As Nigerian asylum seekers flood into Canada across a ditch in
Upstate New York, Canadian authorities are asking the United States for
help — but not with managing the influx at the border.
Instead,
they want U.S. immigration officials to reduce the foot traffic by
screening Nigerians more stringently before granting them U.S. visas.
It is a ripple effect that few expected last summer when people, mostly Haitians, began to walk into Quebec via an “irregular” border crossing north of Plattsburgh, N.Y., and seek refugee status.
With
the coming of spring, the flow has picked up again. But recently, the
asylum seekers have been mostly Nigerian, and their route to the
border is more problematic, Canadian officials say.
Many
Haitians had lived in the United States for years before suddenly
learning they would lose their protected status and fleeing north. But
many of the Nigerian asylum seekers are arriving in Quebec with recently
issued U.S. visitor visas, said Mathieu Genest, a spokesman for
Canada’s immigration minister.
“They’re not using the visa for the reason it was intended for,” he said.
Canada
is not asking U.S. officials to refuse entry to Nigerians, Genest said.
It is seeking stricter screening to ensure that Nigerians who are
granted U.S. visitor visas truly intend to return home.
The
request is an unsurprising one between two countries that have
collaborated for decades on migration-related matters. But it also is a
sign that Canada is feeling new pressure on its borders as U.S.
immigration and refugee policies shift.
“Instead
of Trump throwing us back to Nigeria, we appreciate Canada right now
for accepting people,” said one Nigerian man who walked into Quebec in
March.
The man, who gave his name only as
Isaac, carried a single duffel bag as he prepared last week to move with
his family into an apartment in Montreal. Many Nigerian claimants in
Montreal will not speak to reporters for fear of jeopardizing their
status.
For six weeks, Isaac and his family have stayed at a
shelter on the city’s outskirts, a onetime youth detention center that
was converted last year into emergency housing for refugee claimants.
“I don’t want to go back to Nigeria,” he said. “Nobody’s safe.”
He
arrived in Texas early last year on a visitor visa, he said, with plans
to get another kind of visa when it expired or else claim U.S.
refugee
status for himself, his wife and their two young children.
But the election of Donald Trump changed his mind. “He doesn’t want immigrants,” he said. “Canada is open for an immigrant.”
The Canadian government has been trying to tone down
its welcoming image — or rather, to provide accurate information about
how it processes refugee claims. Ethnic communities in the United States
have been warned that actually winning refugee status here is hard.
But
the campaign has been ineffective. As of mid-April, nearly 6,000 people
had entered Quebec unofficially, three times as many as during the same
period in 2017. And in 2017, claims across the country had doubled from
the year before.
A complicated web of factors explains why most of the new claimants are Nigerian.
For years before Trump’s election, the number of Nigerian refugee claims was already climbing worldwide, driven by violence
by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram and other problems, including
persecution related to sexual orientation and religion. In Canada,
Nigerians were the biggest group of claimants in 2016.
Mary
Chukwuwuekezie, who walked into Quebec with her three children in
November after staying in the United States for 11 months on a visitor
visa, said conditions in Nigeria are worsening.
“They kidnap,” she said. “They burn houses. They’ll even burn a church.”
But
it has never been easy for Nigerians — or many other asylum seekers —
to enter Canada to lodge a claim in the first place, partly because of
its geography. Most foreigners need a visa to board a flight to North
America, and the United States grants visitor visas more freely, said
Benn Proctor, a researcher at the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute.
No one can officially enter Canada from the United States as a refugee claimant because of the Safe Third Country Agreement,
which forces people arriving in either country to make their claim
where they first land. Last year, however, a way around that became
apparent, when news organizations and past border-crossers on social
media publicized the locations of Canada’s unofficial land crossings,
opening an opportunity for Nigerians.
“If your final [destination] is Canada, you’ll want to walk across the border,” Proctor said.
The
State Department says that it has “strong working relationships” with
Canadian colleagues and that screening is constantly improving, but it
isn’t planning any bigger changes to its visa program.
“National
security is our top priority when adjudicating visa applications,” a
department representative said in a statement. “At this time, we have no
changes to our visa application process to announce.”
The
United States has also become less appealing to Nigerians as a place to
stay rather than to pass through, they say. Many took personally two
comments reportedly made by Trump — one last June about Nigerian immigrants going “back to their huts” and another in January about African “s---hole” countries.
Winning
U.S. asylum claims has become much harder, as well. The approval rate
dropped 26 percent from 2016 to 2017, according to U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services statistics compiled by Human Rights First.
Eleanor
Acer, the Washington-based group’s director of refugee protection,
said Canada is well aware that, for many people, the only way to claim
asylum in any country is to get a visitor visa first.
“It’s
shocking and disappointing that they are trying to encourage another
country to deny visas to people who are, in some cases, legitimately
seeking protection from persecution,” she said.
As
a signatory to international conventions, Acer said, Canada should open
its doors further and “actually terminate its Safe Third Country
Agreement . . . if the United States is simply not meeting that
standard, given its harsh treatment of asylum seekers.”
Canadian
officials have said they are not looking to abandon the agreement,
although last week they struck a slightly different tone.
Given
the current numbers of asylum seekers, “we have contingency plans,”
Genest said.
“That being said, we are constantly in conversation with
the U.S., making sure that the Safe Third Country Agreement is working
for both countries.”
Many of Canada’s new
asylum seekers may end up disappointed. Of asylum claims processed last
year — a minority of the total awaiting adjudication — more than half
the Nigerians were rejected, a significant jump from the previous three
years, and nearly three-quarters of Haitians were rejected, up from
about half.
Their likely fate: deportation.