U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and federal officers detain a migrant as he walks out from a hearing during targeted detainment at a U.S. immigration court in Manhattan, New York, on Oct. 27.David Dee Delgado/Reuters
Since its inception in 2004, the legitimacy of the Safe Third Country Agreement has always been predicated on the convenient fiction that the United States offers refugee claimants the same protections as Canada provides to asylum seekers who arrive in this country.
Even before Donald Trump became U.S. President for the first time in 2016, concerns about the treatment of those who claim refugee status in the U.S. cast long shadows over the bilateral agreement under which Canada turns back most asylum seekers from third countries who try to enter this country at the U.S. border. Successive governments in Ottawa have largely glossed over those concerns, reasoning that the U.S. refugee system, while imperfect, met minimum standards set out in international conventions.
Since Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, almost a year ago now, it has become impossible to ignore the fact that the asylum seekers returned to the U.S. under the Safe Third Country Agreement face dangers that include detention and/or refoulement – that is, deportation to their country of origin, where they could be subject to the very persecution they fled in the first place.
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Indeed, the Trump administration openly boasts about its moves to detain and deport undocumented migrants without due process or basic respect for human dignity. Roundups by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents of those suspected of being in the country illegally are promoted and publicized by Mr. Trump and his lackeys – in part to distract from his governance failures and satiate his MAGA base, and in part to sow fear among immigrants who hold U.S. citizenship that they could be next on his list of targets.
The U.S. President’s move last week to halt asylum claims after the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington – seizing on the alleged shooter’s Afghan nationality as a pretext for the pause – has rendered the Safe Third Country Agreement all but inoperable. How can Ottawa claim that Washington will uphold its end of the bargain by offering asylum seekers that Canada returns to the U.S. the basic protections they deserve?
“As of now ... we have a safe-third-party agreement and Canada will honour that,” Immigration Minister Lena Diab told The Globe and Mail’s Marie Woolf, amid renewed calls from refugee advocates for Ottawa to suspend the STCA. “We’re comfortable with that plan.”
If anything, Ms. Diab should be feeling very uncomfortable. Turning a blind eye to the abuses and denial of due process refugee claimants face south of the border risks making Canada complicit in them. It would be much better that Ms. Diab recognized the STCA’s shortcomings before the courts do so, which could throw Canada’s backlogged refugee system into even more chaos than it is currently experiencing.
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Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government, which wants to restore order to Canada’s immigration system after years of disorder under Justin Trudeau, does not wish to see a spike in asylum seekers, something that the suspension of the STCA would likely generate. Nor does it wish to antagonize Mr. Trump – whom Mr. Carney must still try to talk out of his trade war – by criticizing his mistreatment of migrants.
The uncomfortable truth is that, as most Western countries increasingly tighten controls on asylum claimants, Canada does not have many good options left to protect the integrity of its own refugee system.
It is now widely understood that the postwar international conventions that govern the treatment of refugee claims must be modified to consider the capacity of countries to uphold them. Many European countries have learned this the hard way as the political fallout from migration threatens social peace.
European far-right politicians rarely distinguish between bogus and genuine refugee claimants, lumping them together as leeches (with views incompatible with Western values) seeking to exploit the generosity of Western governments.
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Canada is not immune to this kind of backlash – which is why accelerating the adjudication of refugee claims and discouraging bogus asylum seekers are preconditions to ensuring this country’s ability to uphold the principles of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention.
To its credit, the Carney government is on track with Bill C-12, known as the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, which would, among other things, ban individuals who have been in the country for more than a year from claiming asylum. Exceptions must be possible, of course, but toughening eligibility criteria protects genuine refugees.
Critics of C-12 fail to appreciate how lax laws undermine public trust in the refugee system. But maintaining trust in the system is the key to saving it. And that trust will be sorely required when Ottawa finally gets around to scrapping the Safe Third Country Agreement.