Sikhs + Facebook= Attention
Writing by shinda on Monday, 30 of July , 2007
Firstly let me apologize to those of you who I left hanging for the last little without any updates. Fortnuatlly I was busy for the better part of the month and then lazy for the other half. None the less when I saw this story I thought that maybe its time to take a break from taking a break and get back into the mix of things.
Most of you have probably heard about the ban on Singh and Kaur that has been going on by the Canadian Immigration offices in Delhi. All though the practice has been going on for 10 years now, most of us had been oblivious to it until it made headlines recently. Anyway’s the government has since issued an apology and something along the lines of stating a change in policy.
Without getting to much into that though, I was kind of surprised to be reading the following from the CBC today:
Sikh name-change letter challenged on Facebook
Last Updated: Monday, July 30, 2007 | 7:20 AM ET
CBC News
Sikh groups angry about a controversial government letter requesting name changes for Sikh immigrants have taken their fight to the popular social networking website Facebook.
At least five online groups dedicated to discussing the government letter, which asked people with the common Sikh surnames Singh and Kaur to change their last names before coming to Canada, have been created.
Kupreet Singh, an administrator for one of the groups protesting the letter, said his forum has already attracted more than 400 members.
He said the online members are proof that Canadians are dissatisfied with Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Diane Finley’s response last week. A spokesman from her department told CBC News a letter from the Canadian High Commission stating “the names Kaur and Singh do not qualify for the purpose of immigration to Canada” was not government policy and was “poorly worded.”
Finley added that the letter did not demand that people named Singh or Kaur change their names, but was actually a request for them to add a surname in order to help the department be more efficient.
Singh said the members of his Facebook group are demanding more clarification on the issue.
“We would like [Minister Finley] to instruct her New Delhi office that not only should they not require people to change their names,” he said, “but not even request [a name change].”
Immigrants fear delays in applications
Immigrants are in a vulnerable position, Singh said. They fear that if they do not comply with a government request, their immigration applications may be delayed or even ignored.
Asking people to change their names simply to ease up some bureaucratic filing is unreasonable, he said.
The name-change controversy erupted after Tarvinder Kaur, waiting for her husband Jaspal Singh to arrive in Canada, learned his application to become a permanent resident had been delayed for more than a month because of his last name.
When CBC News first asked about the letter, immigration officials said the policy to ask for a third name was put in place 10 years ago.
More then anything, I was surprised by the fact that the CBC actually noticed the Facebook group and used it as the base of the Sikh voice. Not that this is a bad thing, just an interesting trend that I’ve seen emerging amongst the media, where they’ve now started to scour Facebook and other social networking sites to gauge the reaction of the public. The Toronto Star has written a few stories based souly from accounts taken from Facebook including the more recent Turban ban @ Marlowe story. Whether this trend will continue or not is still to be seen, however it does offer an interesting alternative to all those petitions that are often prepared that rarely get anyone’s attention.
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Tariq from 
Made Monday, 30 of July , 2007 at 11:46 am
This is not an isolated incident if you visit the website of Canadian immigration http://www.cic.gc.ca ; there have been changes in the webpage. Few months back the top banner used to have face of Muslim women along with representative pictures of other ethnic groups. That picture has been replaced with picture of “limited” plurality. Unfortunately there is no other change in web site, so CIC can not claim that it was just change that is part of big change. Once again new/old Harper’s govt. has kept its promise of change but “selective change”
