This paper describes the system
used by the government of Canada to determine the number of refugees allowed to
settle in the country annually, how they are integrated into the labor market
and how threats to national security are dealt with. The paper is one of
several commissioned by the Swiss think tank Avenir Suisse for a project
designed to permit the comparison of the policies adopted by different
countries to deal with these issues in the hope that best practices can be
identified and serve as models for optimum national policies.
The analysis below draws heavily
on the distinction between asylum seekers and refugees: “An asylum seeker is
someone who is seeking international protection but whose claim for refugee
status has not yet been determined. In contrast, a refugee is someone who has
been recognized under the 1951 Convention relating to the status of refugees to
be a refugee.”
The status of asylum seekers in
Canada is adjudicated by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (Refugee
Board for short), a quasi-judicial organization that is financed and controlled
by the federal government. This system brings Canada two different but related
problems: controlling the arrival of asylum seekers and adjudicating their
claims.
The following analysis considers
the ways in which the government of Canada approaches these two problems,
describing for each first the theoretical model and then its real-world
performance.
Determining the Number of Asylum Seekers
In
theory, Canada has in place a system, which allows it to precisely determine
the number of asylum seekers arriving in the country by sea, land, and air.
This system is very important because in
1985 the Supreme Court of Canada made what is known as the “Singh
Decision”, which mandated that all persons who have reached Canadian soil and
informed a border guard that they are seeking asylum, are entitled to refugee
board hearings, could not simply be denied their request and forced to return
to another country. After they entered Canada, these asylum seekers are legally
entitled to receive many costly services at the expense of Canadian taxpayers.
The government of Canada has
adopted the following measures to prevent the arrival of potential asylum
seekers:
No measures are needed to prevent
their arrival by sea, which is a serious problem for the European Community,
since Canada’s coasts cannot be reached by the kind of vessels asylum seekers
have access to and are used in the Mediterranean.
Arrival by land from the United
States is prevented by the existence of the Safe Third Country Agreement, which
requires guards in both countries to turn back asylum seekers arriving at their
borders. This policy is justified on the grounds that it is more efficient to
have asylum seekers apply in the country in which they first arrived and that
it avoids “welfare shopping”. This policy avoids the problem existing in
European Community, where the Schengen Agreement makes it possible for asylum
seekers to cross national borders without hindrance to the country believed to
have the most generous social and economic assistance programs.
Arrival by airlines and passenger
vessels is prevented by requiring that all airplane and ship passengers have
official Canadian documents, which show that:
1.
They are tourists,
temporary workers or students who have persuaded Canadian visa officials abroad
that they have strong family and economic ties, which will make them return to
their home countries after their business in Canada has been completed.
2.
They are citizens of
countries with which Canada has an agreement allowing tourists and business
agents visa-free entry. These countries have stable, democratic, and liberal
systems of government so that its citizens have no causes to seek asylum.
3.
They are individuals
who are slated to become landed immigrants under the government’s official
immigration plan. They arrive with proper documentation certifying their status
and have no incentive to apply for asylum.
4.
They are individuals
who have been selected in refugee camps abroad by Canadian and UN agents and
are part of the government’s official immigration plan. After arriving, they
are subjected to health and security checks, but they have no need to seek
asylum.
Shippers are incentivized not to
bring to Canada passengers that fail to meet these requirements since they must
at their expense remove these passengers from the Canadian ports.
The Performance of the Model
In fact, the system has not worked well. 29,365 asylum seekers arrived in 2019. At the end of 2021, 100,000 asylum seekers were
awaiting adjudication of their claims.
What caused the failure of the
policies designed to prevent their arrival?
Some of the asylum seekers are
tourists, students, and temporary workers who had obtained visas by deceiving
visa agents about their true intentions or who decided to move to Canada after
they had experienced living conditions and learned about economic opportunities
in the country.
Many are visitors from stable,
democratic, and liberal countries who arrived without visas and are seeking a
better life in Canada by seeking to be declared refugees rather than go through
the normal but lengthy and uncertain immigrant selection process that they
otherwise would have to use.
Recently, so many citizens from
visa-free Mexico and Hungary claimed asylum that they began to overwhelm the
capacity of the Refugee Board to adjudicate their claims. Minister Stephen Harper’s
government reacted to this problem by ending visa-free travel for citizens of
these countries. This policy reduced claims sharply. However, they increased
rapidly again after the newly elected government of Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau restored the visa-free agreement with Mexico.
The arrival of asylum seekers crossing the long and mostly
unguarded Canada-US border has long been minimized effectively through the
efforts of Canadian law enforcement agents. However, this success has ended as 50,000 asylum seekers have
entered Canada during the last two years at the rural Roxam Road in Quebec.
This inflow of asylum seekers came about because a Canadian judge had ruled
that the
United States was no longer a
safe country that respected human rights and that therefore the Third Safe
Country Agreement no longer applied to asylum seekers coming from that country.
The judge’s ruling was based on reports that asylum seekers who earlier had
been turned back at the Roxam Road crossing had been deprived of their human
rights after their return to the United States.
Determining the Number of Refugees
The Government of Canada annually submits to parliament a
plan in which it presents the target number of immigrants for the coming year.
Refugees are included in this target number. Table 1 shows
the plan for the year 2020[1]
with refugees targeted to be 49,700 or 13.8 percent of the total.
Since refugee policies are such a
contentious political issue in Europe, it is worth noting that this is not the
case in Canada. The annual immigration and refugee targets are produced by
cabinet and civil servants and put into effect without parliamentary
discussion. They attract little media and public attention, no less
controversy. One reason for this situation is that Canadians are used to
accepting many immigrants, which the government argues are needed to deal with
labor shortages and a slowdown in the growth of national income.
Another reason is that Canadians widely agree with the idea that they live in a “land of immigrants”, as is evidenced by statistics derived from the 2016
census: 58.4 percent of the population were the offspring of parents who were
both born in Canada, 17.7 percent had at least one parent born abroad, and 23.9
percent were born abroad. Often heard in discussions about immigration policies
is the remark “If my parents had not been allowed to immigrate, I would not be
here”, which is used to explain individuals’ support for the governments’ plans
to bring large numbers of immigrants to Canada.
Table 1
Immigration
Level Targets for 2020
|
• |
Economic
Immigrants (individuals with skills or good prospects for economic
success, |
|
|
|
|
plus their spouses and under-age
children) |
|
195,800 |
|
• |
Members of the families of immigrants already
settled in Canada |
|
91,000 |
|
• |
Refugees
and Protected Persons |
|
49,700 |
|
• |
Humanitarian
and Other |
|
4,500 |
|
|
Total |
|
341,000 |
Chart 1 shows the number of immigrants in Canada between
1990 and 2019. These immigrants have added considerably to the growth of the
country’s population. For example, according to a report by Statistics Canada in the year 2018-19: “Canada’s population rose by 531,497 to 37,589,262 ...
with
immigration accounting for 82.2 percent of the growth. The growth of 1.4
percent in population … is the highest among all G7 countries, more than double
the rate of 0.6 percent witnessed by both the U.S. and the U.K.”
Source: Statistics
Canada: Estimates of the components of international migration, quarterly
As was noted above, refugees are a percentage of all
immigrants, 13.8 percent in 2020. Chart 2 shows this percentage for the 1993 to
2016. The average of these years is 13.4 percent with a low of 8.3 in 2012 and
a high of 24.3 in 2016. Like the fluctuations in total immigration, these
variations are due to cycles in economic activity and related conditions in the
labor market. It is worth noting that the high number for 2015 is due to the
arrival of 30,000 refugees from Syria, which represents the government’s contribution
to the global effort to alleviate the suffering of refugees from the military conflict
in Syria.[2]
Source:
Extracted from Figure 1.4 in a Statistics Canada document on the 2016 Census.
How does
Canada’s intake of refugees compare with that of Europe and the United States?
In 2020 Canada’s
target of 50 thousand refugees comes to 0.13 percent of the population of
38 million.
For the European Union with
a population of 448 million, 0.13 percent comes to 514 thousand. In fact, the
EU admitted 1.25 million in 2015-2016 and an average annual 613 thousand in
2017-2019.
With the US population of 327
million, 0.13 percent equals 390 thousand. The actual number of refugees for
2016 was 84,989 (Yearbook of Immigration Statistics,
Table 13).
These statistics suggest that
Canada is more than pulling its weight in relieving the misery of refugees in
the world in comparison with the record of the United States but falls short
with respect to that of the European Union.
Refugees and National Security[3]
The number and scale of terrorist attacks by
immigrants and refugees in Canada has always been small, especially compared
with those in Europe. The only significant event involved the mid-Atlantic
downing of an Air Canada flight to India in 1985, which resulted in the loss of
329 lives. It was motivated by political struggles in India and carried out by
and aimed at Canadian citizens born in India.
The low incidents of terror
incidents caused by refugees is attributable in part to the work of security
agents, though by the nature of the work, little is known of the extent to
which they have prevented terrorist attacks by refugees.
However, the work of these agents
has been facilitated by the ways in which refugees are selected by government
policies that minimize the arrival of terrorists. These ways are shown in Table 2. As
can be seen, the 2020 target is for the admittance of 49.7 thousand refugees.
Of these, 18 thousand will be “Protected Persons in Canada and Dependents
Abroad”, who are asylum seekers in Canada that have passed the evaluation of
their claim by the Refugee Board, including the assessment of the security risk
they pose. The second category of “Resettled Refugees” consists of individuals selected
by Canadian and UN agents in UN-operated refugee camps abroad based on their
good economic prospects, health and threat to security.
It is noteworthy that 20 thousand out of a total of 49.7
thousand refugees are sponsored privately. Most of these sponsors are relatives
already living in Canada or private charitable organizations with links to the
refugees’ home countries. The rest of the resettled refugees are supported by
the government.
Table 2
Types of
Refugees 2020
|
1. |
Protected
Persons in Canada & Dependents Abroad |
|
|
|
18,000 |
|
2. |
Resettled
Refugees |
|
|
|
|
|
|
a. Government
Assisted |
|
|
|
10,700 |
|
|
b. Blended
Visa Office Referred |
|
|
|
1,000 |
|
|
c. Privately
Sponsored |
|
|
|
20,000 |
|
|
|
|
Total |
|
49,700
|
Canada has some enclaves in which
immigrants dominate the population, but it does not have Europe’s problems with
enclaves in which refugees preserve their national culture and language but
also are centers of unemployment, crime, religious intolerance, and the
breeding ground of terrorists. This is not the place to explain this benign
situation in Canada, but one important possible explanation is that most
refugees and immigrants in Canada stem from China, India, and South Asian
countries where militant Islamists are in a small minority. Other factors
contributing to the absence of terrorist-breeding enclaves in Canada is that
refugees and immigrants enjoy good employment opportunities, generous social
assistance programs by governments and private charities and a general
welcoming atmosphere by a public which believes that immigrants increase
economic prosperity and enrich the diversity of Canadian culture.
Labor market
Canada’s economy and labor market
have always benefited from the production and export of natural resources found
in abundance in the ground and harvested in fields, forests, and oceans. In
addition, Canada’s manufacturing and service industries have grown and
prospered through exports to and supply chains with the United States that were
facilitated through free trade agreements.
Under these conditions,
immigrants normally are readily absorbed by the growing demand for labor from
these industries. They also often reduce shortages of labor with special skills
and find ready employment in occupations that Canadians were reluctant to fill,
such as janitors, home and health care providers, truck, security guards, bus-
and taxi-drivers.
The growth of the Canadian
economy and demand for labor has fluctuated in the wake of business cycles that
were highly correlated with and often caused by recessions and booms in the
United States. Chart 3 shows
the variations in immigration that existed for most of Canada’s history.
Showing up clearly are recessions in the 1890s, post World War I, the 1930s and
several financial and technology driven recessions in the period following the
Second World War.
Noteworthy is that no such major fluctuations are evident
after 2000 shown in Chart 3 and Chart 1. Even the sharp and deep recession of
2008 brought no major reduction in the number of immigrants and refugees. These
facts seem to reflect a basic change in government policy that was not
justified or discussed by politicians responsible for it.
Chart 3
Summary and Conclusions
Canada’s refugee policies are
shaped by its unique geography, history, and institutions. The refugee policies
are part of general immigration policies that are driven by politicians, have
not encountered major public criticism and meet the country’s commitments to
the relief of human suffering around the world.
The findings of this study
suggest that Canada’s natural and legal barriers to the unplanned entry of
asylum seekers, its method of adjudicating their claims, selecting them from
the occupants of UN refugee camps, evaluating the security risks of refugees
and offering refugees ready employment and public assistance provide European
countries with few insights on how to deal with the problems refugees pose for
their countries.
However, in conclusion it needs to be noted that while
Canada’s refugee and immigration policies have broad public support, they are
coming under increasing criticism by policy experts and academics.[4]
Opinion surveys show a growing public dissatisfaction with
existing immigration policies.[5]
These developments appear to have no effect on the
government’s immigration targets, policies, which it has raised to record
levels of 400,000 annually for three years 2021 – 2023.
Grubel and Patrick
Grady in 2015 published Immigration and The Welfare State
Revisited: Fiscal
Transfers to Immigrants in Canada; Grubel in 2020 published Can Canada Handle A Rational, Polite And
Fact-Based Debate About Immigration?
The
titles of the Bissett articles reveal their contents. The Grubel-Grady study
uses government statistics to calculate that the relatively low earnings of
recent immigrants living in a welfare state impose a large annual fiscal burden
on Canada’s taxpayers. Grubel’s 2017 article explains the causes of this burden
and the 2020 article discusses the effects mass immigration has on soaring
housing costs and growing congestion of economic and social infrastructure.
[1] The Covid-19 epidemic has
made the 2020 plan obsolete. Announcements about the effect of the epidemic on
future targets are expected to be made soon.
[2] Canada has a history of
relieving such suffering. It accepted 37,000 Hungarians who had fled to Austria
after the failure of the uprising of 1956-57; 12,000 Czechoslovaks in 1968
after revolution that year; 7,000 Ugandans in 1972 forced to leave Idi Amin’s
terror; 7,000 Chileans in 1973 after the downfall of Salvador Allende’s
government; over 100,000 Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon in 1975;
and 11,000 Lebanese during the civil wars in the late 1970s. This information
was provided by James Bissett in an unpublished speech to the Library of
Parliament. James Bissett is a former Canadian Ambassador and Executive
Director of the Immigration Service 1985-1990.
[3]
The government periodically provides a “Public Report on the
Terrorism Threat to Canada.”
[4] James
Bissett, a former Ambassador and Head of the Refugee Board in 2010 published an article The Rise of Treason and the Decline of Canadian-Based Terror Threats and in 2018 How
Canada can actually fix the migration mess on its borders. The academic
economist Herbert Grubel in 2017 published a study entitled
Canadian Immigration Policies: Blueprint
for Europe?;
[5] In a Leger poll in 2019
it was found that “Sixty-three per cent of respondents…said the government
should prioritize limiting immigration levels because the country might be
reaching a limit in its ability to integrate them.” However, most recent polls
find that about one quarter of respondents believe that Canada accepts too many
immigrants and about 50 percent believe that the number is about right. An
example of such polls is found here.
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