You may not know, but Immigration Canada does. Or at least, it pretends to.

These and other equally obtuse job classifications, more than 2,000 in all, are carefully inscribed in the department's General Occupations list -- a monument to bureaucratic insanity in which the department has attempted to estimate the demand for every conceivable type of job.

This only begins to describe the complex tangle of regulations bundled together under the authority of the 1978 Immigration Act, through which would-be Canadians arriving from abroad are streamed, sorted, graded and stamped like so many incoming sides of beef. The system has become so confused that even the federal immigration minister has seen fit to launch a top-to-bottom review of the act, the first since it was proclaimed. As the work of redrafting the regulations begins, let me offer a small suggestion for reform: Abolish them.

As degrading and humiliating as the selection process may be for the immigrants themselves, it is equally shaming and insulting to the nation that imposes it. The ills that bedevil the act are not merely those of uncertain application or improper drafting: the whole thing is rotten, a morass of untenable preferences and impossible distinctions, of misbegotten assumptions and unenforceable edicts, designed with no other end in mind than to make work for Immigration bureaucrats. It is a strategic investment in futility, a gross national waste of time.

As everybody knows, immigrants to Canada are divided into three broad classes --family, refugees, and independent or economic immigrants -- each further divided into subclasses and sub-subclasses. Miraculously, each of these categories takes precedence over the others: family class are admitted before refugees, who are assigned a higher priority than economic immigrants, who are now to be preferred to family class.

Not only is there no way to sort these categories in moral terms --who should be first in line, the wife of a wealthy businessman from Hong Kong or a dissident physicist from Beijing? What if she has an MBA? -- but in practice it is usually impossible to make any neat separation between them.

People migrate for a mixture of reasons, political and economic; economic deprivation and political oppression as often as not go hand in hand, and it is hard to say which the immigrant is more eager to escape.

The anomalies and absurdities only multiply as you burrow deeper within each category. What's a family? Who's a refugee? These are difficult enough questions, but they pale beside the conundrums posed by the independent category. The occupational demand calculations described above are only one small part of the "points" system, an elaborate compounding of an immigrant's score on a range of desirable attributes.

This bit of pseudo-science would be silly enough -- it would be interesting to know whether the bureaucrats who administer the system would themselves pass the points test -- were there any evidence that immigrants even remained within the professions to which they were admitted. But studies show that within a few years the distribution of immigrant occupations converges to that of the population at large.

Not that it seems to matter. Although less than 15 per cent of immigration is subjected to this sort of screening process, immigrants as a group consistently outperform the native-born population on every social and economic indicator. But then, the refugee-screening process seems to be equally irrelevant: although the department devotes several hundred adjudicators and support staff and at least $40 million every year to the task of separating the persecuted from the starving, at the end of the day nearly three-quarters of all those who apply are admitted.

Or take the investor program, through which it was envisaged Canada could direct wealthy immigrants to locate in undercapitalized provinces. As frustrating as it may be to the department, there seems to be no way to ensure that they remain in the designated province. But then, if all we wanted was their money, they could just send us a cheque. There is no reason to prefer investor immigrants to any other, unless it is held that an investor from halfway around the world is somehow able to spot investment opportunities that home-grown venture capitalists miss.

Of course, the most invidious distinction of all is the one most basic to the Immigration Department's mission: the one between those who chose to come to Canada and those who were lucky enough to be born here. But if we aren't yet ready to lift immigration controls altogether, let us at least do away with the classifications. Admit them by lot. If it means an oversupply of remedial gymnasts, I'm willing to take that chance.