TORONTO – The US Customs and Border Protection (CPB) saw a record number of migrants on the border Canada – United States between October 2023 and July of this year: almost 20 thousand people tried to leave Canada to enter the United States illegally. CBP reported encountering 19,498 migrants at border crossings on the northern border between October 2023 and July 2024, including 15,612 in the Swanton sector, which runs along Quebec’s border with New York and Vermont. 

While the numbers pale in comparison to those at the southern U.S. border, they are more than double the 7,630 encountered at Canada-U.S. border crossings in the same period last year. And the year before, CBP reported encountering just 2,238 migrants between checkpoints on the northern border.

In an interview with Fox News on August 22, after complaining about illegal immigration across the southern border, former President (and candidate) Donald Trump said that the United States now has a problem at the northern border with migrants arriving from Canada. And according to Kelly Sundberg of Mount Royal University, the issue could become a political “hot potato” for the Trudeau government, regardless of who becomes the next president of the United States.

“I hate to admit it, but I think Donald Trump is right on this point, that we need to focus on the north” told CBC Sundberg, who worked for many years as a police officer at the Canada Border Services Agency. Moreover, the other candidate for the White House, Kamala Harris, also recognized that there are concerns about the northern border of the USA.

As the CBC reports in an article by Senior Reporter Elizabeth Thompson (you can read it here), RCMP Sergeant Charles Poirier said “there isn’t a day or night that there isn’t a crossing”. In Quebec alone, the RCMP intercepts an average of more than 100 people a week on the Canadian side of the border, and Poirier said that’s only a fraction of those headed toward the United States.

U.S. news outlets have also documented a boom in taxis and cars ferrying migrants from small New York State border towns to New York City.

Keith Cozine, an associate professor of homeland security at St. John’s University in New York and a former Department of Homeland Security official, said the numbers at the northern border are cause for concern. “The recent arrest of the Pakistani citizen in Canada, who was planning to carry out some sort of attack on the anniversary of October 7, is alarming”. As well known, on September 4, Muhammad Shahzeb Khan was arrested by the RCMP in Ormstown, Quebec, allegedly as he was about to enter the United States illegally: police allege that he was planning a deadly attack on Jewish citizens in the New York area (read our article here). An episode that obviously adds fuel to the fire on the already burning topic of migration from Canada to the USA.

According to US statistics from CBP, it is mainly people from India who try to cross the border: 9,742 of the 19,498 migrants stopped between October 2023 and July 2024 came from that country. “In the last few months, what we’re seeing is a lot of people landing at international airports, so Montreal or Toronto” Poirier said: “And then, within hours of their arrival, we catch them at the border, trying to cross or having already done so successfully”, adding that smugglers promise migrants easy, guaranteed passage from Canada to the United States, but increasingly the RCMP is seeing drivers abandoning people in the middle of nowhere. “Which obviously puts those migrants in danger because even though it’s nice and sunny now, at night, with the cold coming and the darkness, they get disoriented, they have children…,” he said. “And we’ve seen some tragedies in the past as well. Some people have died”.

But why are more and more people trying to cross from Canada to the United States? According to NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan, changes to Canada’s immigration policy (read here one of our previous articles) have helped fuel an exodus of temporary foreign students and workers to the United States. “It is quite possible that people are now finding themselves in this dire situation and looking elsewhere to establish themselves” she said to CBC .

After the UN (United Nations) called Canada’s immigration system “a model of modern slavery”, it’s no surprise.

(Pic from www.travelweek.ca)