Well, Mr. Chairman, I think that follows through from Mr. St-Cyr's questions.
We want to be a country that is open to providing protection to victims of persecution and violence. That is our best tradition, it's in our national character, and we do just that. We do it better, virtually, than any other country that I'm aware of in the world. I make no apologies for this country's approach to refugees, to victims of persecution. This year we will land in Canada, as permanent residents, more than 10,000 people who have been determined by the United Nations to be refugees. The majority of them are government-assisted refugees who we will help to establish in Canada, and about a quarter of them are privately sponsored refugees who—like the Vietnamese boat people 30 years ago—will be settled with the assistance of local communities, such as parishes and community organizations.
This is a tremendous thing, Mr. Chairman. There are countries substantially larger than Canada that receive substantially fewer resettled refugees. Having said that, we in Canada, with a population of 33 million, are not in a position to welcome all of the world's refugees and certainly not all at once. There are more than 10 million refugees in UN camps abroad, and there are tens of millions of people who could probably make legitimate asylum claims in a system like Canada's. We cannot practically take that entire global burden on our shoulders. We do far more than our share, according to Abraham Abraham, the representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees here in Canada.
Our government is contributing more to global refugee relief than any government in the history of Canada. We have increased, effectively, our operational target for resettlement of refugees to Canada this year, in part, as Mr. Dykstra has indicated, through our program for refugees in the Middle East, most of whom will be Iraqi, many of whom are persecuted because of their religion. In fact, for this and each of the two subsequent years, we will be receiving 3,900 refugees from that region, mostly from Iraq. That's more than any other country in the world, except the United States, and it's far more in absolute terms than any other country. We are receiving, over the course of a number of years, 5,000 refugees from the Burmese Karen population who have been living in camps on the border between Thailand and Burma. We're receiving 5,000 Bhutanese Hindus who have been sitting in refugee camps in Nepal. We're receiving thousands of Rohingya Muslims who have been sitting in UN refugee camps in Bangladesh.
Mr. Chairman, we are doing what we can, but if we really want to take the approach Mr. St-Cyr wants and just open the doors to a flood of asylum claimants, someone has to pay for that. There is finite capacity for us to accept a certain number of people in a year. Yes, we have the highest relative level of immigration of permanent residents in the developed world at 0.8% of population, but we cannot increase that by orders of magnitude and resettle people here successfully. There are limits to how many people we can house. Take the example of the Roma claimants in the Toronto area. According to reports I've received, public housing facilities were overflowing in the spring and summer of this year when we were seeing as much as half of the passengers on direct flights from Prague making asylum claims.
There are practical limits to our generosity. I'm simply saying that we need to be soft-hearted but hard-headed about the balance between our generosity and the practical limits of the number of people we can accept. We have no apologies to make in this regard. Let me say that in any refugee reform package that I bring forward to Parliament, I would like to see an increase in the number of people we resettle to this country who are defined by the UN to be refugees. I think we can only responsibly make that undertaking if we can reduce the incentive for abuse for people to come—they cost our taxpayers at least $29,000 per case. This is not free. The kind of abuse that we were seeing from particular source countries earlier this year costs our taxpayers. Those are dollars that could be going to help real victims of real persecution around the world. I think we need to get our priorities right.
Being in government and being in public service is about making choices, and I choose to prioritize real victims of persecution over immigrants coming through the back door of our asylum system.
