Quote Originally Posted by Vahid View Post
For instance, while government announced emergency measures to facilitate the immigration of Haitians to Canada, many civil society organisations in Montréal (by the way, this has been very amply covered in the francophone media) are unimpressed by the government's "emergencu measures" since it doesn't subsume cousins, brothers, or sisters amongst the people that can be sponsored by Canadians of Haitian origin. The momentous question is, will the Canadian government make it easier for these people to more easily immigrate to Canada?
I think this is a rather difficult policy issue, and I'm not surprised that the government hasn't made a decision yet. Would this policy then apply to all places that suffer humanitarian disaster (or, for that matter, war) in the future? Would it result in trimming the number of non-Haitians that would be eligible to enter in an effort to maintain immigration targets? Etc.

I'm certainly not doubting that there is a great deal of political interest in policy-making.. as a political scientist, I could hardly believe otherwise. I am saying, however, that sometimes states, politicians, and bureaucrats do things for normative reasons too.