Blueberries, policy wonks and Mexican refugees

Yesterday I attended the tenth national Metropolis conference in Halifax. Metropolis is a network of scholars, bureaucrats and advocates who work in the field of immigration. It has chapters in over 20 countries, including one in Canada.


The conference is taking place in Halfax's World Trade and Convention Centre, where I attended an international summit in 2006 on microcredit.

Based on these two events, I have developed a major beef with high-profile conferences. Upon registration ($152.55 for one day - thankfully covered by Mount Allison), I received a one-shoulder backpack full of pamphlets, journals and brochures. While I appreciated the journals and the conference schedule, the rest of the package was mostly irrelevant. The backpack, which reminds me of the fleeting one-shoulder trend in middle school, will likely end up at the Salvation Army.

Right after I arrived, lunch was served. It was an impressive array of fruits (cantaloupe, blueberries, strawberries, honeydew melon, grapefruit), vegetables, sandwich makings and drinks. Dessert was strawberry shortcake.

Somehow I couldn't reconcile the mission of the conference with some of its amenities. I don't need another backpack, and I doubt the mostly middle-aged participants are going to wear the one-shoulder to their office jobs. The food could have been local, or organic; the coffee could have been fair trade. It is possible to adjust large events to run more sustainably - the Hillside Festival in Guelph is a great example. Even to attend the conference, people flew from across the country and even across the world. I was looking for a bit more innovation to make the conference practically sensitive to environmental and social issues.

Onto the sessions. The first session I attended, "Current Research, Dissemination and Mobilization on Refugee Issues," was a small round table featuring a policy analyst from Citizenship and Immigration Canada and the director of the York Centre for Refugee Studies. The main theme of the talk was the tension between civil society, academia and the government when it comes to protecting refugees. The CIC employee discussed the need for "evidence-based research," and the academics talked about the impossibility of gathering enough evidence from such a transient and vulnerable population.

The second session, "The Challenges of Becoming a Welcoming City," was a round table featuring members of the Windsor, Ontario community. The municipality has gone from receiving 16 refugee claimants in 2006 to the current average of 50 claimants a month. The first group of claimants came from Mexico, the second, from Haiti. I went because of a summer project I did on Mexican refugee claimants. (It turned out that the research supervisor of a student I know conducting a similiar project also attended the round table.)

In the evening I attended two documentaries about immigration issues in Canada. The first followed a 100-person march from Montreal to Ottawa in June, 2005. The second was about Francophone-African settlement in the West of Canada. Following the films, a discussion began with the film makers. It was a neat moment - the discussion was almost entirely in French (as were the films), and once again the bilingualism of Canada played out in front of me.

The conference was a nice academic boost, and at the same time, a bit humbling. The issues of homelessness, resource communities, the Alberta tar sands and migration all came up over the course of the session - and are all topics that I have studied this semester. After being at the same school for five years, I feel confident in my classes and able to speak up on most topics. At this conference, however, I felt a bit out of place; I still have a lot to learn about the academic and political context of migration, and tried to be quiet and listen for a while.

The biggest benefit of the conference, for me, was the clear distinction I saw between the four groups dealing with migration issues: the bureaucrats (or "policy wonks"), the academics, the social workers (NGOs) and the lawyers. I realized that I have been thinking about each of these four arenas without laying them out as distinct options. I still haven't figured out where I would be most comfortable and effective.

In terms of my future, I have an internship interview on Friday. I have also been accepted to present my summer research at a conference hosted by York in June. Exciting times.