Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he and Joe Biden will discuss stemming the flow of irregular migration into Canada when the U.S. President visits Ottawa next month.
Trudeau has been under pressure over the increasing number of asylum seekers entering from the U.S. at a border crossing not far from Champlain, New York. It’s about 40 miles south of Montreal.
Quebec Premier Francois Legault has said his province doesn’t have the capacity to handle the influx of migrants right now, and wrote a letter to Trudeau asking him to press the issue with Biden. There were nearly 5,000 asylum claims in Quebec in January, according to federal data — far more than any other Canadian province.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Trudeau said he has already raised the matter in direct conversations with Biden, and the president “understands that it is a priority for Canada.”
“This will be a conversation that we will continue to have with the U.S. administration, including during the visit later next month,” Trudeau said in French. Canada and the U.S. have not yet confirmed dates for the visit.
The New York-Quebec crossing, known as Roxham Road, is used because it exploits a loophole in a Canada-U.S. pact called the Safe Third Country Agreement. Under this deal, refugees must claim asylum in the first country they enter, and will be turned back at a Canada-US border station if they try to cross there. But since Roxham Road is not an official land port of entry, refugees are able to cross over and then claim asylum within Canada.
Trudeau’s Conservative opponent, Pierre Poilievre, has called on the prime minister to close off the Roxham Road crossing within 30 days, but hasn’t said how he would address the issue of irregular immigration simply moving to another location along the border.
“The problem is we have 6,000 kilometers worth of undefended shared border with the United States,” Trudeau said earlier this week. “People will choose to cross elsewhere.”
Trudeau said he also wants to see Roxham Road closed, but said the only way to do it, in his view, is by renegotiating the Safe Third Country Agreement. “Those are ongoing conversations with the Americans that are continuing to progress,” he said.
But David Cohen, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, said in a TV interview that Roxham Road is only a symptom of an underlying problem, and would not confirm whether the U.S. is in active talks to change the deal.
“It is a mistake to think that you can solve this problem by treating only symptoms,” Cohen told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. “You have to treat the underlying causes of irregular migration.”
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With assistance from Mathieu Dion.
