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| Subject: The Safe Third Country Agreement????? |
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The Toronto Star June 11, 2011
OTTAWA—The United States government has quietly scrapped a popular exchange program for teens from Afghanistan after watching scores of students flee to Canada as refugees rather than return home.
The defections from the State Department´s Youth Exchange and Study (YES) initiative have been occurring since 2005, the second year the program was offered. But they reached the breaking point this year when more than half of the 40 Afghans brought in to attend U.S. high schools vanished.
A Toronto Star investigation has tracked a number of those students to refugee shelters in Fort Erie, Ont., high schools in St. Catharines, universities and provincial government jobs in Toronto, apartments in Burnaby, B.C., and elsewhere in Canada. The newest arrivals are collecting welfare as they attend school and work their way through the immigration system.
The first ones to have fled to Canada give a measure of their potential contributions to their new country. When Ghufran Tarin disappeared from his American host family in 2006, he mused that he wanted to serve Canada as an ambassador.
Tarin, who declined to be interviewed, went to Ryerson University to study business. There he won scholarships and became vice-president of his student union and a counsellor to international students. He is a summer student at the Ontario Finance Ministry.
Partly out of embarrassment and partly out of frustration from seeing federal money go to waste, Washington suspended the YES program this year, denying visa applications for Afghans who were set to arrive in America this fall.
“A year pause is appropriate,” a State Department official in Washington said. “The circumstances might change once people realize that this ... can´t be taken for granted as a route for immigration.”
To see how endemic the defections had become, look no further than this year´s crop of students. Start with Mohammed Karim Azizi.
Five-foot-four, 115 pounds and 15 years old, the Kabul shopkeeper´s son was just two months into his year-long exchange program when he vanished from a Future Farmers of America conference in downtown Indianapolis on Oct. 21, 2010.
His disappearance set off a search by local police, the family he had been living with in Ohio and federal officials running the exchange program, which brings students from Muslim countries to the U.S. to help educate them.
Though officials classified Azizi´s disappearance from the convention as a mystery, his whereabouts were well known to at least one other Afghan student at the conference.
When Haseeb Latifi, 17, returned from Indianapolis to the home of Tom and Sandy Manion in Lanesboro, Minn., he told his host family about the incident. It only fuelled his own determination not to return home at the end of the school year.
Yet Latifi played the good student, saying all the right things. Officials with the exchange program even posted a story on their website last December written by a local newspaper about his experience in the U.S.
“When I go back to Afghanistan, I will help people know better about the U.S., and I will share everything that I learned,” he told the Republican-Leader.
Two months later, Latifi was gone, armed with an airport shuttle bus schedule he had swiped from the Manion kitchen.
“They found out that he had gone from ... St. Paul´s to Chicago to Pittsburgh to Buffalo,” said Tom Manion. “Now he´s in Canada and I believe he´s going through the process of staying there.”
Students accepted into the program, which was created in 2004, are chosen from among more than 5,000 applicants across the country each year. They are the brightest, the most articulate and the ones judged most likely to become the country´s future leaders.
That made it a big problem in both Kabul and Washington when they started using their stay in the States as a beachhead for asylum bids in Canada.
Ted Achilles, a 74-year-old retired businessman who moved to Kabul in 2002, is the former Afghanistan-based director of American Councils for International Education, the organization picked by Washington to administer the exchanges.
“I saw this coming, and I saw it coming through the eyes of a young lady named Wazhma Sadat,” he said.
Sadat was an exchange student in the third year of the program in 2006-07. Unlike others, she returned home when it ended. The next year, she was employed as a counsellor, charged with preparing fourth-year exchange students for their term in the U.S.
“They weren´t even worried about classes or academics at all,” she said from Kabul. “The way they talked to their families on the phone, it was more like, ‘Goodbye forever.´ “
Sadat, now on a scholarship to Yale University, recalled preparing a list of 14 students she believed would leave for Canada that year. All but one of those students fled, along with a number of others she had not suspected.
She told Achilles, who raised the alarm with the U.S. embassy and the program´s administrators, but no preventive action was taken, Achilles said.
“These kids just started peeling off and going across the Peace Bridge.”
The State Department official disputed that nothing was done to stop the flow of students to the Canada-U.S. border, but admitted Washington had little power to prevent them from leaving.
“They´re in a free country. Part of the experience of being in a free country is being free.”
The first girl to come to Canada left the program a few months after arriving in Buffalo. A relative in Toronto picked her up one day and drove her across the border, said Tony Agnello, who helped find host families for the Afghan students until 2008.
The second girl, also placed in Buffalo, had caught the eye of an Afghan warlord back home who was pressuring her family to sell her into marriage. Agnello was in Kabul, chaperoning a group of exchange students back to Afghanistan, when he got word of her disappearance.
“I think that scared the Washington bureaucrats, and they said, ‘My gosh, what´s going on with Buffalo?´ “ Agnello recalled.
That was the last year students were placed with families and schools in upstate New York. The enticement to flee to Canada was seen as too great.
“That held them up for all of about two minutes,” said Achilles. “Then the girl from Arizona found out how to get to Canada and the girl from Texas found out how to get to Canada.”
The Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the U.S. is meant to prevent asylum seekers from using one country as a step in their bid to get refugee status in the other. Afghan adults would be barred from entering Canada unless there was a family member willing to sponsor them.
But these minors — most instructed by their families not to return home — are allowed immediate entry. As a result, they come to Canada alone. Their stay in the U.S. may have taken care of culture shock, but cooking, budgeting or caring for themselves remain foreign concepts.
Latifi, who excelled academically and played on the high school basketball team in Minneapolis, never stopped looking for a way to remain in the West, said Tom Manion.
“Almost daily, the subject would come up that he couldn´t return home. It wasn´t an option. His family was counting on him,” said Manion. “It was very hard to listen to that every day — and it was every day. I´m not exaggerating.”
There was no solution by the time that Latifi received notice of the date he would be returning home. Tom´s wife, Sandy Manion, delivered the news and reported to her husband that the 17-year-old had taken it well.
“It was not rational to me for him to take it well. I think at that point in time he had chosen. He didn´t tell us this, but his last option was to leave.”
Latifi flew to Buffalo, crossed the border and spent his first few weeks in Canada at Matthew House, a Fort Erie shelter where, during a visit by the Star earlier this month, seven Afghans from the exchange program were living. He spent a few weeks at another Afghan student´s apartment in St. Catharines before making his way to Toronto.
The frustration surrounding the program´s failures has been mounting for years.
Washington spends about $27,000 per school term for each student and provides an additional $125 monthly allowance. At about 40 students a year, it adds up.
“It´s at taxpayer expense,” said the State Department official. “It means we´ve got an obligation to taxpayers and Congress to ensure that the objectives of the program are being met.”
Achilles quit the program in 2008 to start a privately funded exchange program, the School of Leadership Afghanistan, which is targeted at Afghan girls. He blames the State Department for failing to offer follow-up employment or education opportunities to the students.
The official in Washington said expanding the program is not likely when — or if — the exchanges are restarted in the future.
It´s a short-sighted view, Achilles says, that has resulted in the best and brightest Afghan youths fleeing a country that desperately needs their talents and aspirations to rebuild after three decades of conflict.
“I took on this job because I wanted to do something for Afghanistan and not — excuse me — for Canada,” he said.
[11-06-2011,09:19]
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Kabul to US then Canada!! |
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FREEDOM & LIBERTY (in reply to: The Safe Third Country Agreement?????)
"Who would escape what he desired..."
[11-06-2011,11:29]
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Anonymous |
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