New Canadians alienated by U.S. travel indignities

Muzaffar Iqbal will not be fingerprinted and photographed by U.S. immigration officials and he will not sign a registry before entering the United States.

He refuses to submit to what he considers indignities that are not required of all Canadians.

As a result, Mr. Iqbal -- Pakistani by birth, but Canadian by citizenship -- is denied entry to Canada's giant neighbour. That denial is in effect despite assurances from the Foreign Minister that Canadians would not be subjected to additional scrutiny on the basis of where they were born.

"The [U.S.] registration system is much more than the initial fingerprinting," Mr. Iqbal said recently.

The chemist and leading Islamic scholar who lives in Edmonton was speaking after being turned back by the Americans as he tried to fly to Washington to attend a scientific conference.

"It is a complete code of apartheid based on race, religion and country of origin."

Mr. Iqbal is not alone. By mid-December, roughly 200 Canadians had launched protests with the Department of Foreign Affairs.

They allege they had been subjected to unfair probing by U.S. immigration officials on the basis of their country of birth.

Many of those complaints were lodged after the Americans promised to stop treating foreign-born Canadians differently from those born in Canada.

The first grievances were received on Sept. 13, two days after U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service brought in strict new rules requiring anyone born in countries suspected of being breeding grounds for terrorists to be fingerprinted and photographed as they entered the United States. The new procedures were to apply regardless of citizenship.

Initially, there were five countries on the list: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Sudan. On Oct. 1, the United States said people from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen could also expect extra attention from immigration officials.

It was a policy that enraged long-time citizens of Canada such as Mr. Iqbal who found their passports were not equal to those belonging to people born on Canadian soil. And it drew ire in Ottawa where Foreign Minister Bill Graham promised to force the Americans to back down.

"A Canadian is a Canadian for all purposes," he proclaimed indignantly in the House of Commons.

On Oct. 31, Mr. Graham announced he had received assurances from U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell that no distinction would be made at the borders based on place of birth.

But Mr. Iqbal said the room in Toronto's Pearson International Airport -- where he was detained by U.S. immigration officials for eight hours before he finally refused to submit to their new requirements -- tells another tale.

"This was a terrible room where 10 or so people were sitting and the officers were continuously coming in and out of their little cubbyholes and I saw people coming out in tears and people who were being fingerprinted and it was a shock to me," he said.

An 85-year-old Canadian woman who was born in Afghanistan was sitting in one chair, he said. She had been there for four hours.

"She couldn't even stand on her feet," Mr. Iqbal said. "I said, 'Is she going to turn into a terrorist? She can't even walk.' "

"He was a U.S. citizen who had come to Canada two days before to visit his cousin and he was stopped because he was told that they cannot find his citizenship papers in the computer system," Mr. Iqbal said. "They said [his] passport may be fake. He had the driver's licence, he had so many other documents to prove his identity."

Mr. Iqbal was not completely surprised to be singled out for a secondary examination as he tried to cross the border. The same thing had happened in October when he tried to fly from Edmonton to Denver. But the U.S. immigration officials who stopped him that time knew him and sent him on his way.

He assumed that they had sorted out whatever problem had barred his entry before, he said. And he was doubly reassured by Mr. Graham's statements that the issue had been resolved.

"When I heard this. . . . then I stopped keeping track of these things. I just assumed that we're fine. But apparently we are not."

A spokesman for the U.S. embassy denied last week that Canadian citizens were still being selected for registration at border crossings based on where they were born.

"There are people who are selected randomly" or because "their story doesn't make sense," he said. "They're not picked out because of the country of their birth."

But since the day the agreement was reached between Mr. Powell and Mr. Graham, the United States has expanded the number of countries it considers suspect to include Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates.

All men born in those countries who are 16 years of age or older, who entered the United States on or before Sept. 30, and who plan to stay until after Feb. 21 have been told they must be fingerprinted, photographed and registered.

And while that does not mean that Canadians born in those countries will be forced to go through all of that as they enter the United States, Reynald Doiron of the Department of Foreign Affairs said "they could be subjected to more probing, more questioning. . . . It would be the INS officer's judgment call based on 'reasonable suspicion or actual advanced knowledge.' "

Mr. Doiron said the number of complaints his office receives from Canadians who believe they have been mistreated by U.S immigration officers on the basis of their birth country is winding down. But the drop can be interpreted in a number of ways, he said.

"We hope and we think that it's directly related to the assurances given to our minister by Secretary of State Powell whereby country of birth is not the sole trigger to submit people to that regulation," he said.

But it could be that people born in countries that arouse suspicion are simply refusing to travel to the United States. And other people, Mr. Doiron said, may be submitting to the requirements without complaint "because they have to go to the U.S. and they don't want to start saying things that will come back to haunt them."

Isabelle Savard, a spokeswoman for Mr. Graham, said her boss was aware that there were still some problems at the borders. Deputy Prime Minister John Manley raised those concerns two weeks ago when he met with Tom Ridge, the Director of Homeland Security in the United States.

"We're being reassured by the American authorities that they are sending messages to employees at the border. We are assured that place of birth does not automatically trigger registration," Ms. Savard said.

"The U.S. immigration officials have the right to register non-immigrant aliens regardless of nationality. These things take time to be implemented. . . . and in general we are quite satisfied that the U.S. is trying to address our concerns."

Nancy Nightingale, the principal of A. Y. Jackson Secondary School, an art school in Toronto, recently cancelled a field trip to a Buffalo art gallery because U.S. officials could offer no guarantee that some of her students would not be subjected to special scrutiny.

Despite the agreement between Mr. Powell and Mr. Graham, "it is up to the individual [immigration] officer who would get on the bus and make a decision about whom he may want to profile or not," Ms. Nightingale said. "We did see it as a case of profiling and we absolutely refused to participate in any kind of activity like that."

As for Mr. Iqbal, he says he will not barter away his dignity for the privilege of entering the United States.

"It is not just the question of being detained at INS offices for hours and of being photographed and fingerprinted, it is a question of our basic rights being violated," he wrote in a letter to Mr. Graham last week.

"Thousands of Canadians have relatives and friends who live across the border. And in this holiday season, they will not be able to visit them unless they are willing to submit themselves to this humiliation."

12/11/2002 - Political - Article Ref: IV0212-1804
By: Dr. Muzaffar Iqbal
Iviews* -

Thank you, President Bush for your Eid greetings, we are indeed greatly indebted. And thank you for telling us, one more time, that your new war is not against Islam and Muslims. It was time that you reminded us that we should not take the B-52 bombers showering bombs on our cities so personally. Indeed, the six Iraqis who died on the first day of December are not to be counted among the dead; they were illegal combatants, working in an oil factory.

As Muslims, we are grateful to you for all the food packages that were sent down from the Afghan skies during the last year. Had we been the children of Israel, it would have reminded us of our great past when Manna and Salva was sent down by God. Let me assure you, Mr. President, American peanut butter tastes so good that our Afghan children became so keen to pick up the food packages that they could not even distinguish between the food packages and thousands of canister bombs that your B-52 bombers left behind in their wasteland. But, of course, it was their bad luck; we will just add them to the list of collateral damage. That way, we will not have to go through the tedious ritual of calculating the number of dead.

I am sorry to hear that things are not going well back home. Some unpatriotic Americans have started to ask questions about your war of terror, excuse me, war on terror. They ask for results for the 40 billion dollars you so graciously and hurriedly sanctioned for the great war. That little audio cassette that recently surfaced at the Al-Jazeera did not help much, I suppose. Although you have the Al-Jazeera's Kabul correspondent firmly locked up in a cage at camp X-ray (and thank God, the international union of journalists has not made a peep about him), this little island of a network keeps coming up with trouble after trouble.

You were, however, more successful with Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, the German Justice Minister who so rudely compared your new war policies to that of Adolf Hitler; thank goodness, she was quickly sacked by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder for poisoning the relations. I must also congratulate you on quickly getting rid of Mme. Francoise Ducros, the Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien's Director of Communications, who so ungratefully called you a moron despite all the soft lumber that American companies so cheaply buy from Canada in order to help their economy.

Mr. President, it is heartening to know that the new Department of Homeland Security is finally off to a grand start. With an operational budget of $37.5 billion and nearly 170,000 federal employees, it should keep the homeland secure. Just let no American walk out of your great country without the protection of pilot-less drones for streets of the world have become very dangerous for them.

I hope that with your ambassador in London so ardently standing behind you in your war after war, it should not be difficult to soon control all the unruly streets. Whatever happened the other day in Amman should never be allowed to happen again. I think it would not be a bad idea to send a little congratulatory note to your distant relative in Amman for taking care of the matter so promptly. I hear the little town of Mann is also grateful to you for bringing all the world attention to this tribal region. The price those little rabbles had to pay was not much, I suppose, compared to what the Afghans have paid. It was merely a double digit number that they lost. But we will not call it war against Muslims; after all, it was their own king whose army was doing the job.

Mr. President, in your Eid greetings, you have rightly told us that the new year is full of promises. We look forward to the new ventures. Afghanistan is indeed becoming a little too dull and although great news is in store regarding Iraq, Hans Blix and his team of inspectors are taking too long. Please hurry up or else the current rating will start to go down and you know very well how difficult it is to whip up the hysteria once it has subsided.

You know that anthrax cannot be used again to create fear. (By the way, the little leak leading to the US military was plugged very well and I sincerely hope that all patriotic Americans will remember never to ask any questions about anthrax.) So, what are we going to do next time? How would you generate new waves of fear? I suppose those little Napoleons in thousands of homeland security offices would come up with something. Perhaps, you should ask them to start cooking something like the danger of a bio-engineered mosquito bringing a deadly virus. That would be something!

It is my sincere hope, Mr President, that in the new year, you will not be so lenient with men who keep bothering you with their silly questions about Afghanistan. I was shocked to read a report by one Robert Fisk who sketched a graphic picture of little children being blown up in the deserts of Khost. He also had the nerve to draw world attention to the endless queue of mutilated civilians sitting outside the hospital in Herat, hoping to get an artificial leg. Likewise, people who keep mentioning international laws, protocols and agreements should be stopped from reminding the world that in your war of terror (excuse my slip again, Mr. President), you have not even spared ambassadors. No one has the right to remind the world that Ambassador Mullah Zaeef is still locked up in a cage in Camp X-ray.

I am glad to know that early in 2003, Germans will take charge of the Afghan ordeal. It would be their boys who would risk their lives for this grand show which, we all know, will only last for as long as money keeps coming. But I am afraid, Afghans are rather notorious for their tenacity. There is little hope that what the Soviet Union could not achieve with 140,000 men, we can achieve without large-scale disasters soon erupting all over this unruly land. Those who keep saying that the Afghan adventure is headed for disaster should all be locked up with the "illegal combatants". (By the way, that was an excellent invention for which its inventor should be amply rewarded.)

That reminds me to say that events like the appearance of those four pictures of C-130 planes carrying their human cargo to Camp X-ray should not be allowed to happen again. They do bring the specter of war crimes being launched in some court, somewhere in the world although you have rightly declined to sign the international charter which would put the American soldiers in risk. But the images of those shackled men, which recently flashed on millions of computer screens around the world, was not nice, to say the least.

I am also sad to know that some Edward Saids are still around. They keep talking about an impossible linkage: the suffering of Palestinians, so carefully crafted by a 2.1 billion dollar annual aid to Israel and numerous supplements. They have maps, numbers and pictures which they keep showing to the world. The appearance of a new great wall here, barbed fences there, burned olive orchards, destroyed homes, pieces of dead bodies scattered on streets, made-in-America gun ships and helicopters bombing the refugee camps. Of course, your war is not against Muslims and certainly there is no link between the suffering of Palestinians and the catastrophes Americans continue to experience abroad. No, the world should accept the verdict of your "man of peace" who looks forward to his new term which will complete the task of fortification of Israel.

And finally, let me close by thanking you, once again, Mr. President, for the opportunity you so graciously provided to some of our Muslim brothers and sisters to come and visit you and Laura at the White House at the beginning of the month of Ramadan. That great occasion will always be remembered by them and their children and their children. They are eternally grateful to you and Laura. I am sure you also value their friendship because they the harbingers of an intellectual northern alliance you so desperately need at this time. With all the best wishes for your new year adventures I am, yours sincerely.

Dr Muzaffar Iqbal is a freelance writer
muzaffar_i@hotmail.com

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