Too soon to put Canadian price tag on Trump’s immigration overhaul: officials

2017/03/22 Leave a comment

Useful questioning of the Minister and officials, and reasonable responses to an evolving situation:

The Liberal government is examining whether the fallout from U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration will require more cash to be spent north of the border.

But both immigration officials and the federal minister told a House of Commons committee that right now, there’s no new money.

Departmental officials say Trump’s executive orders are too new for them to be able to estimate how much they could cost Canada and in what ways.

The Immigration and Refugee Board, however, has been saying for months that a rise in the number of asylum claims is already straining its resources and it has put in a pitch for more cash.

Board officials had been hoping to get an answer in Wednesday’s federal budget but Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen wouldn’t commit Monday to new funds.

He says the fact that claims have been rising at the IRB since 2015 is proof the problem goes beyond the so-called Trump effect.

The board did receive about $4.5-million to deal with an expected increase in claims from Mexican nationals following a government decision to lift visas for Mexicans last December.

Those numbers are already up over last year – 241 Mexicans lodged asylum claims in all of 2016 and 156 have already done so in 2017.

Many anticipate the U.S. president’s executive orders curtailing immigration from certain countries, scaling back refugee admissions and speeding up deportations could push the numbers of people seeking asylum in Canada higher.

Hussen and his officials were pressed Monday by the NDP’s immigration critic Jenny Kwan on whether any more money has been earmarked yet to deal with the potential fallout.

The executive orders are too new and the money currently being requested from Parliament deals with already identified needs, said Daniel Mills, an assistant deputy minister in the Immigration Department.

“We haven’t yet estimated the amount that we will need,” he said in French.

What might be needed next is under review at least in one area.

“The IRB is already facing a number of pressures and recent events will only give rise to further pressures,” Richard Wex, an associate deputy minister in the department, told the committee.

“This matter is under active consideration by the government.”

Hussen tried to bolster the case at committee that the so-called Trump effect isn’t to blame for the rise in claims.

Of the 143 people who’ve who crossed illegally into Manitoba to make an asylum claim in 2017, he said only about 50 had U.S. visas, 97 per cent had been the U.S. less than two months and had not filed an asylum claim there.

“It puts into context the claim made by many that this is as a result of the U.S. administration,” he said.

“In fact, the rise in asylum claims through the border . . . there’s been a small and steady increase since 2015, most of 2016. This is definitely not specific to the incoming U.S. administration.”

Another element that could complicate the IRB’s caseload is the upcoming plan to lift the visa requirement people coming from Romania and Bulgaria. Romania in particular was a large source of asylum claims in Canada prior to a visa requirement being imposed and the decision to phase-out the visa later this year is likely to lead to a renewed increase in asylum claims.

No money has been earmarked yet for the IRB to deal with that.

Source: Too soon to put Canadian price tag on Trump’s immigration overhaul: officials – The Globe and Mail

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Starbucks faces backlash over CEO’s vow to hire thousands of refugees

2017/03/14 Leave a comment

Not necessarily surprising but not clear whether those more opposed to the hiring of refugees were regular Starbucks customers (the “latte sipping elites” as some would portray them) or the broader population:

Starbucks Corp.’s vow to hire thousands of refugees after President Donald Trump’s first executive order that temporarily banned travel from seven mostly-Muslim nations appears to be hurting customer sentiment of the coffee chain.

Trump supporters have used Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites to call for a boycott since Jan. 29, when Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz vowed to hire 10,000 refugees over five years in the countries where it does business.

Schultz in a letter to employees said the promise of the American Dream was “being called into question” and that “the civility and human rights we have all taken for granted for so long are under attack.”

YouGov BrandIndex, which tracks consumers’ sentiment toward companies and their willingness to purchase from those brands, noted that the data around this boycott is different because both measures are declining.

Starbucks’ consumer perception levels took an immediate hit as measured by YouGov BrandIndex’s Buzz score, falling by two-thirds between Jan. 29 and Feb. 13, and have not recovered.

Starbucks Buzz score fell to four from 12 during that time. Such scores can range from 100 to -100 and are compiled by subtracting negative feedback from positive. A zero score means equal positive and negative feedback.

Immediate drop

Prior to Schultz’s refugee comments, 30 per cent of consumers said they would consider buying from Starbucks the next time they made a coffee purchase, that fell to a low of 24 per cent and now stands at 26 per cent, according to a YouGov spokesman.

“Consumer perception dropped almost immediately,” said YouGov BrandIndex CEO Ted Marzilli, who added that the statistically significant drop in purchase consideration data showed that consumers became less keen to buy from Starbucks.

“That would indicate the announcement has had a negative impact on Starbucks, and might indicate a negative impact on sales in the near term,” he said.

Marzilli noted that the Starbucks holiday “red cup” controversy from November 2015 corresponded with an even larger drop in perception, but no real impact on purchase consideration scores.

Support for rival urged

Among other things, boycott supporters are urging like-minded friends to support Starbucks rival Dunkin’ Donuts . Representatives from Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts declined to comment on the surveys and the boycott’s impact on sales.

Source: Starbucks faces backlash over CEO’s vow to hire thousands of refugees – Business – CBC News

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2016 Refugee Claim Data and IRB Member Recognition Rates | Canadian Council for Refugees

2017/03/10 1 Comment

This is really an impressive analysis  suggesting (no surprise) that individual decision-makers are not as objective and consistent as desired (as Kahneman and others have demonstrated in different contexts). All Canadian government tribunals should conduct this kind of analysis to improve consistency in decision making:

The following note and the accompanying data are provided by Sean Rehaag, Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School.

8 March 2017

Data obtained from the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) through an Access to Information Request reveals vast disparities in refugee claim recognition rates across decision-makers in 2016. This is consistent with similar findings from prior years for Canada’s previous and new refugee determination systems.

Refugee claims referred to the IRB after 15 December 2012 are subject to the new system, whereas claims referred to the IRB prior to that date are legacy cases that are decided under the old system. Legacy and new system cases are not only decided under different rules, but are also decided by different cohorts of decision-makers. Because of these important differences, the data on RPD decision-making for 2016 is separated into legacy cases and new system cases.

In 2016, some Refugee Protection Division (RPD) decision-makers granted refugee status in most of the cases they heard, including R. Tiwari (95.9%, 74 new system cases), I. Singh (92.5%, 53 new system cases) and K. Genjaga (91.8%, 85 new system cases). Others granted refugee protection much less frequently, including B. Lloyd (23.8%, 63 new system cases), R. Gibson (26.0%, 77 new system cases) and M. Beatty (29.8%, 57 new system cases).

Some of the recognition rate variation may be due to specialization in particular types of cases. For example, some decision-makers specialize in geographic regions with especially high or low refugee claim recognition rates. For further possible explanations for variations in recognition rates, please see an IRB explanatory note, which was provided with a response to an earlier Access to Information Request: http://ccrweb.ca/files/7.irb_explanatory_note-2012.pdf

Although some of the recognition rate variation can be explained by factors related to specialization, the tables below suggest that country of origin specialization alone fails to fully account for the variations. The tables show substantial variance for some decision-makers between the recognition rates that would be predicted based on the average recognition rates for the countries of origins in the cases they decided, and their actual recognition rates. For instance, in new system cases B. Lloyd (predicted 57.4%; actual 23.8%), R. Gibson (predicted 53.9%; actual 26.0%) and J. Daubney (predicted 59.7%; actual 32.3%) had much lower recognition rates than predicted, whereas R. Tiwari (predicted 62.6%, actual 95.9%), J. Eberhard (predicted 56.5%; actual 87.4%) and J. Bousfield (predicted 63.6%; actual: 89.3%) had much higher recognition rates than predicted.

This year’s data also includes information about outcomes on appeals at the IRB’s Refugee Appeal Division (RAD). As with RPD decision-making, outcomes at the RAD appear to vary greatly depending on who serves as the decision-maker. For example, in RAD cases decided on the merits, claimants were much more likely to succeed in their appeals before S.S. Kular (56.5%, 46 cases), R. Dhir (50.5%, 32 cases) or L.F. Agostinho (46.6%, 58 cases) than before L. Favreau (5.3%, 94 cases), Stephen Gallagher (17.1%, 35 cases) or D.E. Sokolyk (20.6%, 63 cases). Remarkably, claimants were more than 10 times as likely to succeed on appeals with S.S. Kular than with L. Favreau.

A few implications of this year’s data are worth highlighting:

  • Some countries that are designated as “safe” in Canada’s refugee determination system produced many positive refugee determinations in 2016. Consider for example, Hungary, which had a 66.9% recognition rate, and which produced 184 successful refugee decisions (involving 529 individual claimants) in the new system in 2016. It is difficult to understand how such countries can reasonably be designated as “safe” or what could justify limitations on procedural rights (e.g. expedited processes, limitations on pre-removal risk assessments) that come with such designations. For further analysis, see: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2588058
  • The persistence of unexplained variations in recognition rates across adjudicators in the new refugee determination system, combined with the devastating potential impact of false negative refugee decisions (i.e. refugees being returned to face persecution), make robust oversight mechanisms essential. Unfortunately, many refugee claimants continue to be denied access to the appeal at the Immigration and Refugee Board and are ineligible for automatic stays on removal pending judicial review at the Federal Court. This includes large numbers of claimants who transited to Canada via the United States – even though one’s route to Canada has little to do with whether one has a well-founded fear of persecution. For further analysis, see: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2647638
  • While substantial variation in recognition rates persist, it should be noted that no new system decision-makers in 2016 who made 20 or more decisions denied every single claim they heard. This is in contrast to the old refugee determination system (S. Roy in 2013: 0.0%, 23 decisions; D. McSweeney in 2011: 0.0%, 127 decisions; D. McBean in 2010: 0.0%, 62 decisions; D. McBean in 2009: 0.0%, 72 decisions). It is worth considering whether this change relates to the professionalization of refugee decision-making and the shift to civil servant decision-makers (rather than political appointees as was the case under the old system).
  • The overall success rates on RAD appeals are remarkably high. Indeed, appeals brought by claimants and decided on the merits were granted in almost one third of cases (33.1%). On the one hand, the fact that the RAD is correcting large numbers of claims that were wrongly denied at the RPD emphasizes the importance of this form of oversight. On the other hand, however, it also suggests that there is room for improvement in initial decision-making at the RPD.

For a discussion of the methodology used to obtain the data and to calculate the statistics, as well as an analysis of the implications of similar data for a previous year, see Sean Rehaag, “Troubling Patterns in Canadian Refugee Adjudication” (2008) 39 Ottawa Law Review 335. This article is available via links here: http://ssrn.com/author=404046

Source: 2016 Refugee Claim Data and IRB Member Recognition Rates | Canadian Council for Refugees

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Cabinet to map out scenarios for dealing with border-crossers

2017/03/07 Leave a comment

As expected, work taking place behind the scenes:

Federal cabinet ministers are set for an in-depth discussion of the practical and political pressures being placed on the Liberal government by a rising number of asylum seekers in Canada.

Border security, RCMP and immigration officials have been running scenarios to prepare for the possibility that a relative winter trickle of crossings into Canada could turn into a spring flood.

The results of their table-top exercises will help form options being put before cabinet Tuesday, The Canadian Press has learned.

Officials are also studying links between distinct groups of border-crossers that might belie the common notion they’re all being pushed into Canada by the volatile U.S. political climate.

Two government officials confirmed to The Canadian Press that many of the people coming into Quebec hold American visas issued at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Interviews revealed the visas were obtained to use the U.S. as a transit point to get to Canada and claim asylum — plans set in motion long before the U.S. election in November, the officials said, neither of whom were authorized to publicly discuss the issue.

USA-IMMIGRATION/CANADA-BORDER

An RCMP officer carries a child from a family that said they were from Yemen after they crossed the U.S.-Canada border into Hemmingford, Que., on Sunday. (Christinne Muschi/Reuters)

But it is the pictures of RCMP officers hoisting small children above snow-covered fields along the Canada-U.S. frontier that have drawn global attention and placed political pressure on the Trudeau government from all sides.

The Opposition Conservatives are demanding a crackdown, and want those crossing illegally charged with crimes, something the government notes cannot happen until asylum claims are heard.

‘We are the endpoint’

The fact those claims are being fed into a clogged system has others urging the Liberals to put more resources into the refugee-determination process and the agencies that support newcomers.

“We are the endpoint,” said Chris Friesen, director of settlement services for the Immigrant Services Society of British Columbia.

The Immigration and Refugee Board reported in its last quarterly financial document that in the first nine months of 2016-17, there was a 40-per-cent increase in new claims compared to the same period the previous year.

Statistics provided to The Canadian Press show claim levels generally began rising in Canada before U.S. President Donald Trump took office.

Refugees crossing into Quebec

A family claiming to be from Turkey are met by a RCMP officer after they cross the U.S.-Canada border into Hemmingford, Que. (Christinne Muschi/Reuters)

In fact, the increase seems to have begun just as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took power.

In October 2015, the month of the last federal election, 1,519 claims were lodged in Canada. The next month, when the Trudeau Liberals took office, there were 1,647 and — with the exception of two months in 2016 — they have been rising since.

Trump is pushing people into Canada, but the Trudeau government’s repeated messaging on welcoming diversity and immigration is a pretty strong pull factor, Friesen said. “We are now the beacon of hope for desperate refugees.”

In B.C., there has been a 60-per-cent increase in the number of refugee claimants in the last 12 months compared to the previous one-year period. Most are Iraqi Kurds and Afghans, and there were also 18 undocumented Latin Americans from Guatemala, Honduras and Venezuela who recently crossed the Canada-U.S. border, immigration agencies said.

The number of Mexican claimants is also starting to rise in B.C., following the end of a requirement for Mexican citizens to have a visa to enter Canada. During the last three months, there were 29 refugee claimants from Mexico, the agencies reported, compared to 30 who arrived between December 2015 and November 2016.

The Immigration and Refugee board is already adjusting to deal with the bigger numbers, but cabinet will consider giving it more resources.

Spotlight on Safe Third Country Agreement

Ministers will also consider whether there is room to alter the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the U.S. The agreement says a refugee claimant must apply for asylum in whichever of the two countries they arrive first — unless they qualify for an exception.

It is being singled out as the reason people are avoiding official border stations and crossing into Canada illegally, and there are calls for Ottawa to suspend the agreement.

Source: Cabinet to map out scenarios for dealing with border-crossers – Canada – CBC News

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Newly arrived Yazidis who escaped sex slavery of ISIS eager to build better future in Canada

2017/03/07 Leave a comment

Another article on Yazidis in Canada, focussed on London:

It’s here in London — where about 300 Yazidis have formed a small but tight-knit community since the early 1980s when they fled the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein — that Bhasa and other recently arrived Yazidis hope to start building a new life for their families and try to move beyond the horrors they suffered in captivity.

Dalal Abdallah, a Yazidi human rights activist who lives in London, says members of her community have been donating clothing, hygiene products and toys for the families who have arrived and look forward to absorbing more into their community.

“For many, many years, we have been struggling [to grow] as a community because no Yazidis were coming through,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity to build our community, and the more people, the merrier.”

She said London has already accepted and integrated Syrian refugees and that there’s enough support for Yazidis, including a program at Victoria Hospital to help refugees deal with trauma.

Other support comes from London’s Cross Cultural Learner Centre, where Yazidis can learn some basic tools for integrating in Canada: how to get housing, set up bank accounts, apply for health cards.

“We are here to support them, welcome them, make them feel comfortable, that they are not alone here,” said Omar Khoudeida, a Yazidi interpreter who works at the centre and who himself came to London nearly 20 years ago as a refugee.

“There’s a community behind them and supporting them.”

But even with that support, Bhasa must still cope with the emotional fallout of a family torn apart by genocide.

She fears being identified. Although she doesn’t know the fate of family members in Iraq, she’s worried that going public could put them in danger. She hasn’t seen her husband and other male relatives since ISIS invaded her home in August 2014.

Daughter still missing

She also fears for her daughter, who was nine years old when she was snatched by the Islamist militant group.

“They took her. She doesn’t know anything about her,”  Khoudeida said.

While ISIS targets all communities, it has particular antipathy for Yazidis, whom it considers to be infidels.

Iraq Cda Yazidis 20170222

ISIS survivors Suham Haji, from left, Samira Hasan and Saud Khalid sit in the Dohuk Girls and Women Treatment and Support Centre in Dohuk, Iraq. The three women are among 900 being treated at the centre after escaping ISIS captivity. (Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press)

Last June, a UN commission declared in a report that ISIS was committing genocide against the religious group of about 400,000. ISIS, it said, was subjecting “every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific of atrocities.”

Source: Newly arrived Yazidis who escaped sex slavery of ISIS eager to build better future in Canada – Canada – CBC News

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Women-only English program in Metro Vancouver hopes to expand

2017/03/04 Leave a comment

Good initiative:

A unique English program for immigrants and refugees in Metro Vancouver is hoping to expand after finding success with women-only classes where participants can also bring their children.

The focus is not just on language, said teacher Diana Jeffries, but also on supporting mental health.

“So learning the language through taking care of yourself … making connections through community, through working together in this classroom.”

Unlike federally funded language programs like Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC), there are no eligibility requirements or tests to join the Pacific Immigrant Resources Society’s community English classes for refugee women.

“We’re different in that we’re trauma informed, that we allow young children in the classroom, we don’t have the same kind of assessment processes the LINC has,” said program director Amea Wilbur.

“We are specific to women and also we can be a lot more responsive in terms of curriculum.”

The program is open to refugees and immigrants from any country.

Farzana Fakrhi said the flexible atmosphere is the main reason she’s able to attend the classes in Burnaby.

“It’s very helpful — especially for the women who have small kids. They have daycare for the small babies, which the other classes didn’t have it.”

Some federally funded classes do provide child minding for children, but they usually have to be 18 months or older.

Community english classes

The female-only language program in Metro Vancouver allows women to bring their children to class. (Bal Brach/CBC)

Outreach worker Zarmina Ali said some of the women have never stepped foot in a classroom before arriving in Canada.

“This program is very important for them because most people haven’t been at school in their life — this is the first time they come to school and they enjoy it so much.”

Sharing stories of loss

Jeffries said the supportive environment in the class has given students the confidence to share their stories of loss and struggle.

“[They talk about] the era of the Taliban and wearing burkas,” she said.

“And experiences of great loss, family members, of even children. They carry around a huge weight of their past but [they are] just looking to Canada as an opportunity for a better future for themselves and their children.”

Wilbur created the program after witnessing a gap in services for newcomers.

Source: Women-only English program in Metro Vancouver hopes to expand – British Columbia – CBC News

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Officials confirm rise in asylum seekers [with data] crossing illegally into Canada, but RCMP lay no charges

2017/03/04 Leave a comment

Good that the numbers are being released, along with the close monitoring – an increase of 26.5 percent compared to last year (January 1 to February 21) :

Canadian officials are keeping close tabs on the number of people illegally crossing the border into Canada, but they don’t expect the winter increase will necessarily lead to a spring surge.

Government officials, who spoke on background and did not wish to be named, provided journalists with an update on illegal crossings today and confirmed an increase in three provinces.

Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 21 this year, there were 290 illegal crossings in Quebec, 94 in Manitoba and 51 in British Columbia, totalling 435.

That compares with 2,464 illegal entries apprehended by the RCMP in the same regions in all of 2016.

These numbers do not include people who may have crossed illegally without being caught by police.

While it is a criminal offence to cross into Canada outside a legal border point, no one has yet been charged, according to an official. If caught, the person who has entered the country without authorization is arrested and required to undergo a criminal background check.

“To my knowledge we haven’t charged the people for crossing the border illegally,” one official said. “We determine if there’s any criminality … then we would follow up. If there’s no criminality, we would turn them over to our counterparts at CBSA.”

The Canada Border Services Agency can detain people who have a criminal record, who can’t be properly identified or who are at risk of not showing up for a hearing. Officials stressed that all people are carefully screened by CBSA before they are released.

No charges until after refugee claim process

Refugee and human rights lawyer Lorne Waldman said police cannot lay a charge until the refugee claim process is complete.

“There’s a clear provision in the law that says people who cross the border or use false documents in order to come to Canada to make a refugee claim cannot be charged unless their claim is rejected, because the UN convention says people shouldn’t be punished for illegal entry if it’s for the purpose of making a refugee claim,” he told CBC News.

Careful screening process

“We are not releasing anybody that we have concerns about,” an official said. “Their identity is confirmed, the biometrics have been confirmed, the biographic data is confirmed … they are deemed admissible and they are eligible for proceeding towards a refugee claim.”

The total number of people who made refugee claims in Canada inland — not at official border points — climbed to 2,281 this year between Jan. 1 and Feb. 21, up from 1,803 during the same period in 2016.

Source: Officials confirm rise in asylum seekers crossing illegally into Canada, but RCMP lay no charges – Politics – CBC News

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Documents reveal why Canada rejected dozens of Syrian refugee claimants

2017/03/01 Leave a comment

Interesting insights into how the vetting and selection process worked:

One had been a senior government official complicit in human rights abuses. Three had been involved in “subversion by force.” Another was considered a danger to the security of Canada.

Government documents obtained by the National Post reveal why Canada rejected dozens of Syrians as refugees, and provide a “high-level overview” of the backgrounds of those who were selected.

The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada documents, released under the Access to Information Act, summarize the results of interviews of Syrian refugees conducted by visa officers in Beirut.

The refusal rate for Syrian refugees was 4 per cent according to the documents, which, though released only recently, date to the early stages of the Syrian refugee program, when the Liberal government was trying to fulfill a campaign promise to resettle 25,000 by the end of 2015.

During the first month the Liberals were in office, Canadian visa officers refused Syrian refugee claimants 35 times for everything from failing to answer questions truthfully to uncertainty about their identities.

Between 2014 and Nov. 17, 2015 83 applicants were refused — five of those for security reasons. (Because some may have been rejected for more than one reason, it is unclear exactly how many Syrians were turned away in total.)

According to the documents, the Syrians accepted as refugees came from five areas: Aleppo, Hassakeh, Damascus, Homs and the Dara’a and Sweida region along the Jordanian border in the south.

Those from Aleppo were “virtually all” Armenian families with one or two children. Most were “self-employed businessmen and tradesmen (welders, mechanic, jewelers) with moderate to high levels of wealth,” it said.

The oft repeated narrative with this group was that they were forced to take flight very suddenly, in the middle of the night or early morning upon discovering that the Daesh (ISIL) was marching on their town or village

They tended to be from neighbourhoods close to Aleppo’s old city, near the frontline between government and opposition forces. Most had fled Syria in 2012, although some had stayed until as late as 2014 because they didn’t have the money or needed to care for elderly family members.

“Those who stayed longer tended to float between neighbourhoods staying with different family members. They moved as the fighting moved and intensified in different parts of the city,” a report on the interviews said.

They cited their reasons for leaving Syria as the complete lack of security. “There was no water or power, and regular shelling of neighbourhoods. There were a few accounts of client, client family members, or neighbours having been kidnapped and ransomed.”

In Beirut, most found work in their trades while others were employed part-time at places such as restaurants. Those lacking money or jobs “tended to migrate back and forth between Lebanon and Syria,” the report said.

Source: Documents reveal why Canada rejected dozens of Syrian refugee claimants | National Post

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Muslim Refugees Were Admitted at a Lower Rate During Trump’s Refugee Ban – The New York Times

2017/02/28 Leave a comment

Numbers tell the story:

During the week when President Trump’s refugee ban was in effect, refugees were allowed in on a case-by-case basis. Just 15 percent of the 843 refugees who were admitted during this time were Muslim, compared with a weekly average of 45 percent in 2016.

Only two refugees were allowed in from the seven Muslim-majority countries affected by President Trump’s travel ban. About 1,800 refugees from these countries had arrived in the United States every week on average since 2016.

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A tougher refugee border pact? America said no. Former Minister Kenney

2017/02/27 Leave a comment

Useful to hear former immigration minister Kenney’s comments and history of earlier discussions, although his reassurances of the safeguards in the US system, while generally correct, understate some of the significant differences between the Canadian and American approaches (even pre-Trump):

The sometimes tragic phenomenon of asylum-seekers crossing fields in Manitoba and ditches in Quebec has prompted many immigration experts and some politicians to call for changes to the Canada-U.S. pact that makes border hopping the only choice for people urgently seeking refuge. That is: stop shuttering our front doors, our border entry posts, to those desperate for safety and legal protection they want in Canada.

There are those on the other side of the status quo who wish for a way not only to keep the door shut, but to press down on the windows people are finding their way through. One of them is Jason Kenney, Canada’s former immigration minister.

In the face of pressure on the Liberal government to suspend the Safe Third Country Agreement, Kenney has called on Ottawa to instead demand renegotiation with the U.S. to eliminate the de facto exemption which lets people making so-called “irregular” border crossings into Canada’s refugee determination system. Irregular crossing, in this case, means getting one’s feet on Canadian soil somewhere other than an established port of entry.

If it granted such a request, the Trump administration would take pressure off Canada’s asylum program in a way the Obama White House refused to do. Kenney told Maclean’s he made this pitch when he was minister; his counterpart in Washington said no.

“I approached then secretary of homeland security (Janet) Napolitano with a request to reopen the STCA for renegotiation to remove this and other exemptions,” he said in an interview Friday on the sidelines of the Manning Centre Conference. “They basically refused to do so, because I quite frankly think they cynically saw these exemptions as operating in favour of the United States. To put it bluntly, if people whom they regard as illegal aliens go to Canada, they don’t have to worry about them any more, or remove them.”

If the Obama administration was unwilling to change rules to keep asylum seekers on his side of the border, what chance is there the new U.S. government would? Among the administration’s policies is a recent order from John Kelly, the new Homeland Security secretary, which would deport undocumented immigrants to Mexico even if they hailed from other Central American countries—a signal this White House is unconcerned about immigration conventions or norms, as long as foreigners perceived as problematic are out of the country.

…His meeting with Napolitano came about while he was crafting new policies to overhaul refugee laws to deter questionable claimants. While he failed to enact a border crackdown, he did speed up the hearing process, create new options to detain asylum seekers and, controversially, limit their health benefits.

Still, refugee advocates in Canada continued their long-standing criticism of the safe third-country agreement, and have amped up their calls in the wake of Trump’s wide-ranging crackdowns on the immigration system, which included a suspension of refugee resettlement and beefed-up deportation and detention systems. These moves have prompted a spike in migrants crossing over to Canada, in hopes of a fair shake at becoming refugees here. Advocates argue that American bellicosity toward newcomers and refuge seekers puts lie to assertions the U.S. is a safe third country (though many of these critics opposed the border deal even before Trump entered politics).

Ministers in the Trudeau government have said they see no reason to abandon the agreement. Their position has gotten new support from the UN High Commission for Refugees. Jean-Nicolas Beuze, its new representative in Canada, told Maclean’s that the asylum conditions in the U.S. and Canada today are not sufficiently different from 2004, when the safe country pact was established, to warrant a change to the agreement. Having spoken recently to dozens of refugee claimants who entered Canada near the border post at Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., Beuze said their “perception” of the Trump actions and rhetoric are prompting their escape north. But the agency, he said, will continue monitoring the situation.

Kenney said there’s no reason refuge-seekers currently in the U.S. should not seek asylum in that country, arguing that “hysteria” has driven the recent trend. “The United States has one of the world’s strongest, fairest asylum systems. It’s not administered by Donald Trump. It’s administered by the independent American judiciary and tribunals,” he said.

There are, in fact, substantial differences between how U.S. and Canada treat refugee claimants, some of them predating Trump. In the U.S., detention is vastly more common; in Canada, claimants have easier access to legal aid for refugee status hearings. Canada has an interim health-care program and gives readier access to work permits, among other benefits. The sharpest emerging contrast, however, is that of image: Trump has boasted of walls and ejections, and has particularly stigmatized Muslims (especially from certain countries) as potential terrorists. Trudeau has highlighted Canada’s openness, both through the Syrian refugee resettlement program and a globally rebroadcast tweet declaring welcome to those fleeing persecution, “regardless of your faith.”

The vast majority of border-hopping refugee claimants have been Muslims from Somalia, Syria, Yemen (all countries targeted by Trump’s now-suspended travel ban), as well as Turkey, Ghana, Djibouti and other countries.

Kenney said the Liberal government should bid to renegotiate the agreement as he previously tried to, as its current limitation “almost incentivizes these irregular crossings.” A sharp increase in the flow would massively burden our system “and blow a hole in the integrity of our immigration system,” he says—particularly if illegal immigrants fearing Trump-ordered deportations start joining the overseas migrants. “I think we need to be soft-hearted but hard-headed about this,” Kenney said.

“This is why I think it’s unhelpful for leaders like Prime Minister Trudeau to muddy the waters with what sounds like an open invitation for foreign nationals of the United States to come north,” Kenney went on. “We have immigration laws for a reason, so we can have an ordered, fair, compassionate, law-based system.  It really doesn’t help if you create the implication that Canada has open borders. We don’t, in our law.”

Source: A tougher refugee border pact? America said no. – Macleans.ca

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