REFUGEES VS. IMMIGRANTS

Liberals, leftists, churchmen, "human rights advocates", light Greens ,social ecologists, CBC morons, college teachers and trendies in Canada have always liked to draw to firm artificial line between what they call "immigrants" and "refugees".

After the government has already imposed an environmentally unviable and preposterously high annual immigration level, the bleeding hearts then join in a quick chorus to add "Wait! We have a moral responsibility to accept so many of these refugees and you can't add them to this total because they belong to a separate category."

There are some problems with this attitude. First of all, ecology doesn't care where a person came from or why. Only that he's here and consuming so many gallons of water, burning so much fossil fuel, making the same demands on the environment as everyone else.

A refugee is in fact an immigrant because he is here. He is an extra body. And secondly, the fact that he's here rather than back there is more harmful to the planet.

A Vietnamese refugee imposes a cost on the Global environment fifty times greater by living in the Comox Valley than he would have had he stayed in Vietnam. And why did he come here? To save his life? I doubt it. More than likely it was to escape fair land re-distribution and economic justice. And then there is the question of numbers.

Do trendies think they can make a dent in the refugee problem? There are anywhere between 15 to 50 million refugees out there now, according to various estimates.

Wait until global warming takes hold and we have 300 to 500 million refugees from rising sea levels. Toronto and Vancouver are unlivable now and multiculturalism a failure evident to everyone but the media and those in the anti-racism industry. Canada already exceeds the population level that makes our enviroment sustainable. We have more responsibility to it than to a bottomless pit of third world misery. Misplaced pity will sink our ship.