How the Canadian border may factor into the U.S. election
The most memorable policy proposal of the last U.S. presidential election may well have been Donald Trump's vow to erect a wall along the country's border with Mexico.
Four years on, it's clear that building the wall has not been the simple task Trump made it out to be. Funding was only secured last year, and the administration's latest goal is to have 724 kilometres' worth of wall – less than one-quarter the length of the border – in place by the end of 2020.
But what about the other American land border?
While many Americans don't typically spend a lot of time thinking about the Canadian border, 2020 has not been a typical year. Non-essential land crossings have not been allowed since March, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite assurances that anyone looking to reunite with loved ones would be allowed through, plenty of experiences suggest that this system is not functioning perfectly. And then there was the plan briefly and unexpectedly floated by the White House to militarize the world's longest undefended border.
Add it all up, experts say, and there's reason to think the Canada-U.S. border could become an issue on the campaign trail – if not a major one.
"I don't think it will be a central theme by any means, but I do think that it's more likely to come up than it would have in the past, particularly if the border restrictions are still in place," Laurie Trautman, director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University, told CTVNews.ca via telephone on July 29.
When the border was first shut, it might have seemed farfetched to think that would remain the case for six months or more. But that's exactly what has happened, with the most recent extension pushing the closure into September. Experts see little appetite to reopen the border anytime soon from authorities on either side, despite lobbying efforts from a group of members of the U.S. Congress.
"The possibility of a second wave looms large for politicians on both sides of the border," Sharry Aiken, an immigration expert and law professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., said July 29 in a telephone interview with CTVNews.ca.
PROSPECTIVE IMMIGRANTS & SKILLED WORKERS
More likely to come up on the campaign trail, Trautman said, is the Trump administration's repeated attempts to restrict the flow of immigrants into the U.S., including skilled workers. Although Canadians do not seem to be the intended targets of these actions, they often get caught up in them.
This is what happened in June, when the White House froze the issuing of new temporary work visas in several classes, drawing the ire of the Canadian American Business Council and suggestions that hundreds of Canadians could be prevented from working in the U.S. as a result.
"I think there's a general feeling … that if there was another four years of the Trump administration, those work restrictions on non-immigrant and immigrant visas, those are just beginning," Trautman said.
"They're slid in there under this guise of COVID-19, whereas this administration has clearly wanted to make much more restrictive immigration policy, particularly for work visas."
Canada is generally believed to have benefited in some ways from Trump's hard line on immigration. This is especially true in the technology industry, where Canada has become a more attractive destination to skilled workers from overseas. This was especially evident in the response to the announcement of the latest American visa restrictions, which included the CEO of language app Duolingo threatening to move jobs to Canada and one Canadian tech organization putting up billboards in San Francisco advertising opportunities north of the border.
A Joe Biden presidency, then, could be seen as harmful to Canada in the same ways, as the Democrat nominee appears to have a more open stance on immigration. His immigration platform notes that the tech sector and other industries "rely on immigration" and praises the contributions immigrants make to the American economy. He also vows to reform the visa system in several ways, including by expanding the number of high-skilled visas granted and eliminating existing country-by-country limits on employment visas.
Beyond this, he vows to remove daily limits on the number of asylum applicants accepted by the U.S., increase humanitarian aid for asylum-seekers whose claims are pending, and halt all funding for the Mexican border wall – all of which could make the U.S. more attractive to prospective immigrants, at the expense of Canada.
The former vice-president says his immigration proposals are one way he will "take urgent action to undo Trump's damage." A common theme of his campaign material is that his presidency would be focused on reverting policies enacted in the last four years – one reason why Trautman sees opportunities to draw on history from the last time Biden was in the White House to predict how he would handle Canadian border issues if elected on Nov. 4.
"We can really draw on the relationship between Obama and Trudeau – and Harper too, for that matter – [to project how Biden might view Canada]," she said.
That could include filling vacant positions at government agencies geared toward cross-border co-operation that have been largely ignored since 2016, Trautman said, whereas a Trump victory could result in "more and more of that weakening of those layers of bureaucracy."
THE STCA (SAFE THIRD COUNTRY ACT)
Another Canada-U.S. issue that has made headlines this year is the Federal Court's striking down of the law underpinning the Safe Third Country Act, which allows Canada to turn back asylum-seekers from outside the U.S. at border crossings and require them to apply for protection in the U.S. instead.
Justice Ann Marie McDonald ruled that the American system allows for detentions and other rights violations that, in her view, contradict the spirit of the act. Although Trump has taken harsh positions on the matter of refugee claimants, the issues raised by McDonald go back to long before he took office.
"This can very readily and erroneously be filtered as a Trump administration problem, but these immigration holding cells and jails have been a problem [since] well before President Trump assumed office," Aiken said.
"We know anecdotally that asylum-seekers are routinely detained upon returning to the United States, regardless of whatever assurances may be in place."
Public Safety Minister Bill Blair said Aug. 21 that Canada will appeal the decision. A loss on appeal would mean that the government could either suspend the agreement, meaning Canada would no longer have to turn back asylum-seekers at the border, or attempt to renegotiate it to mandate better protections for refugee claimants in the U.S.
The Safe Third Country Act is currently set to expire in January, although the government will likely attempt to allow the law to remain in force until the appeal is ruled upon.
The ongoing legal battle in Canada may not result in the law becoming a part of election discourse in the U.S., however. As the procedures flagged by Aiken have occurred under Democrat and Republican administrations, it seems unlikely Biden or Trump will attempt to use it as a wedge issue.
"The agreement with Canada is small potatoes relative to other worries," Aiken said.
What Aiken sees as more likely to come to the fore between now and November is what she describes as "a broader discourse about 'America first' and closing down" – protectionism that, by definition, could result in harm to Canada.
"We've seen tendencies in that direction … from both parties," she said.
"We tend to be a non-issue for Americans, but I think the Canadian border will feature in a broader context about borders – and not necessarily to our benefit."
