What to do about Tamil migrants

Suggestions from pundits this week include: send them all back home, work with other countries to stop human smuggling, or do nothing at all.

The government has launched a two-pronged immigration offensive in the wake of last month’s arrival of a ship carrying 492 Tamil migrants. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is touring Asia to rally support for international efforts to fight human smuggling, and next week Public Safety Minister Vic Toews will announce ways to toughen immigration laws.

“What’s to toughen?” asks the Toronto Star. “Canadian law is far from weak” and provides for a $1 million fine and/or life imprisonment for convicted smugglers. The Star editors accuse the government of “generating more spin than substance as they try to impress the public by striking a ‘tough’ stance.” The Tories are taking their domestic ‘tough on crime stance’ to the big leagues, you might say.

Kenney’s mission is important, according to a Globe and Mail editorial, because human smuggling is an international issue that will “take a government-wide strategy, domestically and internationally, to combat.” Asian countries and Canada should recognize they have a common interest in tackling smuggling because human traffickers are linked to domestic organized crime and defraud Asian citizens, and for Canada “that often means the entry of the wrong people into the country.”

In the National Post, Chris Selley tries to reconcile the government’s determination to stop Tamil migrant ships with their claim that they don’t want to deter legitimate refugees. “(H)ow does one square the casual shooing away of Sri Lankans afloat with the fact that the Immigration and Refugee Board continues to buy their claims of persecution at an 85% clip?” Either the real problem here is that the refugee board is accepting a high number of illegitimate Tamil refugee claims, or the government is setting up a policy to keep out real refugees.

Sun Media’s Ezra Levant reports that things are mostly fine in Sri Lanka now “because the 30-year civil war with the Tamil Tigers terrorist group is over. The terrorists lost. ... Everyone can go home. Including the 492 gatecrashers.” Unfortunately immigration lawyers, liberal politicians, and leftist journalists in Canada all have something to gain from migrant ships arriving here, so they’ll probably keep coming.