Foreigners, Refugees or Minorities? by Didier Bigo Sergio Carrera

Author:Didier Bigo, Sergio Carrera [Didier Bigo, Sergio Carrera]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409474050
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2013-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

4 Conclusions

Visa policy puts the rights of sovereign states and human rights directly in conflict. States have a necessary, exclusive and unquestionable right to determine entrants, citizens and refugees have a clear and settled claim to entry and it could be argued that all humans have an embedded right to mobility. Discourses and practices of the Canada–Czech ‘visa war’ highlight a number of emerging patterns in visa-regime under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. In this conclusion we highlight three such issues as well as looking at recent developments in the Canada–Czech visa issue.

First, one of the most worrying trends we see in Canadian visa policy, as a symptom of other innovations of the wider border control regime, is the off-shoring of decisions, where the grounds for appeal or recourse are limited. The European Commission and the European Parliament must continue to engage Canada in diplomatic efforts to lift the visa restriction or find a new way of accommodating a differential visa regime. The current situation undermines the authority and the claim of the European Commission to both its members and to the international community to be able to speak and more significantly to negotiate visa waivers. The situation also undermines Canada’s reputation as a globally renowned, rights-focused government.

Second, the category of ‘designated country of origin’, formerly defined as ‘safe country of origin’ gives the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration disproportionate ability to decide on ‘designated countries’ based on a technical evaluation by a group of immigration experts without appropriate public oversight. EU Member States and the European Commission itself must guard against the adoption of the logic in the Balanced Refugee Reform Act, particularly the notion of safe country of origin. This makes a fundamental level of analysis error in justice – that is to say that individual claims about reasonable fear of persecution cannot be waived. It is a primary characteristic of procedural justice that each individual claim be adjudicated.

Finally, changing discourses surrounding temporary visas signals a more substantial change in Canadian – and global – visa regime. In light of the Czech and Mexican examples, we believe this substantial change to Canadian visa regime will come in the form of a ‘visa plus’ system that will scale down risk assessments from the national level to the individual level. In other words, instead of a national visa waiver, this new visa regime will enable a group of ‘trusted travellers’ – assessed based on level of education, wealth, criminal background, travel patterns, etc. – to travel in relatively free(r) terms while making it harder for those that are deemed untrustworthy to move across borders. There is no evidence that this kind of profiling will make the border any more efficient or secure, but it will certainly restrict access to the basic rights of mobility for certain populations.

In the particular case of the Canada–Czech ‘visa war’, we believe there are a number of opportunities that are coming up to solve the problem. On 31 January 2011, CIC sent a delegation of ‘immigration

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