Chronicle of a “crisis” foretold: Asylum seekers and the case of Roxham Road on the Canada-US border

Abstract

Irregular crossings at the Canada-US border between 2017 and 2019 made headlines and pervaded political debates. Drawing on the literature on the instrumentalization of migration crises and on the disappearance of asylum in Canada, this article interrogates the “crisis” framing of these arrivals. We argue that, at its core, this framing builds on the incremental erasure of asylum seekers as a legal and political reality from the Canadian public sphere over the last three decades. During this period and leading up to 2017, there was a shift in the public understanding of asylum from an international obligation to a problem that had been dealt with and erased. When this “problem” resurfaced in 2017, it shattered the illusion. Over the past two decades, Canada and the United States have created a hostile border architecture that channels migrants towards a narrow section of the Quebec-New York border known as Roxham Road. This generated pressures on Quebec's migrant settlement resources, providing the elements for a framing of these arrivals as a “crisis” and paving the way for the implementation of exceptional measures within a very tight framework, with massively expanded budgets, and with the participation of a range of public and private actors at times unfamiliar with the international protection system and unprepared to meet the needs of asylum seekers. The discussion concludes with an examination of two main legacies of the Roxham Road events: the articulation of a Canada-specific form of border humanitarianism and the solidification of an old policy aspiration – the elimination of the agentic asylum seeker.

Counter-Archive as Methodology

“…3 Accounts of border crossings such as Maria's that opens the paper remind us that the declaration of any 'crisis' at the border is but a recent chapter in a lengthy and contested history of border crossings that scaffold and unfold through contemporary border politics. Part of the issue with this 'crisis mode' of framing the border is that it works within an emergency present moment that provides no historical context, as if it is a variation from the norm of how the border typically operates (Carastathis et al 2018;Côté-Boucher, Vives & Jannard 2023;Roitman 2013;Young 2021). Another reason the crisis framing is problematic is that it ignores the consequences of policies that are disproportionately experienced by those enduring the instability and violence of precarious migration status.…”

Critical Feminist Approaches to Migration and Mobility Justice in Canada: Guest Editors' Introduction

“…Under Canadian and international law, it is not illegal to claim asylum, nor can people be penalized for using irregular channels to exercise this right. Without going further into the complex legalities and details of what rendered this passage a viable and relatively safe option for many (see Côté-Boucher, Vives, and Jannard 2023;and Reynolds, Wu, and Young in this issue), the point here is that its closure was prompted by right-wing political pressure and media reports that created the false impression that the loophole had created a "border crisis" and that the people crossing were doing something illegal or "jumping the queue" (UNHCR Canada 2019). The closure means that people seeking asylum through "irregular" channels will be forced to pursue more dangerous and life-threatening options, as our second flashpoint below illustrates.…”