For those of us who were born in Canada, immigration scandals and controversies tend to float by without too much effect. We become perturbed only when we know personally someone caught in the gears of a broken-down system that is starting to amount to an international embarrassment.

My own unfortunate insight into the system has come through the cases of three Catholic priests who came from the Congo over four years ago — two in Yarmouth County, N.S., Crépin Khonde at Ste-Anne-du-Ruisseau and Edgar Mvubu at West Pubnico; and Joseph Navambu in a parish in northern New Brunswick.

They’re still “temporary” visitors, unable to know anything about their applications for permanent residency; unable to go home for a visit or for family emergencies because they won’t be able to get back in; facing the prospect of being turfed out of the country when their visitor status comes to an end next year; and watching with dismay as some 30 colleagues from their Congolese diocese, who went to Europe, got their permanent residency papers within six months.

“Even in Switzerland, which is very hard to get into,” exclaims Father Khonde, who has the patience of Job and is extremely reluctant to criticize, but whose frustration and astonishment grow by the day. “We keep getting forms back, telling us we had filled out the wrong ones — but nobody can tell us what the right forms are!” Sometimes, he says, “it goes around in your mind — I’ve wondered if it’s because I’m from Africa, because I’m French-speaking, because I’m a priest.”

Well, no, it’s none of those things. Apparently, it happens to everybody in some form or another. At least, almost everybody. The whole point of the “strippergate” controversy now howling in Ottawa — in which an exotic dancer who worked on Immigration Minister Judy Sgro’s election campaign got her resident’s permit ahead of nearly 700,000 waiting in line — is that the system is not only bunged up, it’s inconsistent: Some can apparently get ahead through luck, influence or quirks in the system. Father Khonde says he knows a quirky one. “We were told when we came that ecclesiastical workers didn’t need work permits,” he says. But one African priest who went to Ontario, perhaps with a keener nose for the ways of bureaucracy, applied for a work permit anyway and now has his permanent papers.

As for how bad it is, NDP immigration critic Bill Siksay, a B.C. MP, says most MPs have had a dramatic increase in their immigration cases since about two years ago — to the point where most big city MPs have a full-time staffer, and some have more, dealing only with backlogged immigration cases. Meanwhile, Ottawa recently backed off in the face of a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 260,000 would-be immigrants who had been waiting for years to have their claims processed, only to have to start all over again because Ottawa imposed more stringent rules in 2003. Ottawa has now agreed to continue processing them under the old rules. These are mostly professional people — doctors and engineers and the like, the type we say we’re desperate to get.

There are many reasons for this impaired state of affairs, says Siksay, but the main one is that the Immigration Department is understaffed and overworked. Robert Thibault, a Nova Scotia Liberal MP, adds a more intriguing twist: “Things seem to have started going wrong with the cutbacks of 1995 when we closed all those embassies,” he says.

That remarkably frank statement refers to the cuts of the famous Paul Martin budget — the one that ultimately led to huge federal surpluses and tax cuts for which the prime minister has been taking bows ever since. But the other effect of those cuts was to cripple many functioning national institutions, among them the Immigration Department.

Another factor in slowing things down has been increased security screening since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. This has knotted-up even more an already convoluted system.

So, what’s being done to fix it? On one front, there has been some apparent progress, although it has been despicably late. This is a move to upgrade the qualifications of Immigration Board judges, who are mainly untrained political appointees often following slapdash procedure — the source of a great deal of inconsistency in applying the rules, not to mention occasional accusations of prejudice and abuse and, in Montreal a couple of years ago, a bribery scandal.

One of the damaging aspects of this state of affairs involves refugees, says Siksay. Canada got a medal from the UN for its system of private sponsorships for refugees. Since then, the process has got so slow that the sponsoring groups have tended to drift away.

Nevertheless, Siksay gives the embattled Judy Sgro marks for wanting “a different process for the 21st century.” Adds Thibault: “We’re working on it in the immigration committee we’ve got going, and we’re trying to fix it.”

But it’s not fixed yet. The priests’ case is still hanging, despite supposed help from Thibault’s office. Feeling increasingly desperate, they recently approached the area senator. “I feel you have to keep knocking on doors. If you can find the right one, it will open,” says Father Khonde, with a kind of desperate optimism. He may be right. If so, it sounds like something right out of Franz Kafka. It shouldn’t be that way in a supposedly advanced country.