The Roxham Road dilemma: What are Canada’s options in the border controversy?

2023/03/15 Leave a comment

Good in-depth overview:

Jose Moncada Urbina gets emotional when he hears people talking about shutting down Roxham Road, the famous rural route in Quebec that opens Canada’s door to asylum seekers.

Sitting in his cosy Mississauga home, the Nicaraguan man can’t help but reflect on his own journey, fleeing police violence and political persecution — and imagining how life would have been different for his family now if they had been denied that lifeline to safety.

“To think that other people won’t have the same opportunity and chance that my family and I had,” pauses the 47-year-old man, tearing up, “makes me upset.”

A spike in irregular migration and U.S. President Joe Biden’s upcoming visit to Ottawa have put both Roxham Road and the Safe Third Country Agreement, our bilateral border pact with the U.S., in the spotlight. Critics say neither are working, but what are the alternatives and will they just create new problems?

Although irregular migrants have been crossing for decades at Roxham Road, one of many entry points along the 8,890-kilometre porous land border with the United States, it gained prominence — and notoriety — with the surge of foot traffic spurred by the anti-immigration agenda when Donald Trump became U.S. president in 2017.

Ottawa’s asylum ban against these border crossers during the pandemic halted the flow, but the influx returned as soon as the ban was lifted in November 2021. Last year, the RCMP intercepted 39,540 people who crossed between Canadian ports of entry. In January alone, already some 5,000 entered Canada in the same manner.

Under the Safe Third Country Agreement, Canada and the U.S. each recognize the other country as a safe place to seek refuge. It dictates that migrants should pursue their claims in the country where they first arrived.

But the policy does not apply to the woods and dirt roads — and waterways — between official crossings, which some say is a “loophole” that makes the measure ineffective in pushing back the border and stopping migrants from seeking asylum in Canada.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau plans to raise the issue with Biden, and Canadian Immigration Minister Sean Fraser met this week with his White House counterpart.

While the Parti Québécois and the NDP have called for the agreement to be suspended, the Progressive Conservatives want to close Roxham Road as the Liberal government continues its “renegotiation” of the treaty with Washington that started in 2018.

“Canada remains firmly committed to upholding a fair and compassionate refugee protection system that respects the rights of asylum seekers and safeguards the integrity of our border,” Bahoz Dara Aziz, Fraser’s spokesperson, told the Star.

“Irregular migration demands a focus on both the root causes in a migrant’s country of origin, as well as with the promotion of regular pathways and managed borders. This requires co-operation on the international stage, including with the United States on the Safe Third Country Agreement.”

Suspending it or “closing” Roxham Road could result in migrants using other irregular crossings, some of which place them in danger and affect local communities incapable of responding to the influx, said Aziz.

While no quick changes to the border treaty are expected, critics say it’s a root cause of irregular migration that Canada is seeing and something has to be done about it.

Ottawa could expand the rules to the entire border, which, in effect, would plug the opening at Roxham Road; cancel the agreement to allow migrants to orderly seek asylum at official crossings; or tweak the terms to adjust how wide or narrow the door should be open for refugees.

Each option, experts say, could have unintended consequences.

Extending asylum ban across the entire border

Irregular migration on the northern border has been a “less salient” issue for Washington, which saw immigration arrests from the southern border with Mexico top 2 million last year, said Susan Fratzke, senior policy analyst at Migration Policy Institute, a bipartisan think tank in Washington.

That explains the cold reception from the U.S. in response to Canada’s request. In a recent interview with the CBC, American ambassador to Canada, David L. Cohen, said changes to the Safe Third Country Agreement would do little to solve irregular migration.

Even if the White House is willing to renegotiate, Fratzke said it’s hard to predict if the number of irregular migrants to Canada will go up or down with the closure of Roxham Road because desperate migrants would find more perilous and surreptitious ways to come.

But expanding the asylum ban to the entire border could have an immediate political impact.

“It’s something that has a lot of appeal in terms of the messaging of it. This would send a message to people who are trying to cross that it is something that will no longer be as easy or as possible,” said Fratzke.

“Policymakers on both side of the border still need to be prepared for other incentives and unintended consequences it creates as regards to how people will behave. It certainly won’t in itself solve the problem.”

For decades, successive Canadian governments had pushed the U.S. to sign the pact because the flow of migrants at the Canada-U.S. border disproportionately came from the south to north as it was generally easier to first enter the U.S.

According to a U.S. House of Representatives hearing, in the year prior to the treaty taking effect in 2004, about 14,000 asylum seekers came through the U.S. to Canada but only about 200 went the other way.

The September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 gave Ottawa a chance to push for the treaty, with Washington conceding to Canada’s lobby in exchange for more border security co-operation.

Fratzke said such bilateral treaties are built on signatories sharing similar asylum processes and immigration policies such as visa requirements.

The Dublin Regulation, a similar regime in Europe, was first established in 1990 but she said it is still rife with challenges with its implementation because systems and capacities of the member states are not always in sync.

“One of the reasons why you would implement something like a safe third country agreement is because the odds and conditions under which someone is being considered for asylum in one country are quite similar to those in another country,” said Fratzke.

“It’s fair to say that even within the context of the EU, where there is co-operation and alignment between countries’ asylum and migration systems, implementing an agreement based on safe third country principles has been difficult.”

And that’s a problem between Canada and the U.S., according to critics, who argue that the U.S. asylum system is cruel and inhumane, which makes it unsafe for refugees.

For it to work, both the Canadian and American governments must also do their equal part in preventing migrants from entering the other country, said University of Toronto law professor Audrey Macklin, who has studied the border agreement closely.

It did not help, for example, when the City of New York began providing free bus tickets to migrants heading north to claim asylum in Canada.

Before the border treaty was signed, said Macklin, experts and advocates testifying before Parliament had warned them about the anticipated disorderly irregular entries into the country, and that the rules would not deter people from coming.

Although the number of asylum claimants in Canada dropped by 23 per cent to 19,748 a year after the agreement was implemented in 2004, the decline was short-lived as migrants tried other ways to skirt the rules.

There were ebbs and flows through the years in response to global refugee crises and domestic policy changes such as visa requirements against certain refugee-producing countries. But it peaked at 64,030 in 2019 during the Trump era before the pandemic hit.

“It’s not just about extending the agreement so Canada can push people over the border. It would be asking the United States to develop an entire apparatus on its side,” said Macklin.

“How do you make people stop wanting to flee the country they’re in to get to a place that they think is better or safer? That’s the question. It’s not even in the United States’ control?”

Macklin points out that Canada could build a wall and invest billions of dollars in surveillance technology and hire border patrols but it costs far less to process asylum claims made by irregular migrants.

Scrapping Safe Third Country Agreement

When the Nicaragua government started using armed forces to crack down on protests against tax hikes and pension reductions in April 2018, it was the last straw for Moncada Urbina, a computer engineer, and his wife, Norma, a lawyer.

The couple joined peaceful demonstrations to condemn police violence and supported the young protesters trapped in university campuses by delivering them food, water and medical supplies.

As authorities began detaining and jailing dissidents and sympathizers, Moncada Urbina decided to seek refuge in Canada, where he has close relatives.

However, only he and his eldest daughter, Katherine, now 21, had a visa to Canada and they didn’t have time to apply for a travel document for his wife, Norma, 48, and their two other children, Allison, 16, and Daniel, 13.

Instead, with their American visas (except for Norma, who went into hiding), Moncada Urbina flew to Boston with the three teenagers and arrived at Roxham Road three days later, in September 2018.

“My children couldn’t cross at a port of entry without a visa. Roxham Road was our only option,” said Moncada Urbina, whose family was granted asylum in 2021, with his wife arriving this past November.

“If you shut down Roxham Road, people would pick more dangerous ways or use traffickers to come. It’s human nature for survival,” he said.

And that would be the last thing that Loly Rico would like to see happening.

The executive director of Toronto’s FCJ Refugee Centre said Canada has a more fair asylum system that processes cases faster and allows claimants to work while waiting for their hearings. With Biden’s administration continuing Trump’s policies, Rico said the push for irregular migrants to Canada won’t end anytime soon.

Scrapping the Safe Third Country Agreement would mean a return to the way things were managed before 2004, when asylum seekers could cross at any of the 100-plus land ports of entry in eight provinces.

Currently 99 per cent of irregular migrants cross through Roxham Road and in June the federal government started transferring them to Ontario and other provinces, housing them in hotels.

As of this month, 7,848 asylum claimants have been transferred to Ontario, including 702 to Ottawa, 1,028 to Windsor, 4,618 to Niagara Falls, and 1,500 to Cornwall. Since February, 113 have been transferred to Halifax, 38 to Fredericton and 25 to Moncton.

Between 2017 and 2021, Ottawa issued payments totalling $551.6M to cover housing costs of asylum seekers who arrived in the U.S. through irregular means: $374 million to Quebec, $144.1 million to Toronto, $17.1M to Ottawa, $8 million to Manitoba, $6 million to B.C., $2.2 million to Peel Region and $220,000 to Hamilton.

Abolishing the border agreement “is not going to open a flood gate but would distribute migrants more evenly across Canada,” said Rico, who with her late husband, Francisco Rico Martinez, fled El Salvador in 1990 under a program to grant asylum to those trapped in their own country that was spiked by the Harper government in 2012.

Toronto refugee lawyer Raoul Boulakia agreed.

“There’s no reason for irregular migration when you don’t have a safe third country agreement,” said Boulakia, who has seen migrants choosing to remain in the U.S. underground even if they would have met an exemption from the rules for asylum at a Canadian port of entry.

“By not having people go through irregular points of entry, we’re allowed to have a lot more flexibility to distribute where people are entering. People do have a higher likelihood of staying at where they arrive.”

In February, the Biden administration introduced new rules to deny asylum to migrants who show up at the southern border without first seeking protection in a country they passed through, said Boulakia, and that could help check the downstream of northbound migration.

Tweaking the terms of the border treaty

The Safe Third Country Agreement provides exceptions for some groups to make an asylum claim at Canada’s official crossings

  • Those with family members in the country;
  • Unaccompanied minors;
  • Someone with a valid visa and permit to enter Canada
  • People who have been charged with or convicted of an offence that could subject them to death penalty in the U.S. or in a third country.

University of British Columbia law professor Efrat Arbel said the border agreement allows either country to make exceptions unilaterally.

“We have at our fingertips the ability to create a larger scope of protections through these exceptions that will result in greater efficiency, in saving resources, and a more principled, more progressive, more rights protecting approach to managing our borders,” said Arbel, who teaches refugee and constitutional law.

Ottawa could exempt migrants fleeing gender-based persecution or those from countries where Canada has a moratorium for removals due to wars or human rights violations, she said.

But at the end of the day, it’s a zero sum game that would simply divert migrants from one way to another to reach a safe destination as the displaced population worldwide continues to grow, doubling in the last decade to more than 100 million people.

Roxham Road is a byproduct of the global response to the refugee crisis, said Arbel.

“Through the deliberate acts of the Canadian government, there is no other point of entry. And combined with the fact that Canada is so geographically removed from the world conflict zone, it becomes impossible or practically impossible for migrants who are seeking protection to access Canada any other way,” she explained.

“These are measures that prohibit refugees and asylum seekers from meaningfully accessing rights protection based on how they enter or where they enter from, and not the reason why they are seeking entry.”

Macklin said the concerns over irregular migration do appear to be more about border control and possibly racism than the actual number of arrivals. She pointed to Canadians’ response to Ottawa’s special immigration measures that, in just over a year, welcomed 178,000 Ukrainians fleeing the Russian war.

“Nobody is hysterical about the numbers, it seems to me,” said Macklin. “It’s not about numbers, right? It’s about whiteness. Look, we have made it our choice and therefore, it’s OK.”

Last October, the Supreme Court of Canada heard the appeal by asylum seekers and rights groups to declare the Safe Third Country Agreement unconstitutional. A decision is pending.

“Oddly enough, if the federal government loses the Supreme Court appeal, it will actually solve the problem for them,” Macklin said.

Source: The Roxham Road dilemma: What are Canada’s options in the border controversy?

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , ,

Coronavirus Is Spreading across Borders, But It Is Not a Migration Problem

2020/03/25 Leave a comment

Good commentary and analysis by MPI researchers:

Governments around the world have been dipping into the migration management toolbox to demonstrate decisive action in the face of a global pandemic. More than 130 countries have implemented border closures, travel restrictions, prohibitions on arrivals from certain areas, and heightened screening. These steps initially were taken to try to block COVID-19 from crossing borders and later as part of a raft of mobility restrictions seeking to mitigate further spread.

While these restrictions failed in their initial goal of preventing the breakout from seeping across international borders—the virus is now in every corner of the world save Antarctica—they may be more effective as governments shift their focus from containment to mitigation.

In a matter of one week, a handful of bans has given way to sweeping shutdowns of international travel, alongside aggressive interior restrictions on movements. Travel bans are a blunt tool to stem spread from one country to another (as authorities struggle to distinguish between affected and unaffected travelers), yet they are a logical part of the toolkit in the context of social distancing and restricting all forms of movement.

The Containment Phase

The pressure to wall countries off from the virus has been fierce; yet in a globalized world where millions of people cross borders on a regular day, hermetically sealing one country off from its neighbors to prevent the arrival of an airborne threat is next to impossible. First, borders are porous, so even the most sweeping legal restrictions will not prevent all crossings. At best, they may delay the arrival of the disease, but this benefit comes at an enormous social and economic cost—essentially grinding international ties to a halt at a time when cooperation to overcome a common threat (including by sharing medical knowledge and allowing health workers to circulate freely) is more critical than ever. And at worst, mobility restrictions may encourage deception (to elude both border and health screenings), which is highly undesirable in a public health emergency where it is paramount to identify and track those who are infected. Indeed, the World Health Organization (WHO) is clear that blanket travel bans from affected areas rarely achieve their goals.

The Wrong Tools for Containment?

The threat of a pandemic has spilled over into border closures in more recent history as well. Fear of Zika virus (2016), Ebola fever (2014), and H1N1 influenza (2009) all led to calls for tighter restrictions on international entries in a range of countries. Yet applying border controls to the spread of disease across international boundaries is like trying to catch water with a sieve. It has little chance of stopping all possible threats.

It is also unclear whether tools such as visa restrictions and prohibitions on certain categories of arrivals—designed to screen for “bad actors”—can be adapted to address a very different kind of threat. Targeting nationality, for example, may be a blunt tool in the realm of public health; the Hungarian government banning Iranian asylum seekers, for instance, fails to account for those who may have been living in closed camps in Turkey for years. And airlines do not have systems in place to collect (and verify) even basic contact information that would allow individuals to be traced should they become infected. By some estimates, this technology is more than a year away.

In the containment phase of the novel coronavirus (before WHO acknowledged on March 11 that the new pathogen would likely spread across the globe) attempts to reduce the pool of people arriving from high-risk countries may have had limited effect for a number of reasons, including difficulties reliably screening people on entry. And curtailing some forms of mobility while allowing certain types of travelers (including returning citizens and diplomats) to cross borders—even as these groups, too, have been tied to spreading the disease—can undermine the whole purpose of containment.

Aside from failing to achieve their public health goals at the containment stage, these measures may also lead to unintentional perverse outcomes. Enacting blanket travel bans at the start of a crisis could potentially incentivize more travel from an outbreak zone to get around these hurdles. Under President Trump’s proclamation, Chinese nationals can only apply for visas to the United States from another country; this could incentivize unnecessary travel to a country like Japan.

These measures simultaneously cast the net too widely (snaring some who are not a threat) and far too narrowly (missing those who are). But rather than improve passenger data or information-sharing, countries have been closing borders rapid-fire. The United States, for example, in early February banned the entry of certain arrivals from China and Iran. Colombia closed its border to Venezuelans, as well as to arrivals from Asia and Europe. And in an early precursor to more significant European border closures, Austria and Germany began imposing checks on trains and vehicles arriving from Italy in early March.

Weaponizing Fear

Bold measures taken in the name of containing the spread of disease across international boundaries are often fig leaves for broader aims: reducing “undesirable” migration and curtailing the openness that has been blamed for uncontrolled movements of asylum seekers and migrants. Announcing the closure of the U.S.-Mexico border to nonessential travel, Trump described the border restrictions as necessary to stop “mass global migration.”

Other countries seeking curbs on immigration, Greece and Hungary, for example, have announced they will refuse to accept any asylum seekers for a month. And in some cases, governments have exploited public health concerns to expedite plans in morally gray areas. For instance, the Greek government has leveraged fears about the spread of coronavirus to justify its controversial plan to build “closed” camps (essentially detention centers) for asylum seekers who reach Greek shores.

Yet even countries historically friendly to immigration are taking sweeping measures, with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for example, announcing that Canada would cease to accept asylum seekers from the United States at unofficial crossings.

Populist politicians who rail against migration are attempting to draw a clear link between migrants and coronavirus, in face of no evidence to support this. Italy’s former interior minister, far-right politician Matteo Salvini, traced his country’s outbreak, without justification, to the docking of a rescue ship with 276 African migrants in Sicily. And Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared: “Our experience is that foreigners brought in the disease, and that it is spreading among foreigners.”

Migrants have long been scapegoated for the public health concerns of the day. Cholera was nicknamed the “Irish disease” in the 1830s. Ellis Island screenings in the late 19th century would send people back for contagious diseases such as trachoma and ringworm. In the 1980s and early 1990s there was vigorous debate in the United States over whether being HIV-positive should disqualify prospective immigrants (a ban imposed in 1993 was not lifted until 2010). And today a definitional battle is taking place over COVID-19, with some insisting on referring to it as the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan flu.”

Nativist politicians across Europe and the Americas have found they can score easy points by casting the blame for society’s ills on the “other,” and by stoking moral panic for political gain. Fear is being weaponized. And these fears are taking root in fertile ground: facts are being questioned like never before, and today’s social media environment is rampant with conspiracy theories (such as the idea that the coronavirus is a bioweapon engineered by the Chinese or even the CIA).

The Mitigation Phase and an Effective Way Forward

The actions, and in some cases bombastic rhetoric, around closing borders are taking public attention away from where it is better spent: measures that actually work to stop the spread of disease once it is in the community. In the mitigation stage, curtailing travel to limit human interaction may prove effective precisely because all other movements are similarly restricted under a larger social distancing strategy.

The mutual agreement between the United States and Canada to close their common border to nonessential travel, for example, is a logical extension of steps both countries are taking to encourage people to stay home. Some of the measures taken within the European Union, where several Member States have temporarily reintroduced border controls, are sensible extensions of domestic decisions to limit movement.

However, it is essential to implement these measures in ways that advance public health goals—which means not stopping at restricting travel, but aggressively testing, tracking, and limiting exposure. Enhanced screenings at airports that put large crowds into very close physical proximity for hours, as occurred recently at a number of U.S. airports, flouts these principles and increases the risk of transmission. Failing to obtain travelers’ travel and contact details (given the likelihood of asymptomatic transmission) or letting individuals come from high-risk destinations without any medical screening at arrival likewise may undermine any benefit gained from restricting movement.

Governments are under huge pressure to place the bulk of their resources on the most visible measures, including at borders. But these controls are only one piece of the puzzle. Many communities are already at risk of dire outbreaks (particularly those with individuals of precarious legal status who may fear coming forward to authorities or feel pressure to continue work despite symptoms), so these controls must be combined with other interventions. Among them, medical testing, limiting contact with exposed individuals, outreach to vulnerable populations, and ensuring everyone has access to medical care in the event of infection.

There also are broader philosophical considerations, including whether immigration enforcement operations, and widespread detention of asylum seekers and other migrants awaiting immigration hearings, may conflict with other public interest imperatives during this crisis. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), for example, has wisely decided to temporarily suspend most nonurgent enforcement actions (committing not to arrest people at health-care facilities, for example). However, lingering fear and mistrust within unauthorized communities, and contradictory messaging from government authorities, may still keep people from seeking care.

Governments need to find a way to respond to legitimate public concerns without scaremongering, which risks eroding already weak public trust. And while a threat that has now reached global pandemic proportions has sparked a “nation-first” approach in many countries, the solution to complex transnational challenges facing our societies must by necessity be an international one. Rather than focusing inward on protecting their own, countries should be reaching out to other countries—including those where the virus first surfaced—to help find solutions.

Source: Coronavirus Is Spreading across Borders, But It Is Not a Migration Problem

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , ,