ELECTRONIC ILLUSTRATION BY RAFFI ANDERIAN; FILE PHOTOS BY CHUCK STOODY/ CANADIAN PRESS, MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS

This summer's boatloads of Chinese claimants enter a refugee system where good intentions are often overwhelmed by crass politics

HOW DO YOU begin a story about those who come to Canada claiming to be refugees? Do you talk about the obvious successes, the ones who - like Governor-General designate and former Hong Kong refugee Adrienne Clarkson - have made it in this country?

Or do you talk about the more dubious cases - such as the women who, when refused work permits by the Canadian embassy in Budapest, flew to Toronto anyway and claimed refugee status? Earlier this year, they were found working as strippers in an alleged bawdy house.

Is it the same story that has been part of our national mythology for more than 100 years - of individuals braving all odds to come here and build a better life?

Or is it the story, as Reform's Preston Manning would have it, of Canada's hospitality being abused by ``illegal immigrants and bogus refugees''?

The spectacular arrival on the British Columbia coast this summer of four boatloads of Chinese migrants has brought all of these conflicting stories to the surface.

And to make sense of them . . . Well, to make sense of them, you have to start a long time ago.

In fact, until the late '80s, Canada had not been very generous at all when it comes to accepting foreigners. Rather, the country has been motivated by a calculated self-interest.

Since the late 19th century, when the federal government combed Europe to find settlers for the newly opened West, Canada's immigration policy has been designed to benefit those already living here.

The immigrants themselves might improve their lot, but this was secondary. The role of immigration was to make the country wealthier and to provide new markets for existing Canadian businesses and cheap labour for existing Canadian employers.

Yet at the same time, calculated self-interest was leavened by politics. For much of the 20th century, politics meant race. Ukrainian Catholics or Protestant Germans might be welcomed. Jews and Asians were not, as Howard Adelman, founder of York University's Centre for Refugee Studies, points out.

Chinese migrants brought in to work on the railroads were allowed to stay. But until 1947, their families weren't.

Jews fared somewhat better, although not when it counted. In their book None Is Too Many, Irving Abella and Harold Troper note that, between 1933 and 1945, Canada accepted only 5,000 Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. By comparison, the U.S. took 200,000, Bolivia 14,000, Argentina 50,000 and strife-torn China 25,000.

Indeed, the very concept of refugees had no legal meaning in Canada at that time. The odd individual, such as Clarkson (who escaped Japanese-occupied Hong Kong) might describe herself as a refugee, but there was no official refugee category.

There were only immigrants. And we would accept only the immigrants we wanted.

All of this began to change after 1945, although not quickly. Cheap labour needed to build the new highways and cities of postwar Canada was found in countries such as Great Britain, Italy and Portugal. Once again, immigration from Asia was discouraged, not by an outright ban but by a more subtle system of quotas - a system not eliminated until 1967.

The only new wrinkle was the Cold War. In Canada and the U.S., virtually any migrant who managed to make it out of a Communist country was welcomed. A word, ``defector,'' was invented to describe these privileged migrants.

It was not until 1969 that Canada became party to the 1951 United Nations Convention for Refugees and agreed to harbour, with a few exceptions, any asylum seeker with ``a well-founded fear of persecution'' owing to race, religion, politics, nationality or membership in a social group.

When Ottawa signed on to the Geneva Convention, Canada seemed far from the places where most refugees were settled and was protected by three oceans and a rich neighbour to the south. This changed in 1973, when armed forces in Chile, under Augusto Pinochet, staged a coup against the socialist government and began to murder those deemed Communist.

Chileans scrambled for safety. If they could get a direct flight to a safe country, they could ask for asylum. And by 1973, there was a direct flight from Santiago to Toronto.

The arrival of South American refugees at Canada's border suddenly made the 1951 Geneva Convention less theoretical. It also brought into prominence a new player - the refugee lawyer.

Lorne Waldman was one of the first. Along with others, such as Barbara Jackman, Waldman advised the growing number of Central and South Americans trying to work their way through the swamp of the Canadian refugee system.

Twenty-six years later, Waldman and Jackman are prominent in the field of refugee law. Now critics castigate lawyers for slowing down the system and flooding it with bogus claimants. But in the '70s and early '80s, they - and a few non-governmental groups - were the only allies the refugees had.

For politics still dominated. Indeed, the main reason so many Central and South Americans were showing up on Canada's border had to do with the politics of the U.S. refugee system.

Whittier College political scientist Michael McBride documents the bias in a paper written for the U.N. High Commis sion for Refugees. Between 1984 and 1990, he says, the U.S. accepted 26 per cent of refugee claimants fleeing a left-wing government in Nicaragua that Washington opposed. But it accepted only 2.6 per cent of refugees fleeing the right-wing government in El Salvador that Washington backed.

Those rejected in the U.S turned to Canada. By the late '80s, a modern-day underground railroad smuggled Guatemalans, Salvadorans and others to the Canadian border, where they would apply for refugee status.

Canada's period of generosity had finally begun. And so had the debate over abuses.

Already, there were public mutterings about bogus refugee claimants - aimed particularly at those who arrived in Canada by air after having torn up their travel documents en route. Refugee claimants would say they did this out of fear. But the practice also made it virtually impossible for the Canadian government to check claimants' stories, or even know for sure who they were.

It was the arrival of two lifeboats off the coast of Newfoundland in 1986 that focused public attention on the problem.

The lifeboats carried 152 Sri Lankans who said they were fleeing oppression in their home country. It would later turn out they had come from Germany. The next year, a freighter carrying 174 Sikhs who said they were fleeing oppression in India landed in Nova Scotia. They had set sail from Holland.

Virtually all claimants from both incidents, including one who had earlier been deported from Canada, were allowed to make refugee claims (most of which succeeded).

Riding a wave of popular resentment, the government of then-prime minister Brian Mulroney promised action. By 1989, a new law was in place. But the toughest parts were never implemented.

The government's caution stemmed in part from the courts' new-found interest in refugees. Up to then, decisions on refugee claims had been made by government officials meeting in private without the claimant present. But in 1985, the Supreme Court ruled every person allowed to make a refugee claim had the right to be at the hearing deciding his fate.

It was, the court said, a question of fundamental justice.

While far more limited than critics of the Supreme Court like to suggest, the 1985 judgment did signal to the government that it could not act arbitrarily. As a result, in 1989, the Mulroney government created the Immigration and Refugee Board, a tribunal to hear and decide all refugee claims.

It was supposed to make sound decisions that could be held up in court. But its membership was chosen through patronage - the plum, well-paying jobs (now 200) filled by the party in power.

A hearing before one of the board's two-member panels was supposed to be legally correct enough to satisfy the courts. Claimants could, and usually did, bring lawyers (by this time, many provincial legal aid plans were paying for refugee claims).

Yet the hearing was supposed to be non-adversarial. Questioning of the claimant was permitted, but not a stiff cross-examination. Board members who heard the claims did not have to be lawyers; nor was it an absolute requirement that they knew anything about the refugee system.

A scathing report by the federal auditor-general in 1997 noted that board members tended to be appointed for short terms, which minimized their independence from the governing party. At any given time, the auditor-general added, there were too many members just learning the ropes.

But probably the most difficult problem the board faced was pressure to produce. There is always a backlog, and governments want it gone. For any board member who wanted to be reappointed to a job paying $85,000 to $90,000 a year, the key was to produce decisions - preferably two a day.

A minority of refugee claims are obviously bogus and a minority are obviously genuine, but the vast majority are in the middle. And the easiest way for the board to be productive was to accept those claims in the middle.

The reasons were systemic. Board members who rejected a claim would have to take time to give detailed written reasons. But a positive decision could, in most cases, be given quickly and orally at the end of a hearing.

Negative decisions might be appealed to the Federal Court. Positive decisions almost never are. While the court only overturns about 1 per cent of all board decisions, former employees say the fear of having their rulings reversed makes adjudicators cautious - which is to say, more likely to rule in the claimant's favour.

On top of this is the built-in bias: In virtually all cases, only one of the two board members has to vote yes for the claim to be approved. But to reject a claim, both must say no.

Richard Jackson, assistant deputy chairman in charge of the Vancouver board, puts it in an understated way: ``The system itself is somewhat weighted toward positive.''

The main reason is not that refugees seek out Canada. The U.S. alone attracts four times as many refugee claimants. But Canada is now, to use Chrétien's word, more generous.

In 1998, Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board accepted 44 per cent of the refugee claims made before it. The U.S. accepted only 21 per cent and Australia 24.

In fact, Canada's acceptance rate is probably far higher. The U.N. figures do not include the cases ``otherwise closed.'' According to Jackson, most of those are people who, after making an initial refugee claim at the border, disappear before their hearing is held.

Adding those into the 1998 figures would bring Canada's real acceptance rate to approximately 65 per cent. In the U.S., it would be an astounding 93 per cent - which might give pause to those who want Canada to mimic its southern neighbour's tougher attitude toward refugees.

And if the figures were adjusted to include those whose refugee claims had been rejected but who, nevertheless, were never deported, the acceptance rate of both countries would be greater still.

The 1997 Auditor-General's Report found that, in Canada, only 22 per cent of those who failed to win refugee status over the previous four years had actually left the country. In one year alone, 38 per cent of failed refugee claimants had simply gone missing when asked to report for deportation.

Deportation, as Waldman points out, is the responsibility of the immigration department, not the refugee board.

We might turn down a prospective immigrant who doesn't have the skills the country needs.

But we are not supposed to turn down a genuine refugee - even if he speaks neither French nor English, has no marketable skill and has never been to school.

This is the theory. But as former Star reporter Daniel Stoffman wrote seven years ago in a controversial series funded by the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, the two streams have became one.

As Canada's criteria for immigrants become more exacting (we accept rich people unquestioningly and people with specific skills if we need them), those who don't make the cut, yet who still want a chance at a better life, look to different channels.

Close relatives of Canadian citizens have a chance to get in as landed immigrants.

Otherwise, the one remaining legal way into Fortress North America is as a refugee claimant.

And so the refugee system becomes the safety valve for those rejected by an increasingly picky immigration process. Were Canada's refugee system designed to accommodate real refugees in a consistent, efficient and orderly manner, this might not matter; bogus asylum seekers would be quickly weeded out.

But it is not. Everything is suffused with politics. The Immigration and Refugee Board itself, chosen though patronage, operates like the governments that appoint it - with an eye to the whimsy of public opinion.

There is a certain irony to the story of the migrants from China, most of whom are languishing in detention in B.C. If they had managed to make that harrowing journey just 25 years ago, they would have been welcomed as defectors from communism. If they had applied to come as immigrants 50 years ago (and had been white), they would have been welcomed as cheap labour.

Their mistake was to be born at the wrong time, to want to come to North America at a time when unskilled Chinese people wanting a taste of pure capitalism are out of favour.

There is a certain tragedy to their story, too. For by overloading the country's refugee system, those with questionable claims - along with their lawyers and even their well-meaning friends in the media - threaten to demolish it, threaten to destroy Canadians' genuine, albeit relatively new, sense of generosity towards the oppressed of the world.

According to the U.N., there are still 22 million people displaced by war and persecution who could use some of that generosity.