A migrant takes a photo of a new border sign before deciding to cross into Canada at Roxham Road, an unofficial crossing point from New York State to Quebec for asylum seekers, in Champlain, New York, U.S. March 25, 2023. REUTERS/Christinne MuschiCHRISTINNE MUSCHI/Reuters
It’s almost impossible to travel to Canada from Europe, Africa or Asia unless Canada lets you come. We’re surrounded by oceans.
Our land border is a very different story. There are thousands of places, from British Columbia to New Brunswick, where it’s easy enough to simply walk into Canada.
Take 0 Avenue. It runs parallel to the border for 29 kilometres in Metro Vancouver and beyond. The United States is at the pavement’s southern shoulder. There’s even a stretch where 0 Avenue runs parallel to an American street called Boundary Road, separated by a grassy median.
Picture the Berlin Wall. Now picture the opposite. That’s a lot of the Canada-U.S. border. Roxham Road – where, between 2017 and 2023, tens of thousands of people took one small step out of the U.S. and one giant leap into a Canadian refugee claim – is not geographically unique. Far from it.
That’s why the possibility of a supersized Roxham Road sequel is very real. U.S. president-elect Donald Trump says he wants to mount the biggest deportation program in American history, and unlike his first term, this time he apparently means it.
There are an estimated 11 million people living in the United States without legal status. There are also several million who crossed from Mexico (most are not Mexicans) to make a refugee claim; they are legal residents for now, but perhaps not for long. The Trump administration would like to deport most of them; it would like it even more if they self-deported.
For many, Canada could be the logical destination. But Ottawa has to persuade Washington to avoid encouraging or enabling that. It also has to persuade millions of people in the U.S. that coming here is not an option.
On the first matter, Canada has some leverage with the U.S. That’s because we’re the source of a growing American border concern. In the 2024 fiscal year, more than 19,000 people, nearly all non-Canadians, were apprehended trying to enter the U.S. from Canada in what American authorities call the Swanton sector, which runs from Lake Ontario to New Hampshire. That’s nearly triple the figure for 2023, and 18 times higher than in 2022.
Mr. Trump’s nominated “border czar,” Tom Homan, is originally from upstate New York and wants to resolve this issue. Ottawa should be eager to help.
Canada will always have an immigration policy that is different from the U.S., independent of it and (hopefully) a lot smarter. We will decide how many immigrants to accept, and how they are chosen. But on border integrity, a precondition of national sovereignty, Washington and Ottawa should be aligned, regardless of who’s in the White House.
Both countries want to limit the number of people arriving and staying without invitation or legal justification. And Canada badly wants refugee claims decided in the first country of arrival.
On Wednesday, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said that when it comes to border security, “there is no daylight at all between the goals of our two countries.” Ottawa needs to keep saying that.
Roxham Road is closed because of the expanded Safe Third Country Agreement, under which someone who comes to Canada from the U.S. to make a refugee claim can generally be returned to the U.S., for their claim to be decided there. That’s also what the U.S. wants Mexico to agree to, and Canada should share that goal. It’s profoundly in our national interest for the Trump administration to embrace and honour this principle.
Canada is not ready for a refugee crisis, because we’re already in one. More than 132,000 refugee claims were made in the first nine months of this year. Many are people on tourist visas who filed their claim after they got off the plane; others are visa students. The numbers have been steadily growing. In 2019, there were 62,000 claims. Between 2011 and 2016, the annual average was just 18,250.
The Immigration and Refugee Board suddenly finds itself with 260,000 cases pending – quadruple the backlog of two years ago. Processing a case now takes 44 months. Absent major reforms, that figure is sure to rise.
It’s a similar story when it comes to those who overstay their temporary visas and cease to be legal residents of Canada: there isn’t enough of a bureaucracy to count them, let alone compel them to leave. If you can get into Canada, you can stay indefinitely and maybe forever.
That’s why Canada used to do such a good job of vetting people applying for temporary visas, from tourists to students. We had a considerably higher legal immigration rate than the Americans, but we were also, quietly yet effectively, tougher at the border.
For our own sake, we have to get back to that. It’s also one of the things we can do to persuade Washington to keep us out of its sights.