In recent days, the Canadian government has shown the first signs of how it will respond to Donald Trump’s efforts to turn migration into a border security and enforcement issue.
Speaking to the media after a recent dinner at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Public Safety Minister Dominic Leblanc indicated the need “for the Americans and for Canadians to see that the border is secure”.
In tying the border to security, Leblanc made no attempt to correct the mistaken and flawed assumptions about global migration underpinning Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, nor did he defend the legal right of people in danger to seek asylum.
This early response to Trump’s second term is worrisome on several levels, most notably because no conversation about border controls should begin at the border.
Instead, discussions about managing and responding to migration must consider the profound root causes that compel people to contemplate where, when and how to move. Those include systemic inequalities and environmental degradation.
International conventions
Canada’s initial response to Trump’s threat of 25% cent tariffs on all Canadian and Mexican imports to the United States “until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” violates international human rights principles and international refugee law.
The federal government should therefore reverse course and adhere to conventions that guarantee the right to seek asylum, including at the Canada-US border.
The United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to seek asylum, but states this “right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations”.
Under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the right is protected by Article 33 on what’s known as non-refoulement.
Drafters of the convention recognised that security would be a concern to signatories. As a result, a caveat was added after a proposal by French and British delegates. Supported by Canada, it essentially stipulates that refugees who have been convicted of serious crimes forgo their right to seek asylum.
Caution was woven throughout both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1951 Convention – though you’d never know it from the way modern-day politicians demonise migration and asylum.
Failing refugees again
By treating migration and asylum seekers as a problem, the federal government is undermining international human rights and refugee regimes, which emerged precisely because governments had failed to help previously.
Canada is now showing the same disregard that led to the need for the 1951 Convention in the first place. The convention was necessary in part because of the failure to assist refugees prior to and during the Second World War. This included stopping efforts like the 1938 Convention Concerning the Status of Refugees Coming from Germany, which extended minimal protection to refugees of the Third Reich and later to Jewish refugees from Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Limited in scope and the number of signatories at only seven, the 1938 convention gave refugees from Germany “without prejudice” the “right of sojourn and residence” in signatory territories. However, widespread antisemitism meant very few people actually benefitted.
Other efforts, such as a week-long conference in Evian, France in July 1938, failed to secure broader commitments. Of the 32 countries in attendance, only the Dominican Republic formally committed to accepting any additional refugees. Globally, Shanghai was one of the few open ports for Jewish refugees seeking to escape persecution in Europe.
The Evian conference ended up being a victory for Nazi Germany, which correctly believed states would not overextend themselves on Jewish refugees. The Holocaust was in part the tragic result of this widespread failure to act and the insistence that Jewish refugees themselves were a problem.
Lessons of MS St Louis
These failures have since been recognised and to some extent reconciled publicly. In 2018, Trudeau apologised to “the Jewish refugees who Canada turned away” in the summer of 1939.
The apology referred to the approximately 900 German Jewish passengers aboard the MS St Louis, which set sail for Cuba from Hamburg in July 1939.
En route, the Cuban government cancelled previously approved transit visas. As a result, the ship’s captain, Gustav Shröder, sought another port of entry. Both the US and Canadian governments refused admission and the ship returned to Europe; 254 of the passengers later died in the Holocaust.
During deliberations on the 1951 Convention, an observer from CARITAS, a Catholic relief organisation, seemingly evoked the MS St Louis, describing “a party of Jewish refugees sailing on a ‘ghost ship’ had scuttled itself after it had been turned away from any port at which it had sought refuge”.
Six years after Trudeau’s apology, and 85 years after the voyage of the MS St Louis, the lessons about the dangers of demonising refugees appear to have been lost.
Eroding refugee protections
The deaths of six million people in the Holocaust shaped the subsequent post-1945 reconstruction, as did the onset of the Cold War.
As American historian Mark Mazower detailed in his book No Enchanted Palace, this aspirational rebuilding had fundamental and deeply problematic contradictions, most notably due to continued western imperialism in many parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
But in terms of refugee protection, the reconstruction was notable for the ways in which previous failures were meant to be corrected by the post-1945 solutions. Refugee protections, including the right to seek asylum, exist today precisely because states had previously failed refugees and migrants. The post-1945 period was about correcting these mistakes.
The right to seek asylum is now in jeopardy globally, as is refugee protection generally. Refugee camps have even been attacked by Israeli forces in Gaza, leading to critiques about the very notion of refuge.
In Canada, tough talk on border security is compromising the fragile legal structures that were introduced in the wake of the human tragedies of the Second World War. This doesn’t just jeopardise the right to seek asylum, it threatens the very foundations of contemporary international human rights and refugee regimes.
Canada must not turn its back on legal obligations built on past failures, regardless of what Trump does. More than ever, the focus must be on the root causes of migration and displacement, not on the migrants themselves.
Laura Madokoro is Associate Professor, Department of History, Carleton University.
This article was first published on The Conversation.
