COLUMN ONE : A Lamp to the Nations Flickers : For years, Canada has taken in more refugees per capita than any other country. But concerns about abuse of the system, hard times and prejudice seem to be changing that.

TORONTO — The scene at a recent Canadian refugee hearing was sharply at odds with the picture of the big-hearted northern neighbor that most Americans carry in their minds.

A young Iranian monarchist, pleading for political asylum in Canada, was telling of life in his post-revolutionary homeland. He said he had been burned with cigarettes by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s police, beaten while hung upside-down and scalded with boiled eggs jammed into his armpits. Electrical shocks were administered to his genitals; one testicle had to be surgically removed after his ordeal.

In the years since World War II, Canada has taken in more asylum-seekers per capita than any other Western country. From draft-dodging Americans of the Vietnam War era to death-listed Central American activists of the 1980s, dissidents have long assumed that, if they made it to Canada, they were home free.

And rightly so. Back when America turned away nine of every 10 Salvadoran asylum-seekers, for instance, Canada was accepting nine of 10. In 1986, the United Nations awarded its prestigious Nansen Medal to Canada for its generous treatment of refugees.

Accordingly, one might assume the Canadian refugee-claim examiners listened intently to the long-suffering Iranian, ready to clutch him to the national bosom. But no. While the young man spoke, the two hearing officers were gossiping, giggling and passing notes.

Randolph Gass, the Iranian’s lawyer, later fished their scribbles from a wastebasket. His darkest suspicions were confirmed: The refugee screeners had been snickering about whether the Iranian might have been “neutered”; they had been speculating whether the eggs had been hard- or soft-boiled, daydreaming about what they would eat for dinner and wishing the Iranian would just give it a rest.

“He is now practicing torture on us!” one hearing officer wrote to the other.

Such behavior may have been an isolated incident, but Canadians who work with refugees and other immigrants fear it is something more--another piece in a growing body of evidence that Canada, long a haven for the world’s oppressed, is banking its lamp unto the nations.

They point to statistics: During the first three months of this year, Canada took in just one out of every two people who came here pleading for political asylum. That’s still far higher than America’s one in seven--and still by far the world’s highest acceptance rate. But it is a significant reduction for Canada, which in 1989 admitted three of every four refugee claimants.

Refugee advocates point further to the Canadian government’s eagerness to deport asylum-seekers to the countries they passed through on their way here--something Canada has not done in recent memory. Now the government is negotiating the necessary agreements with Mexico and the United States, and, this week, it introduced enabling legislation in Parliament.

Virtually every refugee claimant in Canada has come by way of some third country, often the United States. Refugee advocates say that if Canada goes ahead with its plans to begin deporting refugees to these countries, it could theoretically reduce its influx of asylum-seekers to almost zero.

Canadian immigration officials, for their part, are quick to argue that Canada has every intention of fulfilling its humanitarian obligations. They say that they plan to reduce refugee claims by only 40% or so. They caution against reading too much into the raw statistics on declining refugee-acceptance levels.

“Be careful,” said immigration spokesman Roger White. “The acceptance rate should be a variable rate and not automatic bean counting.”

He said the decline doesn’t reflect increasing Canadian hardheartedness so much as the changing political realities in the world. Canada, for example, once accepted most asylum-seekers arriving from Poland, he said. But now Poland is democratically governed, and there is little reason to think the new leadership is persecuting political opponents. So acceptance levels for arriving Poles have fallen off markedly.

As for the newly introduced immigration measure, White said the bill--which would increase immigration officers’ powers, streamline refugee-screening and make appeals more difficult--will permit Canada to go on showing real refugees the generosity that this country has become so famous for. At the same time, they will help keep Canada from becoming known as an international soft touch.

“Canada has been, and continues to be, the target of abuse,” he said. “People are looking to get a better life for themselves, and are looking to the (Canadian) refugee system to circumvent the normal (immigration) process.”

That may well be. For years, it has been an open secret that Canada was deporting hardly anyone--even those refugee claimants who lied. Some claimants who were rejected on their first pass through the Canadian system were traveling to the U.S. border, crossing over, re-entering Canada and filing all-new refugee claims.

Once back into the system, their applications could take several years to process. Meantime, they were eligible for expansive Canadian welfare benefits, including free health care. Some enterprising asylum-seekers were even filing multiple claims and collecting welfare benefits under each fake name.

Other rejected claimants have been getting married, then arguing that they shouldn’t be deported for “compassionate” reasons. If they failed to impress one panel with that argument, they were shopping their claims around, hoping to find a lenient screener.

Such abuse has grown intolerable, Canadian officials say. “Order and control must be re-established over migratory movements,” warned Gerald Shannon, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. He spoke at a meeting of the U.N. agency for refugees last fall, responding to proposals that the United Nations’ definition of “refugee” be broadened.

Canada opposes such a move, Shannon said, adding that if international migrations weren’t curtailed, there would be a “loss of the domestic public support which is so critical in our efforts to assist true refugees.”

But Canadian refugee lawyers and advocacy groups say something else is at work here. They think the government isn’t trying to cut down on abuse and save precious funds for the real refugees, so much as to please a growing number of Canadians who have had it with foreigners and their problems.

“It’s clearly just a hardening of attitudes,” said David Matas, president of the Canadian Council for Refugees, an umbrella group for the many local organizations that try to help asylum-seekers make new lives in Canada. “As the refugee population builds up, there tends to be a backlash by certain elements of the public. And that creates a political climate to which the refugee (screening) board is not impervious.”

Refugee advocates cite the recent case of another Iranian, a 40-year-old woman who made the mistake of showing up at a party in her homeland without a veil. Indignant Revolutionary Guards tied her to a table and gave her 35 lashes with a heavy wire cable for her indiscretion.

When she came to Canada, she filed for permanent residence as a refugee, testifying that she had been hospitalized for a month and had lost her job as a result of the beating. But the refugee board said no, arguing that the flogging “was not exceedingly harsh” and that her experience didn’t fit the definition of persecution set out in Canada’s immigration laws.

The two examiners--both men--figured that the woman had “not suffered permanent physical damage and was only detained for a day.”

Refugee supporters and women’s groups rose in protest, but the government clung to its decision, arguing that the definition of “refugee” under the 1951 Geneva convention on refugees doesn’t specifically include those who suffer persecution because they are women. (Indeed, the convention grants asylum to those who fear persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political beliefs.)

The protests continued, though, and the government backed down, granting the woman the right to stay in Canada under “extraordinary humanitarian considerations.”

Refugee advocacy groups took from the case the message that the government wants to go by a strict definition of who is and who isn’t a refugee. And increasingly, they say, the screeners--who are supposed to be independent of the government and not subject to political pressure--are going along with the government’s wish.

“It’s getting hard to separate the decision-makers from the political climate in which they find themselves,” Matas said.

Without a doubt, many Canadians by now agree that too many foreigners are taking advantage of the refugee system. Canada, a huge, largely empty country with seemingly endless space for newcomers, has undergone a dramatic demographic change in the past two decades, not just because of large-scale refugee movements, but because of its immigration policies overall.

While there have been several great waves of immigration to Canada over the course of this century, the earlier ones were mainly from Europe and countries that now make up the Commonwealth of Independent States. (A variety of exclusionary practices--such as a $500 head tax on Chinese immigrants--conspired to keep nonwhites out.) Those newcomers blended in easily with the French and British stock who make up Canada’s official “founding peoples.”

It wasn’t until 1967 that Canada rewrote its immigration code, ending decades of discrimination by color. The revision has changed the face of the nation. Last year, 76% of the immigrants to Canada were from Africa, the Middle East, Asia or Latin America--people whom Canadians call the “visible minorities.”

At the same time, the Canadian government, in hopes of offsetting a population drain to the United States and resultant labor shortages, has increased its quotas for “independent immigrants”--those who have a skill Canada needs or who have pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars to start a business.

As recently as 1984, Canada was taking in just 90,000 immigrants per year. Now, in a country of about 26 million, the government hopes to take as many as 250,000 annually.

The independent immigrants are generally well-heeled, well-educated foreigners, and studies have shown them to be a boon for Canada.

But since they are overwhelmingly black, Middle Eastern or Asian, they stand out in staid, WASP-y Canada, a country where, until a generation ago, a pizza was exotic fare and signs warned Jews that they were unwelcome on certain public beaches.

And these days, Canadians are in no mood to ponder big-picture findings about the economic contributions of immigrants. On the contrary, the Canadian economy has been going through a long recession, far deeper and more painful than its counterpart in the United States.

An estimated one in 10 adult Canadians is now looking for work; those Canadians who still have jobs fear they may lose them to international competitive pressures, especially if Canada enters a free-trade accord with the United States and Mexico, as expected.

“I don’t want to paint a bad picture. I really do think we’re a more humane society than the United States,” said Gass, the lawyer for the Iranian who was ridiculed by the refugee screeners. “But in these hard economic times, the born Canadians are having a tough time finding jobs. People get frustrated, and everybody comes down on the immigrants.”

Indeed, white-supremacist fringe groups have been busy in Canada of late. In Alberta, they put on an “Aryan Fest” in a farmer’s field, and elsewhere the Ku Klux Klan and other groups have sponsored telephone dial-a-diatribe lines and posted hate mail on computer bulletin boards.

Even Canadians who wouldn’t stoop to joining the KKK have occasionally been sporting lapel buttons showing a white Canadian cowering between an East Indian and a Chinese. (Hong Kong, China and India ranked first, third and fourth last year among the countries sending immigrants to Canada.)

There have been fights to keep turban-wearing Sikhs out of Canadian Legion halls and to force Sikhs recruited into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to trade in their religious headgear for the regulation Stetson.

In Quebec, one Francophone leader, Sylvain Simard, has advocated moving immigrants “from cultural communities”--that is, those who aren’t of European descent--off Montreal Island and into the surrounding countryside.

In western Canada, the fastest-growing political movement by far is the populist Reform Party, which calls among other things for stripping refugee claimants of their constitutional due-process rights.

And at the federal level, one opposition Parliament member, Tom Wappel, proposed creating special camps called “welcome centers” on old military bases and housing refugee claimants there. Wappel’s plan called for giving the inmates of the “welcome centers” crash courses in “Canadian society, laws, values, expectations and everyday life.” Any asylum-seeker who refused to live in the camps would be deported straightaway.

The plan was shot down, but refugee advocates fear that the thinking behind it is gaining ground.

“It is true throughout the whole Western World: Refugee claimants are viewed with suspicion, because they’re coming from poorer countries and going to richer countries,” said Matas, noting that the government’s proposed immigration law changes call for fingerprinting future asylum-seekers. (The government says the fingerprinting is necessary to curb welfare fraud.)

Back at the refugee tribunal in Toronto, lawyer Gass notes with satisfaction that his Iranian client was awarded refugee status and the right to remain in Canada--but only after Gass went to the media with the examiners’ notes and created an uproar.

The notes show, he says, that the examiners had been planning to reject the Iranian, even though they found his plea “credible.”

Gass says that, for him, the most taxing moment in the entire case came when the young Iranian asked him why the adjudicators had been snickering as he described his agonies.

“I had a hard time explaining that Canadians really do have principles,” he said.

A Refuge for Asylum-Seekers

Here is the rate at which Canada accepted asylum-seekers in 1991, compared to other nations: Canada: 64% Britain: 21% France: 20% United States: 14% Denmark: 10% Netherlands: 10% Australia: 7% Germany: 7% Sweden: 5% Switzerland: 3%

But Canada’s refugee acceptance levels have been going down since 1989, the year its current refugee-screening system was started. 1992: 54%* 1991: 64% 1990: 70% 1989: 76% * First three months of ’92 only

Source: Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board