A report on CNN Thursday suggests Canada and the US are close to an agreement on closing the Roxham Road border crossing between Quebec and New York State. Since 2017 Roxham Road has been used as by refugees passing through the U.S. to get to Canada, via Roxham in order to seek political asylum here. More recently immigrants began coming to the United States specifically to make the crossing at Roxham and apply for asylum in Canada, leading to criticism of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government for its apparent failure to enforce Canadian immigration law Over the next two years, around 90 percent of those who irregularly entered Canada seeking asylum did so via Roxham Road, making it a symbol of the loopholes in Canada’s immigration policies.
Housing the asylum seekers required building facilities at the border, a camp nearby (and then in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium) at considerable expense to the Canadian government, and led to white nationalist and anti-immigration groups protesting near the border crossing, attracting counterdemonstrations from their opponents.
A Panel on CNN today suggested Trudeau and Biden have been negotiating an agreement that will see a crackdown on asylum seekers which will mean more deportations. After his election Biden tried a more humane approach to the refugee problem, but it has resulted in chaos at the Mexico border and the growing refugee problem in the Montreal area. The observers suggest Trudeau and Biden hope to be able to announce an agreement on the border crossing when the US president visits Canada later this month
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