Monday, August 23

MARCUS GEE
The Globe and Mail
Monday, August 23, 1999

It was a Frenchman, Jean Raspail, who best captured the anxiety of the rich world about an invasion of the poor.

In his apocalyptic 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, he portrays a future in which Europe is besieged by more than a million hungry migrants from India, who arrive on the Mediterranean coast of France in an armada of small boats.

"The nations are rising from the four corners of the earth," says one of Mr. Raspail's characters, "and their number is like the sand of the sea."

Mr. Raspail's nightmare haunts us all. Rich countries have worried for decades about being overwhelmed by desperate migrants from the Third World.

For a while this summer, that fear seemed justified. When two boatloads of undocumented Chinese arrived on the West Coast, many Canadians worried that admitting them would open the floodgates to a tide of economic migrants posing as refugees.
The Germans, British, Americans and French fear the same thing.

So far, it has not happened. Despite the widening gap between the world's rich North and poor South, the vast majority of the world's poor stay put unless forced to move by war or some other catastrophe. And the majority of those who do leave go to other poor countries, not rich ones.

The fear of uncontrolled immigration is a bit like the fear of crime. The anxiety keeps rising, but the numbers (like the crime rate) are falling.

The number of people who arrived in rich countries to claim refugee status has dropped steadily in the past few years, from 891,000 in 1992 to 489,400 in 1997. Canada recorded about 24,000 refugee claims last year, about two-thirds the level in the early 1990s. The entire group would only half fill the Toronto SkyDome, and only half of those have been officially accepted as refugees.

"All developed countries have leaks in their immigration systems, and they are thrusting their fingers into the cracks," said Demetrios Papademetriou, an expert at Washington's Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "But the dam is not breaking under any circumstances."

Mr. Papademetriou is careful not to dismiss the concerns of Canadians about uncontrolled immigration. But he does ask them to consider the following facts:

About 100 million to 120 million people live outside their countries of origin, a mere 2 per cent of the world's population. The vast majority of these live in poor countries and never attempt to migrate to the North.

Most of the world's roughly 12 million refugees also stay in the poor world, usually moving to countries next to their own.

Seven of eight immigrants who have moved to rich countries have done so by legal, regulated channels.

That is not to say that illegal immigration isn't a problem. Most rich countries have struggled with one kind or another of unwelcome arrival. More than 200,000 illegals cross into the United States from Mexico every year. Thousands of Albanians are smuggled by speedboat to Italy.

British authorities estimate that organized gangs are smuggling more than 2,000 illegal migrants and would-be refugee claimants into the country every month. Tension over the issue has reached such heights that violence broke out last week in the quiet English coastal port of Dover, with residents battling refugee claimants in the streets.

Even insular Australia has its troubles. Last Thursday, Australia returned a group of 101 boat people to China after apprehending them off the country's far north. Like the boat people who arrived off the coast of British Columbia, the Chinese had paid tens of thousands of dollars for a chance at a better life in a developed country.

But, hard as some migrants try, it's getting tougher and tougher to enter the rich world by the back door. The United States has doubled the number of guards along the Mexican border and built kilometres of new fences. Spain is spending more than $200-million on radar and night-vision equipment to stop Africans from sneaking across the Strait of Gibraltar.

Meanwhile, almost every rich country has tightened its entry rules for migrants. Germany cut off welfare benefits to refugee claimants and started turning back those who passed through safe third countries such as Poland. Britain fingerprints all refugee claimants and undocumented visitors. Australia is introducing 20-year prison sentences for people smugglers.

Canada's rules are softer than most, but even Ottawa now requires anyone coming from a refugee-producing country to have a visa. It also penalizes airlines that let travellers come on board without proper documents.

"It's actually very hard to get to Canada," said David Matas, a Winnipeg lawyer and refugee advocate.

Unless they come by plane, which is now much harder without documents, unauthorized migrants must either sneak in through the United States or make a costly, dangerous voyage across the ocean by boat.

Mr. Matas noted that the two boatloads of Chinese are the first such arrivals since a freighter carrying 174 Sikhs from India arrived in Nova Scotia in 1987. Though such incidents seize media attention, the numbers of migrants are a drop in the bucket and the public reaction is "wildly irrational," he said.

Legal immigration is down throughout the rich world. Canada had expected to take between 200,000 and 220,000 immigrants this year, but lowered its estimates by 20,000 because it got fewer applications than expected.

"There is a lot of fearful anticipation about immigration, but it just isn't borne out," said Kathleen Newland, a Washington-based immigration expert.

That fact looks even more amazing in light of how fast the population is growing in poor countries and how far they have fallen behind the rich. The share of the world's population that lives in poor countries has grown by 250 per cent in the past 50 years.

Given all that, what's really remarkable is not how many poor migrants wash up on Canada's shores, but how few.

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