Since the beginning of the year, the arrivals of asylum seekers via Roxham Road have made headlines every week. In four questions this week, The duty attempts to provide nuanced answers to this complex phenomenon. Today: possibility and consequences of a restriction of passages at Roxham.
Both political parties, lawyers and citizens on social networks have been calling for the “closure” of Roxham Road for months.
The solution is obviously not as simple as putting a physical barrier, such as a fence or barbed wire, on this now famous Montérégie road.
As a signatory to the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, Canada has undertaken not to turn back asylum seekers at its borders.
A third of asylum seekers in Quebec did not go through Roxham Road in 2022. Nearly 19,000 people filed their application at the airport (11,650) or at an inland office (7275) Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
The Safe Third Country Agreement is the source of all the tension. In effect since December 2004, it provides for the immediate removal of a refugee claimant seeking to enter Canada from the United States by land.
However, it does not cover people arriving between two official entry points, hence the possibility of seeking asylum at Roxham Road.
What to do with the Agreement?
On the one hand, there is the camp of those who would like to abolish the Safe Third Country Agreement. Asylum seekers could then “simply go to the official border post”, says lawyer Stéphanie Valois, that of Lacolle for example, which is near Roxham Road.
Others would rather renegotiate it, to change these exceptions precisely, including Prime Minister François Legault. Proponents of renegotiation point in particular to the fact that the situation “encourages” people to cross the border irregularly. The costs generated by the reception of asylum seekers are also part of this reasoning.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau assures us that the Agreement is indeed being renegotiated with Washington. However, he has long refused to reveal more about the content of these negotiations.
It is precisely in the details that everything becomes complicated: could a new version of the Agreement include all the passages between the official entry points?
But how, then, to succeed in such an attempt to seal the country? Canada has a border of nearly 9000 kilometers with the United States (including that with Alaska). “It’s a bit like trying to retain water with your hands, it can work for a while, then the flows will go around”, says Élisabeth Vallet, director of the Geopolitics Observatory of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair.
Another option is to return to the status quo that prevailed during the pandemic, with only the exceptions already provided for in the Agreement, for example people with family in Canada or unaccompanied minors. More than 4,000 asylum seekers have passed through Roxham in 2021 despite the restrictions.
“During the pandemic, people were still crossing between two entry points. If we close Roxham, people will just pass by, ”believes Me Valois.
Even before 2017, the year in which arrivals accelerated via Roxham Road, “there were always people who crossed the border unseen and who went directly to Sherbrooke, for example”, also remembers Stephan Reichhold, director general of the round table of organizations serving refugees and immigrants. However, this number remained “marginal”, he specifies.
It’s not just Roxham, precisely: a person who passes through any place other than a border post can currently apply for asylum when intercepted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. , or do so at an inland office.
This is what makes M sayme Valois that the Roxham road, “it is an orderly migration, contrary to the image that we try to give”. “At least we know exactly who is there, who is coming in, because we register them, we take their fingerprints, we do checks,” she describes.
“Roxham is safer and more organized,” says Mr. Reichhold. The hardening of the border would lead, according to him, “more risk of death and more suffering”.
The link between the strengthening of borders and the increase in the death toll has indeed been studied in multiple places around the world. In the United States, more than 750 people were found dead at the southern border in 2021, which is a record.
This element was even put forward by the provincial Minister of Immigration, Christine Fréchette, in a press briefing on February 2, before she retracted the same day. “It would be dangerous [pour les migrants]. It would make them [devraient] go through paths that are not marked like Roxham Road”, making the crossing “more perilous”, she said then.
Global Context
Could partially “closing” Roxham nevertheless reduce its power of attractiveness? “Maybe, I don’t know,” said M.e Valois in reflection. But if you’re willing to risk your life, I don’t think the Canada-US border is going to stop you. »
She cites the case of several Haitians who transit through the Darién region of Colombia, known to be one of the most dangerous places in the world, both because of a dense tropical jungle and because of drug trafficking and of the Colombian armed conflict.
“I think you have to realize that Canada can’t escape the global trend,” she says.
“Roxham is a drop of water in the global reality of people who need help, to migrate,” also notes Mireille Paquet, political scientist at Concordia University.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has calculated that 89.3 million people were forced to flee their homes in 2022, the “highest level since these statistics exist”.