I’m Isaac Thomas. I received a grant from Theatre Ontario for a part of this summer to work as an intern in dramaturgy and artistic direction. I have been primarily reading scripts, and been peripherally involved in Sheep and the Whale which I will be stage managing in the fall.
In thinking about the Sheep and the Whale, my mind had been swirling around issues of race, class, immigration, and refugee status.
And then in my own small world it suddenly came to the fore. My mother, who lives in India, had been planning to visit us this summer. For one week. She has been missing her grandchild and regrets not being able to see him grow up. And I suppose she misses seeing me.
She called me with the Canadian visa requirements. Previous to this my mother has received the visa with merely a letter from a close friend stating that he will be financially responsible. She has been to Canada several times both personally and professionally. This time with the change in government or change in foreign policy the list was longer.
Along with that same letter of financial support, the Canadian High Commission required my tax returns from the previous two years; my companion’s tax returns; 6 months of our bank statements - checking account; letters from our employer stating that we were indeed employed; and the usual immigration and citizenship documentation. From my mother they required the same.
But what call for all this extra documentation? Why now? Is it the war on terror? Will this screening weed out terrorists? Is our Canadian foreign policy’s nose rammed so firmly up US foreign policy’s derrière that they cannot see anything but the Great Brown Threat? Is a 79 year old grandmother likely to pose a threat to national security? Or is it that in a 1 week visit she will decide to settle down here, bilk our decaying health system, and attempt to leach the system for every last dollar.
And what matters my bank account and tax return? It must be to check my class. Am I wealthy or at least comfortably middle class enough to support her if she falls ill? Or is my mother a worthy visitor only if I am in a particular tax bracket? Canada revenue already checks all financial transactions over $5000, so it can’t be a terror check. Would these same demands be made of a white nation? Of an Israeli visitor?
The funny part is that my mother will visit my brother and his family in Denmark. She will be staying there for a month after her Canadian visit. The Danish government gave her the visa upon merely receiving a letter from my brother stating that he will be financially responsible for her costs. That was all that was required. She had the Danish visa in her passport; but the Canadian High Commission wanted to confirm that my mother had no diabolical plan for the one week she would be here, so they sent her for this barrage of medical tests. By the time the second set of tests were done and the passport had been shuttled between Chennai and Delhi it was too close to her date of departure. So she rebooked her ticket to just a Copenhagen return, and has given up any hope of coming to Canada again.
The Dane’s have a far less open immigration policy. But getting a visa from them was not an issue. The Canadian’s on the other hand who pride themselves on their immigration policy haul us into this bureaucratic maze. The Liberals’ motto was “Give us your PhD’s, your Doctors, your Engineers, your IT specialists and we will make of them taxi drivers”. Is Reform’s, sorry the Regressive Conservative’s motto “Keep your brown skins out of our land unless they are gilded with Swiss Bank account numbers”?
If I wanted a group of immensely talented theatre artists – poor, brown and S.Asian - on a theatre exchange program would any of them get visas? What does this story say of Canadian immigration policy? What does it say about this nation and our obscenely underemployed immigrant population?
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