A few months ago, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney (who notoriously once stated that “Canada isn’t a hotel”) announced new visa requirements for people visiting Canada from Mexico and the Czech Republic. People from those countries now “have to apply for temporary resident visas in order to visit, study or work in Canada.” The reason? Those two countries are the top sources of applications for refugee status. Kenney’s argument at the time was that “many of the asylum requests are either rejected or abandoned, raising questions about the legitimacy of the claimants’ allegations that they face persecution in their home countries.”

In other words, the Canadian state responded to a high volume of refugee claims not by giving more resources to the people who evaluate the claims, nor by finding better ways to separate “genuine” refugees from those filing false claims, but by making it harder to apply for refugee status — as if the only real refugees are the ones with the resources to get around the arbitrary obstacles that Canada’s immigration bureaucracy puts in their way.

And now we learn that deportations from Canada have increased dramatically over the past ten years — and the majority of those deported are failed refugee claimants:

Figures obtained by The Canadian Press through Access to Information show Canada removed 12,732 people last year — a major increase from the 8,361 who were deported in 1999.

A series of steady increases over the years shows no sign of abating in 2009. By Aug. 25 of this year, 8,999 had already been deported.

Statistics from the Canada Border Services Agency show failed refugee claimants accounted for three-quarters of deportations while the remainder were often removed on criminal or security grounds.

[...]

The government explains the spike in deportations as the logical result of a jump in refugee applications; there were 35,000 refugee claims last year, and the government says the system can only handle 25,000. [...] But the stats cast some doubt on Ottawa’s explanation. Figures obtained from the Immigration and Refugee Board indicate the 35,000 refugee applications received last year is no record.

While the figure represented a six-year high, it was still far less than the 44,000 cases received in 2001 and 39,000 in the following year. While there was an increase in claims in 2008, the government also completed far fewer cases than in the past.

Refugee advocates say the explanation is simple: the government has wanted to deport more people, and has taken steps to do it in recent years.

(I highly recommend reading the whole article, which goes into detail about some of the failures of the current immigration system and the appalling consequences for rejected refugee claimants.)

There’s an interesting bit of circular reasoning at work here. The rationale for the new visa requirements was that most refugee claims are rejected; the implication was that most such claims were made under false pretences. But we know that the people who control Canada’s borders have been intentionally rejecting more applicants as a matter of policy. Then they use the resulting increase in rejections as a pretext to keep more and more people out of the country. It’s a deliberate vicious cycle — and the people who get screwed are the ones trying to escape misery and persecution back home. That’s one hell of a legacy, Mr. Kenney.