Fortress America drives newcomers north,
WASHINGTON— Republican strategist Alex Conant told me this summer that there are two policies which are actually close to Donald Trump’s heart: higher tariffs and lower immigration.
Canada feels the effects of both. The most recent go-around on the tariff Tilt-a-Whirl jolted Canada in obvious ways. But his administration-spanning focus on tightening immigration eligibility and aggressive treatment towards asylum-seeking refugees also has effects on Canada — ones that may be less obvious to most people, and might change depending on the results of the election.
On one hand, Trump’s famously tightened immigration policies — suspending permanent resident applications and heavily restricting skilled immigrant work visas — might actually help Canada attract new skilled immigrants and the businesses that employ them.
“The part that we see the most, especially doing corporate practice, is companies struggling to get workers into the U.S., where Canada is more open. That is my guess to why we have so many offices for tech companies in Canada,” said Meera Thakrar an immigration lawyer with Larlee Rosenberg in Vancouver.
“I have corporate clients who have an operation in the U.S. and an operation in Canada, and, for different reasons,
they want to maintain their operation in the U.S.,” Thakrar said. “But anyone who’s not an American, they’re looking at Canada as a plan B.”
She was discussing immigrant workers from other countries, but Thakrar says she’s also seen a noticeable uptick in inquiries from Americans. “I have clients who are calling, and I do mean in corporate immigration … and they’ll just tell you very bluntly, like, ‘I can’t take it anymore. This is crazy. Like, we have a maniac in charge,’ ” she said.
Thakrar noted there was a similar uptick in interest among Americans about moving to Canada in 2016, but it didn’t lead to any huge influx of immigrants. CNN reported in 2017, for instance, that Canadian permanent resident applications from U.S. citizens increased by 3.6 per cent in the year after Trump took office — a small number compared to the 16 per cent of Americans who told pollsters that year they’d like to move out of the country permanently.
But immigration by skilled workers from the United States to Canada through the “express entry” system is already up significantly — more than 10,000 skilled immigrants who were residents of the U.S. arrived in 2019, almost twice as many as arrived in 2017. A significant majority of them were not U.S. citizens, which may indicate skilled workers from other countries are moving to Canada from the U.S. as a result of more favourable permanent resident policies here, compared with Trump’s tightening of rules and outright suspensions down south.
That isn’t the main thing most Canadians think of when they consider Trump’s immigration policies, however. They think, instead, of asylumseekers who have been detained, often in horrifying conditions. Those policies don’t just offend Canadians’ sense of human decency — they also cause stress on our own refugee system.
Trump’s policies have led to a massive surge in refugee claimants arriving in Canada. In 2018, for the first time, the number of refugees settling in Canada exceeded the number settling in the U.S., as the number of refugees accepted by the U.S. reached a historic low.
And the number of refugees arriving in Canada from the U.S. has surged. The
Safe Third Country agreement Canada has had in place with the U.S. since 2003 means that most asylum applicants who arrive at a marked border crossing with the U.S. are turned back — which has led to more than 50,000 asylum-seekers crossing the border outside of official ports of entry, creating a massive backlog of cases.
In July, a federal court ruled that agreement was unconstitutional because it made Canada complicit in “grave human rights violations” in the American detention of asylum seekers.
Implementation of that ruling is suspended while the Canadian government appeals, but it’s expected to lead to a much larger influx of refugees into Canada at the border if the decision stands.
As Queen’s University immigration law professor Sharry Aiken told the Star in July, Canada has an obligation to provide shelter to those seeking asylum —“Constitutional rights are not about the numbers” — but those numbers (and potential numbers) do provide logistical and possible political stress on the Canadian system.
That strain might be lessened if, as he is promising, Joe Biden wins and implements more humane policies. His critics point out that the Obama administration deported more people than Trump’s has, and that policies of migrant detention were also carried out under Obama.
Biden has said he regrets those policies, and his platform calls for a comprehensive overhaul of the immigration system, an increase in the number of refugees admitted from 18,000 to 125,000, the repeal of Trump’s executive orders on immigration and asylumseekers, and an overhaul of the refugee policy to make it more humane.
A re-embrace of immigration under a new administration might affect Canada’s ability to attract the kind of elite skilled workers the government often favours. But an overhaul of the American refugee system might ease the strain on the Canadian system.
It might also lead to a more humane system in the U.S. — one the Canadian courts wouldn’t characterize as marked by “grave human rights violations.” It is a tradeoff I suspect many Canadians would likely be happy to accept.
In 2018, for the first time, the number of refugees settling in Canada exceeded the number settling in the U.S., as the number accepted by the U.S. reached a historic low