On the day after the US elections, the largest question asked of Google was “How do you immigrate to Canada?” The question was also asked about Britain, New Zealand and Australia. Similarly following the 2016 election Google faced an equally large number of inquiries on immigration to Canada. It has continued through the week. Following the 2016 election the number of asylum seekers doubled.
The fallout from the Trump election has many implications to Canada. Immigration is among the top issues facing the federal government. With earlier announcements of reducing immigration into Canada, the promises of Donald Trump cannot be forgotten.
With Donald Trump’s election and promise to round up and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and their families from the US, it is not surprising that Canada will again see many of those immigrants trying to relocate to our country. It happened as Haitian immigrants lost their preferred status in the United States in the Trump administration and crossed the border to Quebec where there was a common language.
Other provinces in Canada also saw a surge of asylum seekers.
Federal Ministers have been questioned about the potential surge of new asylum seekers to Canada and they are confident that the RCMP will be able to handle the potential surge. In 2023 with the exodus of Haitians to Quebec, the Canadian government had an agreement with the US government that those asylum seekers arriving in Canada would be returned to the US as a safe country until their application for asylum in Canada was heard.
In 2017, Prime Minister Trudeau tweeted “To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you.” Today with the new cap on immigrants demanded by Canadians, that statement no longer is true. Similarly, the statement on the Statue of Liberty “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Those words no longer ring true under a Donald Trump presidency.
NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said that most asylum seekers arriving at the border would be turned back because of the Safe Third Country Agreement.
It remains unknown if the Trump government would honour that agreement. In Canada, asylum seekers cannot be deported until their cases have been heard. Today’s backlog of asylum seekers is expected to take over 44 months for their cases to be heard according to a Canadian immigration attorney.
Just as Trudeau swung in the political wind by reducing the number of immigrants to Canada, the government may again swing back welcoming immigrants being deported from the US. It is a problem that all federal and provincial parties will struggle with.
