Almost 60,000 people claimed asylum at Canada's border with the United States from April 2017 to May 2020.1 The flow from and through the United States contributed to a doubling of overall asylum claims in Canada, from just under 24,000 in 2016 to 50,400 in 2017 and 55,000 in 2018.2 This increase strained reception capacities in Canadian cities, led to multiyear asylum backlogs, required billions in emergency expenditure (Parliamentary Budget Office 2018; Auditor General of Canada 2019), and fomented broad debate in Canada around asylum policy divergence with the United States (Paquet and Schertzer 2020).

Virtually, all arrivals associated with this flow (98 percent) crossed irregularly at Roxham Road, a non-descript rural road connecting upstate New York and the Canadian province of Québec.3 The route was made possible by what is often referred to by journalists and politicians as a “loophole” in the 2004 Canada/US Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), whose asylum coordination provisions only pertain to official ports of entry (Mercier and Rehaag 2021).4 As describe below, the STCA is an example of safe-country designations, which the UNHCR defines as countries to which asylum-seekers “have, or could have, sought asylum and where their safety would not be jeopardized, whether in that country or through return from [that country] to the country of origin” (UNHCR 1991). Safe-country designations are based on the legal concept of effective protection, which allows states to deny access to asylum procedures so long as the country to which asylum-seekers are returned provides commensurate protection standards (Moreno-Lax 2015). Safe-country designation proliferated throughout the 1990s and early 2000s as tools for states to manage asylum flows and prevent what politicians often referred to as “asylum shopping” to states with more liberal asylum systems (Costello 2005). After a significant spike in July and August 2017, entries at Roxham Road stabilized to roughly 1,350 per month (described in Figure 2, below) and were halted in March 2020 by Canada's decision to close the border to asylum-seekers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (Mercier and Rehaag 2021).

Roxham Road presented a challenge to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's centrist government. Right-wing parties in Canada called for extending the STCA to the entire border and incarcerating asylum-seekers (Smith and Hofmann 2019). Civil-society groups and left-wing parties demanded that the STCA be suspended, arguing that the United States was unsafe for refugees (Paquet and Schertzer 2020). Human-rights criticisms were troubling for a government which came to power in 2015 vowing to increase refugee resettlement, reengage multilateral institutions, and export Canada's refugee policies (Smith 2020). Donald Trump's election a year later cast those policy promises into stark relief. As detailed below, the Trump administration rapidly curtailed immigration, refugee resettlement, and asylum access in the United States, ramped up inland enforcement, and terminated temporary protections for hundreds of thousands of residents. These policy changes drastically expanded immigration policy and protection differentials with Canada.

Although Trump-administration policy changes coincided with increased STCA border refusals and Roxham Road asylum claims, relationships between Trump-era policies and the significant increase in border refusals remain underexplored. This article presents findings from an 18-month research project which included in-depth interviews with over 300 asylum-seekers who used Roxham Road. Fieldwork revealed two distinct populations: 42 percent of participants resided in the United States for an average of 3.5 years and a median duration of 13 months (though many resided for far longer—the maximum was just over 24 years), and 58 percent transited through the United States with the intention of claiming asylum in Canada.

Reference：https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01979183221112418