At the border, a test of compassion

The stream of Haitian asylum seekers arriving in Quebec from the United States in recent weeks poses a test of Canadian compassion and of the readiness of our refugee policy and machinery to deal with the human challenges of a changing world.

On compassion, early signals are encouraging. As the number of Haitians crossing the border illegally into Quebec sextupled over the last month, from 50 to 300 per day, all levels of government have moved quickly to accommodate the asylum seekers.

This week, the Canadian Army set up a camp at the border in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., to help manage the influx. As Montreal’s shelters reached capacity, the city opened up Olympic Stadium, the former home of the Expos, to house the newcomers. Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre has repeatedly assured residents there is room for these asylum claimants and that his vision of Montreal as a sanctuary city requires that they be welcomed with open arms.

That’s as it should be. Critics who imply the surge in border crossings is approaching a crisis vastly overstate the threat. Roughly 6,500 people have crossed into Quebec so far this year. That is a notable increase over last year, but is by no means unprecedented in recent history. In 2008, even more, around 12,000 people, walked into the province over the same period. Nor, in the larger scheme of things, does the current uptick truly strain our capacity. Canada plans to take in some 300,000 immigrants this year, including 40,000 refugees.

The surge in border-crossings is the result of a change of policy in the U.S. that threatens to deport these people back to their impoverished homeland, ravaged over the last decade by natural disasters and political upheaval. Many of the border-crossers seem to be under the impression that they will be granted automatic asylum in Canada. That is not case. The temporary protections being suspended in the U.S. have already been suspended here. All the asylum seekers are guaranteed in Canada is a fair hearing. This is a numerically limited group. Some 40,000 Haitians living in the U.S will be affected by the policy shift. Of those, many won’t come here and of those who do, many will not be granted asylum. Coderre and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are right that we can manage these numbers fairly and with compassion.

That said, the spike in illegal crossings has exposed a number of critical gaps in our refugee policy and raised important questions about our readiness to process and integrate those coming into the country.

There is, for instance, the question of whether the definitions we use for refugees today accurately reflect the increasingly complex reality asylum-seekers face.

The Haitians in North America, for instance, were given temporary sanctuary after an earthquake devastated their country in 2010. Yet as those protections expired, it became clear that no framework existed for returning these people to a home from which they had long been absent and to which many have little remaining connection. As climate change does its work, bringing floods, fires and droughts, it is reasonable to expect that this unusual scenario will become increasingly usual.

Another issue is whether we have adequately adapted our refugee system to Donald Trump’s closed-off America. The so-called Safe Third Party Agreement, for instance, which dictates that most refugees who first land in the United States cannot then claim asylum in Canada, and vice versa, is not sustainable in the Trump era, as the Star has argued before and the current case seems to illustrate.

The agreement is explicitly premised on the assumption that each country has a fair and functioning refugee policy. But when it comes to the U.S., that’s now a bad assumption. Amid Donald Trump’s ugly travel bans and immigration crackdowns, many in desperate need of asylum remain in danger and in limbo.

In the case of the Haitians, while the U.S. and Canada have both suspended temporary bans on deportation to Haiti, the U.S. rhetoric on refugees in general and on Haiti in particular has given both the Haitians and Canada cause to doubt that Washington will deal compassionately with these asylum claims.

Even if Ottawa is reluctant, for a range of understandable political reasons, to take on the Safe Third Party Agreement, it certainly shouldn’t be surprised that asylum seekers are exploiting the loophole that allows them to circumvent the agreement by entering the country illegally. Prime Minister Trudeau has urged asylum seekers to cross only at official checkpoints, but if they do as he asks they will be turned away.

They won’t, of course, because they are now desperately caught between a country that doesn’t want them and one that can’t support them. They believe, with some reason, that Canada offers a better chance.

Finally, the influx of Haitians crystallizes what has been a recurrent tension in our refugee policy: namely, how do we achieve the dual goals of protecting the integrity of the refugee system and the special needs of asylum seekers, who will be seen by many as queue jumpers? We have always navigated this tension in an ad hoc way, but given the current circumstances, surely it’s time we aimed higher.

For one thing, the queuing problem is aggravated by the fact that our system is woefully under-resourced and that we have no mechanisms in place to deal with surges like the one we’re now seeing.

For instance, the Immigration and Refugee Board, which decides on such claims, lacks the resources to keep up in the best of times, never mind amid the current influx.

The Trudeau government has exacerbated this problem, filling the board’s many vacancies with no hint of the urgency that the circumstances demand. Moreover, the influx of Haitians, discrete as it is, would seem to justify a discretely resourced process. Yet no formal rules exist for triggering such a process. If Trudeau is after order, he ought to learn the lessons of the current surge. There will be more like it.

Amid the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War and a moment of American retrenchment, the Trudeau government has rightly suggested that it’s time to place a renewed emphasis on the humanitarian purpose of our immigration and refugee policy. Changing circumstances, which have arrived so loudly at the Quebec border, will force us to confront directly what we mean by our promises of openness and whether we are truly willing to do what’s necessary to deliver.

Amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s ugly travel bans and immigration crackdowns, many people in desperate need of asylum remain in danger and in limbo