Migrant influx from U.S. tests immigration system
It’s a phenomenon that has splintered the European Union, animated a surge in far-right politics across that continent and put German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s professional future at considerable risk: the uncontrolled flow of asylum seekers from Middle Eastern and African nations. And for the first time in many years, Canadians are confronting it as well: last week, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) reported more than 400 people had illegally crossed the 49th parallel from North Dakota into Manitoba this fiscal year. With six weeks left to go in the year, that’s almost five times as many as crossed three years ago. In January alone, the RCMP reports 452 asylum claims were made at the border in Quebec, more than three times the year before.
Canadians do not seem particularly alarmed by this, and for good reason: the numbers are relatively small; the crossers are happy to report themselves to authorities; and the fact is, there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it. On Thursday, La Presse reported the nearly comical scene of RCMP officers shouting at Omar, a 31-year-old Yemeni, that it was illegal for him to cross the border. Over he went, into handcuffs, and the Canadian refugee determination process.
“We have virtually no resources at the border,” says Christian Leuprecht, a political-science professor at Royal Military College and Queen’s University. “The way (the Mounties) respond is when the Americans tip them off.” And, in any event, he says, “once someone reaches the border it’s too late,” to stop them, even if we wanted to. Anyone who can plant his feet on Canadian soil is entitled to make a claim for asylum.
Many have attributed this phenomenon to President Trump’s executive orders suspending refugee claims and barring citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries. It’s important to recognize this isn’t a brand new situation: people have always walked across the border and claimed asylum, and, in fact, numbers have been trending up for two years. After all, the UN Refugee Agency says there are more displaced people today than at any point in history.
But the current Trump-related surge is real, and there is little reason to expect it to subside. This is all happening in the dead of winter, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair told reporters in Ottawa on Wednesday. “As the weather warms up … we’re going to face a situation that we’ve never seen before,” he predicted. And there is reason to worry Canada might not be adequately resourced if that should come to pass.
We are talking, after all, about an awful lot of potential border-crossers — perhaps 11 million people are in the U.S. illegally. There are people, like Omar, who claim they always intended to come to Canada. “I spent several years in Saudi Arabia, but you will never get legal status there,” he told La Presse. “It’s impossible to make a living.” (He will have to prove a fear of persecution in Yemen, not just penury, to gain refugee status.)
There are people who hoped to claim asylum in the United States, but now have doubts. Winnipeg refugee lawyer David Matas says he has several Somali clients in that situation.
“There are many Latin Americans in the United States who fear return to their home country,” says Laura Best, an immigration lawyer in Vancouver. “I think it is quite likely that we’ll be seeing more of those as the crackdown on deportations heats up.”
And then there are the millions of undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America — economic migrants who are suddenly living in an even more fearful and less certain climate. President Obama deported some 2.5 million illegal immigrants, more than any of his predecessors. But Trump has vowed to deport more than that, and faster, and he clearly relishes the thought.
And U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) isn’t just rounding up non-violent criminals anymore. Guadalupe García de Rayos, mother of two Americanborn children, pleaded guilty nearly 10 years ago for working under a fake ID — a lowest-level felony. When she dutifully showed up for her twice-annual check-in with ICE last week in Phoenix, she was detained and ordered deported, according to a report in the Washington Post. And NPR audiences this past week heard about how a Denver woman, Jeanette Vizguerra, in a nearly identical situation, took sanctuary at a Unitarian church rather than risk keeping her own ICE appointment. And, according to the New York Times, apparently unfounded rumours swirl about random checkpoints and sweeps of parking lots where undocumented day labourers find work.
In such an atmosphere, an allbut-entirely undefended border to the north might seem an enticing prospect, even if only for temporary safe harbour. Douglas Massey, co-director of Princeton University’s Mexican Migration Project, says he expects little proactive migration among undocumented Latin Americans — and mostly southward.
“Nearly two-thirds (of undocumented immigrants) have been in the U.S. for at least decade and a fifth have been present for 20-plus years,” he says. “A large fraction of these people have U.S.-born citizen children. I expect most … will try to remain in place and avoid deportation.”
Still, it wouldn’t take a big chunk of them to constitute a significant burden on the Canadian system — one that still struggles to deal with 40,000 hand-chosen Syrian refugees. “I do not yet know of any individuals considering the possibility of seeking asylum in Canada,” says Denise Gilman, director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, “but it would not surprise me at all.”
Among refugee advocates, the No. 1 goal is suspending the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which has been in effect for more than 12 years. It prohibits most people arriving at a Canadian land border crossing from making a refugee claim, on the premise that the U.S. is a perfectly good place to claim asylum as well. The idea is, people have to apply in the country they arrive in first.
Most refugee advocates have always insisted the American system isn’t “safe” at all; under Trump’s executive orders they believe it’s less safe than ever. And the STCA is a difficult document to defend except as a clumsy way of dissuading all northward traffic. Because it only applies to “any person who arrives at a land border port of entry,” it encourages the determined simply to go around those ports of entry. For example, if someone crosses at a field, the STCA would not apply to them. Ridiculously, illegal entrants apprehended in Quebec are often processed at the Lacolle border crossing, which would otherwise have turned them back.
“The Safe Third Country is encouraging people to enter Canada dangerously and surreptitiously, and I don’t see how that can possibly be in our interests,” says Best. Furthermore, it creates a market for human smugglers, says York University law professor Sean Rehaag, who advocates suspending the STCA for three months to help those affected by the Trumpian chaos and “see what happens.”
But there is no sign the Liberal government in Ottawa is considering that. Immigration minister Ahmed Hussen has argued the executive orders don’t affect refugee claimants who are already in the United States. Certainly, it would be ironic if they did suspend it: it was Jean Chrétien’s Liberals who struck the STCA with Washington during a previous surge in overland refugee claimants after the 9/11 attacks, when many Muslim Americans pondered similar fears for their futures.
“The worst thing that the government can do is revoke the Safe Third Country Agreement,” says Leuprecht. “Then you’ll have a flood of people showing up at the border” — and likely cheese off Washington too, he suggests. And Martin Collacott of the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform suspects the Liberals realize the practical limits of their sunny ways on this file.
In opposition, the Liberals pilloried Conservative immigration and refugee policy as cruel and ham-handed. They opposed an expedited process for citizens of so-called “designated countries of origin” including Mexicans, who before 2010 bogged the system down with thousands of unfunded claims. (The slower the system, the bigger the incentive for nohope claimants to come: in two or three years you can make some good money, perhaps have some Canadian-citizen children.) And the Liberals railed against the visa requirement for Mexican citizens, implemented in 2009 as a way of reducing the number of such claims.
Say what you will about the Tories’ approach, it reduced the number of claims, the number of failed claims, the backlog of claims and the average time it takes to process a claim. At the end of 2010 there were 51,000 outstanding claims; as of the third quarter of 2016, there were fewer than 21,000. “Of the claims that have been finalized in the new system, the average processing time for refugee claims is approximately four months, as opposed to approximately 22 months prior to 2012,” says Immigration and Refugee Board spokesperson Anna Pape.
In government the Liberals dropped an appeal of a Federal Court ruling striking down significant portions of the expedited process. In December they lifted the visa requirement for Mexicans. And lo and behold, the claims started coming up again — 70 in December last year alone, compared with 111 in all of 2015. (The Immigration and Refugee Board hasn’t released more current figures.) That’s nothing compared with what it used to be, but in light of the situation stateside it’s hardly reassuring.
For Canada, selfishly speaking, there is potential good news amid the fear and turmoil in Donald Trump’s America. Immigration lawyers “have been absolutely slammed” since Trump’s election, says Best. “There’s no doubt that people who have options are considering leaving” and if Canada can pick and choose — as it’s used to doing — it stands to benefit from “a pretty strong brain gain.”
But Canadian support for immigration and refugee resettlement seems to be predicated on an assumption that the system more or less works. When Canadians sense immigrants or refugees “jumping the queue” — whether or not an actual queue exists — they tend to react badly. Mass uncontrolled immigration “poisons the debate,” says Howard Anglin, who was chief of staff to Jason Kenney when he was immigration minister. Just look at the U.S.
Liberal and Conservative governments alike have understood and implemented the sometimes ugly compromises necessary to keep Canada’s refugee system under control. If these Liberals are confronting that only now, the chaos south of the border can only be worrisome.