Refugee crisis just beginning

Editor: What are the Liberals playing at with the surge of illegal migrants at our border?

First it was Somalis and Haitians who were in the U.S. illegally and decided to go for silver in Canada after being denied gold by the U.S. crackdown on illegal aliens.

Now they’re coming from among the 58,000 Haitians who’ve been in the U.S. on special status for the past seven years and whose time is up.

We can also expect an unknown number of the 300,000 Salvadorans and Hondurans who are also in the U.S. on temporary status.

The major cause of this problem is the eager signalling by Justin Trudeau in response to the U.S. travel restrictions last year.

He foolishly went on Twitter to take a juvenile, passive-aggressive swipe at Trump by announcing how welcoming and open we are to all comers.

Now we’re working for Trump by taking in a substantial portion of the illegal aliens in America who took Trudeau’s statement as an invitation. And we’re footing all the bills too.

There’s also been an unhelpful “pull” effect from our Haitian and Somali immigrant communities and meddlesome Montreal Mayor Dennis Coderre who declared Montreal a sanctuary city for illegal migrants.

We’ve seen quite a Kabuki show by various federal and Quebec politicians to explain their response to the asylum seekers, including assurances by the transportation minister that the situation is under control. But the numbers and images of tented camps and the overflowing Olympic Stadium say otherwise.

Now Trudeau is urging people who want admission to Canada to follow established immigration and refugee processes.

It’s too late for that as the migrants have decided otherwise. He’s calling these asylum seekers “irregular entrants” instead of the illegal migrants and economic opportunists that they are. But at least he isn’t calling them refugees.

Haiti suffers from chronic poverty and misgovernment in spite of decades of international assistance to improve things. Even the UN is finally getting out.

It’s unlikely that any Haitian migrants will qualify for asylum because they can’t plead oppression after spending seven years in the U.S.

If poverty and misgovernment were grounds for asylum, then most of 11 million Haitians would qualify, as would millions of Canadians.

We’re in dire need of some responsible, adult leadership on this. Twitter is a great place to showcase one’s ego, but it’s no place to develop coherent government policy.

John K. Thompson, Kaleden