REFUGEE

The coast guard and the navy intercepted a boat laden with illegal immigrants off the coast of B.C. on Friday, and towed the ship to Victoria. Aboard were 76 males, which the Canadian Tamil Congress said are Tamils seeking asylum in Canada, found by RCMP when it boarded the vessel named Ocean Lady. They were taken into custody and ferried to Vancouver for screening.

That was their first mistake. The associated costs with now harbouring these 76 illegal immigrants are enormous. Europe has already learned, the hard way, what it means to extend a humanitarian arm without evaluating the potential social, economic, and political costs. The problems with accepting thousands of illegal immigrants from North Africa has resulted in cultural alienation, ethnic ghettoization, and higher crime.

Accepting these refugees can be a very expensive proposition. It’s estimated that it takes $160 a day to maintain the care of illegals in detention, which is roughly $60,000 a year. The annual costs of keeping these men locked away is $4.5 million a year, although you can break down those costs into whatever time frame you like based on whether they are released or remain in custody. There are the costs of assigning guards, the administrative paperwork, food, medical care, evaluations, professional assessments; the list literally goes on and on.

Besides the obvious costs, Canadians overwhelmingly don’t want our government taking in illegal aliens. Deportations are similarly costly. So much so that pro-illegal immigrant groups use the figures as a means of arguing we shouldn’t deport anybody. B.C. residents will remember the fiasco in trying to deport illegal alien Laibar Singh, who ended up costing the Canadian Border Services Agency $68,700 when he never showed up for his specially-arranged flight to India complete with medical personnel at hand. His associated medical and legal costs wound up putting taxpayers in Canada on the hook for close to a million dollars.

Once these people become entwined in the system, they will become available to the legal process of any other refugees. That means consultations, evaluations, and the long wait for processing. By then the refugees could be settled, married to Canadians, have Canadian children, and then it will be impossible to deport them. Sri Lanka is also recognized as a recent war zone, meaning their acceptance rate would be higher than the usual 50%.

And whether they are accepted or not, refugees are allowed free and unfettered health care, and access to welfare during the processing of their application. In fact they are not even legally allowed to work, although most of them will, as they will likely settle in areas populated by fellow Sri Lankans. During the recent Mexican refugee crisis, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said it cost taxpayers an average of $29,000 per applicant, which would be $2 million to process all 76 individual refugees.

Canada also learned the high cost of accepting refugees this spring, when the civil war in Sri Lanka caused thousands of Tamil protesters to demonstrate in Toronto and Ottawa, creating traffic gridlock, straining police services, and costing municipalities millions of dollars. Ambulances had to stand by around the clock for demonstrators who went on hunger strikes and slept in front of the Parliament buildings for weeks. All for a war that had nothing to do with Canada, Canadians, or Canadian interests.

The possible solutions to this conundrum are now all going to cost us in one way or another. Even if we do try and deport these men now, what solution would have been cheaper than simply towing their boat to international waters in the first place? And of course there’s a moral precedent to accept them. Canada recently apologized for turning aside the Komagata Maru ship in 1914 for essentially doing the same thing. 376 passengers from India showed up unannounced and were turned away, highlighting discrepancies in Canadian immigration laws.

Whatever the decisions are made, you can be sure that they will wind up being costly, either socially, economically, politically, or all of the above.