SFU hosts talk by Barua

Housing refugees at home and abroad

By Colten Kamlade, Staff Reporter

According to SFU’s website, nearly one million Rohingyas from Myanmar have sought shelter in Chittagong, Bangladesh.

1. Mitra Barua will be giving a talk on housing refugees on September 27 at the SFU Vancouver Harbour Centre. Barua is the Annette and Hugh Gragg Postdoctoral Fellow in Transnational Asian Studies, Rice University’s Chao Center for Asian Studies.

According to SFU’s website, Barua’s presentation calls for international intervention to prevent the crisis from escalating.

“This presentation warns that the delay in resolving the present Rohingya crisis may trigger another refugee-generating crisis by victimizing the non- Bengali and Buddhist minority living in Chittagong. This observation, made after a month-long visit to Rohingya refugee hosting Chittagong, highlights the urgent need for international intervention so that the Rohingya refugees are repatriated in timely fashion to stop another humanitarian crisis in the region,” the website stated.

Barua’s talk comes at a time when the dialogue surrounding refugees has reached a feverish—and often hostile—peak. There have been many changes to US immigration in recent years. According to a CNN article, Trump’s policies have resulted in the lowest admission of refugees to the US since the 1980s.

“Those restrictions, along with enhanced security screenings enacted in January for refugees from 11 countries deemed high-risk by the administration, have led this year to a slowdown in refugee arrivals and contributed to the historic lull in admissions,” their website stated.

Some have celebrated this, others have decried Trump’s policies as xenophobic. Though much of the media has been focused on the US, Canada is similarly divided on the issue of refugees. According to a new poll by Global News Ipsos, many Canadians are concerned with refugees crossing the Canadian border.

“Sixty-two percent of respondents don’t think the Trudeau government has a ‘solid plan’ to respond to the influx of refugees. And 56 percent of respondents say the fact that Ottawa had to call in the army shows that the issue is ‘out of control,'” stated the website, referencing a poll concerning immigration concerns in Quebec, where an army camp was set up in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle to receive large numbers of asylum seekers coming over the border from the US.