A single male migrant arrives at the unofficial border crossing point at Roxham Road, in Québec on March 24, 2023. He was advised by Police officers before crossing that he will be arrested.Roger Lemoyne/The Globe and Mail
U.S. President Joe Biden did Canada a solid back in 2023, when his government agreed to new terms on the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) with Canada. A loophole in the previous agreement meant that migrants who crossed into Canada at irregular crossings, such as Roxham Road in Quebec, could still claim asylum in Canada. The U.S. could thus wash its hands of, for example, the nearly 40,000 people who entered Canada at unofficial points of entry in 2022 alone. “Sorry, Canada: they’re your problem now.”
Mr. Biden gave that up with the renegotiated STCA. Now the entire U.S.-Canada border is considered an official point of entry, meaning migrants who are intercepted after crossing into Canada are ineligible to claim asylum (with certain exceptions), and those who attempt to do so within 14 days of arrival will be sent back to the U.S. Those failed asylum seekers then became the U.S.’s problem again, which is a burden that Mr. Biden was and is willing to endure for a friend. It’s also one that we should assume, based on good evidence, that president-elect Donald Trump will not.
Mr. Trump’s election victory is the first step in a renewed crisis along the Canada-U.S. border. His first presidency saw a massive wave of asylum seekers flee to Canada after his administration announced it was ending the Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants, which Mr. Biden extended once in office, and Mr. Trump has threatened to revoke once again. But this time, it won’t be primarily Haitian immigrants trying to avoid deportation by escaping to Canada; Mr. Trump had promised to oversee the largest deportation effort in American history – one that has no price tag, and will target roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States.
Canada is already completely overwhelmed with asylum-seekers. In Ottawa, for example, over half of available shelter space is occupied by refugees; some have been forced to live in makeshift shelters. And while irregular border crossings have slowed considerably following the renegotiation of the STCA, asylum requests at airports have ballooned (more than 36,000 from January to September this year, compared to just 3,870 in 2017). We can also expect more inland claims as international students and temporary workers opt to file claims rather than return home following the government’s recent about-face on immigration targets.
Asylum claims now take 44 months to be processed, according to Roula Eatrides of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, and the department currently has a backlog of 250,000 claims. The Trump presidency will significantly compound Canada’s existing crisis, especially if he scraps the renegotiated STCA.
But let’s say Mr. Trump is feeling charitable when he gets back in office, or perhaps gets distracted by a paper bag floating in the wind outside the Oval Office window, and decides to leave the STCA as is. Asylum-seekers can still resort to more dangerous routes into Canada, through which they might be better able to avoid interception. (The RCMP says it started planning for a second Trump presidency months ago, but nearly 9,000 kilometres of border is an awful lot of territory to patrol.) If border-crossers do avoid interception, they can hide out for two weeks then make an inland claim.
If even a fraction of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. decide to make that journey rather than risk deportation once Mr. Trump is in office, our immigration, health and emergency shelter services will be so overwhelmed as to become non-functional (though a system that takes more than three years to process a claim could reasonably be considered non-functional already).
So what can Canada do? Start sucking up to Mr. Trump to try to protect the revised STCA? Hire more officers, more border control agents, more immigration staff? Build a wall, and make Mexico pay for it? Two of three are probably prudent actions. But there is something else Canada can do in the interim that is much more simple: start broadcasting, now, that asylum-seekers from the U.S. will be denied entry to Canada.
In 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rather infamously published a welcome to migrants of the world, tweeting, “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.” To now broadcast the opposite – through tweets, diplomatic missions, perhaps even advertisements – would be entirely off-brand for a government whose belief in its own sanctimony is probably powerful enough to run cars, but extraordinarily necessary considering the circumstances. Asylum-seekers risk their lives with human smugglers, treacherous conditions, and a dearth of resources and services when and if they do make it to Canada. It wouldn’t be fair to them, nor is it fair to those already in the country, for the government to leave the misconception that Canada can accommodate unchecked.