Thursday, Sep 16

Thursday, September 16, 1999

The spectre of the Komagata Maru is again haunting Canada. In 1914, that sad ship mostly full of potential Sikh immigrants was sent back to India after its passengers spent a hungry, uncomfortable two months unable to disembark in Vancouver.

The Sikhs weren't allowed to come here because the government of the day, not to mention many people of the day, didn't want Asians of any kind in their version of Canada. Subsequently, the Komagata Maru's fruitless voyage has come to symbolize the overtly racial prejudice of Canada's past immigration policy.

The image of the Komagata Maru is again before us as we watch ship after ship full of Chinese migrants steam across the Pacific, enter Canadian waters and then disgorge human cargo on our shores. However, this time our reaction is extraordinarily generous. The migrants are housed, fed Chinese food, given medical care, provided with legal counsel and allowed to plead their rights to stay here as refugees, even though both they and we know they are most likely economic migrants and not political refugees.

The irony is that today's boat people threaten to teach us a reverse Komagata Maru lesson. It seems our desire to be fair threatens to turn us into the world's patsies, or as Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has put it: "We have laws that induce some people to abuse the law."

With this as a background, it is vital that the migrants' cases be handled in a way that is not only fair to them, but fair to the spirit of our current high-minded immigration policy. Thus, we applaud Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan for deciding that the process of adjudicating the Chinese migrants' claims be speeded up. If, in three years, most of them are still here in some sort of refugee appeal limbo, we will have sent exactly the wrong message to their countrymen.

We also applaud holding the migrants in detention until their cases can be decided. Releasing the first group of them has been disastrous from a public-relations perspective. More than half of the boat people have gone missing and are presumed to be underground either here or in the United States.

In a larger sense, one also counsels the immigration lawyers who are advising the Chinese to think of the good of the whole. If lawyers cynically suggest that migrants apply for refugee status when those same lawyers know perfectly well the Chinese are not true refugees, it threatens to damage our communal sense of fairness -- not to mention breaking general rules of professional conduct espoused by law societies.

If legal deviousness prevents a scrupulously fair refugee adjudication system from working, Canadians will demand it be replaced with an unfair system that does work.

Finally, we must break the illegal boat migration cycle. If, as seems likely, most migrants are not true refugees, we should deport them back to their villages in China to spread a cautionary message.

They will tell others, look, an illegal boat trip doesn't carry you to a Golden Mountain but to a Canadian prison. The mountain you find is a debt mountain built from the money you still owe to people smugglers. Better to improve the Chinese economy than to try to sneak away to Canada.

In order to ensure this lesson is driven home, the Chinese government must be true to its most recent statement that "repatriation . . . is the best way to shatter [the migrants'] . . . expectations." The Chinese must make it easy for illegals -- even if they have destroyed their identification papers -- to be deported back to their homes in Fujian province. While officials are saying the right things now, it is also true that in the past the Chinese have not always expedited repatriation of Fujian migrants.

All this must occur so that we don't abandon our noblest instincts. If the present system does not expeditiously separate a true refugee from an economic migrant, it will be hard to stifle a return to a Komagata Maru-type response. You hear it already in those angry voices calling for future Chinese migrant ships to be turned back on the high sea -- no matter what the danger is to their passengers.

The government must continue along the course it has struck and demonstrate both to Canadians and to the world that immigration fairness does not inevitably lead to immigration folly.