There’s long been a “grand bargain … between the rich countries of the Global North and the poorer countries of the Global South,” FitzGerald explained: “The Global North pays for refugees to be housed in other countries in the Global South and in return takes a symbolic number of them through refugee-resettlement programs.” But lately that bargain has broken down as a substantial number of asylum-seekers have gotten past the “obstacle course that’s deliberately been put in their way” and requested refuge on the territory of wealthy countries. “People are trying to reach Europe, trying to reach Australia, trying to reach North America,” he observed. And nobody in Europe and Australia and North America has quite figured out how to respond. [...]
The good news is that these countries of origin and transit have become partners in policing borders, combating human-smuggling operations, offering would-be migrants economic opportunities, and taking back migrants who don’t qualify for asylum in Europe. The European approach of striking migration deals with upstream nations is “fully replicable” in the United States, Ardittis said, though it might require, say, better relations between the Trump administration and the Mexican government than exist at the moment. (“Who’s going to build the Wall?”) [...]
The bad news about Europe’s approach, however, is that this means “the outsourcing of the EU’s border-security strategy to third countries with a potentially poor human-rights record and an often discretionary use of rule of law,” Ardittis told me, raising concerns “about the European Union’s wavering observance” of its “fundamental values.” And that outsourcing has stemmed in large part from EU member states failing to agree on a method of distributing migrants across the bloc, and from European leaders contending with the populism and political extremism that has emerged in reaction to the challenges of integrating newcomers. [...]
But Canada’s success is at times linked to cold calculations by its leaders, such as when Stephen Harper’s government imposed visa requirements on Mexican and Czech citizens in 2009 to counteract an uptick in Mexican and Roma asylum-seekers. While these policies were later reversed, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is currently facing another potential reckoning. Since Trump’s election, Nigerians with U.S. tourist visas and Haitians concerned about losing their temporary residence status in the United States have been entering Canada and asking for asylum, creating a backlog of tens of thousands of cases. A government-commissioned report concluded this week that Canada’s refugee system is buckling under the strain of this surge in claims and warned that lower-skilled economic migrants might be exploiting the asylum process as a means of entering a country that prioritizes high-skilled immigration.
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