Saturday, Sep 18

SID TAFLER

Friday, September 17, 1999

IN BRITISH COLUMBIA -- It's an ugly scene: Chinese men and women locked up behind barbed wire on a naval base at the edge of a residential neighborhood near Victoria.

Uglier still when you realize that to those who sent them here, they are just a commodity designed to enrich an organized crime network based in the Far East and deeply embedded into the fabric of our own society.

This factor has stretched the bounds of our compassion for the 600 Chinese migrants that have appeared on our shores this summer. It's a terrible way to begin a new life, $40,000 in debt to a criminal gang that has no written contract but the power of extortion here and in China to enforce the indenture. Terrible for yourself and for your new adopted country.

Since the first migrants were swept up on the coast of British Columbia in July, the public has been engaged in an escalating war of words over their fate. Those who have written letters and carried pickets at the naval base welcoming the migrants claim a higher moral ground over those who would send them to China.

This is after all, British Columbia, part of a nation of immigrants and a land of great open spaces and opportunity. Along with that is its darker legacy of racial prejudice, often reflected in government policy designed to exclude, imprison or discriminated against immigrants and Canadians of Oriental descent.

Those who argue we can't accept the new migrants risk being associated with racists and alarmist headline writers who stoke the coals of anti-Chinese sentiment today. The other side of the debate says anyone who risked and suffered as much as these people have to make it to Canada deserves a chance. We may not like the way they got here, but the Fujianese farmers and factory workers smuggled in on rusty freighters had little practical hope of applying through officials channels at Canadian missions in China.

If there is a bottom line to this debate it's that millions of the dollars the migrants would earn in their first few years in Canada would go straight to the organized crime gangs that arranged for their passage.

That's about $40,000 each, with the payment period stretching over three to five years of low-paid work in Vancouver, Toronto or New York; higher pay for those who end up in the sex trade. That's $24-million before you calculate the interest rate of 15 per cent or more.

Surely our defective immigration policy warrants the scrutiny and debate that the wave of smuggled migrants has provoked. But few would disagree that our immigration standards and quotas must be determined by Canadians and their political leaders, not by criminal gang bosses.

When you catch a glimpse of the people behind the razor wire in their white jumpsuits, they seem fit, trim, young and eager. Eager to work at whatever job they're given, their lawyers tell us, even to spend 10 years in the Arctic to serve Canada.

It seems a failure of our own society that we can't protect these people from the snakeheads who send them here and control their lives when they arrive. But this may speak of another fault of our immigration system which allowed these organized crime operatives to gain entry to Canada.

We need no greater evidence of this gang control than the disappearance of some 40 migrants who were released from detention, likely bound for the sweatshops to begin repaying their debts.

The migrants tell their lawyers they fear for the safety of their families back in China if they try to escape the grasp of the criminal gangs.

Those fears were only increased by the appearance at the base detention centre last month of two lawyers from Vancouver. Evan Sahmet said he represented 17 of the migrants when he arrived in Victoria with his associate Kenneth Specht. Mr. Sahmet showed the identity card of one migrant and a letter supposedly written by the man's mother retaining him to represent the man.

But the migrant told Kevin Doyle, his assigned Victoria legal-aid lawyer, that the signature on the letter was not his mother's and that he didn't want Mr. Sahmet to represent him. A phone call back to the man's family in China revealed that someone had picked up his ID card at the family home after he left for Canada. The two lawyers failed to obtain any of the migrants as clients and returned to Vancouver. They refused to disclose how they obtained the ID card or the letter.

We may offer our sympathy to the migrants who risked everything to make it to our shores. Unfortunately, offering them what they most want, entry into Canada, would be a stunning victory for organized crime and another defeat for our faulty immigration system.

Sid Tafler is a writer and editor based in Victoria. E-mail: stafler@netbc.com