Ottawa won't grant amnesty to illegal immigrants

From the Globe and Mail (Ottawa rules out amnesty for 200,000 illegal workers by Marina Jimenez, October 27):

Ottawa has ruled out amnesty for the estimated 200,000 undocumented workers toiling in Canada's underground economy, saying it would not be fair to those who have applied legally and are waiting in line, according to a letter obtained by The Globe and Mail.

[Hyphenated Canadian: They are illegal immigrants, damn it! By calling them "undocumented workers", Marina Jimenez is showing her bias. Ottawa is right. Allowing queue-jumpers to stay is unfair to legal immigrants. It's also unfair to native-born Canadians whose wages are being depressed. In many cases, illegal workers actually take jobs away from Canadians because the illegals are hired through informal ethnic networks that Canadians workers can't access. For example, in my neighbourhood, there are a lot helped-wanted signs written in Portuguese. If someone doen't know the language, he doesn't know work is available. More than that, some of the signs specifically say Portuguese workers wanted. ]

Allowing illegal workers to stay would likely "encourage more illegal immigration," noted Linda Arseneau of Citizenship and Immigration Canada's ministerial enquiries division in an Oct. 18 letter to the Universal Workers Union.

[Hyphenated Canadian: Of course, it would encourage more illegal immigration. Every amnesty, every decision to allow illegal aliens to stay here on compassionate grounds invites foreigners to ignore the law in hopes of eventually being allowed to stay.]

"Even a small increase in the number who decide to come here and stay here illegally based on the hope of regularization would simply recreate the very problem the proposal is supposed to fix," the letter says.

The decision is a bitter disappointment to Portuguese and Hispanic groups, home-builder associations and unions in Ontario that have lobbied CIC to allow undocumented workers in the construction industry to regularize their status.

[Hyphenated Canadian: All the usual special interest groups. Employers want cheap labour. Ethnic lobbies want to help their own, other Canadians be damned. Again with the biased language: "regularize their status." Oh sure. Ottawa wouldn't be rewarding law-breakers, it would only be "adjusting their status" - a minor administrative matter. Nothing to look at here. Is Marina Jimenez a reporter or a propagandist? And I'm sorry if this is impolitic to ask, but is her Latino ancestry the reason her stories about illegal immigration so one-sided?]

[. . .]

Read all of Marina Jimenez's article

See also:

The Toronto Star's shameless (and shameful) campaign on behalf of illegal immigrants

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

Technorati tags: Canada Canadian federal government politics immigration illegal immigrants immigrant aliens migrants migration undocumented workers amnesty