Quote:
Originally Posted by acottawa
Canada is not adjacent to any refugee source country. Canada is not within small craft sailing distance of any refugee source country. Individuals able to walk across the border have paid thousands or tens of thousands for flights, people smugglers, etc. They have passed through numerous safe countries where they should have made their claims according to international law. They are not refugees in any normal understanding of the word. They are economic migrants who are taking advantage of loopholes in Canadian law.
The worst part is, by rewarding human trafficker's, Canada is taking far fewer actual refugees (i.e. people who presented themselves to the UNHCR in the first safe country).
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Exactly. There is no possible way any person crossing into Canada illegally can ever be said to be a legitimate refugee who deserves asylum. Asylum seekers must make their claim in the first safe country, which for anyone crossing by land from the USA,
would be the USA. Hence why the only logical response is to enforce the border and bar them from entry.
When people were showing up at Roxham Road the RCMP was literally holding their hands to help them cross the ditch to enter Canada illegally. Complete insanity. The correct response from the RCMP would be to follow these steps:
1. Warn these people that they cannot legally enter Canada and they must file their asylum claim in the United States. Make sure there's interpreters at the border so people can understand this in their languages.
2. If they try to enter anyway, use force to prevent their illegal crossing, according to standard escalation protocols (start with gentle nudging or pushing before escalating to weapons).
We already updated the Safe Third Country Agreement with the USA to allow the immediate return of illegal crossers to the USA, so Roxham Road has been closed. There is a loophole where if people enter Canada undetected they can still make asylum claims. IMO, we should update the agreement again to specify that any asylum claimant for whom there is no record of them entering by air is presumed to have illegally crossed from the USA and is subject to return to the USA. In exchange, we should commit to taking in 10% of all refugees whose claims are accepted by the USA - our per capita share of the burden. We can also make a financial contribution, on a similar ratio, to the cost of deportation of failed claimants from the USA.