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We're quick to label refugees as either 'good' or 'bad', but they're all entitled to protection | Amos Roberts

Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, greets refugees fleeing from Syria in December 2015.
Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, greets refugees fleeing from Syria in December 2015. Photograph: Nathan Denette/AP

“Man who beat wife said he didn’t know it was against the law,” read the headline. Underneath, a photo of a man I knew very well – a man I’d once sympathised with. A distinctive underbite, thick salt and pepper hair, olive skin. I read on, with mounting unease.

A Fredericton man who beat his wife with a hockey stick for half an hour told a court on May 24 that he didn’t know it was against the law in Canada.

Facepalm.

I’d spent several days filming Mohamad Rafia and his family last year, as they struggled to adjust to life in rural Canada. Refugees from Syria, they’d arrived in the middle of a snowstorm six months earlier – Mohamad, his wife Raghda and their four children. One of their sponsors, Dawn Burke, remembered Mohamad’s shock when she climbed into the driving seat of the waiting van.

“I said, ‘Are you OK with this, Mohamad?’ And he said yes, he trusted me and I was an independent woman ... I said, ‘Raghda soon will be driving’, and he thought that was very funny.”

Canada had just embarked on a bold social experiment – one it had tried before, with great success. Almost 40 years ago 60,000 refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were resettled in Canada, and half of those were privately sponsored. Now, an outpouring of compassion had led to a similar wave of immigration from the Middle East – more than 30,000 Syrian refugees were making themselves at home in hundreds of communities across the country.

Except not everyone felt at home.

I was making a documentary about Canada’s private sponsorship program for SBS Dateline – Canada’s Open House – and visited two small towns to illustrate the different experiences of sponsors and refugees. Shelburne, Nova Scotia, had embraced the close-knit Hendawi family, which was thriving – Dad was already working part time at the local craft brewery, and the only culturally inappropriate behaviour came from the teenage girls brazenly flirting with his sons at school. Watching the family mixing with neighbours at a backyard pool party (Mum in a hijab and sunnies, sponsor’s daughter frolicking in a bikini), it felt like an advertisement for Canadian multiculturalism.

Things were more fraught in Chipman, New Brunswick. Being the only Arabic family in a village can be an isolating experience, and it was particularly so for Mohamad.

“You feel like a stranger, he told me, smoking on his veranda as trucks piled with logs roared past on their way to the local sawmill. Guantanamo Bay is a prison on an island. Same here.”

He was struggling to learn English, and he hadn’t made friends or found work. While Raghda was a hit with the ladies at the local quilting group, Mohamad was gloomy and introspective, buoyed only by grand plans of opening a restaurant or becoming a successful artist. The kids obviously adored him, but his relationship with Raghda was strained.

“It affected my marriage, because … we are stuck together every day. Raghda might want to mop. I’ll say ‘It’s not the right time, leave it.’ I feel angry sometimes.”

I’d seen this before, making a documentary more than 20 years ago about a refugee family from the former Yugoslavia. We filmed the first six months of their new life in Melbourne, an experience they found more challenging than surviving war in the Balkans. This father was similarly adrift. Without work he’d been robbed of his role as provider, and thanks to Centrelink his wife and children were now financially independent; his authority no longer unchallenged. In one painful scene he supervised his wife closely as she vacuumed, giving her instructions. It was overbearing and claustrophobic – a desperate attempt to claw back his lost authority. At his lowest, he contemplated suicide, and threatened to leave his family and return to Serbia.

In both families the women were adapting, while their husbands floundered.

According to local press reports, Mohamad and Raghda had been arguing about money when he assaulted her. Despite what he told the court, he knew full well that hitting his wife was a serious crime (as it is in Syria) – Dawn had told him this, through an interpreter, several times.

When I was filming with her, Dawn was worried about Raghda, who’d said that she wanted to leave Mohamad, but she was also concerned about him.

“Could you imagine if their marriage doesn’t work? He’d lose everything,” said Dawn.

During his trial, Mohamad admitted to the court that he needs to become a better father, but he also said that his children and wife have room for improvement.

There’s no doubt this is a tragic personal story – but it’s also one that some outsiders in Canada have been disturbingly quick to exploit, fuelling anti-immigration sentiment.

“A battered wife and a bloodied hockey stick. That’s the legacy of Trudeau’s Syrian refugee program,” tweeted Kellie Leitch, a leading conservative politician last week, quoting from a column in a tabloid newspaper.

Leitch had proposed a “Canadian values test” as part of her recent (failed) campaign for leadership of the Conservative party. She argued that immigration officials should weed out prospective immigrants who refuse to embrace so-called Canadian values such as freedom, tolerance and generosity.

Sound familiar? Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is enthusiastically spruiking a new citizenship test that would measure adherence to so-called Australian values – with a focus on respect for women and children.

But how would such a test have prevented Mohamad from assaulting his wife?

As his sponsors discovered, he’s certainly shrewd enough to have passed. And if he hadn’t, what then? The family wouldn’t have come without him, so do you deny them all asylum? How, exactly, would that have protected Raghda?

The proposed values test gained little traction in Canada. Last week the immigration minister (himself a refugee from Somalia) said the attempts to link domestic violence to refugee policy were as abhorrent as domestic violence itself.

But Raghda’s bruises were a gift to rightwing bloggers, who ran with headlines like “Syrian Refugee Enriches Canadian Sporting Tradition – Beats Wife With Hockey Stick, Blames Canada”.

When it comes to refugees, we seem to delight in extremes that reinforce our own view of the world – so-called “bad” refugees like Mohamad, who outrage the community, or “good” ones, who enrich it.

The Syrian family I met in Nova Scotia could be the poster child for Canada’s refugee program, while the one I filmed in New Brunswick is now, for some, the poster child for its perceived failings.

But these extremes risk clouding a simple fact – that both families needed asylum. Most refugees display great resilience as they adapt to a strange new environment. Some will be more fortunate and more successful than others, but this doesn’t mean that the less fortunate and less successful weren’t just as entitled to our protection – or to a fair go.

Watch Amos Robert’s original SBS Dateline report – Canada’s Open House.