As Nigerian asylum seekers flood into Canada across a ditch in Upstate New York, Canadian authorities have asked the United States Government 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, a spokesman for Canada’s immigration minister, Mathieu Genest, said.
“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, adding that it was only 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.
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 were worsening.
“They kidnap and burn houses. They’ll even burn a church,” she said.
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.
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, shole countries.
Winning U.S. asylum claims has become much harder, as well.
The approval rate dropped 26 per cent from 2016 to 2017, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services statistics compiled by Human Rights First.
The Washington-based group’s Director of Refugee Protection, Eleanor Acer, said Canada was well aware that, for many people, the only way to claim asylum in any country was 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 of the Nigerians were rejected, a significant jump from the previous three years, and nearly three-quarters of the Haitians were rejected, up from about half.