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Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 5.10 GMT |
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Canada should get tough on human smuggling -
Former Canadian diplomat |
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People who pay smugglers to get them to Canada are not innocent victims and the [Canadian] federal government should get more aggressive about sending them home, says a former Canadian diplomat and a leading member of a new Canadian immigration lobby group, James Bissett.
Bissett says the Canadian government would send a strong signal to future smugglers and their human cargo if it got tough now, the Vancouver Sun reported.
"There is one solution to smuggling. That's to send them back," Bassett said Tuesday. "If you send one boat back you won't get another."
Bissett, a one-time Ambassador to former Yugoslavia and a veteran of the federal immigration department, and other members of the newly formed Centre for Immigration Policy Reform stopped short of saying those arriving in Canada should be deprived a hearing of their refugee claim.
They agreed at a news conference to launch the new group that some legitimate asylum-seekers get to Canada by using the services of human smugglers.
But, they said, many choose the refugee-smuggling route because they cannot meet the requirements for getting into Canada as landed immigrants.
"Often the people who are being smuggled are going out looking for smugglers and are willing to pay them money to get here," Bissett said "They are queue jumpers."
The Harper government is in the midst of drafting a promised package of stepped up anti-smuggling measures, a step spurred by the arrival of two boats in B.C. last year, carrying more than 500 Tamil refugee claimants who paid $30,000 or more for their passage.
One of the ideas under consideration is keeping refugee claimants in detention longer if they arrive by boat in large groups.
Martin Collacott, a former high commissioner to Sri Lanka, and Bissett said the government should enact a system to hear refugee claims more quickly and to ensure those who fail to make their case get shipped home quickly.
Bissett suggested keeping them in detention during the process might be a good step.
He said one of the reasons Canada was able to send a boatload of failed refugee claimants back to China more than a decade ago was because they were detained until their claims were heard.
Collacott said the Canadian refugee system is too generous, and that the recent approval rate of more than 90 per cent of Tamil refugee claims is a magnet for drawing more asylum seekers. By contrast, the approval rates in German, Britain and other countries fall below 10 per cent, he said.
The situation in Sri Lanka for Tamils since the end of the war does not warrant that kind of blanket acceptance of refugee claims, quoting Collacott the Vancouver Sun reported.
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