EDITORIAL: Canada’s illegal crossings problem quietly continues
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You wouldn’t know it, but every month hundreds of people are still crossing illegally into Canada at the Roxham Road border.
No, you haven’t picked up an old copy of the newspaper by accident. No, you didn’t click on an old link from a year or two ago.
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This is May 2019. And the illegal border phenomenon quietly continues.
It’s now been over two years since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ill-advised social media post helped cause a deluge in people crossing over into Canada at the Quebec – New York state border to claim asylum.
“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada” he wrote on January 17, 2019 on Twitter.
Then they started to come. First, it was only a few hundred a month, but then it hit almost 6,000 in the month of August alone.
The numbers have thankfully dropped from their record highs, but they’re still much higher than they were before the phenomenon began.
This past February only 800 people crossed into Canada this way, but by April the numbers had gone up again to 1,200. It’ll be curious to see if the May numbers have gone up, down or stay the same.
We are now at approximately 50,000 people who have entered Canada “irregularly” in the past two and a half years.
“Most are coming into Canada through the United States, but they haven’t been living there,” writes Brian Lilley in a recent column on the latest numbers. “They come from Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or other countries, they land at JFK airport and immediately head to the border to make an asylum claim in Canada.”
The Liberals have made a few small gestures here and there to reduce these numbers and the growing backlog. Like how they plan to quickly reject anyone who has already made a claim in the United States, although that only makes up a small percentage of the claimants.
What they need to do is not make this form of entry so easy and appealing and send a clear message that Canada won’t tolerate illegal entry.
Yet Trudeau says little. He hasn’t even taken down that offending post.
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