The number of migrants crossing America’s northern border with Canada to claim asylum is increasing at an exponential rate, presenting a potentially dangerous backdoor into the country as resources are focused on the much larger migrant crisis on the southern border with Mexico.
At 5,525 miles, the U.S.-Canada border is even longer than the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border, and extremely hard to police.
“It’s extremely dangerous with the cold weather, the cold water,” warned Brady Waikel, who leads the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) station in Niagara Falls, near the site of the Rainbow Bridge car explosion on November 22nd.
Robert García, who leads Border Patrol in the Swanton, Vermont sector, says his team has “exceeded 6,700 apprehensions in less than one year” – not comparable to the numbers crossing southern border sectors, but higher than in the last eleven years put together.
All told, the number of “encounters” along the Canadian frontier stands at 189,402 in the latest CBP figures for fiscal year 2023, with 10,021 arrests for illegal crossings. Mexican migrants accounted for 4,868 of these arrests – a big increase on the 882 Mexican migrant arrests in 2022.
As a Western welfare state not in a state of war or economic collapse, asylum seekers crossing into the U.S. from Canada are manifestly not genuine refugees. In fact, the Canadian authorities report 14,185 migrants crossed into Canada from the U.S. to claim asylum up to October, suggesting migrants crossing the northern border in both directions are simply “asylum shopping”.
