SA Migration International

News Articles

Canada to roll back asylum access in reported agreement with US

Source: aljazeera, 24/03/2023

The United States and Canada have reportedly reached an agreement that will allow border officials to turn back asylum seekers heading north across their shared border without considering their petitions for sanctuary, sparking outcry from immigrant groups.

US and Canadian media outlets reported the tentative agreement on Thursday, as US President Joe Biden visits the Canadian capital of Ottawa for his first official visit to the country since taking office in early 2021.

Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are expected to confirm the agreement on Friday.

In a press release, Canada’s Migrant Rights Network condemned the action, calling it “unprincipled and dangerous” and stating that it would “force migrants to take even more dangerous routes” as they seek refuge.

Immigration rights groups have accused both leaders of reneging on their obligations to asylum seekers, as the US and Canada commit to more restrictive measures to turn back refugees amid attacks from conservative politicians.

The reported agreement expands a policy known as the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA). The agreement maintains that the US and Canada are both safe countries for refugees and that refugees must apply for asylum in whichever country they arrive in first.

Under that policy, Canada is able to turn away asylum seekers at official ports of entry along the US border without considering their petitions.

However, people could still apply for asylum if they reached Canadian soil. About 39,000 people entered Canada last year through unofficial crossings such as Roxham Road, a dirt path between the US state of New York and Canada’s province of Quebec, which has become a symbol of the debate over the country’s immigration policies.

The agreement, first signed in 2002 and in effect since 2004, has been controversial since its inception, with rights groups in Canada petitioning to ease the policy or do away with it altogether. Instead, the Trudeau administration has sought to defend �` and now expand �` its use.

In the interim, the government has transferred asylum seekers out of Quebec to other provinces to distribute the challenges more evenly.

The STCA has also faced persistent legal challenges and has been struck down twice by courts. Twice, appeals courts have upheld the policy, which is now being weighed by Canada’s Supreme Court, where advocacy groups hope it will be ruled unconstitutional.

Such groups have also questioned the premise that the US is a safe destination for refugees amid reports of poor conditions in US immigration detention centres.

“Canada has an international reputation as a country with a history of assisting refugees,” said Jamie Liew, an immigration expert at the University of Ottawa.

“We have a system for determining refugee claims that is considered the gold standard. Why not let it work? If we opened our official ports of entry, people could cross smoothly and with dignity.”

Experts also note that the tide of people fleeing desperate circumstances is unlikely to ebb anytime soon, especially as climate change drives displacement, particularly in poorer countries.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, more than 100 million people were forced to flee their homes in 2022.

The year before, nearly 5 million people left their countries to seek asylum.

“What Canada faces is a drop in the bucket compared to other countries,” said Liew. “We have an obligation to allow people to make refugee claims.”

www.Samigration.com

Search

Latest News

As a South African who has adopted a nomadic work lifestyle alongside my wife, Ingrid Lotze, I’ve been an interested observer of South Africa’s snail-pace digital nomad visa (DNV) development process. Despite the optimism surrounding its introduction, the visa seems to miss several crucial marks for digital nomads like us.... Read more...

EREMY MAGGS: I want to stay with crime now. Individuals with a criminal record may be faced with significant challenges when seeking employment, I think that’s a given. Here in South Africa, employers may legally exclude an applicant from consideration for a position if having a clean criminal record is what is termed an inherent requirement of the job. That phrase, inherent requirement, is important, but what exactly does that mean, and when can an applicant be lawfully excluded for having a criminal record?... Read more...

There are fears that more people will be separated by the introduction of a minimum salary level for those wanting UK family visas. Families living in the UK and abroad have raised concerns about what new rules will mean for them as they try to reunite with foreign spouses. In December, the Home Office, which says migration to the UK is too high, announced a package of measures to reduce net migration, following a spike in arrival numbers.... Read more...

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail.Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells.... Read more...

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail. Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells.... Read more...

North Korean hackers have been exploiting the updating mechanism of the eScan antivirus to plant backdoors on big corporate networks and deliver cryptocurrency miners through GuptiMiner malware. Researchers describe GuptiMiner as `a highly sophisticated threat` that can perform DNS requests to the attacker`s DNS servers, extract payloads from images, sign its payloads, and perform DLL sideloading. Delivering GuptiMiner via eScan updates In a report released today, cybersecurity company Avast says that the threat actor behind GuptiMiner had an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) position to hijack the normal virus definition update package and replace it with a malicious one named ‘updll62.dlz.’... Read more...

Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) this week revealed that Cape Town International Airport (CTIA) has achieved a ground-breaking milestone by processing more than 10 million passengers over a single financial year. This is the highest number of regional and international passengers processed since COVID-19... Read more...

DA MP says hours lost continue to result in persons being unable to collect their ID documents due to unmanageable queues The DA has been inundated with complaints that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) systems are offline, resulting in long queues and delayed processing of documents. Through questions posed to the Minister, the DA can now reveal that the DHA has lost over 77 years’ worth of working hours due to system downtime and load-shedding from 2019 to date. Concerningly, this data only relates to hours lost for the application of smart IDs, meaning decades more of working hours could have been additionally lost in other spheres such as passport or visa applications.... Read more...

Home Affairs’ seemingly endless court battles set the department back more than R110-million between April 2023 and the end of February this year. This was revealed in a written parliamentary response by minister Aaron Motsoaledi. He said the department accumulated a litigation bill of R117 692 996.3, higher than the R72 637 944.51 spent the year before.... Read more...

Due to system downtime and load-shedding, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) lost nearly 141,000 hours of Smart ID application and production time between the 2019/20 and 2022/23 financial years. Minister Aaron Motsoaledi revealed this figure in a recent response to questions raised in Parliament by Democratic Alliance MP Adrian Roos. Motsoaledi provided a breakdown of smart ID production and application hours lost to technical difficulties and load-shedding per province for each financial year from 2019/2020. These disruptions hit home Affairs offices in the Eastern Cape the hardest, with over 34,000 hours to rotational power cuts and system downtime. Mpumalanga offices lost the next-highest number of hours at 17... Read more...