Windsor (Ontario) braces for refugee tide (Mexicans fleeing USA)

[Newsjock]

Source: Globe and Mail

A sudden flood of Mexican refugee claimants pouring into Windsor has left local officials scrambling and raised fears about how many more may be on their way.

Mexico's ambassador to Canada echoed that concern yesterday, conjuring the spectre of hundreds of thousands heading north to escape rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States.

“If you think that in the U.S. there are perhaps eight million illegals, if you get just 5 per cent of the people who don't feel secure in the U.S. who want to come to Canada as refugees, that would be 400,000 people,” Emilio Goicoechea told The Globe and Mail.

The ambassador said he fears that if the influx turns into a flood, Ottawa will slap visa restrictions on all Mexican citizens visiting Canada.

... In the last three weeks, 220 people, most of them Mexican, have shown up at Windsor's border crossings and applied for refugee status. Many had driven with their families from Florida, where they had been living illegally for years. Nearly all the claimants arrived with Canadian refugee application forms already completed, many containing the same wording. Several said they paid up to $400 (U.S.) to have the form completed by a Florida-based immigration agency.

Read more: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070922.wwindsor0922/BNStory/National/home

[burrowowl]

1. K&R

[Rydz777]

2. There is a reason people are fleeing Mexico by the millions -

to the U.S. and to Canada. Not just poverty - since time immemorial there was poverty - but now a new kind of poverty brought on when their third-world economy was put in harness with the first-world economies of the US and Canada - i.e. in a word, NAFTA.

And when millions of working-age people leave a country, that country's economy gets only worse. Mexico has always been ruled by an oligarchy (in the 20th century pretending to be "revolutionary")and now the oligarchs have been joined by rapacious narco-lords. And a final blow: the oil seems to be running out.

[msongs]

3. corrupt religion, corrupt government, corrupt police & military etc. nt

[High Plains]

5. Yeah, the US is in rough shape. I can see why the Mexicans are

fleeing all the corruption here.

[Canuckistanian]

4. Only one problem with Canada

There are few employers willing to hire illegal immigrants. At least not in the numbers that there are in Texas or Florida.

[seriousstan]

6. But I thought illegal immigrants were a benefit not a hardship.

You mean that they really are a drain on the services and resources of the country they illegally enter?