Thank you very much for this opportunity. I am delighted to be here. For over 24 years, ever since I came to Canada, my work has been with the newcomers and immigrants to Canada, three years as a community worker and for the rest of it, as an academic at the University of Toronto and now at Ryerson University.
Much of what we do is, of course, looking at various aspects of the immigration policy and how it's implemented. My presentation today touches on three major points. One is about refugees; another is about people who have applied for family reunification under the live-in caregiver program; and the third one is about family reunification for parents and grandparents.
I would like to remind everyone of the objective of our immigration policy, which is to support self-sufficiency and social and economic well-being of refugees by facilitating reunification with their family members in Canada. This is for refugees. On the whole, we say that we see that the families are united in Canada.
My submission is that two of the three goals that we have stated in our immigration policy are not being satisfied by the current family reunification policy. These are the social and the humanitarian pieces.
Let me start with the humanitarian piece around refugees. As has been said before, refugees come to Canada from war-torn countries and have traumatic pre-migration experiences. There's very little social capital available to them, so the initial phase involves them looking for anything that they can have in order to settle in Canada. The lack of family around them actually disrupts and delays their own settlement and integration, and as a result, they experience alienation and marginalization as well.
More and more, we are aware of what is called the feminization of migration. Many of the refugees who are coming to Canada now are single women with children. For example, we recently sponsored a family from Syria. The family arrived about three days ago, and it's a single mother with two children. Especially for women who are coming on their own without much social capital, we find that it is becoming very difficult for them.
On the whole, there are enough statistics to show that the processing times are very long and people have to wait patiently. I'm not even getting into the details of the bureaucratic and process-related issues, for example, the DNA testing and the excluded family category, and whether the sponsor is receiving social assistance. All of that aside, just the process itself taking so long actually puts a heavy emotional toll on the refugees.
My second example and argument is about Canada's caregiver program. We know that in the past, live-in caregivers had to live with a sponsoring family for two years, and after that, they would get their open work permit.
I just wanted to give you one story that I came across recently, and I've changed the person's name. This is a person I know very well. Mary came to Canada as a live-in caregiver in November 2009. In 2012, she received an open work permit. She applied for PR in March 2012. It has been four and a half years and she is still waiting for a response from the immigration department. When she came to Canada in 2009, her children were four years and two and a half years old. Now they are over eleven years and nine years old respectively. She has not seen her children in the last seven years.
Mary is just one of the many who are caught in the system in Canada, and there are very many, I understand from Mary herself. They actually even have a support group to talk to each other about their own experiences.
We know that this kind of delayed processing has affected the well-being of the children who are coming to join their mothers at any point in time whether after five years or six years.
The phenomenon of “barrel children” is well known to us, especially from the time when the Jamaican live-in caregiver program was quite alive. The term “barrel” refers to children who receive blue plastic barrels of things—goods and clothes, all of that—from their mothers in Canada, with the hope that their reunification will happen very fast. Studies have shown that, even when reunification happens, there are a great many issues around their emotional well-being and social adjustment, school adjustment and performance, and so on.
There have been a number of studies about the Filipino community, especially the children who have joined mothers in the live-in caregiver program. I don't know if it was Madine, but someone did a study on the Filipino children, and one of the findings was that a quarter of Filipino girls and more than a third of Filipino boys entering grade 8 in the late nineties had not graduated by 2003. The average age of separation is from five to six years old, and by the time the kids get back with the mothers, if at all, they are 13 or 14.
I was also reading about many of these children becoming members of gangs, simply because they don't perform well in school and they feel isolated. Then there are many examples of Filipino children underachieving in our school system, simply because of the separation and the anxiety, and the lack of support they feel, particularly emotionally. Of course, they were getting—