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opinion

In 1996, there was a surge of phony refugee claimants to Canada from the Chilean port of Valparaiso. Word had got around in a poor neighbourhood that Canada was an easy mark. These obviously economic migrants were told: Apply for refugee status in Canada, get into the multilayered refugee-determination system and melt into Canadian society. And the chances of getting caught, or being deported, are next to nil.

Canada responded by slapping visas on all Chileans wanting to come to Canada, even though Chile had thrown off dictatorship and become an admirable country.

And yet, 13 years after that surge of phony refugee claimants, Canada still insists on visas for Chileans. Why? In part, because of our refugee-determination system.

Canada is afraid of another Chilean surge, just as it fears surges from other places, because we cannot turn away any would-be claimants before they enter Canada, including from friendly countries with excellent human-rights records.

It's a situation linked to a 20-year-old Supreme Court ruling (the Singh case) that led to amnesties, administrative chaos, bureaucracy, huge financial costs and, eventually, to the existing refugee-determination system.

Under it, Canada has to process anybody and everybody who comes to this country and claims refugee status, bogus or otherwise. To try to stem the flow, we impose visa requirements.

Visas are required for other reasons: health, national security, fake arranged marriages, bogus documentation, a reasonable assumption the traveller really intends to emigrate. But one reason is the refugee-determination system.

Canada should be able - although this would be hard and controversial, and draw the ire of all the refugee advocates in Canada - to post an annual list of countries where, based on extensive research, we do not consider individuals to be threatened with persecution or torture or discrimination, and are unable to seek redress from local courts and authorities.

If citizens from, say, Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Turkey, Brazil and Argentina (to name a few countries where visas are required) - or the United States, France, Poland, Mexico and the Czech Republic - arrive claiming refugee status, Canada ought to be able to say: Sorry, we don't accept refugee claims from those places. So you can't enter our refugee-determination process.

The list of countries would obviously be updated to take account of changed political circumstances abroad. And to ensure that Canada remains a country that welcomes genuine refugees, we could increase the number brought here from United Nations refugee camps, where we know people truly are refugees. (The Harper government, to its credit, recently resettled refugees from northern Thailand, and is bringing in 1,000 Bhutanese refugees a year for five years.)

Failing such a list, Canada insists on visa requirements for about 140 countries and has just added two more: Mexico and the Czech Republic.

Mexicans have topped the refugee list for the past four years; Roma claimants from the Czech Republic arrived in 1997, when Canada imposed a visa on visitors from that country. It would appear another Roma surge is developing.

The cost of this visa system is large to taxpayers, what with the bureaucracy required - to say nothing of the inconvenience for people legitimately trying to travel to Canada.

Friendly countries on whose nationals Canada imposes visas are understandably disappointed, furious, annoyed. The Czechs, with whom Canada enjoys (or did) excellent relations, withdrew their ambassador this week, a classic diplomatic sign of protest.

Insisting on visas essentially says to friendly countries with actual or possible refugee surges: We don't trust you. We think there is persecution and discrimination in your country, or plausible grounds for believing it. And we don't trust you to do anything about it.

How would you feel, as a Mexican or a Czech, if you got that message from Canada? That's the message we're sending politically to these countries, and to some others in the visa category. We're sending that message because we can't control our borders properly against bogus refugees.

So the Chilean visa story circa 1996 repeats itself today with Mexicans and Czechs. We get a black eye in other countries. We risk fouling up bilateral relations. We incur large costs in money, time and bureaucracy (or what the Supreme Court airily dismissed as matters of "administrative inconvenience"). We get big backlogs in the system. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

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