Author Archives: Louisa Taylor
Open arms, open hearts: Canada’s (belated) response to Syrian refugees
It’s a little over three months since the Government of Canada began expediting the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Canada, celebrating the open door with the government’s newest hashtag: #WelcomeRefugees. Two months since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waited late into the night at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport to help the first planeload of newcomers into […]
Alan’s story: You Have the Power
The world awoke today to news that Alan Kurdi, the little boy whose lifeless body was found on a Turkish beach yesterday, was part of a Syrian refugee family who may have applied for asylum in Canada – and been rejected. Suddenly, both the bloody Syrian conflict and the international migration crisis have landed on […]
‘If we want people to come the legal way, we have to clean up our act’: Part II of The Migrationist’s one-on-one with the UN’s independent expert on the human rights of migrants
Earlier this week we posted Part I of our interview with François Crépeau, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. Crépeau is also the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Professor in Public International Law at the Faculty of Law of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where his research focus includes migration control mechanisms […]
What We Need to Learn from the Tragedy in the Mediterranean: The Migrationist talks one-on-one with the UN’s independent expert on the human rights of migrants
In his day job, François Crépeau is a teacher and researcher. As the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Professor in Public International Law at the Faculty of Law of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, he researches and writes about migration control mechanisms, the rights of foreigners, the conceptualization of security as it applies to migrants, and […]
Love, Lies and Borderlines
Many years ago, a friend in Europe told me her brother was about to commit marriage fraud. Only we would never have called it that. We were in our 20s and thought it compassionate and noble, not fraudulent, that a gay man was marrying a straight female friend to secure her status in a certain […]
A Gentleman and a Scholar: Migrationist Community Mourns the Loss of Prof. Graeme Hugo
It was one of those steamy late June days in Ottawa, blasting sun one minute and drenching rain the next. Inside the minimalist cool of the Carleton University Art Gallery, Professor Graeme Hugo stood at a podium painting vivid pictures of a world in motion. His words were simple, his delivery understated, but Hugo’s presentation […]
What are we talking about when we talk about migrants?
As a journalist I’ve long been fascinated by the interplay between public opinion, politics and migration policy, and you can’t unpack the complexities of public opinion without talking about how migrants are portrayed in the media, as Amy Clarke noted here last month. What we read or hear feeds our world view, but the exact […]
When Welcoming Communities Spark Change
In the news of the unaccompanied minors flooding into the United States this year, it would be easy to focus on how the arrival of thousands of children has sparked a backlash from overwhelmed border communities. The numbers are staggering, the needs extensive – how can people cope? But there’s another way to look at […]
Canada’s new vision of citizenship: a privilege in two classes
Every year, several hundred people from across Ottawa gather in a city park in late June for a day-long festival of soccer (football), sweat, and citizenship. Yes, citizenship. Community Cup – celebrating its 10th anniversary this year – is a hugely successful multicultural event that does more than feature teams from ethnic communities, the police […]
Canada’s guest worker problem: Just not going away
When pundits sit down to write the story of the fall of Stephen Harper’s government, will it include the image of a middle-aged waitress from small-town Canada, fighting back tears after losing her job to foreign workers? At the very least, it will register as a turning point, the moment when a long-simmering immigration policy […]
The Migrationist 