Please write an email - vulnerable refugees need our help

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ve probably heard, at least one two major occasions, that action is needed to speed up the immigration process at the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi, Kenya. 17 African countries’ visa and citizenship documents are processed through the HC, and the timelines are notoriously long.  What takes a week for adoptees in at the Canadian HC in China takes months at HC Nairobi.  It’s crazy.  The commission is chronically understaffed, and as a result, East African applications are consistently segregated against, due to the wait.  If you think adoption timelines are crazy, you should try tto be a professional or a refugee family trying to immigrate. (Read a press release here, or the full report here.) It’s crazy. and it is not fair.

So please polish off your pens again!  Let’s try to make some permanent change this time, instead of a bandaid for a few months. Let’s see if we can help East African refugees get treated with equality by our immigration system. (Thanks to Chris for the instructions below.)

“I believe it is important that we advocate this time for those whose voices are not as loud as our voices. If Nairobi is better resourced, which is what we are asking for, it could potentially benefit our Ethiopian children as well. Here are the simple steps that we can follow to take action on this issue:

1) Cut and paste the letter at the end of this post into an email.

2) Send the email to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Jason Kenney, at Kenney.J@parl.gc.ca  and Minister@cic.gc.ca  

3) Copy your own Member of Parliament on the email. Using your postal code, you can find her/his email address here. 

If you feel strongly about this issue, there are a couple of easy additional steps that you can take to help ensure our message gets heard:

4) At this time, the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration is actually studying the issue of immigration application process wait times. The long visa wait times of the High Commission in Nairobi in particular have recently been raised at Standing Committee hearings. Please copy the following Standing Committee members on the email to the Minister as well:
tilson.d@parl.gc.ca; BevilM@parl.gc.ca; chowo@parl.gc.ca; StcyrT@parl.gc.ca; Calandra.P@parl.gc.ca; GrewaN@parl.gc.ca; ThilaE@parl.gc.ca; karygj@parl.gc.ca; Wong.A@parl.gc.ca; DykstR@parl.gc.ca; Mendes.A@parl.gc.ca; Young.T@parl.gc.ca

5) Please call Minister Kenney’s office to ask CIC to act on the recommendations from the Canadian Council for Refugees report on the immigration application processing times at the High Commission in Nairobi. The Minister’s office can be reached by phone at 613-954-1064. This is a very quick and simple call to make. The person you speak to will simply note your comment, but all phone calls they receive are logged and the more calls the Minister’s Office receives on an issue, the more likely the issue will be viewed as a priority and addressed.

Here is the letter for copying and pasting / personalizing”:

Subject line: Application processing times at the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi

Dear Minister Kenney,

I am the parent/grandparent/friend of a child adopted from Ethiopia. I have read of the Canadian Council for Refugee’s report on the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi, which processed my child’s visa.

I am distressed to learn of the High Commission’s processing times for its most vulnerable applicants. I am embarrassed as a Canadian to read in the report some of the personal stories of refugees and their dependants who are enduring significant hardships, and in some cases tragedy, as they wait years for their applications to be reviewed by your clearly overburdened visa officers in Nairobi.

The Canadian Council for Refugees says that, “immigration officers working there are asked to do the impossible.” I could not agree more and want to lend my voice to encouraging the Government of Canada to stop the neglect of this overseas mission and the many very vulnerable individuals and families it serves.

CIC-Nairobi’s processing times for refugees and refugee dependants are approximately double the average for all of Canada’s overseas missions. In fact, CIC-Nairobi’s processing times for almost all other immigration categories lag dramatically behind the global average for Canada’s overseas missions. This situation is hardly fair or just, especially given that it impacts some of the most at-risk people Canada’s overseas missions serve.

I would like to strongly encourage Citizenship and Immigration Canada to act on the following recommendations from the Canadian Council for Refugee’s report:

- increase resources (both human and material) at Nairobi;
- increase processing targets allocated to Nairobi;
- reduce the number of countries served by Nairobi by using or creating other visa posts in the region to take on some of the burden of Nairobi; and
- review refugee and immigration programs to ensure that access is equitable and that Canadian anti-discrimination and anti-racism policies are fully respected.

Your spokesman’s recent comments regarding the High Commission’s processing times seem to indicate that the Government of Canada feels no sense of urgency to address this situation. While acknowledging that this region is beset with many special obstacles, Canada is clearly failing to meet these unique challenges with unique solutions. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that those with the power in Ottawa to address this situation simply do not care to make resourcing decisions that would better support and protect vulnerable families.

In closing, I urge you to extend our Canadian values of fairness and compassion to vulnerable waiting families and to search for solutions to the issues currently facing the High Commission in Nairobi.

Sincerely,

Your name
Your address