LILLEY: Toronto City Hall rolls out the open borders welcome mat

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Forget just being a sanctuary city, Toronto is now officially advocating for citizenship for all illegal immigrants.

Sorry, let me put that in the terms that our better thans at City Hall would find acceptable – undocumented residents.

It’s just a fancy way to say that someone came here, or stayed here, against the rules.

At a ceremony on Tuesday, Deputy Mayor Ausma Malik called for the “regularization” of illegal immigrants.

Toronto declared itself a sanctuary city more than a decade ago, but now it doesn’t like the fallout. The city wants the federal government and the province to bail them out from the costs of overwhelmed shelters now filled with up to 40% of all shelter spaces taken up by asylum seekers.

Toronto wanted to be a sanctuary city, at least in name, they just didn’t want the costs associated with the move. Which brings us to this past Tuesday and the celebration of Undocumented Residents Day at City Hall.

At the ceremony , inside council chambers, Deputy Mayor and Spadina-Fort York Councillor Ausma Malik warned of a growing anti-immigrant sentiment in Canada.

Stop and think about that for a moment.

A woman who wears a hijab, whose parents immigrated to this country and yet was still elected as councillor and appointed as deputy mayor is warning or anti-immigrant sentiment. And of course the way that she is framing all of this is that this anti-immigrant sentiment is based in racism of course.

Now, step back further for a moment and remember that Malik was named deputy mayor by Olivia Chow. Chow was elected mayor even though she’s originally from China and still speaks English with an accent.

If we were a city teeming with anti-immigrant sentiment, that wouldn’t have happened.

We also would have had the runners up to be mayor be a woman who immigrated from Portugal or a black man who came to Canada from Britain with his Jamaican parents.

Yet, Malik implies a city that would elect her and Chow and many other councillors who are black, Chinese, Jewish, Muslim and more is somehow racist and teeming with anti-immigrant sentiment?

I wonder at times if some politicians think before they speak.

The only anti-immigrant sentiment that I have seen grow over the past while is a question of how many people we are bringing into this country. With more than one million people coming into Canada, even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said we are bringing in people faster than we can absorb them.

There is real concern about housing affordability, which has nothing to do with racism or anti-immigrant sentiment but with simple math.

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Now, Malik wants to bring in a process of “regularization” for what she calls “undocumented residents.”

“As we continue to see anti-immigrant rhetoric on the rise in Canada and around the world, we amplify calls from community leaders and advocates for an immediate, broad and inclusive regularization program that provides pathways to permanent resident status for all undocumented residents,” Malik said.

“Together, we will continue to dismantle systems of colonialism and anti-Black racism”

What Malik and, by extension, Mayor Chow and city officials call undocumented, most of us call illegal.

Some snuck into the country or crossed the border illegally, some came on a visa and stayed too long, while others are refugee claimants who have been rejected because their claims are bogus. The unifying factor here is that they didn’t follow the rules as so many millions of immigrants before have done.

I sent questions to Malik’s office asking if she supports open borders and wants to do away with Canada’s existing immigration system. Based on her comments Tuesday, those are valid questions, but her office refused to answer three emails and two phone calls on the issue.

All we know is that Malik, and Mayor Chow, support rewarding people who broke the rules to come into this country.

blilley@postmedia.com