VANCOUVER, Tuesday April 8, 2008- The national immigrant rights group No One Is Illegal is outraged at the recent proposed amendments to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The group will be gearing up during the next few weeks to demand the scrapping of the amendments, including making submissions today and tomorrow in Toronto at the House Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.

Recently, the Harper Conservative government tried to sneak changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act through the House of Commons via C-50 (the budget implementation act). These sweeping changes will give enormous and arbitrary powers to the Minister to decide which categories of immigration applications will be processed, and which would be ignored or discarded despite meeting all the necessary criteria. It will also limit several out-of-country humanitarian and compassionate applications that Canadian sponsors can use to bring their relatives into Canada.

Furthermore, proposed s. 87.3 of the Act will allow the Minister to issue instructions on setting quotas on the “category” of person that can enter Canada - including quotas based on country of origin. This unprecedented modification of IRPA would risk putting in place implicit equivalents to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, the Order in Council of 1911 prohibiting the landing of “ any immigrant belonging to the Negro race”, that of 1923 excluding “any immigrant of any Asiatic race”, or the “None is too many” rule applied to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi concentration camps in 1945.

According to Cynthia Oka of No One Is Illegal-Vancouver “Not only are these changes anti-democratic, they are anti-immigrant. These changes represent a profoundly dehumanizing and racist conception of immigrants as disposable commodities, who are only worth their labour. The major lobby behind these amendments comes from employer and business organizations. We need to send a loud and clear message that we will not allow Canadian immigration to turn into a glorified temporary work agency under the absolute power of the Conservative Ministry of Immigration.”

According to Harsha Walia of No One Is Illegal-Vancouver “It is clear that the priorities will be relatively wealthy people applying under the skilled worker program and investor classes, as well as increasingly vulnerable temporary migrant workers; at the grave and deliberate expense of refugees, non-status migrants, or those immigrants seeking family reunification. The general message being sent to immigrants is ‘do not come unless you are wealthy or are willing to work as temporary workers in exploitative jobs’. The immigration debate in Canada faces a stark choice: either more fear, restrictions, and commodification; or respect for the human rights and dignity of immigrants.”