As the rise in irregular asylum seekers crossing into Canada continues to dominate the news cycle, we've also seen a great deal of rhetoric also crossing over from south of the border, on both sides of the political spectrum. Talk about "illegals" and "sanctuary cities" coming from either side of the debate are bringing a strange American tenor to the debate in Canada, and it's colouring the way we should be approaching the issue.
I will start by saying that the rhetoric hasn't gone full nativist, but it's certainly present on both sides the right concerned about who is getting into the country in this manner, the left looking to push back against the Trumpocalypse to the south of us and trying to assert some kind of moral authority over what they see as racism and xenophobia dictating policy in that country, and trying to use this stance of welcoming refugees as a bulwark against the outside influence of this creeping protectionist sentiment. What doesn't help is when each adopts American lingo to bolster their sides.
On the right, we have Conservative MPs and leadership candidates railing about "illegals," even though any refugee expert will tell you that while the border crossings may be illegal per se, those claimants are not actually illegal but irregular. And because the crossings are illegal, those arrivals are usually arrested and sent to some form of detention until they can be processed, but given that there is no actual prescribed punishment for the irregular crossings, it's hard for them to articulate how the law needs to be enforced and witness eruptions like Tony Clement hanging up on a CBC Radio show when they pressed him on the topic.
On the left, we get imported terms like "sanctuary cities," which doesn't really fit into how our own governmental structures work. Because refugees largely fall under federal jurisdiction, it's hard to see how municipalities making these declarations are actually doing something substantial for these asylum seekers. This imported term, like the use of "illegals," is one that has more to do with the American issue around undocumented workers, mostly coming from Mexico, and crackdowns on them, which is not the issue that we're having in Canada. Using this kind of language when it comes to the problem of irregular arrivals of asylum seekers just muddies the water, and smacks of a kind of me too-ism in the political discourse.
The issue of irregular arrivals is a complex one, and it's one that governments of all stripes have wrestled with for years. The previous government took a very hard-line approach, treating refugee claimants from some countries as automatically bogus and trying to clamp down on them in a myriad of ways, from attempts to close any of the loopholes in the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States (an effort the Obama administration rebuffed), to imposing visa restrictions on countries like Mexico and Romania, to overhauling the entire immigration and refugee system in order to speed through the processing of claimants from supposed "safe" countries that were determined politically. Never mind that significant percentages of claimants were found to have valid claims, yet the new system was designed to make it more difficult for them to make claims by denying them time to adequately prepare.
The rhetoric of the Conservative years, that their party and its leadership candidates are still expressing today as part of this new situation, is that of a hierarchy of "good" and "bad" refugee claimants, and that any irregular arrival must be bogus or the work of human smugglers trying to scam our welfare system. This new increase in irregular arrivals has been couched in new and perfectly legitimate concerns that they're risking their safety to cross in frigid weather while being unprepared to do so (witness the two who lost their fingers to frostbite), but it's still tinged with this same "good" versus "bad" notion. "Good" refugees wait in camps, and generally tend to be from populations that the government can derive some kind of political benefit from (such as Iraqi Christians during the Conservative years), while "bad" claimants are termed "queue-jumpers" in an attempt to delegitimize their own desperation and plight never mind that there isn't actually a refugee queue, but rather a process to be followed.
Part of the problem with importing this rhetoric is that it lacks the perspective of the Canadian situation. We don't have millions of undocumented workers coming over the Mexican border. We don't have millions of refugees coming from places like Syria and Libya arriving in boats and travelling overland to reach our borders. We are pretty isolated and difficult for any asylum seeker to reach, but you wouldn't know it based on the rhetoric that we've been hearing. The numbers we're seeing even this recent spike in arrivals is miniscule compared to what other countries are seeing, and it makes it hard to justify any kind of panic. We're also not placing it in the global context of being in the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War, and that has a lot more to do with why we're seeing more people trying to reach our borders than the simple irrational panic of what is going on with Donald Trump's executive orders and travel bans.
Complicated situations and this rash of irregular arrivals is just that don't make for simple solutions. It's not enough to simply call for loopholes to be closed and irregular arrivals to be sent immediately back to the United States because we have signed onto international commitments, and we have basic humanitarian obligations, and that's why it's for the best that the current government is taking it slowly and not making any rash moves. While the situation is likely to escalate as the weather gets warmer, we need to stay clear-eyed about this. Simply repeating Americanisms as though our situation were at all comparable won't help the debate in any way.
