THOSE WHO CALL THEMSELVES REFUGEES ARE NOT NECESSARILY REFUGEES
In the past few months, Canadians have heard of hundreds of so-called “refugees” crossing Canada’s land border with the U.S. and making claims for refugee status in Canada.
Canadians have good reason to be suspicious of the validity of such claims. To make this point clearer, we are re-publishing the confession of an Israeli citizen who entered Canada in 2007 from the U.S. with his wife and children. With the complicity of refugee advocates in Toronto and experienced fraudsters who had duped Canadian immigration / refugee authorities and succeeded in getting refugee status, he and his family were also granted refugee status.
After living off Canada for several years, he became tired of lying and returned to Israel. This bulletin is his confession of the fraud that he and his family committed.
This confession should remind Canadians of the extensive fraud that has occurred in Canada’s refugee system. It is happening again on a very visible stage.
This is a very large problem for a number of reasons.
(1) According to James Bissett who was the Executive Director of Canada’s entire Immigration Service between 1985 and 1990, about 400,000 foreigners made refugee (asylum) claims here between 1989 and 2002. Using Mr. Bissett’s figure, we estimate that since 1989, the year that the immigration lobby sabotaged the Mulroney government’s effort to institute a Safe Country law to prevent fake refugees from making claims, well over 1,000,000 people have filed refugee claims here. We’ll say that again : Over one million !!! If Canada had not later instituted its Safe Country list and its Safe Country agreement with the U.S., Canada would have had to deal with at least tens of thousands more fake refugee claimants. See the following link to that list and the year when each of the safe countries on that list approved of its name being added to the list : http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/refugees/reform-safe.asp
(2) When Canada’s immigration lobby, (immigration lawyers, immigration consultants, immigration advocates and ethnic groups) sabotaged 1989 safe country legislation, it eventually diverted billions of dollars from helping real refugees overseas to filling the pockets of the lobby. It is now pressing to have Canada’s Safe Country Agreement with the U.S. repealed. Critics have described the lobby as a veritable cesspool which has have repeatedly duped our immigration system.
(3) Canada (along with the U.S.) has one of the highest refugee claim acceptance rates in the world. Yet, the immigration lobby is trying to portray the U.S. as a country with a high refugee applicant refusal rate.
(4) Canada’s right to defend itself from fraudsters who have used loopholes to abuse Canada is being assaulted again. As a result of the notorious “Singh Decision” in 1985 in which six East Indian citizens named “Singh” and one from Guyana successfully challenged a section of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, refugee claimants became eligible to receive Canadian health and social assistance benefits. This decision meant that Canadian taxpayers eventually had to pay about $2 to $3 Billion per year for benefits provided to people who made refugee claims. At the peak of the abuse of Canada’s refugee system, about 30,000 to 40,000 claims were being made here every year.
(5) While Canada’s quasi-judicial refugee system provided huge profits for the immigration lobby, it ignored the spirit of the law. According to Canada’s Supreme Court, “The issue before the Supreme Court was whether the refugee determination process existing at the time was invalid because it did not necessarily provide the claimant with an oral hearing. The judges’ greatest concern with the Immigration Act was the lack of opportunity of the claimant to state his case and know the Minister’s case against the claimant. At that time, an application before the Immigration Appeal Board (IAB) was usually rejected before the refugee claimant had an opportunity to discover the Minister’s case against him in the context of a hearing. The Court therefore found that the refugee determination procedures established in the Immigration Act, 1976 did not accord the refugee claimant fundamental justice and violated section 7 of the Charter.” The Supreme Court of Canada noted that the word “person” in the Canadian charter meant that a ‘person” in Canada did not have to be a Canadian citizen in order to receive health and social assistance benefits.
(6) The impact of refugee claimants has been enormous. Our Department of Citizenship and Immigration has not revealed the number of relatives that accepted refugees have sponsored, but that figure is probably a large percentage of the several million Family Class immigrants who have come to Canada since 1989. In fact, family re-unification has become virtually “village re-unification”. For example, as we have pointed out before, one Somali man has brought 100 “family” members to Canada. Many well-publicized cases of fraud (the Laibar Singh case) demonstrate the cheating that other ethnic groups have committed against Canada’s refugee system. Laibar Singh was finally deported to the Punjab, but his deportation was significantly delayed with the help of illegal actions by fellow Sikhs. Laibar Singh eventually admitted that his claim was fraudulent. However, hundreds of thousands of other fraudsters remain in Canada and laugh at Canada.
(7) A full list of the reasons given for claiming refugee status has never been published, but it would probably show how far Canada has traveled from Canada’s early intentions to help real refugees. For instance, people have claimed they needed refugee status because they were fat, gay, being called names, subjected to spousal abuse, etc. The amazing thing is that they have had a significant number of Canadians actually believe that these are legitimate reasons for these people to be granted refugee status. Some refugee claimants are genuine, but as the the case of the Israeli man shows, the sympathy and star status that is given to almost all refugee claimants is not deserved.
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The following is Part 1 of the confession of an Israeli citizen who fraudulently claimed to be a refugee. Our point in publishing this confession is to illustrate the point that not all those who claim to be refugees are real refugees.
LYING OUR WAY TO CANADA—–PART 1
I am writing from Tel Aviv in Israel. The major characters in the following story are me (Innocent Kwarteng—a fake name I used in Canada), my ex-wife, and my two oldest children. We are all Israeli citizens. My wife is an Ethiopian Falasha Jew who was brought to Israel under a project which allowed Ethiopian Jews to return to Israel as new Immigrants. I am not Jewish originally. I married my wife in 1996 in Israel and as a result, I received Israeli Citizenship. My two oldest children were born in Israel and they are Jewish, based upon the fact that their mother is Jewish.
On May 21, 2007, after I, my wife and two oldest children had traveled from Israel to Orlando, Florida for a family vacation at Disney World, we drove a rented car from Florida to Niagara Falls, Ontario to visit Israeli friends who lived in Toronto. At the time we entered Canada in 2007, I did not think that I would be staying in Canada for long. However, after visiting with these friends in Toronto who had claimed refugee status as Ethiopians, my wife also wanted to stay in Canada. These friends explained how we could make the same claim that they had made. We lived in Toronto for about two months, during which time my wife and I argued about whether or not we should make a refugee claim. On the 24th day of August 2007, we made a false refugee claim. We pretended that we had just landed from Africa (Ethiopia/Ghana). To prevent the truth from being discovered, we hid our Israeli passports at someone else’s house.
In the 4+ years between the time we filed our refugee claim and the time I left, Ontario social services paid for our stay : our accommodation at a cost of $1100 per month and basic needs. In December 2007, my wife had a new baby (our third of the four children we now have) in Toronto’s Scarborough General Hospital. That child became a Canadian by birth. We gave her a name to suit our fake name, not our original names as registered on our Israeli Passports. At our refugee claim hearing on August 10th, 2009, we were accepted as convention refugees based upon the fact that we were Africans. The Hearing officials did not know that we had Israeli Citizenship because we had not disclosed this fact. We also did not reveal that we had never lived in Ethiopia.
In our refugee application, we also claimed that we had been victims of abuse and torture in Ethiopia. But, in fact, that was a lie because we had never lived there.The whole story we gave the officials in Canada was a pre-arranged story written by people who had already lived in Toronto and who knew how the refugee system worked and how it could be abused.
We had fake identification sent from Ethiopia by my wife’s sister who lived in Ethiopia and to whom we paid money for this service. Among the fake false pieces of identification sent by her were Personal Information Forms (PIF). The names of our siblings, et al were changed to suit my wife’s PIF. Other fraudulent identification consisted of Ethiopian birth certificates for the kids who actually had legitimate birth Certificates from Israel as well as a fake birth Certificate for my wife, and other fake ID cards for me and my wife. My wife also got a fake Ethiopian Driver’s License which she later tried to exchange for a Canadian Driver’s License with the help of an Ethiopian translator who gave her signals during the theory exam about the answers she should give. After the theory test, she tried twice to pass the practical exam and failed. The truth is she had never driven in her life. She did take a few courses in Toronto, but they could not help her to pass the practical test.
My wife badgered me to stay in Canada with her and our children (two of them at that time). While I did not want to stay, I had little choice because I did not want to lose my kids by going back to Israel alone. A year after our arrival, other family members joined us from Israel in the same way that we had come. They also filed Bogus refugee claims by doing the same things we had done.
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For details on the Laibar Singh case, see the following : http://immigrationwatchcanada.org/2007/08/16/stand-on-guard-for-canada-ms-finley-and-canada-will-stand-on-guard-for-thee/
Part 2 of the Israeli citizen’s story was published in 2011 : http://immigrationwatchcanada.org/2011/11/29/nov-29-2011-lying-our-way-to-canada-part-2/
