More Immigration Reform

This will certainly meet the "make a leftard's head explode" test.

New immigration rules to weed out marriage fraud

"The Canadian immigration office in Hong Kong, with jurisdiction over much of southern China, rejects 50 per cent of spousal-sponsorship applications, the minister said, "because they've detected a wave of fraudulent marriages that are often facilitated by unscrupulous marriage consultants overseas."

Immigration staff received about 49,500 spousal-sponsorship applications from various parts of the world last year. While the government doesn't know exactly how many of those were deemed bad-faith marriages, Citizenship and Immigration Canada says "many" of the 10,000 applications that were rejected were turned down because there was evidence of a marriage of convenience."

Send get-tough message on human smuggling: New Immigration group

"People who pay smugglers to get them to Canada are not innocent victims and the federal government should get more aggressive about sending them home, says a leading member of a new immigration lobby group.

Former diplomat James Bissett says the government would send a strong signal to future smugglers and their human cargo if it got tough now.

"There is one solution to smuggling. That's to send them back," Bassett said Tuesday. "If you send one boat back you won't get another."

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"One of the ideas under consideration is keeping refugee claimants in detention longer if they arrive by boat in large groups.

Bissett and his group say Canada's refugee and immigration system needs a complete overhaul to better differentiate between false and bona fide refugees and to better tailor the inflow of immigrants to the country's labour needs.

Martin Collacott, a former high commissioner to Sri Lanka, and Bissett said the government should enact a system to hear refugee claims more quickly and to ensure those who fail to make their case get shipped home quickly.

Bissett suggested keeping them in detention during the process might be a good step.

He said one of the reasons Canada was able to send a boatload of failed refugee claimants back to China more than a decade ago was because they were detained until their claims were heard.

The government opted for detention after claimants on an earlier boat from China were released pending their refugee hearing. All of them disappeared, probably into the United States."

Canada immigration policy critics call for overhaul

"Canada was built on immigration, and one of every six Canadian residents was born outside the country. It accepts about 250,000 immigrants and 175,000 foreign temporary workers a year.

But the group says the country's social system cannot handle so many newcomers, and the flow of immigrants is overwhelming its labor markets, with the unemployment rate now at about 7 percent."

And this will positively make their brains boil:

"Burney, who once worked as chief of staff to former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, said that Canada would continue to run into problems with the United States if it did not change the way it handles refugees.

Security along the Canada-U.S. border -- the longest undefended border in the world -- has been beefed up by the U.S. government since the September 11, 2001, attacks.

"The Americans have a lot of concern about the kind of people we're allowing in (to Canada as refugees), many of whom then want to get into the United States," Burney said."

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""We are calling for nothing less than the complete review and total overhaul of Canada's Immigration and Refugee Protection Act," said the group's president, Margaret Kopala."

Bring it on, Cons. This can't happen soon enough.