A stunningly foolish guest column was published in the Vancouver Province that condescendingly calls Canadians concerned about refugee fraud a bunch of xenophobes.
They came as Vietnam War draft dodgers from the U.S. in 1967. Like a couple of the Tamil women who just arrived, my mom was pregnant with me. My parents did not seek advance permission from Ottawa to immigrate. They did not fill out any paperwork before arriving. And they could no more seek permission to leave from their home government than these Tamils could, for what they were doing, as far as the U.S. was concerned, was illegal and would result in my father's arrest.
Of course that's the thing about being an asylum-seeker — you don't get into a queue. When you've got to go, you've got to go.
Ignoring whether or not a draft dodger is really a refugee, note that Seth's parents made their claim at the first foreign location they arrived at. These Tamils left from Thailand, not Sri Lanka. If they were genuine refugees fleeing persecution, they had already succeeded before they even boarded that boat. No, these aren't refugees fleeing persecution, these are fraud artists looking for a soft touch. In Thailand, they'd have to actually start working right away and receive little to no handouts from the Government. Not quite the same scenario as Canada, is it? Here,
we get to start working right away to support
them - and the dozens of family they have every intention of sponsoring into Canada at the first opportunity.
The vast majority of these globally displaced people are not being absorbed by wealthy countries, but rather internally or by neighbouring poor countries — the places least able to afford the costs and with the bleakest economic prospects. The number of refugees accepted by Canada has declined in recent years, and last year we accepted fewer than 20,000 — just over 0.1 per cent of global refugees. Surely, when a few hundred people arrive on our shores, we can afford to treat them with respect and grant them due process.
Canada accepted 0.1% of the world's refugees? How very generous considering that our proportion of the world's population is only
0.0049%. In other words, we accepted 20 times our share of world refugees, based on our share of the world's population and Seth says we should be treating
them with respect? Why, they didn't respect our laws when they made a fraudulent end run around our immigration laws when they left a perfectly safe country for the opportunity to steal from Canadian taxpayers.
When my parents arrived, some Canadians slapped unwelcome labels on the war resisters, but the government itself refrained from such labelling. By and large, the draft dodgers were welcomed, and went on to make valuable contributions to Canada. Much the same can be said of the Vietnamese boat people who arrived in the late 1970s. Why can't better receptions be the norm?
A key difference today is that the government itself immediately labelled the Tamil asylum-seekers as terrorists, criminals and queue-jumpers, before any due process. In doing so, they set the tone of the debate, and gave licence to a particularly nasty wave of xenophobia.
Why can't better receptions be the norm? Because the Vietnamese boat people didn't show up unannounced in Victoria, they were invited and screened overseas before being allowed into Canada.
We chose to allow them entry, they didn't barge their way in like these Tamils have done nor were there serious and credible concerns that many of them were violent terrorists who hadn't accepted the loss of their country in a civil war. Not exactly an apples to apples comparison, Seth.
Finally, we have the accreditation at the end of the post:
Centre for Policy Alternatives. That explains Seth's ideological embrace of Tamils at the expense of Canadians. He thinks that anyone less well off than him must be noble and worthy while well off Canadians have done something unsavory because we have such a successful country. The least we can do to make amends for somehow exploiting the world's poor while we maintain our county's standing is to let in any of them who can reach Canada, whether by hook or by crook. What Seth doesn't realize is that our success is fragile and depends on the rule of law and a stable, homogeneous society. Throwing the doors wide open, which is what he is advocating, to any and all refugees will, over time, destroy what makes Canada so attractive a Country to live in in the first place.
The Tamils must be sent back to send an unambiguous message that Canada is not a soft touch, not coddled, and the Seths of Canada need to stop encouraging more fraud in our already abused refugee system.
