Doh! Canada

by

Via Phil Dennison’s blog.*

“Sorry, amigo, if you want asylum in our country, you have to be a lisping queen. Butch queers have to stay in their own country and take whatever comes.”

Canada, apparently, goes by the Homer Simpson maxim: “We like our beer cold, our music loud, and our homosexuals fah-laming.”

You can’t make this stuff up:

The Canadian Refugee Board has denied asylum to a Mexican homosexual because he is not “visibly effeminate” and therefore not vulnerable to persecution.

Fernando Enrique Rivera, 30, came to Canada four years ago after he was allegedly blackmailed by colleagues in the Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, police department.

In December 2002 the Immigration and Refugee Board concluded: “Effeminate gestures come naturally and unconsciously. … If he were indeed visibly effeminate, he would have been (un)able to easily land a job with the ‘macho’ police force of Puerto Vallarta.”

There’s so much wrong with that I barely know where to start.

Other than the Washington Times, however, I can’t find any information online about this person or his case, so (where’s my lawyer?), perhaps you can make this stuff up. :-p (The Times, that is, not Phil.)

*Which I’ve only begun reading and which can be extremely funny.

7 thoughts on “Doh! Canada”

  1. No, if you do a Google News search under the guy’s name, there are other stories.
    This confirms my theory, that a lot of immigration law was written by people who weren’t even really trying to be coherent….
    I would have guessed the issue would be that employment discrimination in one job doesn’t rise to the level of “persecution”, or that there’s another part of the country where it would be all right to be gay. Those seem like less embarrassing rationales than “not flaming enough.”
    Fun fact: the U.S. offers asylum for discrimination on the basis of H.I.V. status, but being H.I.V.+ is grounds for deportation! Whee!

  2. Hmmm….New, on CTV: “Really REALLY Queer Eye for the Kinda Butch Asylum Applicant”?

  4. Editorial about this in today’s Globe and Mail:

    Being gay in Mexico shouldn’t even approach that threshold if Canada’s refugee policies are to mean anything. Yes, as Mr. Rivera argued, there is a culture of machismo in his country. But Mexico also has an annual gay pride day parade, gay politicians and laws designed to protect homosexuals. It is not some hellhole in which gays are rounded up or imprisoned for their sexual orientation, or where they are officially branded second-class citizens.
    […]
    So the refugee board should have had no trouble in finding Mr. Rivera’s case wanting. Yet the IRB panel member proceeded to judge the case by the degree of effeminacy Mr. Rivera displayed. She said that if his gestures been noticeably flamboyant — in other words, had it been more difficult for him to disguise his gayness — he would have stood a greater chance of receiving refugee status.
    […]
    The calculation strikes us as about as useful as counting the angels dancing on the head of a pin. If “membership in a particular social group” (to cite the UN definition) were the trigger for persecution, it shouldn’t matter whether the gay applicant stood less chance or more of being found out, since the fear of persecution would remain great. Beyond that, where exactly does one drawn the line between someone effeminate enough to qualify as a refugee and someone who doesn’t score quite as high on the IRB’s chart of stereotypes? Assuming a genuine threat, should someone’s rescue from persecution rest on the finding of a limp wrist or a musical voice?

    A slightly different take than the WT, but still, somewhere, there’s an immigration official being slapped about the head. Metaphorically, of course.

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