Canada Braces for Trump Migrant Surge

With President-Elect Trump promising a “mass deportation” program for aliens here illegally, Canada is bracing for a surge of third-country migrants headed north. Expect the “world’s longest undefended border” to soon be a little more defended, as a migrant surge would likely imperil the electoral prospects of current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party.

“Canada Prepares for a Rise in Border Crossings”. Two days after the November 5 U.S. presidential election, Canada’s national public broadcast outlet, the CBC, published an article headlined “Canada prepares for a rise in border crossings with threat of mass deportations under Trump”.

That article noted there was a surge in illegal border crossings into Canada in 2017 after Trump was elected president the first time, and warned that something similar or worse could occur following his latest electoral victory, which was bolstered by his promises of expanded immigration enforcement:

The mere threat of mass deportation could lead to a rise in both asylum claims at official ports of entry and attempts to make clandestine crossings into Canada, said Jennifer Elrick, an associate professor of sociology at McGill University who studies immigration policy.

Overall, the second Trump presidency could have a "profound impact on Canada's borders," Elrick said.

“A Complete Game Changer”. Notably, Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants at the Northern border more than doubled between FY 2023 (just over 10,000) and FY 2024 (nearly 24,000), following big increases in the prior two fiscal years.

In FY 2021, agents apprehended 2,238 illegal entrants at the U.S.-Canada line. That may not sound like a lot of apprehensions considering the millions of migrants apprehended at the Southwest border in the past four years until you consider the fact that between FY 2017 and FY 2020, Northern border agents apprehended fewer than 200 illegal migrants, total.

The Border Patrol’s counterpart on the other side of that line is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and apparently the Mounties are now bracing for that wave to shift direction.

CBC quoted RCMP Sgt. Charles Poirier, who warned:

"If people start crossing everywhere on the territory like the southbound are doing, that is going to be much more difficult," he said.

"It's going to be a complete game changer because those people will still have to be brought to a central facility. But our officers, we'll be running across the territory to catch them.”

#WelcometoCanada. For her part, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is seeking to calm her citizens’ concerns about a migrant rush, recently stating: "I want to assure Canadians that we absolutely recognize the importance of border security and of controlling our own border.”

As CBC notes, that’s a different message than Trudeau was sending just days after Trump’s inauguration in 2017:

That tweet was issued in response to restrictions Trump placed on the U.S. refugee system, but perhaps he could have warned his underlings before he posted it.

As the National Post reported in April 2018, Trudeau’s #WelcometoCanada tweet:

prompted a spike in inquiries from would-be refugees to Canadian embassies abroad, and resulted in confusion within the federal government.

. . .

International commentators wondered whether Canada was announcing it would take in all those banned from entering the U.S. Some Canadian officials wondered about that too, according to records the National Post obtained through an access-to-information request.

In part, that tweet also pushed immigration and refugee issues to the fore in the October 2019 Canadian parliamentary elections. Trudeau’s main opponents in the Conservative Party at the time offered a fairly weak immigration platform, but one of the Tories’ key promises was to “Put an end to illegal border crossings at unofficial points of entry.”

Regardless, Trudeau’s Liberals retained control of the government with the assistance of the center-left New Democratic Party (NDP) once the 2019 votes were counted.

What is now His Majesty’s loyal opposition in Ottawa is led by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, and he has been a bit more straightforward about what his party would do immigration-wise if given control.

In an August press conference, Poilievre noted that immigration to Canada wasn’t “even a controversial issue" before Trudeau took charge, but that an increase in foreign students and temporary guestworkers had wrecked a “multigenerational consensus” that inviting more immigrants to Canada was a positive development for the country.

In summary, he explained: "The radical, out-of-control NDP-Liberal government has destroyed our system. ... We have to have a smaller population growth.”

Poilievre’s Conservatives are now favored to win the next parliamentary election (which must be held by October 2025), and immigration is a key factor contributing to Labor’s woes.

In a September poll, two-thirds of Canadians expressed dissatisfaction with Trudeau, 65 percent believed that the government would “admit too many immigrants with its current immigration plan”, 78 percent thought that immigrants were contributing to the country’s housing crisis, and 76 percent thought they were placing a strain on the health system there.

As my colleague Phil Linderman explained in March, Trudeau attempted to respond to such concerns by tamping down on asylum claims by Mexican nationals who fly to Canada and apply for protection. And last month, the prime minister announced his government will be cutting the number of immigrants it admits.

Those moves aren’t paying many dividends to Liberals, however, despite the fact that three-quarters of Canadians agree with the Trudeau cuts — largely because the party expanded the rate of immigration to begin with and the harm is already done.

Consequently, a border crisis triggered by migrants moving north to evade Trump would be the last thing Trudeau needs, which is likely why Deputy PM Freeland is preemptively attempting to assure Canadian voters that the government could handle a border surge if it comes.

“Safe Third Country” to the Rescue? The one advantage that Canada has in responding to such a border surge is its “safe third country” agreement with the United States.

That agreement allows Canada to return third-country asylum seekers coming from the United States back to here (and vice versa), but when it originally took effect in 2004, the agreement only applied to aliens coming through the legal ports of entry — not illegally between them.

Trudeau pressured the Biden-Harris administration in March 2023 into expanding that agreement to apply to aliens crossing the shared border illegally, as well. Despite that expansion, however, the U.S. government continues to screen illegal entrants at the Northern border for asylum claims instead of directly expelling them back to Canada, as I reported in August.

Don’t expect Canada to follow suit if thousands of Trump-wary migrants seek the northern exit out of this country, however, especially with Trudeau on the ropes politically and the election less than a year away.

That said, the Mounties still have to catch those illegal entrants, which will be no mean feat given that the Northern border is nearly 4,000 miles long, not counting the Alaskan part. Hence Sgt. Poirier’s reference to the fact that RCMP officers will be required to “run[] across the territory to catch” migrants should they come.

As Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre (at the time also prime minister), told President Nixon in 1969: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt”.

President-elect Trump promises to deport many if not most of the millions of aliens illegally present in United States, and as Pierre Trudeau presaged, Canada will be directly affected by that policy change as aliens looking for an escape route head north.

Whether there’s a massive surge of Canada-bound migrants from the United States, and whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can stem such a surge, is yet to be seen. But even the threat of a wave of illegal entrants coming over the world’s longest undefended border is the last thing his Liberal government needs — and may well be the last crisis it will have to deal with.