On Monday, a man was arrested by First Nations police in rural Manitoba after illegally crossing into Canada via the U.S. border. As has become the norm, there was barely any news coverage. Much of the media didn’t bat an eye.
Over the last three-and-a-half years, tens of thousands of people have illegally walked across the border in between official ports of entry — of those, 58,054 have been arrested and detained by the RCMP.
Since 2016, Justin Trudeau’s first full year in office, 156,155 people have arrived in Canada under false pretenses — walking in illegally, using fake documents or pretending to be tourists — only to make asylum claims in the hopes of becoming refugees in Canada. This is according to data from the Government of Canada on asylum claims from January 2016 to June 2019.
This staggering figure is in addition to Canada’s planned annual intake of immigrants and refugees, people who apply in advance, wait in a queue and come to Canada through official immigration channels.
The problem of illegal entry into Canada has shown no sign of slowing down.
Back in 2017, when the illegal border crossings really started to surge, the media was all over it. They wrote sympathetic stories of migrants looking for a better life in Canada; painting them as hapless victims and omitting the fact that many were breaking Canadian laws.
Journalists invented their own narrative about the situation, claiming that somehow these migrants were fleeing U.S. President Donald Trump.
The reality was far more complicated. Many of these migrants were taking advantage of lax U.S. tourist visa rules that allowed them to travel to North America without any previous background screening and gain access to Canada’s generous asylum system.
Far from fleeing Trump, a common migrant route was to fly from Lagos, Nigeria, to New York City (a flight that usually costs about $2,000), then on to Plattsburgh, N.Y., where human smugglers would transport them to Roxham Road along the border with rural Quebec. From there, the migrants would enter Canada illegally, get arrested, make asylum claims, then go on to Montreal or Toronto where they would start receiving tax-payer funded social welfare benefits.
After a lot of hype in the media, and a bit of scrambling by the Trudeau government, they created a new cabinet position for “border security and organized crime reduction” and began outreach in migrant communities to dispel false rumours about Canada’s immigration policies. The issue slowly faded out of sight.
Canadians could be forgiven for believing the crisis has been resolved. But the opposite is true. In the first six months of 2019, 26,860 people entered Canada illegally or under false pretenses to make asylum claims.
That number is higher than the first half of 2018, when Canada received 25,225 claims, and the first half of 2017 when 18,445 claims were filed. It’s more than the total number of claims in 2016: 23,870.
In other words, Canada is on track to have more asylum seekers this year than any of the past four years. And the average number of asylum seekers per year under Trudeau has been significantly higher than any previous government in Canadian history.
Trudeau’s #WelcomeToCanada virtue-signaling on social media led to a huge jump in illegal border crossings and asylum claims.
His government’s changes to the asylum system — rubber stamping migrants from the most dangerous countries and eliminating fast-tracked deportations for bogus asylum claimants from safe countries — has opened the floodgates to those who seek to take advantage of our generosity.
