Opinion on the enduring crisis in our refugee determination system divides along mock-class lines, as does its expression. If you're a working-class redneck, you phone open-line radio shows to attack refugee claimants as spongers. If you're an educated liberal, you write editorials attacking the immigration consultants who advised them.

Those consultants clearly hold a special place in the hearts of caring Canadians. They are invariably described in the news pages as unscrupulous. But on the editorial page, mere unscrupulous immigration consultants become vermin, traffickers in human flesh. The Toronto Star referred to them in one outburst this week as refugee racketeers, scam artists, and, in a final flourish, scumbags.

What, exactly, qualifies immigration consultants, scrupulous or other, for such calumny? They are not, first of all, counseling would-be immigrants to break the law. They are counseling them to test it: show up, ask for refugee status, and see what happens. The system is there to evaluate them; if it's inadequate, that's not their fault.

The evidence, moreover, is that refugee claimants are getting value for money. For most immigrants, the present value of the extra income earned by living and working in Canada is well in excess of anything the consultants might dream of charging.

Even the chance of admission is clearly worth the price: the proof is that people are willing to pay it. And the likelihood has at least until now been rather high. The 20,000 or so refugees allowed in under the 1986 amnesty have clearly profited from the consultants' advice. I suspect the latest measures will happily amount to a disguised amnesty for all but a well-advertised few of the 85,000 in the current backlog.

HYSTERIA

So if these consultants are not breaking the law and have thousands of satisfied customers, whence the abuse?

Much of the evidence against them has been marshaled by those selfless defenders of the public interest, the Canadian Bar Association and the Law Society of Upper Canada. Many lawyers act as immigration consultants. But many more immigration consultants, we are warned, are not lawyers. The testimony of a professional group against its competitors is hardly grounds for hysteria.

It is touching, moreover, to see this sudden passion of Canadians for administrative integrity. One looks for a similar rush now to defend the sanctity of the tax code and the customs schedule - legions of citizens volunteering to declare their capital gains exactly by the book, or proudly paying full duty on their new watch at the border.

Indeed, any time lots of people are paying other people loads of money to get around a law, it ought to be a tip that something's wrong with the law. One of the best arguments for free trade and tax reform is that they will put an end to the petty corruption of everday Canadian morals of smuggling and tax avoidance. See also ''Drug epidemic.''

Unscrupulous immigration consultants, or as I call them, freedom fighters, are performing a useful social service, in the same way as those other economic pariahs, the slum landlord or the sweatshop owner, enabling individuals to trade on mutually satisfactory terms in the face of official attempts to set unsatisfactory terms of trade.

If we want to put these people out of business, there's a simple solution: stop doing whatever it is that creates a demand for their services. In other words, as far as the immigration market is concerned, let 'em in.

But for those unable to stomach unrestricted immigration, try this: let's at least get rid of the distinction between a refugee and an immigrant. The need to classify immigrants in this way is the basis of our present difficulty. Yet it reflects an ordering of political and economic motives that is impossible in practice and untenable in principle.

The defection of the 17-year-old Czech hockey star, Petr Nedved, after a hockey tournament in Calgary this week, is a good example. Does he have a ''well- founded fear of persecution?'' Is it for his political views that he seeks asylum, or might it have something to do with the 1990 NHL draft?

Yet it's pretty well certain he will be allowed to stay, a) because he is from a communist country, and we don't like them, b) because he is a potential franchise player, and we like them, and c) because when it comes to immigration, Canadians are - what's the word? Dishonest? Hypocritical? Oh, yes. Unscrupulous.