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| Exchange program cancelled: Afghan students flee to Canada |
| 2011-06-11 |
| The United States government has quietly scrapped a popular exchange program for teens from Afghanistan after watching scores of students flee to Canada as refugees rather than return home. The defections from the State Department's Youth Exchange and Study (YES) initiative have been occurring since 2005, the second year the program was offered. But they reached the breaking point this year when more than half of the 40 Afghans brought in to attend U.S. high schools vanished. A Toronto Star investigation has tracked a number of those students to refugee shelters in Fort Erie, Ont., high schools in St. Catharines, universities and provincial government jobs in Toronto, apartments in Burnaby, B.C., and elsewhere in Canada. The newest arrivals are collecting welfare as they attend school and work their way through the immigration system. Partly out of embarrassment and partly out of frustration from seeing federal money go to waste, Washington suspended the YES program this year, denying visa applications for Afghans who were set to arrive in America this fall. Students accepted into the program, which was created in 2004, are chosen from among more than 5,000 applicants across the country each year. They are the brightest, the most articulate and the ones judged most likely to become the country's future leaders. That made it a big problem in both Kabul and Washington when they started using their stay in the States as a beachhead for asylum bids in Canada. |
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