Queue-jumpers, terrorists, breeders: representations of Tamil migrants in Canadian popular media

Abstract

The 2010 arrival of the MV Sun Sea on the BC coast sparked a wave of heated anti-migrant sentiment in Canadian popular media which cast the 492 Sri Lankan Tamils on board as ‘illegitimate’ refugee claimants. While Canada has historically seen itself as the safe haven and protector of human rights for those with ‘legitimate’ claims, the Sun Sea response reflects a shift in attitudes about refugees and immigration in popular discourse and Canadian public policy. This paper examines the construction of Tamil migrants in online news comments, blog posts and message boards and considers how such media images reinforce and legitimise public and political opinion.

Keywords:

• Canada
• Tamil
• immigration policy
• public opinion
• online media
• refugees

Notes

As of December 2011, four men have been arrested as part of the human smuggling investigation into the MV Ocean Lady (Freeze and Mills 2011). Two others have been identified as terrorists according to a US database (Bell 2011). To date, no arrests have been made in relation to human smuggling aboard the MV Sun Sea in Canada; several people suspected of orchestrating the operation were arrested by police in Thailand in January 2011 (Clark 2011). To date, 7 of 33 Sun Sea passengers accused of ties to terrorist organisations, human smuggling and other crimes have been ordered deported.

Bauder (2008) explores some elements of this dialectic in a broader framework of humanitarianism and national identity.

See Thobani (2007), Bannerji (2000), and Mackey (1999) for lucid discussion of the history of Canadian responses to multiculturalism and immigration.

The Conservative government made a number of changes to Canada's immigration and refugee system in 2010; Bill C-31, which received royal assent in June 2012, makes additional changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Balanced Refugee Reform Act which would dramatically limit the rights of migrants such as those aboard the Sun Sea, limit appeals and penalise those termed ‘irregular arrivals’.

The LTTE was the main Tamil nationalist organisation against which the Sri Lankan government waged a civil war for more than 25 years. In the 1960s and 1970s, basic civil rights and political representations for Tamils were limited through a series of constrictive language and culture laws passed by Sri Lanka's Sinhalese-dominated government and by increasing Sinhalese nationalist hostilities (Cheran 2000). Widespread violence between the two ethnic groups occurred throughout the country. The country's northern region, where the largest Tamil population was located, became a site for political organising among Tamils and the emergence of the LTTE, a Tamil guerrilla army which sought the creation of an independent state, Tamil Eelam. In 1983, the LTTE ambushed and killed 13 Sri Lankan army soldiers. The resulting pogrom against Tamils led to the beginning of the civil war, the death of thousands of Tamils, and the flight of thousands of Tamils and other Sri Lankans as immigrants and refugees around the world.

The anxiety around these pregnant women, I will suggest later, corresponds to the heated debate in the USA in the past few years regarding ‘anchor babies’; these are children born to migrants living illegally in the USA and are guaranteed rights to citizenship. A similar provision exists for babies born in Canada.

The Columbo Sunday Observer is a government-owned English-language publication.

CBC News (2010).

See Human Rights Watch's (2010) report for documentation of some of these conditions. In addition, Amnesty International's annual reports on Sri Lanka for 2009, 2010, and 2011 provide a summary of conditions in post-war Sri Lanka.

The designation of ‘irregular arrival’ can be made at the discretion of the Minister under the Act.

The Globe and Mail is Canada's oldest national newspaper and enjoys a strong journalistic reputation; its reportage is generally conservative in tone. The Vancouver Sun is also a broadsheet paper with a long history, dating back to 1912, while the National Post was established by Conrad Black in 1998. While the Vancouver Sun has a more moderate reputation, the Post is well known for its explicitly right-wing politics and criticism of other media, particularly the national public broadcaster, the CBC. The Post and the Vancouver Sun were sold in 2010 by Canwest Global and are now part of the Postmedia chain. Finally, The Sun Media group, with major paid dailies operating in nearly eight major Canadian cities and dozens of small regional papers, is also explicitly conservative in its coverage, and its syndicated editorial and opinion pieces tend to take a more populist approach to political issues.

Levant and Libin were, respectively, the founding publisher and editor of the ultraconservative newsmagazine The Western Standard, based in Alberta.

See Aulakh (2010), Tamil-language publications such as Canada Uthayan (canadauthayan.ca) and predominantly English sites such as Tamilcanadian.com.

Critics such as Roy Ratnavel and David Poopalapillai are regularly quoted in the mainstream news. See, for example, CTV News (2010).

I have found that the pro-migrant position of many Tamils has resonated with the left media, with sites such as rabble.ca becoming a location for online activism. Several lively message boards on the rabble.ca site seem to demonstrate this. See, for example, Till the Last Tiger, http://rabble.ca/babble/national-news/till-last-tiger-part-4.

Ottawa Sun (2010).

Angus-Reid (2010a).

Bill C-4, the Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System Act, would criminalise claimants who arrived in Canada by means of ‘human smuggling’.

Canada had limited the financial activities of the LTTE in 2001 (Hyndman 2003). The US government listed the LTTE as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization’ in 1997, but the post 9/11 designation also allows for stricter monitoring on finance and activities.

The man identified as B188 worked as a journalist covering the war and was injured in the crossfire (Woodward 2011).

Vancouver Sun/Canada.com (2011).

There has been extensive reporting on this from a number of NGOs. See Amnesty International's (2009) report, Human Rights Watch's (2010) and Amnesty International's annual reports on Sri Lanka 2008–2012. Many of these issues were raised in the 2011 Channel 4 documentary (McCrae 2011).

These protests earned the ire of the Canadian ‘public’. See CBC News (2009).

The Canadian Tamil Congress announced in July 2011 that it planned to sue Gunaratna for defamation because of his public allegations of migrant ties to terrorism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sailaja Krishnamurti

Current address: Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada. Email: [email protected]