A roundtable discussion featuring students personally affected by the recently passed Bill C-24.
3:09- “I’ve lived here all my life. The only schooling I’ve received has been in Canada… yet I’m not a citizen of this country.”
5:41- “If you’re a Canadian, you don’t have to apply for a visa to go to most places in the world… because they deem ‘Canadian’ as very valuable and honest and nice people that won’t do anything bad.”
7:28- “There are good people who work in immigration, depending on who you get. I think that’s the problem… immigration officials have so much to do already. I [think this] new responsibility… will just burden the system even more.”
11:02- “My sister, who was a minor back then, was deported back to Korea because of a bureaucratic misunderstanding or complication… We’re not people, we’re just numbers on a paper.”
13:32- “Everyone is different. Someone might take five years, someone might take 10 years depending if [Citizenship and Immigration Canada] lose paperwork along the way… No one ever knows.”
“And this really points to the dangers of replacing a judiciary with a bureaucracy because there is no place where this can be appealed.”
17:00- “[If citizenship is a privilege] I would like to ask Minister Alexander ‘What the hell did you do to earn Canadian citizenship?’… My father was a civil engineer and my mother was a special education teacher [in Korea]. They came here and my dad worked as a cashier and my mom started working at a day care. It’s humiliating… if they don’t speak the language they’re treated as children many times… Aren’t we doing enough things to earn that citizenship?”
20:51- “[Multiculturalism] is something the average Canadian is so proud of…”
25:03- “If you wanna come into this country and blow up a building… you could do that with a visitor status.”
26:45- “I grew up in a small town and I’m still Facebook friends with a lot of people there. [They] are the ones buying the idea that restricting citizenship will actually prevent terrorism… It’s ironic that these people who have the least experience [with] or exposure to immigrants are the ones fully supporting this bill.”
31:09- “It’s very unfortunate to me that a lot of Canadians just don’t know about this stuff… There definitely needs to be a more general awareness about what it means to get your citizenship here.”
32:35- “I’m just dreaming of the day I’m allowed to vote.”
42:03- “Do you guys feel like you’ll ever become Canadian citizens?”
“Sometimes I just can’t think about it because it seems so far off… It’s too exhausting for me.”
46:03- “I was telling my mother about doing this podcast and her first reaction was ‘Don’t you have to be a little bit careful about that?’ And we laugh about it, it’s a free society with the rule of law. But as we’ve discussed, this is a fear where rule of law isn’t guaranteed.”
52:24- “When you make an agreement, a basic law of contract [between two parties]… [in which] there is a mutual understanding of the basic situation, [if] you change the terms of contract, that doesn’t really work. If you want us to be good, legal immigrants, maybe stop changing laws.”
53:57- “I feel like I know the CIC voicemail lady.”
