If China skimps on its enforcement of the already skimpy sanctions package against North Korea voted out by the U.N. Security Council over the weekend, it will be in large part because China fears an influx of North Korean refugees should the sanctions destabilize Kim Jong Il’s regime. Well, this represents an opportunity for America and her democratic allies. We could take the refugees. And if our allies don’t want them, America could take them all.

It would be a win-win-win. The refugees would be able to build lives in free nations that will provide them not only with basic necessities like food but with opportunities to live up to their God-given potential, something they’d never get in unfree North Korea or onlyslightly-less-unfree Communist China. The Chinese regime would be free of the “threat” posed by a massive immigration. And the democracies would get a North Korea undermined by a rapid population drop, not to mention the economic benefits inherent in such an influx of talent and entrepreneurial energy.

As it stands, refugees are trickling over the border into China anyway, whether or not China wants them, a point illuminated by Melanie Kirkpatrick in an important op-ed piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. China’s low-ball estimate of the number of refugees over the past 20 years is about 400,000, of which it has deported at least 133,000.Those who are deported face penalties ranging from internment to death for violating Kim’s law against emigration.

Such deportation looms over refugees who have already overcome perilous odds. Ms. Kirkpatrick, who has been following this story closely, reports of one document smuggled out of China that recounts a single day in 2003 in which 53 bodies of refugees were found floating in a river near the border, apparently shot by North Korean border guards. Not since the Berlin Wall has such a situation obtained, but this time it’s worse. While East Germans who survived the perils of the Wall were greeted with open arms by their West German brethren, the Chinese communists are content to ship North Koreans home to near-certain death.

China may never accept those refugees with open arms, and only a comparison to life in North Korea could make life in China seem like an appealing option, anyway. Better by far to offer refugees a place in the free world. North Korea’s greatest unexploited resource is its people, and refugees tend to be some of the most resourceful people in dysfunctional countries. They’re the ones with the imagination and grit to leave everything behind and risk death to build better lives for themselves. If China doesn’t want them, so much the better for the free-market democracies.

Much has been said this week about whether China will live up to its obligations under the Security Council resolution or whether China will even adhere to the common sense that would seem to argue for pulling out all the stops to avert a nuclear North Korea. Why wait for, let alone count on, China? The matter of what to do about North Korea’s enslaved people transcends mere strategy. It has an extraordinarily compelling moral dimension. For 400 years, America has been a place where the oppressed could come for a new life. Now is no time to stop.