American asylum-seeker numbers skewed

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This article was published 15/11/2018 (1981 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Headlines heralding the news that American citizens make up the third-largest group of refugee claimants making irregular crossings into Canada came as no surprise to one Winnipeg-based immigration lawyer.

For years, people without permanent resident status in the United States have crossed into Canada to make refugee claims with their children who were born in the U.S., says Alastair Clarke.

“We regularly see these refugee claimants with American-born children,” he said Friday. “I’ve not seen an influx.”

Fresh statistics on refugee claimants released by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada this week drew media attention across North America. The federal department’s stats showed 2,550 asylum claims were made in Canada by people from the United States in 2017 — “more than six times as many as in 2016,” one CNN headline read.

As newcomers wait for their refugee claims to be processed, living doesn’t stop, Clarke said.

“With the (lengthy) processing times in the U.S., it can take many years,” he said. “During those years, many of these refugee claimants have children. After their claims are refused or their case is abandoned, they see no other choice than to come to Canada.”

One example, he said, is a Somali couple he represented recently at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.

“They were there for many years” — so long, they had three children in the U.S. The parents didn’t have permanent resident status but their children — ages six, eight and 10 — are American citizens because they were born in the United States.

In a decision issued Nov. 6, the IRB granted the couple refugee protection in Canada. As U.S. citizens, the children don’t qualify as refugees, but will receive permanent resident status because their parents were granted refugee status.

The scenario is nothing new, Clarke said. “This has been going on for years and years and years.”

The numbers hold true to that experience, the press secretary for Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen said.

“The majority of U.S. citizens claiming asylum are minor asylum claimants who were born in the United States whose parents are citizens of another country,” Mathieu Genest said. “In these instances, the claims of persecution are made against the parents’ country of origin, not the United States. However, given their citizenship, the minor children appear as U.S. citizens in these tables.”

The children are predominantly accompanied by Haitian or Nigerian national adults.

In Manitoba, most of the refugee claimants have been Somali.

The latest statistics show in October just 23 asylum-seekers were intercepted by RCMP crossing into Manitoba from the U.S. — the smallest monthly total since January. In Quebec, 1,334 were intercepted in October.

A small but steady number of asylum-seekers who crossed at Quebec have been migrating west to Winnipeg, Welcome Place executive director Rita Chahal said earlier this week.

— with files from The Canadian Press

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca