Are Canadian Attitudes Hardening as Haitians Flee US?
Canada Grapples with Exodus of Haitians from US

Stranded on a grass highway median on the approach to Montreal’s Victoria Bridge, stands the Black Rock, a three-meter-high slab of granite marking one of the darker periods in Canada’s immigration past.
As many as 6,000 Irish emigres fleeing the Great Famine are believed to be buried here, passengers aboard dozens of typhus-ridden “coffin ships” relegated to the fever sheds that sprang up along 840 kilometres of the St. Lawrence River from Grosse Ile, Quebec, to Toronto, Ontario, during the summer of 1847.
Contemporary accounts of the tragedy describe “bodies stacked like cordwood along the shore” awaiting burial: by some estimates 30 per cent of the 100,000 Irish who boarded vessels for Canada that summer died along the way.
The arrival of the desperate Irish caused upheaval in the then-British colony. Set against great acts of compassion and sacrifice by physicians, nuns and priests in predominantly Roman Catholic Quebec ministering to their dying co-religious, were the vocal pockets of intolerance and ethnic hatred, predominately Protestant anti-Papists, nativists, and establishment Orangemen in Ontario. There were bloody inter-religious clashes that same summer in Toronto — whose population tripled to 60,000 that year under the weight of Irish migration — and riots in the neighboring provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
Canada’s immigration policy has come a long way since the arrival of the coffin ships, but there’s vague echoes of the past in events unfolding in Quebec today.
On 20 August, 200 nativist-styled anti-immigration protestors from a group called La Meute (Wolf Pack) took to the streets of Quebec City furious at “the scourge of illegal immigration” and the government’s management of an irregular migration phenomena along Quebec’s border with the United States. Earlier police clashed with roughly 300 counter-demonstrators.
Between June and mid-August, more than 7,500 migrants, the majority Haitian nationals drawn to predominately French-speaking Quebec, crossed the world’s longest, undefended border on foot: roughly 7,000 migrants crossed the entire border on foot in all of 2016 according to government statistics.
Hundreds daily hail taxis in neighbouring towns in upstate New York to within striking distance of the border, drag their suitcases along a dirt track to the forested frontier marked by a small plinth where they’re met by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who advise them they’ll be arrested if they cross. They do so willingly, at these irregular crossing points; bilateral agreements require anyone claiming asylum at a formal Canadian border crossing to be returned to the US.
In the past few weeks the Canadian Armed Forces have established a tent city near the crossing of choice where roughly 1,000 people now reside. Individuals are processed, IDs checked, fingerprints taken, criminal databases reviewed and, if all pans out, the new arrivals are bussed to Montreal where the arcades of the Olympic Stadium have been dusted off and fitted with cots to accommodate them.
In the months to come, each refugee protection claim will be reviewed by the Immigration and Refugee Board; each applicant must prove they face persecution in their country of origin in order to remain.
So, what is behind the sudden exodus?
An estimated 58,000 Haitians (Center for Immigration Studies, 2015) living in the United States learned that their temporary protection status (TPS) designation, granted on humanitarian grounds in the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake, had been extended only six months to January 22, 2018, not the usual 12–18 months. At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security in May urged TPS Haitians to “to resolve their affairs, to obtain travel documentation” and prepare to return home.
This, combined with general unease about the new US administration’s attitude towards foreign migrants generated great anxiety within the Haitian community from Miami to New York City, where the majority have settled.
In a decidedly 21st century twist, social media also acted a catalyst. The day after the US announced in January a four-month hiatus on accepting refugees and a ban on travellers from seven countries, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was elected in part because of a campaign promise to resettle 25,000 war-affected Syrian refugees, tweeted “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada”
Interviews with migrants entering Quebec in recent weeks have revealed how this hashtag has been spun on social media as an invitation to travel north.
Beyond the practicalities of assessing each of these individual cases in a timely manner, the emerging humanitarian concern is that should the TPS end, large numbers of Haitian nationals will head for the border, a possible repeat of the first brutally cold months of 2017 when nearly 600 migrants crossed from North Dakota into a remote farming community in Manitoba province. At least one person, a 57-year-old Ghanaian woman, died of hypothermia along the way and several others had hands, fingers and toes amputated due to frostbite.
The TPS for 270,000 Salvadorians, Hondurans and Nicaraguans will also expire in the first five months of 2018.
A Haitian-Canadian Member of Parliament from Montreal, which boasts a 120,000-strong Haitian community visited Miami recently, using influential Creole-language media to try and counter misinformation about Canada’s immigration system.
Less well known than January’s Twitter message is the fact that a Canadian ban on removing Haitians to their impoverished homeland similar to the TPS was allowed to expire in mid-2016; media reports citing government figures say that in the first quarter of 2017 two-thirds of asylum claims have been rejected.
The Prime Minister has been an articulate advocate for the advantages of migration, and Canadians are generally proud of what they see as a tradition of welcoming refugees from war-torn countries like Syria; Quebec’s Haitian population blossomed during the middle years of the brutal Duvalier regimes for example.
What is also clear is that there is a disconnect between the outside perception of Canadian attitudes, and the reality in many parts of the country that has been captured in several recent polls.
· In March, a Conservative leadership candidate’s hardline on immigrations struck a populist nerve; 74 percent of respondents agreed with her assertion that immigrants should be tested for their “appreciation of Canadian values”.
· A week later, polling that specifically asked about people’s attitudes towards migrants crossing into Manitoba found 48 percent of respondents felt they should be immediately sent back to the US, while slightly more than one-third thought they ought to be accepted.
· A May poll on Canadian attitudes towards faith and spirituality reported 57 percent of Canadians agree with the statement, “Canada should accept fewer immigrants and refugees”.
In the face of persistent attacks from the political right and parts of the national media since the beginning of August, the PM’s tone has begun to change, reflecting realpolitik, the lingering, divisive nature of immigration in Canada and the fact the country faces the largest number of walk-in refugee claims in a decade.
A day after denouncing the anti-immigration rally in Quebec City as representative of a “small minority, angry, frustrated group of racists”, he issued a pointed warning to migrants considering irregular entry into Canada saying it is a “myth” that this approach is a fast-track to refugee status and that “there is no advantage in terms of the immigration system to arriving irregularly versus arriving regularly.”
Paul Dillon is the UN Migration Agency’s Communication Media Officer in Indonesia. You can reach him at pdillon@iom.int.
