Keller: I’m not crazy about the Trump administration either, but we have to work with them on the border

Reality:

…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….

Source: I’m not crazy about the Trump administration either, but we have to work with them on the border

Keller: What will be the economic consequences of Donald Trump?

Good series of questions:

..The challenge for Canada is that if the Trump administration decides on an aggressive policy of alien removal, or if non-citizens in the U.S. fear that such a policy is coming, many of them may choose to simply walk across the border into Canada. It could be a repeat of Roxham Road, on a potentially far larger scale.

Since 2023, Canada has an expanded Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S., under which a foreigner in the U.S. who comes to Canada to make an asylum claim is supposed to be quickly returned to the U.S. But if hundreds of thousands of people that the Trump administration wants to deport decide to self-deport themselves to Canada, will the Trump administration follow the letter of the agreement and take them back?

The MAGA movement gets a lot of mileage out of “owning the Libs,” and Mr. Trump could make great sport out this situation. He could say that, while the Biden administration was marked by scenes of migrants flooding across the southern border on the nightly news, the Trump administration is delivering the opposite, namely scenes of illegal immigrants flooding out of the U.S. and across the northern border. Could a border crisis for Canada be played as a deportation triumph for Mr. Trump?

It might be a variation on Republican border-state governors busing migrants to Democratic strongholds such as New York – a move that not only owned the libs but upended U.S. politics, spurring some blue state voters to become more conservative and helping elect Mr. Trump.

Canada’s refugee-claims system is already massively overloaded and backlogged, as is the system for removing failed claimants. Anyone making a refugee claim can expect to live in Canada for many years pending a decision, and possibly many more years, even indefinitely, after that.

To avoid an influx of people from the U.S., Canada is counting on a couple of conditions that may not hold for much longer. First, that if someone comes from the U.S. to make a refugee claim, we can send them back. And second, that there aren’t very many people in the U.S. who would want to bypass the refugee process, sneak into Canada and become an illegal immigrant – even though it’s relatively easy to walk into Canada at thousands of quiet spots from coast to coast.

What does Mr. Trump have in store for us? We are about to find out.

Source: What will be the economic consequences of Donald Trump?