A better way to manage the border after the collapse of the Safe Third Country Agreement

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The Safe Third Country Agreement is not long for this world. This is Canada’s opportunity to replace it with something better, more humane and more attuned to our new national ambitions and alliances.

The 2004 bi-national treaty, intended to prevent refugee claimants from using Canada as a stepping-stone to cross into the United States and vice-versa, has come under widespread criticism and is unlikely to survive its next Supreme Court of Canada challenge.

The reason is in its name: The United States can no longer be considered a safe country to which migrants who come to Canada’s land border can be sent back. The brutality of Donald Trump’s detention-and-deportation regime and Washington’s new official policies of racial intolerance mean the United States is becoming a net producer, rather than a receiver, of stateless migrants fleeing danger.

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That leaves Canada vulnerable to the STCA’s shortcomings. While U.S. governments have long viewed it as a border-security measure permitting quicker deportation, Ottawa has come to rely on it as a burden-sharing arrangement. Hundreds of thousands of migrants from failed states such as Venezuela and Haiti have settled in the United States, unable to move further northward easily. Canada, when the STCA was renegotiated in 2023, agreed to take only 15,000 such refugees (which it then reduced to 11,000), and has seen border crossings decline under tighter enforcement of the treaty. This has given rise to a burgeoning human-smuggling industry: 2025 appears on track to be a record-breaking year for U.S.-to-Canada migrant smuggling.

In the increasingly likely event of a large-scale U.S. crackdown and expulsion under Trump policies, the STCA could cause Canada’s border to be deluged. That’s because the treaty contains perverse incentives that effectively force all northbound migrants to avoid regular land crossings and make dangerous clandestine entries through Canada’s forests and rivers. Migrants living to our south know of no legal ways to apply for Canadian refugee status or regular immigration where they live – so they’ll head to the border.

This is a problem Canada shares with countries like Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica. Those countries share with us both a need to take pressure off their southern borders, and to share the burden of refugee settlement.

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There happens to be a system designed to do both things. The Safe Mobility Initiative was created by the administration of president Joe Biden in 2023, with the participation of Canada, Spain and Latin American countries, to manage the post-pandemic migration surge. It created a string of offices along the Central American migration corridor, along with online portals and mobile-phone apps, where migrants from crisis-hit places could apply to a range of countries for legal labour and family immigration, or for asylum, or for safe legal settlement in a country to the south.

It never fully got off the ground. Like most Biden immigration schemes, it was an ill-designed failure at first: Its documentation requirements were too steep for most Venezuelans and Haitians, it was not widely publicized among migrants, and its apps tended to send migrants to offices at the Mexico-U.S border, heightening the crisis there. But once some of those bugs were worked out in 2024, it was found to have contributed to the steep decline in U.S. illegal immigration that year. Then, this January, the Trump administration abruptly cancelled it.

A new, simplified and better-designed version of Safe Mobility should be launched, in the hands of Canadians in partnership with our southern neighbours who share the same problems. It might be online-only or phone-based at first, and widely publicized among migrant communities.

It would allow prospective migrants and refugees, including those living in the United States and along the road in the Americas, to have their case considered and their background screened before coming to the border. Worldwide experience shows that most migrants prefer to apply for legal programs even if there’s only a slight chance of succeeding, rather than the vast expense and mortal danger of overland migration and smuggling. If rejected, they mostly apply for somewhere else, rather than trudge further north.

A new study by the Denmark-based Mixed Migration Centre proposes Safe Mobility schemes as one of the best ways to end human smuggling. They’re considered the best solution to Britain’s and Europe’s boat-migration crises. I recently conducted a study of migration-governance initiatives for a report by the Canadian Council for the Americas on improving Canada-Latin America relations, and found a big appetite for Safe Mobility schemes across the hemisphere.

Best of all, they could be launched without the participation of the United States – even while the STCA still exists. They’re the best way to take pressure off our border, now that Washington isn’t helping.