means a continuation of Canadian complicity in one of the worst crimes of our times. It is vital that Canada passes this legislation before the end of this parliamentary session, bringing this complicity to an end.

Maria Cheung, Professor of Social Work, University of Manitoba

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Shobana Shankar, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)

To consider that Nigeria, infamous for anti-vaxx campaigns leading to polio outbreaks, has any lessons for Americans may be shocking.

But as measles cases in the U.S. climb to an all-time high after the disease was declared eliminated in 2000, U.S. public health officials have been looking for ways to address the problem.

As a researcher on religious politics and health, I believe that Nigeria’s highly mobilized efforts to eliminate polio can teach America how to reverse the increase in measles cases and shore up its public health infrastructure. Working with international partners, Nigerians have combated misinformation, suspicion of vaccine science and religion-based boycotts to go from ground zero for polio on the African continent in 2003 to nearly polio-free in 2019.

Comparing Nigeria and the US

When the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) was established in 1988 with the goal of complete eradication by 2000, several countries could not meet the target.

India needed another 14 years, while Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan faced stiff internal opposition to immunization. GPEI’s big 2003 push came shortly after Nigeria’s northern states implemented Sharia (Islamic law). Some clerics and political leaders encouraged boycotting immunization, citing contaminants that could reduce the Muslim population and mistrust of the government.

The U.S. is facing similar resistance now. Under scrutiny are anti-vaxx Orthodox and Hasidic Jews in New York City and Rockland County, but The New York Times has also uncovered resistance among Muslims, Catholics, Waldorf school parents and other cultural dissenters.

Anti-vaxxers in Clark County, Washington, are not religious opponents but rather Russian-speaking immigrants who, according to a report, harbor “mistrust of government that built up after being exposed to years of propaganda and oppression in the Soviet Union.” A doctor in their community blames tribalism for suspicion of “people coming from outside.”

Tackling tribalism

Nigerians understood that simply ostracizing religious communities would not work. Anti-vaxx politics tapped into mistrust of government and “others” that ran deep in a diverse but divided society, where religious, regional and ethnic loyalties took priority over national unity.

Nigerians know the ravages of tribalism better than most Americans. By conservative estimates, their nation is home to more than 250 ethnolinguistic groups. The civil war, lasting from 1966 to 1970 after anti-Igbo pogroms in the Hausa-majority north, was a terrifying manifestation of the hatred of difference and a total lack of faith in the government.

To foster reconciliation, Nigerians engaged in efforts to break down tribalism. One experiment, started in 1973 and still going, is compulsory service of college graduates in the National Youth Service Corps in “states other than their own and outside their cultural boundaries to learn the ways of life of other Nigerians.” Notwithstanding problems, the program has instilled in Nigerians a sense that education alone is not enough to build a healthy society. Sometimes it is the source of social separation.

Using this logic to combat polio, Nigerian public health officials took themselves to anti-vaxxers, leaving behind their offices in the city to visit villages with reported polio cases. Their mobility built the “polio infrastructure” that “intensified political and managerial support from all levels of the Nigerian government,” according to a Gates Foundation white paper that analyzed global polio eradication. Traditional leaders like the Sultan of Sokoto also invested time and energy into immunization campaigns and social engagement.

Intensive socialization across class, education and other divisions were as important as traditional public health measures such as scale-up of local technical capabilities and independent monitoring.

Nigerian physicians in the field

I accompanied a team to a village outside Kano city in 2011, after years of public health interventions had reduced reported cases of polio to 20 in all of Nigeria for a 13-month period. The doctor leading the team leader had met four chiefs regularly; the eldest was the most supportive, the youngest the least.

The doctor asked the young man to roll up his left sleeve and pointed to a round scar on his upper arm, remarking, “Your parents had you vaccinated against smallpox. This campaign, though for a different disease, is the same. What’s the problem?” The young chief shrugged, ashamed at direct confrontation and unwilling to insult his parents. They bantered for a bit before we left in the Ministry of Health truck, having accomplished seemingly nothing but a social visit.

“Some may never vaccinate,” the doctor told me, “but I feel better equipped than you or another stranger to talk to them about this issue.”

Between mass immunization campaigns, he visited the villagers. “I know them now, their excuses, habits. Some men say the women are unreasonable. Others don’t care. I know their different personalities. And they know I know them.”

The polio infrastructure in Nigeria immerses experts and local communities in an ongoing relationship. It is an elaborate multilayered surveillance system, with many strategies and functions, from mundane visits to weekly record reviews at health centers in polio-affected areas.

Good strategies matter more than good stories

The media in the West tend to talk about anti-vaxxers as weird and foreign, because they “make a good story,” writes researcher Amanda Vanderslott. She describes common hidden problems like vaccine delays and equipment shortage that sometimes prevent full immunization coverage, but these reasons are less sexy than anti-vaxxers, who are themselves a tribe sharing false beliefs peddled online by discredited doctors like Andrew Wakefield.

Criticism of parents not vaccinating their children may now be commingling with broader mistrust of, say, Facebook. Propaganda and tribal isolation have always existed but now are proliferating with social media that is, paradoxically, fostering anti-social tendencies.

Fearing negative attention would isolate anti-vaxxers and drive them underground, Nigeria fostered greater social engagement in the public health system. The nation’s polio infrastructure was tested in 2017 by new cases in the Lake Chad basin where Boko Haram’s violence reigned. Although international political observers feared the public health effects of Islamist-inspired terrorism, a common element in the remaining polio-affected countries, Nigeria’s disease surveillance capabilities held strong and surpassed those of Pakistan and Afghanistan in its polio surveillance capabilities in 2018.

One clear lesson for the U.S. from Nigeria’s experience with expanding vaccinations is that we should work to depoliticize public health. Scapegoating religious communities evokes ugly histories of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Tribalism and insularity affect many communities, even the educated and political classes. Nigerians have rarely held back criticism of the elites who blame the masses for their own poverty and illnesses. Ordinary Nigerians, in turn, blame elite corruption for destroying the public sector including public health. Nigeria’s postwar efforts to reduce social stigma and scapegoating are unfinished business, but the polio eradication campaign is continuing the good fight.

Few American college grads will spend years immersed in a social experiment, but public health officials can prioritize resocialization around measles. For America to strengthen its measles infrastructure, trust to discuss and debate vaccine science needs to develop.

GPEI had to rejigger its own understanding of the interactions between monovalent oral polio vaccine and wild polio behavior. Like it or not, American public health officials must answer American advocacy groups like Informed Choice that highlight “the messy conundrum” of exposure to wild measles versus the existing measles-mumps-rubella vaccination strain. A disease infrastructure built on human capacity can handle disagreement.

It can also adapt. Nigeria spent over US$8 million on surveillance alone and expanded polio capabilities to fight other diseases like measles and rubella. While the system puts a heavy workload on health officials, it points the way for how the American public health system can reshape existing structures for the current era. America led international health partnerships for decades, but the time has come to follow other countries’ lead.

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Shobana Shankar, Associate Professor, History/Africana Studies, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.