Anuj Rastogi:	Hey, hey. Welcome to the Awoken Word podcast, this is your host, Anuj Rastogi. I am excited because today, I am sharing with you my first guest interview of the show. Our guest today is Raj Sharma, and this conversation is a very special one for me. It's special because Raj is one of the country's top refugee and immigration lawyers, and he's been doing some really incredible work for the past 14 years and changing people's lives in some really meaningful ways. It's also a particularly special episode for me because Raj is one of my oldest and dearest friends, he and I met way back in around '96 or '97 when we were both doing our undergrad.
Anuj Rastogi:	We've had a lot of great adventures together and a lot of amazing road trips and all sorts of memories and the two of us were one seriously kick ass debate team. He moved on to do a lot of amazing things in his career and he's put his talents to good use and I was lucky to have Raj over that night as he was actually in Toronto for a special panel interview with the CBC on its primetime show, the National. He was actually here as an expert to help demystify and talk a little bit more about this entire issue that's now arising in this country around border crossers and it's a big news story. It's definitely something important and topical but I think that there was a whole bunch of nuance that even I wasn't aware of and Raj really kind of shed some light on it for me.
Anuj Rastogi:	Anyhow, the theme I wanted to tackle in this conversation with Raj was really something that's universal and that is home. I thought it would be interesting to talk to Raj about this idea because in his world he's constantly in a high stakes emotional situation, helping people from all walks of life who were trying to flee or leave a home or trying to find a new home and home is something that we often take for granted and we think about it as a place to go and to feel comfortable and safe, but what if home is the place that you have to leave for no fault of your own, and in many cases very suddenly without even having a chance to say goodbye. What does that do to your relationship with this idea of home?
Anuj Rastogi:	This conversation was recorded on September 4th and isn't yet aware of some of the crazy things that have happened in the world since, the alleged killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi regime and this whole Brett Kavanaugh debacle that was the top of the news cycle for several weeks. On the day we recorded, Colin Kaepernick's Nike ad had just come out and we were here at home learning that the supreme court had just blocked the kinder Morgan pipeline. As for our conversational, I'll let you know in advance that Raj casually throws in a lot of Hindi, Punjabi and Sanskrit term, so you might just need to pull out that Sanskrit dictionary.
Anuj Rastogi:	He raises some very interesting and insightful points about how it's not just the fear of the other, but also the fear of a perceived loss of losing one's home that's been particularly important and misunderstood today. Throughout the conversation you'll hear the clinking of glasses, I had just made a couple of my signature old monk rum with thumbs up cola drinks and I had just made some bitters as well. And it was glorious if I can say so. Anyhow, I really enjoyed this conversation and without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, here you go, Raj Sharma.
Anuj Rastogi:	(Music)
Anuj Rastogi:	We're joined here today by a dear friend of mine, Raj Sharma. Raj, welcome.
Raj Sharma:	The honor is mine.
Anuj Rastogi:	Raj, tell us your story, everything that kind of led up to being here professionally. What's your background, where'd you grow up?
Raj Sharma:	Professionally, I'm a immigration lawyer, I have my practice, my firm is in Calgary, I'm in Toronto right now at my close and one of my oldest friends house, came here for an interview, media interview, so great opportunity for us to reconnect and as always, you helped me prepare for the interview, so that was great. Before that I was born in Hamilton, Ontario, came out to the West, grew up in BC, Ontario BC, went to school in Edmonton, that's where we met and then started practicing law. Prior to that I was a refugee protection officer in Calgary, so I've been in Calgary for the last 15 plus years.
Anuj Rastogi:	The theme I want to really hit on today with you is kind of ... it's on the beaten path but yet off and it's really around this idea of home. I just thought that it would be interesting to get your perspective on home, not just as an individual who has a home and goes home, but also as someone who on a day to day basis is dealing with people who are wrestling with this question of home.
Raj Sharma:	You asked me about this and I was like wondering what could I as a immigration and refugee lawyer talk about home. From my clients the concept is to leave home and perhaps to create a new home but for me is the concept of if it's a refugee then its loss. It's a deep seated loss so refugees are by definition they're leaving home not because they want to leave home not but because circumstances force them to leave home so that's a deep aching loss. It's a wound that festers, it's a wound that perhaps never really heals itself. Again, these are loaded terms when you say that the term home, what does that mean to me.
Raj Sharma:	Personally or professionally from a professional point of view, if we're talking about refugees that are perhaps torn away from home. On the other end of the spectrum I have, I represent individuals, perhaps children born in Canada that are at the end of the road and they are being forced to leave the only home they know which is Canada. Just last month I lost a hearing, I lost a state application. It was three very small children, two born in Canada that after eight years we're going back to Lebanon and they had never been to Lebanon before so they were being taken away from the only home that they know. For me, when you say home it's like if it's refugees then they're forced to leave home behind and this is a loss that end perhaps a regret that will follow them for the rest of their lives or it will be other clients that are losing their home in Canada and both are very, very tragic. My relationship with that term is a complex relationship.
Anuj Rastogi:	You keep using the word term and it's like sort of backup just to set the playing field here. I was looking up definitions of the word home and Wikipedia has this definition as a home being a domicile or a living space used, uh, as a permanent or semi permanent residence for an individual family, household or several families in a tribe. What does the word home mean to you as an individual, as Raj Sharma?
Raj Sharma:	Well, it's probably not the definition that fund and Wikipedia I guess. I think home is more of I think a state of mind. So home for me was, for example, our parents were working in the coal mine and our [Foreign language 00:08:20], my [Foreign language 00:08:22], my cousins thought they took care of us in a mobile home in Oxford and there was seven kids running around in a mobile home while this old lady took care of us, taught us Punjabi and made us [Foreign language 00:08:37] and that was, if I were to say like well that's not technically my home that was my cousin's home, but home to me, if that was my deep, deepest recesses of my soul will probably would be that place. But then there's, I think other homes.
Raj Sharma:	I think home is a state of mind for me and home is probably a state of mind for my clients so home is this ideal that they have left and, and they may gloss over. They've put that home on a pedestal and they may not ever remember the flaws, but it's that home and this ideal that they've left behind and there's this longing and then they're trying to create a home here. Or there's clients who this is the only home they know and then they are leaving this place for the unknown. I think that my definition of home would be a little bit different, I would say that it is very much subjective. It would be based on ... I believe that it's a state of mind. I believe that that concept is flexible and fluidic and to some that concept of home or that loss could define the rest of their lives and that would be even more tragic. But I think we're defined by our tragedies rather than our successes and victories.
Anuj Rastogi:	I don't know if you experienced this growing up. I mean we're both Indian ethnic background, second generation here but I've found, I hadn't been to a back to India, I was just about to say home, but I hadn't been back to India for about almost 22 or 23 years since childhood until, just after I got married. And what was really funny is that when I'm here and people asked me my background, I'll say I'm Indian, and when I was there I was telling people I was from Canada or I was Canadian.
Raj Sharma:	Well, you know, for me, India can never be home because I was kicked out of India, we talked about that just before we started recording, once you're kicked out of a place that can never be your home and can never be regarded as home. That'll probably be a story for another podcast but long story short, I had to somehow get deported from India over a sort of picayune, minor error in computation, perhaps my fault, disproportional response perhaps by the Indian authorities. But India can never be home for me because home can never be a place that you can be kicked out of.
Anuj Rastogi:	Does it matter who's doing the kicking out? Like if it's one faction, one element, someone in a government or?
Raj Sharma:	It's a betrayal. The concept of home is, requires the issue of trust and so once it's a betrayal of trust, there's the betrayal of that concept.
Anuj Rastogi:	What is the phrase feel at home mean to you? When we think about home, you often hear these phrases like feel at home or making this house a home or something so it's not just a structure, it's not a cave, it's not a building necessarily, although that may be an intrinsic part of it. I kind of want to get a better sense of that because you talk to people all the time who are wrestling with this.
Raj Sharma:	If you're talking about personally, you've caught me in a transition point in my life, it's gonna be tough for me to even comment about what home means to me. In terms of my clients I think home is a security, so why do people uproot themselves and strive off or seek out the unknown, which could be very, very dangerous. No one willingly, in my opinion, uproots themselves from everything that they know, their language, their family, just for a gamble. So that striving and that attempt ultimately ... and I don't know if necessarily they're looking for a home, I think what they're doing is they're looking for something greater than themselves or a concept and they perhaps can't even put that into words.
Raj Sharma:	For example, you and I went to 269 Pape Avenue today, my father left India in 1970 and after the death of his father and he had told his father that he was going to leave India and my father's from one of the most backward parts of the Punjab and this concept would have been ludicrous to most people. But after he received his masters degree and he was a lecturer and he was at Punjabi University in Costa College and Patella, he came to Canada. He qualified for immigration, but he ended up a series of misadventure as much like his son perhaps, a series of misadventures. A helpful Romanian taxi driver took him to the Gurdwara to 269 Pape Avenue.
Raj Sharma:	He was there for a couple of days and that was this sort of place of security and that's where he was able to view his surroundings and make the necessary decisions to start his life in Canada. Now I'm not sure if my father came to Canada looking to make a home here. I think he came here with perhaps other objectives, perhaps to make money perhaps to make his mark in the world perhaps. And I think over time and eventually he realized and certainly you know, he came here when he was 27 or 28 years old, he was in Canada far longer than he was in India, and eventually at one point and not in the not too distant past, he went to India and realized that India was not his country, it was not his home anymore.
Raj Sharma:	So home sometimes in is an accretion i.e it's a patina, it develops over time. I don't think there's this sudden realization that this is home. Perhaps there's love at first sight. I'm not sure if there's home at first sight.
Anuj Rastogi:	That's an interesting concept. Even with my own parents, I know at this point they've spent far more time outside of India than they've spent in Europe. I mean they left actually when they were very young both of them sort of independently before they knew each other had moved to Europe and they were in Europe almost 10 years each before getting married and coming to Canada. What's interesting is that home, especially for people who've come from in any sort of a diasporic experience is this idyllic romanticized place that you left and you may have left for any number of reasons. It could have been war had befallen the country.
Raj Sharma:	It's the pedestal, it's your first love. The flaws are glossed over, the flaws are diminished.
Anuj Rastogi:	Well, it's also, I think maybe at the time that you may have left, like they left when they were fairly young and maybe they still had a very romantic notion of what it was like and that the struggle outside that maybe it was supposed to be the promised land was actually that much more difficult than they expected. But in the same way that you're mentioning about your father, like my own mother, it's the same thing, like when she thinks of India and she thinks of home from that context, she remembers what it was like when the population of the country was 400 million when it wasn't necessarily the state that it was today.
Raj Sharma:	India had a certain degree of promise in the 1970s.
Anuj Rastogi:	It's gone through ... as many places do, it's gone through all sorts of changes.
Raj Sharma:	Pre-emergency.
Anuj Rastogi:	Yeah.
Raj Sharma:	Pre-1984, pre many, many different challenges.
Anuj Rastogi:	I know we're in post globalization with call center and IT culture and all of these other things that have just kind of changed and yet when she thinks about it, her thing is, this is not the home that I knew.
Raj Sharma:	She's not the person she was, she just doesn't realize it. She's not the 18 year old girl that loved that home where her father and her brother has treated her undoubtedly like a princess. So she is not the same person that she was, that home is not the home that it was, she just doesn't realize that the frames of reference have changed irrevocably.
Anuj Rastogi:	Well, I think we all do that in some way, shape or form will equal romanticize certain parts of our life or memory and whatnot. We may sort of look at it through rose colored glasses and in a different way than ... like if you were to actually go back into some of those times that you're meant to size, it might not actually be so great, but it's easy to kind of remove the bad from your memory because it feels either convenience or creates a certain sort of-
Raj Sharma:	Psychologically we have a tendency to forget a pain.
Anuj Rastogi:	I'm fascinated I think particularly in the current climate today.
Raj Sharma:	By the way, if the listeners are hearing any sort of tinkle of sort of glass or ice cubes, my friend has made me old monk rum with thumbs up with some bitters in it again, reminding us of home. Last time I had this was in Goa.
Anuj Rastogi:	Cheers to that. Absolutely this kind of reminds me of a home I never lived in.
Raj Sharma:	That's right. I think that concept is interesting as well. You can be reminded of a home that you've never lived in either because you can create certain touchstones. For example, I mean I imported in 1971 Hindustan Ambassador from India and I drive this around now obviously ... This has nothing to do with me, this car has very little to do with me, but it does remind me of home and I was thinking about it. I was like, you know, I remember working on this old Volvo that my dad had when I was a kid and it had these round lights and headlights and it actually kind of looks like the Ambassador. Am I trying to recreate in memory of me and my father working on a sort of relatively primitive car that looks like the Ambassador?
Raj Sharma:	I remember going to India and my dad would get an Ambassador, he'd probably just buy one and then we'd drive it around and again, that was very, very young. Perhaps again I'm trying to recreate home by in this case importing a 1971 Hindustan Ambassador.
Anuj Rastogi:	For our listeners who don't know, the Ambassador I believe was the first fully made in India automobile on any mass scale.
Raj Sharma:	Right, in reality it's an Oxford series two and so Bella Motors basically just bought the factory from England and just moved it over and started producing these cars, beautiful cars, but in 50 years they never changed the design and obviously suffered when the market opened up to other cars and other manufacturers. It was odd sort of fixation and odd that I did it and perhaps I did the Ambassador some sort of homage to either these long gone or long or half remembered memories from India and so again, evocative of home, let's say.
Anuj Rastogi:	I've been kind of fascinated with this idea of kind of talking about home largely because this has become even more newsworthy of recent with all of the different crises that we have somehow created for ourselves.
Raj Sharma:	You understand of course we are living in almost unprecedented times, there's millions of individuals that are displaced from their homes right now. We have millions displaced from Syria, we have now millions displaced from Venezuela so we are living in these sort of unprecedented times where unwillingly individuals are leaving behind their homes and their ties and their families and it is ... We are living perhaps in the age of heartbreak that we have not encountered perhaps in decades.
Anuj Rastogi:	It was interesting, particularly as it comes to all of these different refugee crises and what ends up manifesting itself in the far right populist movements, Brexit, the rise of the far right in the US and this country.
Raj Sharma:	Isn't Brexit a reaction against ... isn't Brexit? This is in my country anymore? Isn't Brexit or reaction of I want my home to be what it was or my father's home to be what it was? I mean, isn't Brexit a sort of knee jerk reaction against the tides of globalization, the tides of free movement?
Anuj Rastogi:	Right, but what's what's really interesting about that there's accounts of people who are second, third generation immigrants in the UK for example, it might be south Asian descent or any other ethnicity there-
Raj Sharma:	And they voted for Brexit.
Anuj Rastogi:	Who voted for Brexit and are also complaining that the Romanians and the Romans and the Gypsies are coming in and taking our jobs and whatnot. So that same sort of sentiment that you would have expected from otherwise sort of nativist background is coming even from people who are second and third generation who benefited from it.
Raj Sharma:	At that point like, okay, we expect individuals to integrate, we expect this is our country now, so why wouldn't I react the same way for example as or why wouldn't my son react-
Anuj Rastogi:	Fair point.
Raj Sharma:	If they are Britishers or if they are from the UK and they feel that their concept of home is being disrupted or it's not the same, that sentiment should be respected. Again I was on ... there's a media interview today as well and so I want to be respectful of these feelings and these concepts and so we had this, UNHCR its like what's the big deal? This is nothing compared to Bangladesh, the inflow for Canada, but well, Canada is not living next to Burma. Canada's living next to the US and it's bordered by two oceans and the Arctic to the north so this concept of ... and when we strike at that a person's conception of home and when you seek to perhaps the perception is a radical change, it strikes a chord and that is that native a sentiment.
Raj Sharma:	Even in immigration as an immigration lawyer we have to be cautious here because you could strike that chord and it could lead to nativist sentiment which could then also change that concept of home which for me is Canada's this welcoming, inclusive environment. So we're living in an age that's there's dangers all around us and it's, it's difficult. We're casting pebbles into a lake and there's going to be ripples and there's gonna be consequences both foreseen and unforeseen.
Anuj Rastogi:	I want to come back to this notion of Canada being welcoming and kind and generous and all that in just a moment, but maybe just to kind of set that.
Raj Sharma:	Canada is not Disneyland for immigrants or refugees, but despite the warm feelings, the Tim Horton's commercials and everything to contrary.
Anuj Rastogi:	Let's just back up for a second because what are some table stakes knowledge that anyone would need to have about the immigration and refugee system in Canada and what are some in your eyes common misconceptions about how immigration and the system works here? And even in contrast to the US, because I know you were telling me some interesting things about the US immigration policies and system versus Canada and how different they are.
Raj Sharma:	This concept of Canada being a Disneyland for immigrants and refugees, the reality is that Canada has a meritocratic immigration system, very cold and calculating, and they select and we select, I should say, we select our immigrants based on the subjective criteria. My father passed this objective criteria in 1970 and included language, he still remembers the one word he got wrong. He still remembers the one word that he didn't know the definition of which was Sudan, so we have this meritocratic system which is cold and calculating, and now it's this express entry system. So basically it's shaadi.com. So shaadi.com is you create your profile and your profile is going to be ranked with everyone else in that pool and then Canada picks the top. So just remember, I don't know if you-
Anuj Rastogi:	It's basically tinder for like letting in.
Raj Sharma:	Do you remember those Mahabarat and Ramayan series?
Anuj Rastogi:	Yeah.
Raj Sharma:	Do you remember like the [Foreign language 00:25:16], there'll be a [Foreign language 00:25:17] and there'll be a Raj Kamari and the Raj Kamari would have the [Foreign language 00:25:22] and then all these princes would come in and she'd go and she'd pick one of the Raj Kamari, the [Foreign language 00:25:28] and she'd pick one and she'd put the [Foreign language 00:25:31] on him and that's it. And that's what express entry is. It's a [Foreign language 00:25:36] All these butter are in this pool and we're going to assess them against everyone else and it is cold blooded, very, very calculated, obviously it's point based and all these countries want to follow our model. The US wants it, the UK wants it, they want that cold calculating model and so friendly Canada and everyone's like, oh, they're so welcoming. Well that's 60% of our immigrants. There is this economic class where we gauge people based on their objective criteria, jobs, et cetera, et cetera, 40% is family class.
Raj Sharma:	My brother can sponsor me, a 41 year old from Canada, to the US under the family class, I can't sponsor him to Canada because our Family class is much more constraint. In terms of, again, refugee, again, we're talking about very limited numbers that Canada takes on. So we've got this sort of outsized, perhaps reputation but in reality we really, uh, look to our own interests when we select immigrants. By doing that, what that has done is that it allows the native population to be very accepting of refugees, of immigrants, sorry. It allows them to be accepting of immigrants because they're like, oh, well, we're selecting our own immigrants.
Raj Sharma:	We were then thus smug in terms of the US because the country to ourself is the US and the country to the US's south is Mexico. They've had to deal with millions of illegal immigrants or unqualified immigrants and so there's been frustrations and pent up issues that we've never had to deal with because we've been accepting of Mr. Rastogi, a skilled guy who's created businesses and employment and Mr. Rahm Krishan Sharma, who's done the same. So yes, it's very easy to accept iMmigrants like that and so we've been sort of smug and condescending towards our US neighbors but our experience with immigration has been very, very different.
Anuj Rastogi:	It's interesting because knowing that the US immigration policies are at least in some dimensions more, more generous, maybe even a little bit more, dare I say even humane in some senses than maybe what we have here and yet Canada gets off as being sort of this friendly, cuddly, loving, open, generous country for whatever reason we've kind of created this reputation. But having kind of traveled through the US in a lot of different parts, there's this one particular experience I had in of all places in Topeka, Kansas. I was going there for some work, I flew into Kansas city, drove 70 miles to Topeka and where we entered Topeka was actually, I forget what part of the city, but we had to pass through the Mexican ghetto and this Mexican ghetto was literally a whole bunch of farm fields and then some of really rundown strip malls, not even strip malls. Like they were barely held together by barn board.
Anuj Rastogi:	This is where a lot of the migrant workers were working the farm lands, a lot of the people who are nannies for the upper and you know, wealthy class in, Topeka where they would live, this is where you'd get the best Mexican food and whatnot, but whenever I woUld talk to people there, these people were not seen as sort of a scourge on society. There were sort of essential to keeping a strata of that american society functioning because without access to that type of labor, that was sort of off the record and cheap for them and whatnot. They couldn't have the lifestyle that they wanted. I've met other people who lived in parts of Texas where they'd be gardening, new to the city gardening, you know, coming in from another country in our neighborhood would be like, why are you doing that work, you can just go down the street, go to the nearest gas station. You'll find a bunch of Mexicans. Find the one that has a truck, pay them 100 bucks and they'll come and take care of all of this for you?
Anuj Rastogi:	So there's an entire strata in parts of America that's benefiting from that and I don't want to call it a symbiotic relationship. Obviously these people that are there are somewhat desperate too, but we don't have some of those dynamics quite in the same way. I know there are migrant, and I hate using that word, but there's sort of people that come up from the west indies in Jamaica and they're in the wine region in Niagara and they picked grapes every year and yet they don't get citizenship. We do have some of those types of scenarios in Canada, but it's not quite to the same extent. I find it interesting though that we pretend to be on a high horse in Canada, which maybe isn't very deserved. We're just maybe lucky that we've got that reputation.
Raj Sharma:	The chickens may be coming home to roost. I think one of the reasons why there's life on earth, one of the reasons why there's life on earth is because of the existence of Jupiter. Jupiter has this massive gravitational pull and there's in fact this asteroid belt around that area as well, so all these extra solar system bodies that would then come into our solar system and would pummel the inner planets including the earth, don't do so because they're caught up in Jupiter's gravity wall and thus life flourished on earth. The US was Jupiter, the US had this gravitational pull and so it drew in all legal and illegal migrants and we were able to perhaps flourish and pick off some of those sort of desirable immigrants and develop our own policies in that regard. So we've been smug because of that.
Raj Sharma:	And now of course with Donald J Trump's administration, that gravitational pull is either weakening or repulsing so we now will deal with these challenges and these pressures that the US has had to deal with for many decades. It is going to be an interesting time in terms of immigration and again, you know, I feel for them as well, like if you look at those migrant flows, so you've got to Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, we're talking about some of the most dangerous countries in the world. We've got Caracas, those central american, south american countries, higher homicide rates than war torn countries, what are you going to do? You've got two kids, I've got two kids, what are you going to do?
Raj Sharma:	You're between a rock and a hard place, you would do the same thing that these individuals are doing and in fact these individuals that are being apprehended, these families that are being apprehended at the US border, honestly I would tell them to cross that border and keep heading north. When home and no one leaves home and if home becomes, for example, the multiverse shark, then you kind of have to leave home no matter how much you love it. Home can be a love hate relationship so you could leave home and still always be tied to it. It's just one of those things. It's like having a mother or father that there is some negative feelings there, but you can't exactly abandon it either. These are ties that endure, home is like that.
Anuj Rastogi:	People could be leaving a place for any number of reasons. There could be an outbreak of civil war, there could be some natural disaster, there could be economic factors and whatnot. But when one nation or one group has had a significant enough direct or indirect impact on another nation that causes a level of unrest or instability and whatnot, that forces people to make this tough choice to leave, do you think that the onus of responsibility changes? Like are parts of Europe even in this post colonial era that had been responsible for cutting up certain countries in Africa or destabilizing parts of the middle east with certain policies or US meddling in south America, in your eyes, is there a greater responsibility on the part of those countries to kind of deal with the aftermath and be more generous towards the people that are coming to them?
Raj Sharma:	Yeah. Whether you want to quote Rudyard Kipling, white man's burden or whether you want to talk about the revenge of the empire, absolutely. When we talk about, for example, let's talk about New Mexico, Texas and California, these were parts of Mexico until not too long ago. So you have a situation where people have not crossed borders, but borders have crossed people.
Anuj Rastogi:	Wow, okay. That is ...
Raj Sharma:	You talk about Malcolm X, like we didn't land on Plymouth rock, Plymouth rock landed on us. Absolutely there's a responsibility, absolutely. And you talk about individuals that the slave trade, you're talking about 400 years of the slave trade, you're talking about uprooting and destroying culture, is there an obligation? Absolutely. You're talking about Mexico and taking over territory that we're part of Mexico and now you're blaming like, ..., oh this is America, you have to speak english. We're like, well what America you're talking about? Which borders are you talking about? Because those borders moved and the borders moved more, I think, than the people moved. Again, we were talking about this for the last little bit about nuance and we're talking about, well how do you instruct nuance to individuals don't know history?
Anuj Rastogi:	Are you familiar with this story of the ship of Theseus? It only got introduced to me through this incredible Indian film by the same name, but the concept is that if you over time replace every single part of a ship, is it still the same ship? I guess in that sense that like when you think about any country and every generation, the old guard is dying and a new guard is emerging and it is not, is not the same place. It is always moving, it's always dynamic, it's transient in a sense, right?
Raj Sharma:	Well, look, I mean I haven't read this book or this reference, but every cell that we have in our body has a finite existence and they're dying. I mean every cell and every part of our body is basically replaced, let's say every couple of years. I'm still the same Raj, you're still Anuj, these things are the bones are the same, the genetics are the same. I think a country is more than just the stock of its people or the particular stock of its people.
Anuj Rastogi:	In Canada, and I imagine this has been married to some extent in other countries too. I mean you've seen some of this happened in the UK with Brexit, you've definitely seen the rise of these types of sentiments in, in, in the US, but here in Canada, while people have misconceptions about how there may be some mythical queue which we know doesn't exist for refugees for example, or the immigrants are coming in and taking the jobs of people that live here otherwise. Or why are we spending money to bring in refugees from other countries when we should be taking care of the people that are here at home or the aboriginal communities some of which are dealing with no clean water or no electricity in parts of the winters and whatnot? As someone in a position of power within the government, you have all of these priorities and many of them are competing and you have a finite number of resources, how do we as a society sort of tackle this? How do we go about figuring out what the right thing is to do, when?
Raj Sharma:	We were talking about earlier about freewill, I think some decisions are, are amenable to variability or, or variants and I think some decisions aren't. I think it was almost laughable when the immigration minister and they started talking about, oh, what should the immigration levels be for Canada for the next few years? And I'm like with Donald Trump in the white house and with hundreds of thousands of individuals with precarious immigration status in the US, we shouldn't be talking about immigration levels or what levels we should set because I think we are going to be playing defensive on that front. Certain decisions are up to us and certain decisions are out of our hands so I think wisdom is realizing which decisions are ours to make and which decisions are going to be foisted upon us. And so we have to meet each challenge as it comes.
Anuj Rastogi:	When you kind of play out the stats of changes that have happened in policy, in the US and the impact that that's having, you know, coupled with the fact that we've been largely kind of isolated by oceans on, on three sides of us, and the Jupiter that's south of us, but now there may well be a wave of people who are looking for asylum. They're fleeing whatever circumstances, they no longer have maybe the promising option of, of the US and Canada is a possible option and we may have volumes that we've never really faced before. And it's easy to say we're great and we're welcoming and Canada is open to you when you're talking to a few dozen people. But now when that's like a few hundred thousand or-
Raj Sharma:	We were navigating the traffic of Toronto today, now add tens of thousands of more and you're going to see native resentment. But you know, there's 250,000 Salvadorans in the US right now, over a third of them have a mortgage, they've been there for over a decade. That is home to them. If Donald J. Trump, of course he's canceled the TPS, September 2019 is D-Day, what is going to happen? These individuals, are they going to go back to El Salvador? I mean a lot of their kids have been born in the US, they have been in the US for perhaps 15 plus years. Are they going to go back to one of the most dangerous countries in the world? I don't know. Are they going to make a refugee claim in Canada even though they may not strictly fit the definition of refugee? I don't know.
Raj Sharma:	I said earlier today that we may have to explore the option of an amnesty and I think that a lot of people are going to literally freak out at that term but I don't see how else we can handle, if you're talking about hundreds of thousands of refugee claimants anda refugee determination system can handle 20,000 a year and we already have a backlog of 55,000. We are looking at an intractable problem like, look, I'm not, I've said this many times, I'm a Pandit, I'm not a [Foreign language 00:40:51], I don't have a crystal ball, but there is this [Foreign language 00:40:55], there is a powder keg in the US and I, unlike other people, do not pretend to be able to predict what Donald Trump will do.
Raj Sharma:	He will perhaps determine that concept of home and what home is for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. I mean there's 800,000 plus DACA and their parents, we may well see something that is unprecedented in terms of the US. We may well see some action that may well shocked the conscience, I don't know. I hope not, I hope not. I hope that we can walk back from this precipice.
Anuj Rastogi:	We were talking about this earlier, when you think about any individual an individual situation, it's identifiable, it's human and it seems tragic, but the moment you talk about it in the thousands or the millions it's a statistic. And so like coming back down from 30,000 feet, things that you've seen, what are some memorable situations that you've come across with people you've talked to with clients who are not only ... what are their reasons for leaving or coming? What is it that brings people here from people that you've actually met and spend time with?
Raj Sharma:	Well, I think anyone that truly flees an egregious situation, something that violates basic human rights. I see it and sometimes clients are very guarded and we do the refugee claim and then once they realize that they've succeeded and then they break down and individuals that I never thought would cry start crying in front of you. I did a Palestinian refugee not too long ago, very, very high up in the administration there, he was a whistleblower and that act endangered him and the lives his family and that reaction is sudden. It's incredibly credible because it's so spontaneous. And so when you see that, then you realize, okay, well they have burned all their bridges. They've crossed, they've crossed the Rubicon, they've burned the bridges and Canada's accepted them and that is a seminal moment in their lives.
Raj Sharma:	To be part of that is of course very, very gratifying and so I'm very grateful that I can engage in this meaningful act that there is some nobility in assisting them through and navigating this perilous journey. Those examples are what really sort of motivate me in terms of stopping someone's depredation, particularly a child, a child that didn't make the decision to come to Canada, or was born in Canada and certainly didn't make the decision that their parents didn't have, or parents had precarious status and might be going back to a country that they've never seen. And of course my son, my children are about the same age as some of the children that I'm assisting so many, many times I think really of those kids when I'm ... so stopping those cases or that deportation and it's not really a deportation, they're Canadian, no one can force them to leave, but obviously they're going to be accompanying their parents.
Raj Sharma:	Those are the sort of cases that really sort of motivate you, get you up in the morning, get you reading those ... cracking those books, still reading after so many years of doing this stuff and it's to preserve that home, in particular for children.
Anuj Rastogi:	The term expat gets thrown around a lot, in your mind is there any difference between that and immigrants?
Raj Sharma:	Yes, expat is the term used for white people and immigrant is the term used for everyone else.
Anuj Rastogi:	Okay. It's kind of funny how that works.
Raj Sharma:	Or should I say expat in the past it was used for white people and then now perhaps expat could be the term used for anyone from perhaps a G7 or G8 country. If I were to work in China perhaps I'd be an expat for example, but I think the ex pat term is a term ... in my mind that I always laugh because if it's a brown guy or a woman or a melanin, increased melanin or enhanced melanin levels, then you're an immigrant and if you're a white guy working in Singapore, you're an expat.
Anuj Rastogi:	When you hear terms like immigrants or illegal alien, which is not used so much any more-
Raj Sharma:	I don't use ... I mean that's a term in the US. I don't refer to human beings as aliens.
Anuj Rastogi:	When you hear these terms, what does it evoke in you? Like, what do you think that there-
Raj Sharma:	It's an offensive term because you're dehumanizing someone and you're dehumanizing someone in the most blatant way possible, you're calling them an alien.
Anuj Rastogi:	I kind of feel personally the same way about migrants because it doesn't-
Raj Sharma:	A migrant on the term itself is not offensive in the sense of a migrant or individual in transit, let's say but you're right, the people that use that term tend to frame it in their own way. So if you were, I were to say it, it would mean exactly what it means.
Anuj Rastogi:	It's funny because-
Raj Sharma:	I was very clear I don't refer to, for example, like if there were say illegal border crosser or illegal or irregular border, I'm like, nope, I'm not going to use either of those terms. I refer to them as border crossers.
Anuj Rastogi:	Well, right and this phrase keeps coming up this, this whole death of nuance, but the idea that you can cross a border and file refugee claim-
Raj Sharma:	Legally.
Anuj Rastogi:	In a port of entry or like once you've actually landed, like there's actually a due process for that. You're not technically illegal.
Raj Sharma:	Section 133 of the immigration refugee protection Act, absolutely.
Anuj Rastogi:	But it's easy to take image of someone coming into a border as a potential threat, in all likelihood will probably have some elevated levels of melanin, and then to say that these people are jumping the queue, they are here illegally and to kind of stoke sentiment that you've started to see the sort of the resurgence of populism in western Europe and the US and even to a degree right here where we, you know, we believe this is the greatest place ever but yet those sentiments still exist here and there being stoked. How do we get to a place where people actually take the time to consider any issue whether it's immigration or any other issue in just kind of consider it a little bit more carefully and not just go off of a tweet as news?
Raj Sharma:	I'm really pessimistic on that. I think that we are in the post nuance age. I really am not ... I don't have a lot of optimism in this regard. I think that individuals make decisions based on emotion and I think that immigration is one of those concepts and particularly this quote unquote illegal or queue jumping or border crossing, it's one of those things that cannot be constrained. Again, if anyone thinks Brexit is about bureaucrats in Brussels deciding regulations regarding vegetables and the flame retardant materials inside flags instead of quote unquote hordes of brown people flowing into the US, then I've got a bridge to sell them or perhaps a wall to sell them.
Anuj Rastogi:	It's hard to-
Raj Sharma:	You understand, like they evoked the loss of home in Brexit. Brexit was about loss, Brexit was about loss and so that, that concept of it's home, it's mother, these are chords that strike deep into our souls so Brexit was about that. I think Trump, I don't tell me his muslim ban, which he paraded in his run up to the election. I mean, of course, that played a role, I think that fear of loss and the fear of the loss of home is a very motivating factor and it was more of a motivating factor for Trump and his base than it was like optimism for example, for Hillary Clinton. Like yes, she cannot ... I can't even remember what the hell her slogans were, but Trump certainly evoked home again, Trump evoked Reagan again. He used the same line as Reagan, make America great again, he's evoking this concept of nostalgia as if the '50s were anything great except for guys like Trump.
Anuj Rastogi:	Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing, like you can stoke, you can sort of ... We got to do something about that old market, definitely needs to be replenished. But you can stoke those sentiments I think quite easily, It's interesting that we're seeing this resurgence now and I'm sometimes surprised and yet not that this wave is kinda hitting us. Whether it's someone like Doug Ford getting elected premier in this province or the rise of even like Canadian born like right wing extremist white supremacists groups or the sort of anti immigration, the wave of just Twitter noise that I saw around when that guy drove down young street and mowed down all those people. Every time something like that happens, the first reaction that people have is that, oh, it's sympathetic, Justin Trudeau's letting in all of these immigrants and these muslim and middle eastern immigrants in particular and whatnot, and it just turns into this hysteria and this is right here.
Raj Sharma:	I talked to my parents a couple of weeks ago, even my parents expressed concern about these border crossers. These are, again, when we pick immigrants we're accepting of them because there's a concept of agency and choice. When individuals sort of pick us and voice themselves on us it does affect individuals in certain way. It does affect that and I don't want to sort of just blow it off and you know the panelist today was again a french national, he's a little bit more laissez faire about these feelings, I don't want to blow those feelings off. They're legitimate, these sentiments are legitimate. I can argue with facts and numbers and statistics, but it won't change their feelings.
Raj Sharma:	I am cognizant of those feelings and I want to respect those feelings as well and becaUSe my own parents have raised it because the imagery of the border crossers is affecting this deep seated Canadian concept of the queue i.e there's an orderly process to enter Canada and they are somehow skipping the line. Now again, hard to convince anyone otherwise who believes in that and I may not even have fully convinced my own parents, so this may well be a losing battle in terms of anyone that is arguing on the side of like, how do we know we have to give them a fair shake, we have to give them their hearing?
Anuj Rastogi:	I think that if you look at the phenomenon that is Trump, I believe a significant part of the reason that it was as much of a surprise to the establishment-
Raj Sharma:	It may have been a complete surprise to him. He looked shell shocked.
Anuj Rastogi:	I think he was shocked [crosstalk 00:53:29].
Raj Sharma:	I think his wife was also shellshocked, yeah.
Anuj Rastogi:	But if you were a Trump supporter, I can only imagine in many parts of the US, and it's not maybe that you weren't necessarily a Trump supporter, but nothing else in the options really spoke to you. The moment you said that you're planning to vote for Trump, and it might not be because you're voting for Trump is because you're voting republican or whatever reason-
Raj Sharma:	Or you're voting against Hillary Clinton.
Anuj Rastogi:	Or you're voting against Hillary Clinton, Immediately I can just see the swarms of people saying you're a racist, you're a bigot, you're an asshole, you're all of these things, and the moment you just sort of come down on somebody without actually opening up a dialogue and understanding what's sort of the Underlying root cause of you feeling this way, what makes you feel that this is a better option or that that's a terrible option. If you shut that conversation down before that happens [crosstalk 00:54:16].
Raj Sharma:	I don't want to shut that becauSe you know, again, my panelists who are kind of like had this sort of shrugging their shoulders attitude. I mean these claims will cost us money, it's going to be about 50,000 per claim and do the math, you got 50,000, you've got about 30,000 in the last 18 months That's quite a bit and I don't want a sea change in Canadian attitudes towards immigration so I am concerned on that front.
Anuj Rastogi:	At some point to the uninformed, it's so easy to conflate refugees, immigrants through the standard processes and people who might be second or third generation from other parts of the ... to the uninformed, to the uninitiated, it would almost seem like you can just kind of roll everybody up into a group, right?
Raj Sharma:	One thing that I found concerning is that, again, this UNHCR representative is talking, well, you know the numbers that Canada took in as nothing next to Bangladesh. Why are we comparing ourselves to Bangladesh? We're not next to Burma, why are we comparing ourselves to Lebanon? We are not contiguous or close to Syria, for example. We're Canada, we're bordered by two oceans and the Arctic and the US to the south. For us, for Canadians, this is a very, very significant issue because we've never seen these numbers before, for example, and so I don't know. I think downplaying this issue and dismissing the concerns of average Canadians, Joe six pack, the mythical Joe six pack I think is a recipe for disaster.
Raj Sharma:	Everyone has a notion of home, which you raised and now I realize, you know, at first I was questioning whether can I talk about this concept that you want me to talk about because my business is about everything after you leave home, but I believe like for example, this issue is about preserving home and so you dismiss these feelings of my home is being affected, or my home will not be the home that I remember or there's going to be this sort of irrevocable change, irremedial change, dismiss that at your cost. Justin Trudeau has been very, very lucky in terms of his lackluster opposition and the [Foreign language 00:56:50] in terms of the NDP but I don't know. If anyone else were to bring this issue up ... I mean, you know, like you remember star trek where they go into that parallel universe and Spock is evil, but he's got the goatee and correct, if I was evil-
Anuj Rastogi:	Why do you always ... you have to have a goatee when you're the evil version of yourself, why?
Raj Sharma:	You've got to, even like in India the rapist always had like the mustache or whatever. Right. If I was evil Spock, this issue could be easily parlayed into electoral victory and defeat for the liberals for sure but let's see what happens, the jury's out. I don't know, I don't know. I believe that this immigration and border crossers, this issue will be for the first time a significant issue in a Canadian electorate.
Anuj Rastogi:	I was hearing you sort of chatter about this and then I asked you this question earlier and I was actually like, just again pleading ignorance, I didn't know better, but I was asking you if we've had any significant numbers of Rohingya muslim claims from people who have fled Burma or are currently refugees in Bangladesh but fleeing just an imaginable levels of persecution and horrors and whatnot and you told me something about just the logistics of even filing a claim and ending up here in the first place. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Raj Sharma:	In terms of our concept of what a quote unquote real refugee is, those individuals never get to Canada because to get to Canada you need to get at a minimum of visitor visa, a student visa or some kind of visa to get here. Now no Canadian officer is going to give a visitor visa to someone that won't return, someone that's in dire straits, someone that doesn't have enough funds for their trip. So Canada won't give them a vista visit to begin with and again, this is another example of how we're actually more stingy than the US. The US might actually give them visitor visas, but Canada wouldn't.
Anuj Rastogi:	Is it a case by case basis or are there certain countries that Canada does not give visitor visas to?
Raj Sharma:	Interestingly enough, I mean like the globe and mail ran an article they had over 70, 75% rejection rate from certain countries. A lot of those countries where the exact same countries that are on the US muslim ban, so it's almost as if we have a muslim ban except we just don't call it a muslim ban, we just reject every visitor visa application that comes from Somalia or Sudan or Yemen. It's a muslim ban, but hey, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and a muslim ban by any other name would still be racist.
Anuj Rastogi:	It's obviously something that's close to home like no pun intended for all of us and I think that it's just something that we have to have useful, intelligent, nuanced discussions about. I think it's a shame when I see people ... in some ways technology has sort of empowered us to connect with people in, in two degrees we've never would've been able to, but like when it turns into 140 character shouting matches at each other without actually really kind of listening ... you're right, if Joe six pack says like fuck man, I don't want any immigrants here or whatever. Like, I mean you can say, look, you're, you're racist or bigoted and whatnot, or you could say, tell me more about why you feel that way, what is it in your experience is kind of led to that?
Raj Sharma:	But remember, he's not actually saying that, he's actually raising a nuanced question. Because if he simply said, I don't want any more immigrants then the conversation's over, but what I'm hearing is wait, what exactly is happening and what's changed from before and why is this unprecedented sort of surge. These are all legitimate questions and we have to engage in that, this is not knee jerk anti immigrant rhetoric that I'm hearing. This is legitimate sort of concerns like, okay, well how, what's changed now?
Anuj Rastogi:	He might not be seeing like I don't want any immigrants, period. He might not be saying it in so many words, but like if you were to deconstruct and understand maybe on a day to day basis he has a Somali doctor and he has ... like the peRson who as accountants from another background and moved here 10 years ago or whatever, and you saw maybe his day to day life and it's already filled with this sort of mix of people to begin with. But if you never actually kind of hurt him out and you just kind of took them at face value at the thing that he just said once and you never really kind of deconstructed, you would never have this nuanced discussion. Understand what's actually bugging them. If you can't get to the root cause of something, you can't address that and I think that's what we do today.
Raj Sharma:	The perniciousness of this and in the US and in Brexit, is that this concept of the border crossers where these migrants is striking at the heart of identity. Whenever you have something that threatens identity, it is going to be something that there's no logic that will then overcome that, this is why we have to tread cautiously and this is why I hope our politicians tread cautiously, again, these loaded terms, every time I hear these loaded terms, I'm going to push back and I'm going to say like, look, I don't agree with these terms, I don't agree with this premise and these terms and this loader premises actually do harm than they do good.
Anuj Rastogi:	But when you say tread cautiously, you're not also saying that like we have to, there's certain conversations that we should or should not be having or that anyone shouldn't be privy to.
Raj Sharma:	Tread cautiously in the sense of you know, there's semantic battle between the liberals and the conservatives, irregular border crossers versus illegal. That's a loaded term and it adds nothing to Conversation. In fact, what it does is it stokes nativist sentiments and the actual nuanced answer is that it's neither. Is it a regular? Well, it's expressly provided for by the law, is it illegal? Well, technically, but another provision contravene set or stays it or suspends it so why go into this?
Anuj Rastogi:	I find that like this ... I mean this is just one of many topics and hopefully we'll get, you know, opportunities to talk about a lot more in the future here, but in this death of nuance, I think a lot of that death of nuances actually by this homogenization of opinion. For example, and we were talking about this earlier being a-
Raj Sharma:	Homogenization of opinion or polarization of opinion because we now see is this sort of polarized, homogenized. On this side I can tell you exactly what the argument is or the speaking notes here then on this other side I can tell you exactly what those are.
Anuj Rastogi:	Yeah, it's both. So marginalization and polarization is taking something that's your account was shades of gray and turning into a similar ... like just a binary black and white and from that perspective, it's difficult and I've seen it firsthand, I see it day in day out. To be a middle aged blond haired, blue eyed white men today who was saying something that would otherwise be considered rational, can be so quickly misconstrued as racist, but if you happen to be [crosstalk 01:04:33] it's not always the case, but to some that to some degree.
Raj Sharma:	It's a little early yet to jump to the defense. I think there's quite a bit of privileged still that point for sure so forgive me for my lack of sympathy for a little bit yet. We'll see, we'll see. I think we are now getting some diversity of opinion.
Anuj Rastogi:	Maybe more what I was getting at, it's not to say that there isn't privileged and there's clearly many ills that have been committed by blond haired, blue eyed, men over history, but at the same time, if Joe six pack happened to be from one physically identifiable background versus another, that opinion may carry certain weight in certain circles in this sort of bipolar left and rights a continuum that we're operating in. And I think that that's ... what's unfortunate is just look at somebody and not actually hear out their opinion just because of what you see. I hope that there is just more discussion regardless of what background someone comes from.
Raj Sharma:	I agree, I think it is a recipe for disaster to do what again, I think a co-panelist was suggesting today, which is to dismiss those concerns as being completely unfounded. I have respect for those views even if I disagree with them.
Anuj Rastogi:	On that note, like out of respect for your time and you've been very generous with it. I appreciate you being here.
Raj Sharma:	Respect for my empty glass.
Anuj Rastogi:	Yeah, which we will have to remedy very quickly. But if anyone wants to kind of keep up to date with what you're up to or can they follow you? Where can they find out more?
Raj Sharma:	I Tweet, perhaps more than I should, that's @immlawyercanada, so I-M-M lawyer Canada, I've got a blog. I've got obviously the website for the firm, it's Raj Sharma, I'm sure people will be able to find me. It's something that I've enjoyed engaging with. I really appreciate it, I know you're just bouncing ideas off you. You've always been fantastic that way even if obviously you're not in this field at all, but it's still very, very useful just to hang out with you and even ... not a lot has changed after two decades.
Raj Sharma:	I think it worked out well today and I hope I was able to bring some more light. I mean, this conversation always brings up more heat than light and more noise than signal. So hopefully it worked out today, let's see. We always have to do our best in this regard and people will make the decisions that they make and I wonder what will happen in the next couple of months. It could be a momentous change for Canada if what I fear happens.
Anuj Rastogi:	I will sleep a little bit better knowing that someone like you is at least on the front lines of this because we definitely need more nuanced and honest and open people like you, so thank you so much again.
Raj Sharma:	My pleasure.
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Transcript by Rev.com