About that family Ottawa just deported: most countries wouldn't even consider a refugee claim made by Costa Ricans.

[Update: I edited this entry to make it clearer. I changed the subject line. The first one was sarcastic, but that may not have been obvious.]

Yesterday I blogged about a Costa Rican family that was being deported after their refugee claim had been rejected. The family had been in Canada for five years. I wrote that I didn't take any pleasure in their deportation but that the law had to be enforced, because despite what some libertarians may argue, Canada can only accept a limited number of immigrants each year. Illegal immigrants and people who file false refugee claims have to be deported out of fairness to those who play by the rules. It's not right to reward people who jump the queue.

I linked to a Toronto Sun column by Michele Mandel in which she portrays the deportation as a heartless act. A small sample of Mandel's writing style:

On a morning when they should have been celebrating Canada Day, the nation they love showed them the door.

Their appeals exhausted, their tears and their pleas raining on deaf ears, the heartbroken Lizano-Sossa family was deported to Costa Rica yesterday, five years after they arrived here with bright hopes of beginning a new life.

But yesterday that Canadian dream lay bleeding outside the cold departure gate of Pearson Airport's Terminal 3.

"That Canadian dream lay bleeding?" This phrase reminds me of an Elton John song.

I have complained about stories like this before. In April, I wrote about a Toronto Star article that portrayed illegal immigrants from Portugal as victims. I said the article was part of a propaganda campaign by the Star to promote amnesty for illegal immigrants. I call these one-sided articles sob stories because they focus on the distress felt by the families involved while ignoring issues such as the rule of law and Canada's limited capacity to absorb newcomers. Seen in isolation, these stories tug at the reader's emotions, but they often leave out important facts. For one thing, no mention is made of the many foreigners who are trying to come here legally. The reader is encouraged to sympathize with the people who have no right to be here but no thought is spared for those trying to come here the right way.

This brings me back to the Costa Rican family I wrote about yesterday. As far as I can remember, none of the news reports I saw ever mentioned that Canada is one of the only countries in the world that even considers refugee claims from Costa Rica. Most refugee-receiving nations consider Costa Rica a safe country of origin and summarily dismiss claims made by that country's nationals. From page 32 of Martin Collacott's Fraser Institute report: Canada's Inadequate Response to Terrorism:

Safe countries of origin are those that are democratic, have a good human rights record, and have signed the UN convention on refugees. Most refugee-receiving nations refuse even to consider refugee claims from nationals of such countries. Canada, however, has no such restrictions. We are, in fact, the only country in the world where Americans are permitted to make refugee claims and, in 2003, allowed 317 to do so. In the same year, Canada also received several thousand claims from people from such countries as COSTA RICA, Uruguay, Grenada, and St. Lucia - once again being the only state to do so. While none of the Americans whose cases were decided in 2003 was granted refugee status, and only 38 of the 2,102 Costa Ricans were, applications from nationals of these two countries helped to clog up a system that should be concentrating on people from areas where there is a real possibility of persecution taking place. Even so, the hundreds of applicants from such democratic states as Uruguay, Granada (sic) and St. Lucia enjoyed modest success in that more than 20 percent of their claims to be refugees were approved (UNCHR, 2003, table 8)

Writers like Mandel use the fact that the family has been here for five years as an argument for letting them stay. The reader is told the family has put down roots and it's unfair to make them leave after so much time has passed. Mandel, however, never asks the crucial question. Why did it take five years to deport the family? Why weren't they removed as soon as they made their claim? Canada has a refugee determination process that allows asylum seekers to make appeal after appeal and if the appeals fail, the claimants ask to be allowed to stay on "humanitarian grounds." In other words, they ask to be rewarded for dragging out their deportation. The sense of entitlement is breathtaking. It's as if the failed asylum seekers are saying: "We put so much effort into pursuing our false refugee claim. How dare you deny us?"