Different approach to Tamil refugees needed

Watch part 2 & part 3 of the interview

By Seth Klein | Times Colonist
.............................................................................................................................................................................................

If the 492 Tamil asylum-seekers who recently arrived by boat are "queue-jumpers," then I guess my parents were too. 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 the Canadian government 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 was, as far as the U.S. was concerned, 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. My folks didn't even know Montreal, where they landed, was a predominantly French-speaking city.

So they just showed up. The difference, however, was that, in those days, they got landed immigrant status in 20 minutes at the airport. Over the course of the Vietnam War, about 100,000 American war resisters came to Canada (many with less formal education than my folks and thus unlikely to score particularly well under today's immigration point system).

Among the common reactions to the arrival of the MV Sun Sea is the proposition that Canada's allegedly lax immigration laws make us a global sucker -- a target for many of the world's migrants. This is an absurd notion.

World conflicts, environmental disasters and a global economic system that keeps billions impoverished has resulted in millions upon millions of refugees and displaced people. In Pakistan alone, the current flooding has produced upwards of 14 million internally displaced people. Globally, according to the UN, there are over

43 million "forcibly displaced people," of which about 15 million are refugees.

The vast majority of these 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 these people with respect and grant them due process.

The real and much more significant Canadian immigration story of recent years (at least numerically) isn't about refugees. It's about the explosion in temporary foreign workers. The number of temporary foreign workers coming into Canada each year now exceeds 200,000 and surpasses the number of immigrants.

But the Harper government hasn't been sounding the alarm about this. On the contrary, the federal government has been promoting and facilitating the massive growth in this category of migrants.

Why? Because unlike regular immigrants and refugees, these workers are being specifically requested by employers, their indentured status makes them unable to exercise key employment rights and leaves them highly vulnerable to exploitation and unsafe conditions and they are unable to make the same claims to the social and economic rights that Canadians take for granted.

© Times Colonist