Front Burner - Canada closed a border loophole. Where will migrants go?

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

For a year and a half, almost 50,000 migrants had walked into Canada via Quebec’s Roxham Road to seek asylum. Then, at midnight on the morning of March 25th, Roxham Road – and the immigration loophole that made it a famous irregular border crossing – effectively closed. CBC Montreal reporter Verity Stevenson has been speaking to migrants who arrived at Roxham soon after the change, only to suddenly discover their journey would be cut short. Today, she brings us their stories, as well as what she saw in towns south of the U.S. border that are hosting hundreds of asylum seekers rejected from Canada. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This police officer is giving orders at the Canada-U.S. border, at Quebec's Roxham Road, on March 25th. It's just hours since the stroke of midnight when Roxham Road effectively shut down to migration. It's the result of a deal between Canada and the U.S., a deal kept secret for a year, and only announced when President Joe Biden visited Ottawa this spring. Now, save for a few exceptions, migrants are no longer allowed to cross this land border and claim asylum. Those who do can now be sent back to the U.S. and barred from seeking asylum here ever again. We heard Canada was looking for immigrants,

but we arrived here and now they don't want immigrants? At a time of historic global migration, immigration experts warn that closing Roxham Road will push desperate asylum seekers to seek new crossings, riskier crossings in more dangerous places. Verity Stevenson is a reporter with CBC Montreal. She's talked to migrants who've spent months, even years, trying to get into Canada.

We'll talk today about the impact the Roxham Road closure has on these migrants and on the impact across the border in the U.S. Hi, Verity. Hi, Alex. Before we get to how and why Roxham Road was closed, I just want to start with the story. The story of one person who endured a lot to get there. We aren't using her last name because she fears for her safety and for the effect on her case. But who is Naomi? What path did she take to Canada? did she take to Canada? So Naomi is this 24-year-old woman from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

And she fled because her stepfather, who's a soldier with a lot of influence, was sexually abusing her. He was raping her. And so she fled into neighboring Angola without many resources. There's political strife there as well. She landed in a market where she met a man who said that he could help her out. He, you know, rented her a place to stay. But soon after, she says, his wife found out and basically sent these bandits in the night to intimidate her. It's unclear what her relationship was with that man, but she says

that one of those bandits raped her as well. She managed to get a visa to Brazil, met a family who was planning to take this journey north up to the United States. And so her plan was to meet up with this uncle that she hadn't seen since she was a baby, but he lives in Canada. And so she was hoping to reunite with him. And so this journey north is incredibly harrowing,

but it includes this jungle called the Darien Gap. It's just this treacherous 60 miles of fast-flowing rivers, steep hills, knee-deep mud, bandits who prey on the vulnerabilities of asylum seekers. Naomi says she was robbed of everything that she had except for a couple documents left to her name. She says she almost drowned several times, was starving by the time she got out of there and was just basically staggering. And from there, you know, that's sort of early on in the journey. You know, after that, she continued through several more countries.

She was detained in Texas after crossing and, yeah, had hoped to cross into Canada. But she said that she took a cab to the official point of entry because at this point, taxi drivers were no longer taking people to Roxham Road. They'd been told that they weren't allowed to do that. She spent a couple days in detention at the Canadian border, and they, for some reason, didn't accept the evidence that she had for her uncle in Canada, and she was turned away. So let me get this straight. After all this, after assaults, after crossing the most murderous walking path on earth, she gets to Canada and is told,

sorry, you can't come in. Yeah, that's exactly it. She said that she was so stressed by the time she got to Canada that she fainted, they had to take her to the hospital. And so when I met her, she was in this gas station, bus station in Plattsburgh without any savings left and trying to figure out where to go from there.

Let's go back a moment and talk about the way Roxham Road used to work. I mean, it had become like an unofficial border crossing, right, before March this year. Why were so many migrants using this one spot to get into Canada? Like you say, it was this country road that straddles upstate New York and southern Quebec. So it's about an hour south of Montreal. And in 2017, after U.S. President Donald Trump was elected and there was these policies that threatened to end the temporary protected status for people, including Haitians. What happened is that word got around about this loophole in the safe third country agreement between Canada and the United States.

And what this agreement says is that essentially people seeking asylum, they should claim asylum in the first of the two countries that they land in. And so if you're coming from South or Central America, traveling by land, that would be the U.S. But you have to in order to essentially cross the border. There was a loophole to this agreement, which was that between official ports of entry, if people found their way across the border and handed themselves in to authorities, an immigration judge would then have to hear their case, that they were essentially able to make a claim as soon as they arrived in the country. It doesn't stop, even in the dead of night in a snowstorm. People keep turning up at Wroxham Road, at least 100 every day.

But for most, the road to Roxham... And the provinces have been complaining, right? I understand that the premier of your province, François Legault, wasn't happy about these thousands of migrants coming to Quebec. How heated did the rhetoric get in Quebec as well? Yeah, exactly. So this effective closure of Roxham Road is something that the Quebec government had been pushing for for a long time. Legault had repeatedly said, you know, that Quebec

resources were stretched. 100 a day is 36,000 new people a year. Of course, in addition of the other migrants, we cannot offer services to so many people. He had also suggested that these new immigrants were contributing to the decline of the use of French in Quebec. We know by facts that at 50,000 a year, there's a decrease in the percentage of francophones in Quebec, especially in Montreal. We had 36,000 people who came through the Roxham Road. And, of course, there's a question of language, but there's also a question... But, you know, what I've heard a lot in my reporting from advocates is that actually a lot of the asylum seekers were in fact French speaking, that they were ready and willing to integrate into society to work right away. And that given more of a boost from Quebec and Ottawa, that these organizations were in fact

prepared to accommodate the greater numbers of people arriving. Okay. So then fast forward to March this year, like how, how exactly do we find out that Roxham and the so-called loophole are going to be closing? Yeah, this was first leaked to the media the day before U.S. President Joe Biden was set to arrive in Ottawa for his visit with Trudeau. joint announcement after Biden arrived, where they explained that asylum seekers would no longer be able to claim asylum in Canada if they had already claimed asylum in the U.S. After midnight tonight, police and border officers will enforce the agreement and return irregular border crossers to the closest port of entry with the United States. So just, you know, hours away. But there are exceptions in this agreement, right?

Some crossers are still allowed into Canada. I understand Naomi was hoping for one of those exemptions. What exactly are these? There's three exemptions to the agreement. They include having a family member with legal status in Canada, being an unaccompanied minor, and also having somehow obtained a work permit or other official document allowing a person to be in Canada. And so that's pretty much exactly how it's laid out on the Canadian government website.

It doesn't say, you know, what proof you need. And so what we're hearing from advocates and lawyers is that a lot of people are showing up, you know, with family members, but unsure of how exactly to prove that information. So the migrants get there, they don't have a whole lot of information. As a matter of fact, we should underscore that the government's had this deal in place in secret for a year, since April of last year. So it was basically shipped around in an envelope across North America, signed, and then kept quiet because officials didn't want the public to know about it. They wanted to avoid a stampede at the border.

So Verity, talk to me. I mean, how much notice did these migrants get that Roxham was about to be sealed off? Yeah, it's interesting. We were there in the hours leading up to midnight, basically, and afterwards. And there were a lot of people showing up. You know, there were, I think, cabs after around 6 p.m. constantly arriving. As the clock struck midnight, Canadian border officials tore off the tape and cut the plastic on this new sign at Roxham Road, warning migrants to stop, do not cross. But as they did that, just 50 meters away, a last taxi pulled up with a family trying to make it across in time. Their driver urging them to run. And so most of those people seemed to have been

told, at least by the cab drivers, that there would be this change. But a lot of people didn't know about it and were simply lucky to have arrived before the deadline. There was, we'd been hearing from taxi drivers that they were expecting a bus from New York City to arrive around 3 or 4 a.m. And so we went to the gas station in Plattsburgh. People had just gotten off the bus. There were around 30 or 40 people, asylum seekers from Haiti, Cameroon, Venezuela, Honduras. And there were two cab drivers who were there essentially only to deliver the news to them because they had been told by the government that they weren't allowed to bring them to Roxham Road even. And so that was quite something to see the faces of, you know, these people who traveled through similar journeys to Naomi's, spent all of their savings and, you know, arrived in the middle of the night.

It was quite cold as well. The gas station there was closed only to find out that they wouldn't be able to go into Canada finally. And so there, I mean, they were just completely stunned and asking a lot of questions and really heartbroken it's just a terrible human ordeal like the stuff that Naomi went through with others and then you get told no sorry you did this for nothing I love you. empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you.

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migrants not want to stay in the United States and why are they trying to get to Canada? Yeah. So there's a lot of, Canada holds appeal to asylum seekers traveling through the US because many have heard that processing times in Canada are shorter. So people who've had to leave their families, for example, behind in fleeing their countries, they believe, and in many cases they do have a greater chance of reuniting sooner with their children. And then in the case of French-speaking migrants, they have the idea that it would be easier to integrate into French-speaking communities like Quebec. But we met a lot of people who had left families behind in fleeing their countries. There was this one man from Cameroon on that bus who, he fled Cameroon

into nearby Equatorial Guinea, and he had to leave his 11 children behind with his wife. He fled because his father had been assassinated and he feared that he would be targeted as well. Harrowing stuff. I mean, we have to remind ourselves, I mean, this is a global story. I mean, a historic number of human beings are on the move. And so when you shut down one access point, like Roxham Road, it has an effect somewhere else, like on other towns across the border. I mean, just last week you were in Portland, Maine, right? And the population there is only, I think, 68,000 people. So how many asylum seekers are currently in that community trying to get across? Although it's the biggest city in Maine, it's quite a small city compared to a lot of other metropolises. And the city is currently housing or sheltering 1,200 asylum seekers. And some people in the city believe that there could services there, Kristen Dow, and she said that she's quite certain that Portland has been housing the greatest number of asylum seekers per capita in the U.S. It's really important and has always been important for me.

I'll never you'll never hear me say don't don't come to Portland. That will never be something that I will say. But I want to make sure that everyone who decides to travel to Portland is making an informed decision. And I want them to know that when they come, they probably will have to now find housing and shelter on their own because the city does not have that capacity right now with the numbers that we are sheltering. And the shelters themselves are leftover vacant spaces that the city could find to just get people out of the cold. That includes gymnasium floors, its family services, shelter. There are people as well who've been sleeping, you know, on floors and church pews in churches and church basements. And as well, in mid-April, after the state's basketball season

ended, it opened its basketball stadium as a shelter. So it set up 300 cots for people to sleep in. And, you know, that space, to give you an idea of how overwhelmed they are, that space was full within a week. The majority of the people that we met outside of this basketball stadium, which is known as the Expo, they said that they had wanted to go to Canada and that they were basically stuck. They said that their children were showing signs of malnutrition because they were only being fed expired cakes and milk. And so they were quite upset and in distress. This reminds me of stories I've heard in Arizona, just communities overwhelmed along the border. And it feels like, you know, you and I have been covering different bits of this global story.

You know, in Quebec, and I have been covering it in the United States. I mean, so I want to ask you a little bit about the sort of global context here. There are other big changes at the U.S. border happening now. The U.S. had pandemic rules, Title 42, powers that let it turn migrants away on the grounds of preventing the spread of COVID. Those rules expired on Thursday of last week. So now the Biden administration is bringing back an even older policy where migrants can be quickly deported and banned from re-entry under threat of prosecution. And it's basically banning asylum claims from anyone who's passed through another country. So what's happening with the number of people migrating that both the United States and

Canada are now narrowing immigration? Yeah, I mean, what we're seeing right now is this global migration wave that has really picked up in earnest since the end of many pandemic restrictions. And, you know, a lot of countries over the pandemic have experienced really severe economic strain. There's more political instability. People are also fleeing the effects of climate change. And so I think the UN said that we're seeing the greatest number of displaced people in the world since World War II. And there's a lot of political pressure in the United States and in Canada to sort of stem the flow of people because of the strain on resources and housing and so on. But a lot of experts also say that strict policies don't necessarily stem these flows of people because people are fleeing

really real dangers and it's not possible for a lot of those people to simply stay put. Yeah, so the federal government has analysis on this, right? If I understand correctly, the Canada Gazette posted our own government's own assessment of what the impact of closing places like Roxham Road might be. What did it say about the danger to migrants after making this change? Yeah, so the Canada Gazette is this place where different government departments will post analyses or, you know, reasonings behind policy changes. And so in this case, this was an analysis by the Canadian Immigration Ministry. And in that document, you know, it explains the motivation for renegotiating the deal.

motivation for renegotiating the deal. Public confidence in Canada's ability to manage the border was one of the main motivation behind the change to the agreement. It also listed potential costs to the fallout of this change. So the analysis estimated that this would cost $61.5 million over 10 years to Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada, as well as to the Canadian Border Services Agency. And that includes, you know, buying extra vehicles to ferry people from different points along the border to U.S. Border Patrol, increased surveillance and intelligence. And it also, this document also acknowledges dangers that asylum seekers are potentially exposed to as a result of this change. It said they may also face risks from exposure to extreme weather conditions if they cross

at remote locations or fail to secure access to shelter. It also mentions, you know, the potential of, you know, falling in the hands of smugglers, smugglers, you know, making potentially dangerous decisions. It could increase the risks of human trafficking and sexual violence. And the document even says often disproportionately targeted at migrant women, girls girls and LGBTQI individuals. And so, yeah, so it was interesting to sort of see behind the curtain a little bit with this document. So, I mean, yeah, people were using taxi drivers to get to Roxham Road before.

Now the concern is that they'll be talking to criminal gangs to try to get them across. And people have actually died crossing the border into Canada and from Canada in the past. Eight bodies of two migrant families have been found in the St. Lawrence River near here in Akwesasne on the Canadian-U.S. border, including an infant and a child under the age of three. All are believed to have been attempting illegal entry into the United States from Canada. So I guess what I want to know is what the government's trying to achieve by trying to clamp down. Like, what are they hoping that migrants do as a result of knowing the border is closing? Yeah, that's a good question. And I mean, you mentioned border deaths. A lot of advocates were after the deaths of the two families in Akwesasne, you know, they

were crossing into the U.S., but a lot of advocates and experts were saying, well, this could potentially now happen going the other way into Canada, you know, people relying on decision making from smugglers, even in dangerous conditions. And so what this document says is that the reasoning behind creating a strict policy like this is that it will deter people from even trying to cross the border. will deter people from even trying to cross the border. I feel like we're, again, talking about a different part of the story that I've been covering here in the U.S. It sounds like a lot like what you hear on the southern border. The Biden administration is now saying essentially the same thing. Yes. Sort of you need to deter people from crossing, as did Donald Trump. In fact, Biden's now taking heat from both sides on this issue, not just from the right,

which has been saying that he's allowed this surge to happen. But now his allies on the left are saying, you know, you're hardly better than Trump. You know, as a result of closing down the United States, other countries, poorer countries are struggling with migration. Like Colombia has practically 10% of Venezuela living in it. I was at the Arizona border with Mexico a while ago, and I heard, I mean, so many terrible stories about abuses people suffered while migrating, about being robbed and assaulted by Mexican police officers. I heard several people talk to me about being robbed and assaulted by Mexican cops. And then some of these people got

rejected. And one of those folks emailed me later to say, Hey, how can I get to Canada? And then she was deported back to her country after all that. So, you know, I guess that's where I'd like to conclude with the effect across the hemisphere. The U.S. is cracking down. Canada's cracking down. Where will these people wind up? Yeah. I mean, Canada, I've heard criticism of these policies of some people say, oh, well, Canada is just mimicking U.S. immigration policy. And it's exactly as you describe, I think, is can these strict policies really stem the flow of people heading north? Does this only expose people to all of those dangers that you listed and more along the way if they're having to stop in countries along the way where they may, you know, people are also fleeing some of these countries, fleeing gang violence and abuses from officials in certain cases. So, yeah. So we'll see whether policymakers get the reduction in migration they were looking

for, and we'll see what happens to these folks who are on the move. Verity, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. That's all for today. Thank you for listening to FrontBurner. Talk to youbc.ca slash podcasts.