Canada’s border is broken, but not the way Trump thinks. Here’s how the next government can fix it

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A decade ago, Canada’s border had all but disappeared from public consciousness. The mid-2010s saw Ottawa and Washington talking about opening the border to labour mobility in something like a European free-movement agreement. Immigration was overwhelmingly popular among Canadians across the political spectrum, Britain and Germany were racing to adopt “Canadian-style” selective-immigration systems, and the sponsorship of refugees was seen as a source of national pride.

Then, beginning with a series of disturbing incidents at the start of President Donald Trump’s first term of office in 2017, the border, and the people trying to move across it, burst into the Canadian mind.

Those incidents, some of them lethal, were the result of unnoticed flaws in Canada’s constellation of institutions of border control, immigration, asylum, settlement and citizenship – flaws that would be at the root of a second crisis beginning in 2024, as temporary-immigration entries soared far above targets, overshadowed permanent-immigrant numbers and badly strained the rental-housing supply and job market.

Now the border is Canada’s biggest story. It is the subject of a series of angry accusations and trade-war threats from Mr. Trump, and there are worries that large numbers of migrants fleeing the President’s policies will sneak across remote stretches of the border, as thousands did during his first term. If they do, they’ll add to a refugee system that’s already overwhelmed and preparing to face applications from hundreds of thousands of Canadian temporary residents and students reaching the end of their visas and in danger of becoming “illegals” – a concept that’s new to most Canadians. And for the first time in decades, immigration may be a major issue in a federal election.

Canada’s border is broken – but not the way Donald Trump thinks it is. Our real border is not the 8,891-kilometre line to our south, but a complex set of institutions and bureaucracies and rules that determine who can enter, who can stay and who should be kept out. This array of more than 100 immigration and asylum programs, while often very successful on their own, together have created perverse incentives that often channel the wrong people into the wrong pathways, and confound the policy desires of governments – whether those desires are greater population growth or lower immigration levels.

To understand how the next federal government, of either party, might fix the border and deliver on its immigration promises, we ought to start by taking a closer look at two of those events of eight years ago, and how they shaped our current crisis.

The first involved a little girl.

She was the 6-year-old daughter of Jon and Karissa Warkentin, a couple from Colorado who moved their family to rural Manitoba, where they had invested $600,000 on a fishing-and-hunting lodge and resort. They were, by any standards, ideal immigrants: Rather than just filling job vacancies, they created a business that employed people from the nearby First Nations community; they created units of housing and a restaurant. After arriving as immigrants under Manitoba’s Provincial Nominee Program (in which the province selects a quota of business immigrants under Ottawa’s main points-based system), a few years later they applied to Ottawa for permanent residency.

Then, without any warning, in 2017 they received a letter saying they’d been rejected and would have to leave Canada within months under a deportation order.

The reason, according to the letter, was their daughter. Her intellectual disability, it said, placed an “excessive demand” on the province’s education system. Under a rule known as “medical inadmissibility,” if a family member’s health is predicted to create “excessive demand on health or social services” then the entire family is effectively denied residency and citizenship. It’s one of many restrictive rules that tend to deter some of the most desirable immigrant families from coming to Canada.

It’s the sort of ordeal familiar to many families that have immigrated in recent decades. The Warkentins then hired a lawyer, who produced a 500-page report arguing that their daughter’s disabilities weren’t as serious as they seemed, and used it to launch an appeal with a federal court. But response times to such filings are typically in the years, and the family was to be deported in months. Despairing, they had only their lawyer, their provincial government and the media to turn to.

The second incident involved the corpse of a grandmother.

One cold morning in May, 2017, the body of Mavis Otuteye, a 57-year-old Ghanaian who’d lived for years in Delaware, was found by police in a ditch on the edge of a field just south of the Manitoba border. Authorities determined that she’d died of hypothermia making the long trek across Minnesota farm fields in the subzero evening. She had set out to go to Toronto to visit her daughter, who’d just given birth to her first grandchild.

She had reportedly decided on this roundabout, dangerous route after researching the trip, where she had learned about the Safe Third Country Agreement. That post-Sept. 11 treaty between Canada and the United States prohibits immigrants living in one country from making refugee claims in the other – meaning that undocumented U.S. residents can’t present themselves at border crossings. Although it is not known if Ms. Otuteye had planned to apply for asylum, if she had contacted the Canadian Border Services Agency, she would likely have been told that she could not be admitted.

So she had followed a path that thousands of other U.S. residents had taken in early 2017: travelling, likely with help from a smuggler, to sparsely populated spots between border crossings, walking across the border and presenting themselves to authorities to make an asylum claim. This route had already led to tragedy – another pair of Ghanaian men had lost all their fingers to frostbite while crossing into Manitoba that February (both men are now Canadian citizens, suggesting that they would have been accepted through a normal, legal immigration or asylum channel if they had been able to apply). This was the first in a wave of border deaths to attract public attention, but it would be far from the last – for example, there were at least 15 deaths of irregular migrants at the border between 2020 and 2023.

Particularly heartbreaking was the news, reported days after her burial, that Ms. Otuteye would likely have been legally eligible to enter Canada through an official border-crossing point, on a bus or plane. Unbeknownst to her, and probably unbeknownst to the CBSA officials at the border, she was subject to an exemption to the Safe Third Country Agreement that allows immigrants to visit relatives living legally in Canada. But experts say that the border officials from the CBSA probably wouldn’t have told her this, since they are largely trained in the movement of goods and, unlike the immigration officials who worked the border in the 20th century, are not expected to have expertise in the finer details of immigration policy.

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Ms. Otuteye’s death provoked multiple calls for changes to Canada’s border system. For some, it showed that the Safe Third Country Agreement was jeopardizing lives, incentivizing people to take unnecessarily dangerous risks and employ smugglers rather than simply appear at a border crossing or airport and get accepted or rejected – and that the United States had arguably ceased to be a safe third country. For others, the almost 70,000 people who crossed the border between entries during the first Trump term and the year after (about half of whom were deemed to be legitimate refugees) symbolized a mounting threat of illegal immigration and Ottawa’s inability to control who entered the country.

In the end, tragedy did lead to reform: Starting in 2023, the STCA was amended by the U.S. and Canada so that people who had crossed the border into Canada between crossings could be sent back by authorities, if intercepted within two weeks of crossing – a measure intended to deter illegal immigration. By that point, during the Biden years, the great majority of illegal border crossings were from Canada to the United States (including a family of four who froze to death trying to cross from Manitoba into Minnesota in 2022), but some fear that the second Trump term will once again drive people northward.

There’s now talk of eliminating the two-week provision, which may be driving people into hiding and encouraging even more dangerous routes across the border – but doing so is thought by legal experts to be unconstitutional and subject to a court challenge.

None of those proposals address the root problem that caused Ms. Otuteye, and tens of thousands others, to come to the Canadian border in the first place: They saw no other way to apply to come to Canada. Many would have avoided the trip entirely if they’d applied and been rejected back at home, or at least somewhere other than the border.

A large proportion of refugee applicants are also qualified economic immigrants who simply knew of no opportunities to apply for normal immigration pathways. That was likely true of the two Ghanaian men who lost their fingers – they were from educated middle-class English-fluent families with marketable skills. If Ms. Otuteye’s family had been able to be interviewed by Canadian immigration officials in Ghana or the United States, and even if she had been told she wouldn’t qualify, she may never have begun her fateful journey, instead trying another country.

The Warkentin family’s ordeal also provoked changes to the Canadian system. Weeks before they were scheduled to face their deportation order, and after months of media attention and expensive legal efforts, then Liberal Immigration minister Ahmed Hussen granted them an exemption and made changes to the “medical inadmissibility” rule, at first raising the medical-cost threshold and then exempting dependent children from it entirely, along with spouses. The Warkentin family are now Canadian citizens.

That change may have been welcome to immigrant families who live with disability, but it did not address the larger problem: Even though both political parties claim they want the system to be focused on permanent immigration of full families rather than temporaries and refugees, Canada’s rules and processes make it extremely difficult, expensive and time-consuming to reunite immigrant families. For example, parents are still subject to a medical-inadmissibility threshold, and for 2025, the Liberals have excluded sponsorship of parents from family-class immigration altogether – even though many families rely on the older generation to make economic and cultural integration possible.

That’s a small part of a frustrating larger picture for the most coveted immigrants. Canada’s main points-based stream for high-skill families, ironically known as Express Entry, has become a complex and lengthy ordeal that all but mandates would-be immigrant families to pay large sums to a lawyer and be prepared to submit and resubmit voluminous documents, repeatedly switch between programs and pathways, and await results of monthly lotteries often stretching out for years. Currently, Express Entry has a backlog of almost half a million family applications.

“I think immigration should be a more collaborative process,” says Alastair Clarke, who was the Warkentin’s Winnipeg-based lawyer. “Far too often when an officer receives an application that has some small thing missing, instead of talking to the applicant, instead they’ll either return it or refuse the application. It would be much more efficient if they could just resolve issues in a much more informal process.”

As a consequence of this, people who ought to be permanent-resident immigration applicants are choosing instead to come to Canada through quicker pathways: As college or university students, as temporary workers, as refugees or through an astonishing range of specialized programs targeting specific work areas (such as domestic workers or home builders). To some extent, the system was designed this way: Coming to Canada as a graduate student or contract worker and then applying for permanent immigration is a long-established and successful way to create new Canadians. But it also isn’t really a system: Many of these immigration paths have their own application systems and their own bureaucracies; some are administered by non-profit groups, provinces, charities or industry organizations, and the refugee system is a completely separate set of bureaucracies and procedures.

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Those events of eight years ago revealed a flaw in Canada’s patchwork quilt of border and immigration systems: The points-based permanent-resident system that’s supposed to be our main pathway has become increasingly difficult, time-consuming and sometimes inaccessible, creating big incentives for both prospective immigrants and immigrant-seeking businesses to turn to temporary and humanitarian pathways that were designed to be secondary, specialized side-channels.

That flaw exploded into the public eye in 2024, when Canadians learned that their resident population had unexpectedly grown by an astonishing 1.27 million people the previous year, following an intake of more than 900,000 in 2022 – a 3.2-per-cent annual growth, the highest immigration rate since the 1950s – that swamped the Liberals’ well-considered permanent-immigration targets of somewhat less than 500,000 people (or slightly more than 1 per cent of population) per year.

It turned out that most of that growth had come from short-term, temporary-immigration visas controlled by provincial governments, for workers and students. During the peak pandemic years when international borders were closed and many provinces struggled to fill gaping labour shortages, these channels were opened up wide, and not shut during the recovery.

That is not how Canada’s immigration system is supposed to work, and evidently not how Immigration Minister Marc Miller thought it was working. But those twin crises in Manitoba should have given the Liberals a sense of what had gone wrong, and what was about to happen.

In principle, when Canadian cities and regions face shortages of skilled workers and tradespeople, they are meant to turn to the Provincial Nominee Program, which allows provinces to designate quotas of permanent immigrant families who are received under several business and trade-based streams and processed under the Express Entry points-based program (fewer points are required for provincial nominees).

But entering as a provincial nominee can be an arduous, time-consuming and uncertain process, and immigrants who make it this way generally expect high-level jobs. Companies facing shortages in lower-wage areas usually need employees within weeks. So over the last decade companies and provinces have increasingly turned to non-permanent immigrants – especially TFWs and former students using their three-year postgraduation work permits.

And these have ballooned as some provinces, facing no limits on postsecondary visa applications, allowed their universities and colleges to replace lost provincial funding with foreign-student fees; many prospective immigrants saw this and realized that a couple years of college was a faster and easier initial entry to Canada than permanent-resident immigration; some colleges, especially in Ontario, responded by opening “degree-mill” campuses to serve just such applicants.

As a result, by the middle of 2024 there were 2.7 million of these temporary residents in Canada, making up a record 6.5 per cent of the country’s population. As Canadians realized last year, these numbers were substantial enough to put a severe strain on rental housing, drive up youth unemployment rates in some cities, and create a general sense that immigration was out of control. For the first time in recent decades, a majority of Canadians said levels were too high.

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The Liberals should have known of this risk. In the 2000s and early 2010s, the Temporary Foreign Worker program had been used heavily by the government of prime minister Stephen Harper, drawing harsh criticism from the Liberal Opposition.

After the 2015 election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decided not to scale it back but instead to create pathways for TFWs to permanent residency and eventual citizenship. In practice, though, the requirements for permanent residency, and the limited numbers of spots, mean that very few temporaries have been able to become permanent. And in November, Ottawa closed down the Temporary Resident to Permanent Resident Pathway. As a result, there are now hundreds of thousands of people living and working in Canada who aren’t accompanied by their families and don’t have a clear route to citizenship when their visas run out. Some will return home, but many will seek other paths to permanence.

Many are reportedly considering a pathway that’s already facing record demand: asylum. Close to 14,000 international students applied for refugee status in the first nine months of 2024, compared to 1,810 in 2018. That’s not a very high proportion of foreign students or of immigrants, but it suggests that when post-graduation visas run out, there will be a larger surge of asylum applications.

“Many students applying for asylum aren’t doing so because it’s a backdoor into Canada,” writes Yvonne Su, director of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University. Instead, they “are being pushed into that position by institutions that have promised them a future and then left them to fend for themselves.”

There’s an underlying problem here, related to the one exposed by the crises of 2017: People who come to Canada aren’t easily divided into neat categories. Almost everyone fleeing war and persecution across international borders is also a skilled economic migrant (it’s generally only skilled or middle-class people who can afford to flee internationally). Many labour migrants also need to be students, to get their foreign credentials raised to Canadian standards. And a certain proportion of labour immigrants and students also face persecution and violence in their home countries and are thus eligible for asylum. It’s quite common for people to apply to change immigration categories while living in Canada. Because there’s no single application or interview, it’s hard to predict where migrants will end up.

That’s a problem for Canada’s refugee system, which is a completely separate bureaucracy from immigration, with only 2,600 employees compared to the 13,000 staff of the federal department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. Canada’s refugee body, the Immigration and Refugee Board, uses in-person hearings and was designed for a much smaller refugee flow, typically less than 10 per cent of immigration. It’s still reeling from recent emergency cases involving more than 100,000 Syrians since 2015, almost 300,000 Ukrainians since 2022 (many of whom are now required to reapply for extensions on their status), and the almost 100,000 people who crossed the U.S. border to apply for asylum before 2024.

As a consequence, refugee claims are almost as backlogged as the permanent-resident immigration system – as of December there were 267,000 claims in the queue – and in some categories take years to get processed; even urgent resettlement cases involving immediate threats to life are taking eight months or more. Some refugees facing immediate danger, such as Afghans targeted by the Taliban, are now applying for labour-migration schemes because they’re told they may be faster and less restricted than refugee resettlement.

What makes this especially frustrating is that Canada’s refugee-settlement system has been a great success in recent years. In 2015 and 2016, some expressed worries that the Syrians fleeing their civil war would have trouble fitting into Canadian communities. But recent studies by IRCC and by the Environics Institute found that the 100,000 Syrians have integrated exceptionally well, especially in cultural areas such as language acquisition, national pride and Canadian identity. The system works, but it’s not built to handle such huge numbers coming from within Canada.

Especially not when a substantial portion, perhaps more than half, will eventually be rejected as ineligible, after several years of processing and possibly appeal hearings. Some of the applicants will return home, but many will join a growing number who are living here without a valid visa – undocumented residents, or, as the Americans call them, “illegals.”

In 2024, for the first time since the 1970s, Canada’s undocumented population became a subject of political concern, with growing suggestions that we need a much more substantial deportation system to deal with them. To do this at such a scale would be very expensive: Between 2022 and 2024, Canada deported 29,000 undocumented people, at a reported cost of more than $115-million. Although there is clearly a need for a better and faster system to remove people with criminal or extremist backgrounds and, for example, solo men who repeatedly enter on fraudulent grounds, it is a waste of resources to spend tens of thousands expelling people who have violated a minor immigration rule or overstayed a legitimate visa, but who otherwise have qualifications and skills that would make them valuable contributors to Canada.

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There has to be a sensible Canadian space between Trumpist mass deportations and closed borders on one hand, and on the other the current reality of a set of policies and institutions that make Canadian governments unable to control who enters the country.

Luckily, there seems to be an awkward political consensus around this. Both the federal Conservatives and the major Liberal leadership candidates appear to be united (though they might not admit it) around a common set of aspirations: a return to a focus on permanent, citizenship-focused immigration of intact families and a reduction of temporary migration to a minimum; immigration targets tied to economic conditions and population-growth needs; a refugee policy driven by genuine humanitarian need and not by irregular border crossings or opportunism.

Those goals won’t easily be attained with mere tinkering of the sort that governments this century have engaged in. Rather, they require a set of systemwide reforms. After interviewing a dozen former immigration officials and experts, I found a strong consensus on the changes that would make the system work:

Simplify the system with provinces at the centre. At the core of Canada’s recent immigration and border troubles is the proliferation of entry points – both physical border crossings and, especially, the myriad of programs, schemes and pathways that often effectively compete for applicants. Virtually every immigration official and expert agrees this needs to be simplified and streamlined, with the goal of making permanent, full-family programs more appealing and accessible than the temporary visas and asylum programs that have become default first ports of call.

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“I think we really have to look at all the pathways, and I think we really have to start with a fairly drastic simplification exercise and question whether each pathway is needed,” says Andrew Griffith, a former senior immigration official and analyst of citizenship policies. “There are more than 100 – could we get away with 50? Maybe 20?”

Although a key objective should be speeding up the Express Entry process, the goal should not be streamlining for its own sake – there needs to be a recognition that most of these pathways came into being for important reasons. “It’s like the tax code – it needs simplification, but every measure has an interest behind it. So to do simplification requires a government with a lot of political capital that’s willing to expend it … you then also save a whole layer of complexity for the people who are applying.”

The system was originally meant to be centred around Express Entry, which due to its high points threshold tends to bring in professional and high-education families.

But this itself creates a problem: What many regions of Canada most need are people in trades or occupations that don’t require advanced degrees; too often, we force highly educated newcomers into those slots. A recent study by the C.D. Howe Institute finds “a widespread mismatch between immigrants’ qualifications and job opportunities” to the point that more than a quarter of immigrants are severely overqualified for their work. That also partly explains why Temporary Foreign Worker visas became so excessively prevalent.

The solution is to give more power to the Provincial Nominee Programs, which allow provinces to assess their own labour-market needs, housing supplies and population-growth goals and send their own quota of chosen immigrants through the Express Entry processing system. Provinces with both labour shortages and strong housing supplies, such as Manitoba and New Brunswick today, might request higher quotas.

“PNPs have greater flexibility to allow provinces to pick and choose to suit local labour market needs,” says Ratna Omidvar, a retired independent senator and academic devoted to immigration and citizenship policy. “And PNPs are also a proven route to permanency for temporary folks – for students and TFWs.”

When Liberal Immigration Minister Marc Miller cut back immigration numbers in the wake of the 2024 temporary-migration crisis, he also sharply curtailed provincial nominees. It might be wise for the next minister to do the opposite, making a speeded-up version of the provincial program a replacement for temporary workers as the main way to address labour needs.

Create a single front door. One proposal that captured a lot of attention last year was the suggestion in The Globe by Robert Vineberg, another former senior immigration official, that the huge backlog in refugee applications be cleared by having the far larger IRCC staff process initial refugee applications, and that the slower, in-person Immigration and Refugee Board be reserved for appeals and less legitimate-seeming cases.

But Mr. Vineberg is one of several experts who sees this as just one part of a much more integrated front end, where interviewers (live or virtual) assess individuals and families on behalf of a wide range of Canadian programs. He points to the efficiency of the 20th-century system in which prospective immigrants began with a general-purpose interview.

“Right now, if you’re applying for a sponsorship asylum program or a resettlement program or a labour-based scheme or for express entry, you’re dealing with four different bureaucracies and staff for each of those applications,” he says. “Before, immigrants didn’t have to choose – they were just applying to immigrate. People can come in to the office thinking they’re refugees, and they might or might not be, but if they also had appropriate skills, we could just direct them to a skills-based immigration program and take the pressure off the asylum system.”

And by allowing clearly unqualified people to be assessed and rejected for all programs on their first interview in their home country, the number of undocumented people coming to Canada could drop – evidence suggests that many, perhaps most, would simply stop trying at this point and apply for a different country.

Remove incentives to come to the border. The Safe Third Country Agreement is under pressure from two directions. Many see it as inhumane and illogical, now that the United States is no longer a safe country for many categories of people. On the other hand, Prime Minister Trudeau, in response to Mr. Trump’s threats, has beefed up enforcement of the agreement with high-tech border security and large-scale patrols. There’s fear on both sides that abolishing it would provoke a rush to the border.

A more effective policy would remove the factors that cause people to come to the border in the first place.

Quebec recently announced that it would be opening a processing centre for asylum seekers who illegally cross the border near Montreal. But those irregular crossings could be reduced to negligible numbers if migrants were able to apply for asylum before they approach the Canadian border – in centres located on the U.S. side (an idea that’s been used successfully in the past by the United States in Central America and by Britain in France), or even at Canadian consulates, which is not currently permitted.

There is fear that such measures would create a big rush of applications. But immigration experts say it would sharply reduce illegal crossings and make it easier for Canada to screen out ineligible or dangerous applicants before they get to Canada.

“If people who want to seek refugee protection were able to come to a port of entry [or application centre], they would not use smugglers, and they would not want to enter irregularly,” says Audrey Macklin, a professor of immigration law at the University of Toronto faculty of law. “Another advantage, though, is that when people enter in that way, the government actually has a much better opportunity to screen them at that point – people for whom there is some risk of criminality. A few people will still try to avoid that screening, but you’re going to have a much smaller problem of a irregular entry between borders.”

Another proposal is to reintroduce immigration officials at border crossings. They were replaced after 2001 with the CBSA, which is mainly focused on intercepting goods and terrorist threats. But CBSA officials have few incentives to become experts in the details of immigration and refugee policies, Mr. Vineberg notes. Bringing back immigration-department interviews at legal crossings would likely actually reduce the number of people crossing the border illegitimately and, he says, reduce the cost of processing and deportation north of the border.

As Dr. Macklin and other law experts note, there is a likelihood that the STCA will suddenly end – either because the Supreme Court rules its measures unconstitutional (many scholars agree that they are) or because Mr. Trump angrily cancels it. Any Canadian government should prepare for that eventuality, and for the possibility of a flood of people enticed into irregular border crossings. We can prepare by creating a better, earlier option.

Fill immigration needs using existing Canadian residents. Many of the more than 2 million temporary immigrants currently living in Canada are going to be a problem when their visas expire – either because they’ll force themselves on an already-oversubscribed refugee system, or because they won’t leave and will need to be removed, at huge expense.

Given that most of them are skilled and educated people who have already been screened and assessed, it’s far better to view them as an asset and turn them, and their families, into regular permanent immigrants. That should be particularly appealing to a prospective government wishing to reduce immigration levels sharply below the Liberals' levels: It will likely be possible to do so for several years, without hurting labour-market or population-growth needs, by converting the status of former students and TFWs already in Canada to permanent-resident immigrants.

Doing so would save a lot of money, remove the largest burden on the refugee system, and provide an instant solution to job-market challenges. But more importantly, it would return our famous immigration system to its original priority – turning talented and industrious families into proud Canadians.

A previous version of this article included an incorrect caption beneath the photo of an RCMP officer speaking to a migrant couple at the border crossing from Champlain, N.Y., to Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que. The correct date is August 2017.