Dhe United States and Canada have agreed on new rules for migrants to ease the situation on the common border. The New York Times reported on Thursday, citing a senior American official. Accordingly, the agreement is to be announced on Friday after a meeting between US President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa. The expansion of the previously valid migration agreement should enable Canada and the USA to limit the number of migrants arriving in the respective country.
According to the report, Canada will in future be allowed to turn migrants away at the busy, unofficial Roxham Road border crossing between New York State and Quebec Province. According to the 2004 migration agreement, people must also apply for asylum in the country in which they arrived. So far, however, there have been unofficial border crossings as a loophole for entering Canada: migrants who entered Canada via the “Roxham Road”, for example, were usually only detained for a short time and were then able to apply for asylum.
In exchange for this agreement, Canada is to launch a new program for 15,000 migrants from South and Central America who are fleeing violence, persecution or economic hardship, according to the report. This is intended to reduce the number of illegal entries into the United States. The main concern in Washington is the American-Mexican border in the south, where more than 2.3 million people tried to cross to America last year. But even on the northern border, the number of migrants is increasing in both directions.
US border agency flies migrants to Texas
For example, migrants from the United States hope to get asylum in Canada more quickly; Conversely, Mexicans in particular, who enter Canada on a visitor’s visa, make sure not to be turned away at the far less frequented northern border of the USA. According to the New York Times, the agreement does not apply to asylum seekers who arrive by plane or ship.
Reuters news agency reported on Wednesday that the US border agency had flown migrants who had entered Canada illegally to Texas as part of a deterrence campaign. In March, there are said to have been around a hundred people who were brought to Harlingen and El Paso in Texas on two charter flights as Plattsburgh in the state of New York. This is “the consequence of illegally crossing the border,” Reuters quoted an anonymous border official as saying.
The broadcaster NBC reported that, according to the border agency, the relocations served to “relieve the burden on the facilities and make better use of resources and staff”. It is not known whether the migrants in question were deported to Mexico under the “Title 42” regulation related to the pandemic. This allows border authorities to turn migrants away on grounds of public health and expires on May 11 after around three years.
According to the American border protection agency, a good 100,000 migrants wanted to enter the USA from Canada last year, three times as many as in 2021. The Canadian authorities state that the number of attempted illegal border crossings from the USA has more than doubled since 2019; instead of around 16,000, there were almost 40,000 cases last year.
President Biden arrived in Canada on Thursday. A bilateral meeting with Trudeau and an address to the Canadian Parliament are planned for Friday. Due to criticism of both the government in Washington and in Ottawa, both countries had previously assured that the question of how to deal with the increasing number of migrants at the border would also be discussed. The United States had long refused to negotiate the border agreement.
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