Great news from the world of medicine

Genetic link to autism

I wonder if this will have any impact on the people who believe vaccines caused their child's autism?

This is weird.

I've just come across a huge immigration dilemma.

Here's the story.

An Iranian couple came to Canada some ten years ago seeking political asylum - in other words, they were refugee claimants. While that claim was wending its way with glacial slowness through our court system, the couple had a child - a son, Kevin, now nine years old. The child is a Canadian citizen by dint of birthright citizenship.

In the fullness of time, the refugee claim was denied and the entire family was sent back to Iran. While there, the parents were tortured, in particular the husband. After a year or so, they managed to escape and were on a flight from Guyana direct to Canada.

That was a fateful flight in more than one sense. A passenger had a heart attack and died during the flight, so the plane landed unexpectedly in Costa Rica. Everyone got off the plane while they were dealing with the deceased passenger. The family was asked for their American visas. They didn't have any. They weren't expecting to come to America at all - they were on a direct flight to Canada.

The Americans didn't know what to do with them. For the past twenty days, the family has been in that detention centre in Texas that I linked to a few days ago.

That's right, folks. There's a nine-year-old Canadian citizen sitting in a prison cell in Texas for the horrible crime of leaving Iran with his parents and getting stopped on U.S. soil.

A link: An interview with the family

Now, I was all set to start writing letters, until I found out that they'd already applied for, and been denied, refugee status in Canada. You see, it's actually quite difficult to get deported from Canada. It doesn't happen all that often. The court process is extremely slow, and many judges would look at that nine-year-old son and let the family stay on compassionate grounds. That didn't happen in this case, and I would really like to know why. What is it about this family that caused them to be deported, and then tortured in Iran? We're missing some vital information, here.

But then there's the dilemma of their treatment in the States. Why the heck didn't the American officials simply put the family back on the plane and let us deal with them? There are shades of the Arar case all over this one, and that fiasco still hasn't been settled as far as the Americans are concerned. No matter what else is or isn't true of this family, the bottom line is that the Americans didn't need to ever be involved. All they had to do was make sure that anyone who got off that plane, got back on it a few hours later. That's it. End of story. Where in that scenario is there room for a maximum-security prison in Texas that has been grudgingly "converted" to a detention centre for immigrant families? And that's not even considering the human rights issues of the existence of that detention centre.

So I'm cautiously outraged. I want more information. I want to know if the Americans in Costa Rica may have contacted Canadian immigration while the flight was on the ground. I want to know if they've had any dealings with them in the intervening weeks. I want to know if there's any grounds for reopening their refugee claim (as perhaps there should be, if the story about the torture is true.)

Most of all, I want Peter Mackay (foreign affairs minister and deputy PM) to grow a spine and insist that people who are Canada's to deal with, actually end up in Canada to be dealt with. If I ever learn that our immigration people had a hand in keeping them in the States, I'll be outraged in truth.