Understanding African refugees' resettlement experiences in Canada through a critical anti-racist paradigm

This is a study of how African refugees understand and interpret their resettlement experiences in Canada. The research was designed to explore how African refugees perceive their lived/living experiences in Canada. The learning objective of the study was to bring the voices of refugees within the context of their histories and experiences to the center of academic discourse, social policy formulation and implementation. The study also explored how issues of social difference: race, gender, class, and ethnicity complicate the refugee migration experience. Furthermore, the study interrogated the social, political, and ethical dimensions of dealing with African refugee issues using a critical anti-racist discursive framework. In addition, neo-Marxist and feminist frameworks are utilized to explain the issues of social difference discrimination as they impose on African refugees' socio-cultural adjustment in Canada. A qualitative research method was adopted to explore resettlement issues facing African refugees. Thereby enabling all the participants to provide individual accounts of resettlement and adjustment challenges they experience in Canada through open-ended oral interview questions. Canadian immigration and refugee policy implementation and practice is interrogated, and tacit racism is analyzed within this context. Also, the Diaspora experience is conceptualized in relation to refugee flows, connections, and the complexities of resettling in Canada. Towards the conclusion of the study, the catalyst of gender inequity in refugee policy practice is articulated, in conjunction with the paradigm of voicing social difference discrimination as it affects refugees/immigrants in Canada. The research findings demonstrate how differential implementation of refugee and immigration policy exhibits racist attitudes that lead to exclusion of African refugees and their containment in Africa. Once refugee claims are repudiated, immigration officials are less inclined to grant landed immigrant status to African refugees, regardless of humanitarian and compassionate grounds refugees may present. The study shows how the Diaspora community, on an individual level, has helped African refugees to migrate from troubled homelands to safety in another country, and assisted with the process of their socio-cultural adjustment to Canadian society. This aspect of my research into how African refugees interpret their resettlement experience may perhaps represent a "scientific" discovery of my study, because it captures and empirically explicates how African refugees essentially migrate out of Africa to North America and Europe in particular. Furthermore, this study shows how gender inequities in refugee policy practice are carried out implicitly and yet appear equitable on the surface. In this context, the study exposes how bias across the lines of difference reinforces sexism and racism, and identifies race, geographical location, legacy of colonialism, socio-cultural tradition and religious affiliation as the root-causes for intolerance of African refugees. The research also reveals how highly educated Africans are marginalized in the Canadian labor market, and systemically coerced to accept menial jobs without the prospect of aspiring to a better career. Lastly, the study firmly exposes social injustice through the reality and illusion of refugee resettlement, and broadens the terrain of anti-racism framework in tackling issues that strive to sustain inequitable social order. The study suggests anti-racist paradigm for change and for future directions that will help unify the voices of the oppressed against their oppressors.

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