Fraser: Trading rights for efficiency: Why Bill C‑12’s restrictive asylum measures will likely backfire

Interesting analysis:

…The rhetoric then was nearly identical to the rhetoric today: procedural restrictions would filter out “unfounded” claims made by applicants from “safe” countries and speed up the system.

Human rights concerns aside, did these deterrence policies meet their stated goal of making the system more efficient? 

My SSHRC-funded study of 178,873 asylum claims filed between 2006 and 2017 — one of the largest independent analyses of the Canadian asylum system to date — reveals they did not. 

As an expert witness cited in the Social Affairs, Science and Technology (SOCI) committee report on Bill C-12, I briefed the Senate on my study.

My research was based on a statistical analysis of asylum claims filed before and after the DCO policy came into effect (2006 to 2017) and interviews with immigration lawyers and adjudicators at the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) of Canada’s Refugee Protection Division. To date, mine is one of the few academic studies examining what makes Canada’s immigration procedures more or less efficient. 

The Harper government rightly identified withdrawn and abandoned asylum claims as a key source of inefficiency. In my analysis, I found that these types of unfinished claims significantly contribute to application backlogs:…

Source: Trading rights for efficiency: Why Bill C‑12’s restrictive asylum measures will likely backfire