August 29, 2010
By Mark Milke
Research Director
Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Mark Milke
CALGARY, AB, Aug. 29, 2010/ – The recent arrival of 492 Sri Lankans on the West Coast, courtesy of the MV Sun Sea, claiming refugee status again raised the rhetoric which was of little help to refugee claimants or to their potential host countries.
While some assume any concern about the immigration and refugee system is merely a cloak for anti-immigrant sentiment, others, also skating on the surface, suggest border controls should be abolished, similar to the absence of passports in the 18th century.
Sober reflection
Past migration patterns, unfortunately, don’t help with present-day realities. The choice really is not between shutting the door to all potential newcomers or doing away with the border altogether. Few want the first option – that would neither be compassionate nor economically smart – and the open-the-floodgates trial balloon is not a sober suggestion, given the reality of modern terrorism.
Some type of processes for allowing newcomers into the country will always be necessary. To understand what happens when governments lose control of significant parts of their borders, consider a recent story on the problem that exists on the Mexico-U.S. boundary. Reporter Monica Alonzo from New York City’s Village Voice newspaper: she began her investigative account of human trafficking this way:
“Maria was drifting off to sleep on the bedroom floor. She could hear women getting raped in the next room. Only, she didn’t hear screams – she heard the laughter of male guards. The women had been drugged by their rapists, who had done the same to Maria as soon as she walked into the house.”
The reporter was describing the increasing problem encountered by migrants who are ferried across the border into Arizona only to be held to ransom by their “coyote” escorts. Alonzo writes of the brutality of the human smugglers who double-cross their paying prey by demanding extra cash from the victims or their families back in Mexico.
“Kidnappers,” wrote the Voice reporter, “kick and punch hostages, beat them with baseball bats, submerge them in bathtubs and electrically shock them, burn their flesh with blowtorches, smash their fingers with bricks, slice their bodies with butcher knives, shoot them in their arms and legs, and cut open their backs with wire-cutters. The kidnappers usually videotape the sexual humiliation and violence and send the images to family members if ransoms aren’t paid.”
In the case of Maria and 12 other Mexican migrants, including two boys, each paid human smugglers $1,800 to ferry them safely across the border. But once they reached Phoenix, their coyotes-turned-captors demanded another $1,700 before they would be released.
Maria, her husband and the other captives were eventually freed after an anonymous tipster told local police about the house. After the raid and after giving Phoenix police information, they were eventually deported back to Mexico.
There is a plethora of issues in the illegal immigration conundrum, none of them easily solvable. What the Village Voice article exemplifies is how, in the absence of effective border controls, human smugglers exploit the shadowy existence of those in a country illegally. The Voice noted that in 2008 alone, and just in Phoenix, there were 368 reported kidnappings, most of them in the world of smuggled migrants such as Maria.
The U.S.-Mexico border is a mess and may be problematic until Mexico and central American countries become a lot more prosperous. In the meantime, no option is perfect. The U.S. could naturalize all illegal immigrants as it’s done before. That’s humanitarian. But absent a wide-open border, it won’t solve the problem of how to control illegal flows exacerbated by smugglers. A better option, suggested by some, is to try to legalize many more “guest workers” as is done in Europe.
Regardless, sympathy is due for anyone who wants to escape Mexican corruption, violence and poverty, or Tamils who want to leave Sri Lanka after undergoing repression there. But not every claim of refugee status is to be believed. So distinctions are necessary. And it’s critical that governments which wish to maintain some control of their borders, such as Canada, do so.
Immigration policy run by human smugglers
When they don’t – and there are plenty of Supreme Court and political hurdles in Canada in the way of such a basic government function – then it is human smugglers who run Canada’s immigration policy by default.
The point of trying to control a nation’s borders is not to turn our back on refugees and immigrants. The point of quick deportations is to remove the incentive for newcomers to pay human smugglers to get them here. It is to force them into safer and legal (albeit lengthy) channels in all but the most immediate cases of actual persecution.
Without that, the sloppy, ad hoc approach risks an explosion of brutality in the black market of human trafficking.
Channels: The Calgary Herald, Aug. 30, 2010
Coyote ugly: curbing human trafficking | Troy Media Corporation
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