Let the boat people stay

There is nothing like the arrival of a boat load of refugees off the coast of British Columbia to trigger the redneck in us.
“Send them back” …Canada is a patsy … where did they get the money  to pay human smugglers … they are terrorists … etc,” dominate the views of the pundits, public forums and blogs.
The racist barbs come from the other direction as well in the form of “if this was a boatload of white people …”
It happened when about 600 Chinese migrants arrived in B.C. on rickety ships in the summer of 1999.
It is happening again with the arrival last week of 76 Sri Lankan Tamils on board the MV Ocean Lady, a rusting hulk that crossed the Pacific.
The racist rhetoric went up a notch this week, after The Province reported on its website that the migrants are likely to have paid up to US$45,000 to human smugglers for a new life in Canada.
An analysis of the public reaction to the so called “illegal immigrants” clearly shows that we have little comprehension of the horrors that drive people to risk life and limb to seek a new life.
We are fuelled by unsubstantiated innuendo that the migrants could be terrorists, end up on welfare rolls and dilute the Canadian way of life by the “queue jumping”.
While we fret about the precedents and costs that may be set by giving refugee status to the latest arrivals, we completely ignore why they come this way to Canada.
After years of a violent civil war, the Sri Lankan government continues with its philosophy of mass punishment of the Tamils by incarcerating over a quarter of a million men, women and children in over-crowded and unsafe internment camps.
“Since March 2008, the Sri Lankan government has confined virtually everyone displaced by the war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to detention camps, depriving them of their liberty and freedom of movement in violation of international law. As of September 15, 2009, the government was holding 264,583 internally displaced persons in detention camps and hospitals, according to the UN, while fewer than 12,000 have been released or returned home,” reported Human Rights Watch.
Those who have seen the camps say they are packed with two or three families sharing a tent or tin shack.
Inside the stinking barbwire fortified camps thousands have died from dysentery, malaria and an assortment of diseases.
When the floods come, the misery rises a thousand-fold.
If you were in one of these camps, would you not dream of making a new life in Canada?
Would you not sell everything, beg, borrow and perhaps even steal to finance your way out of hell?
The human rights abuses in Sri Lanka should worry us more than the alarmist rhetoric about flood gates being opened to refugees.
The boat people from Sri Lanka who arrived here last week brought with them something more than just their hope for a better life.
Their perilous journey tells us that the international community is not doing enough to make Sri Lanka stop persecuting its citizens.
We should treat the latest arrivals with compassion and dignity.
We should focus on why they left, rather than why and how they came here.
We should let them stay.
Then use their stories of horror and flight to shame Sri Lanka into respecting basic human ri