Suchergebnisse

SommaireLe durcissement des politiques migratoires a diminué les possibilités légales de migration, créant ainsi un environnement propice au trafic de migrants. En 2002, le Canada a drastiquement augmenté les pénalités associées à ce phénomène. Ces dispositions sont inadéquates: elles cherchent moins à réprimer une activité criminelle présumée dangereuse qu'à dissuader l'immigration irrégulière. D'une part, les dispositions législatives s'inscrivent en faux avec le traitement jurisprudentiel du trafic de migrants au Canada, et ne correspondent ni aux lois ni à la jurisprudence étrangères: on surestime la gravité du crime. D'autre part, elles ne se conforment pas au droit international. En excluant la recherche d'un avantage financier de la 'définition canadienne de l'infraction, on privilégie la lutte à toute forme d'aide à la migration irrégulière, et non seulement au trafic de migrants.

Irregular crossings at the Canada-US border between 2017 and 2019 made headlines and pervaded political debates. Drawing on the literature on the instrumentalization of migration crises and on the disappearance of asylum in Canada, this article interrogates the "crisis" framing of these arrivals. We argue that, at its core, this framing builds on the incremental erasure of asylum seekers as a legal and political reality from the Canadian public sphere over the last three decades. During this period and leading up to 2017, there was a shift in the public understanding of asylum from an international obligation to a problem that had been dealt with and erased. When this "problem" resurfaced in 2017, it shattered the illusion. Over the past two decades, Canada and the United States have created a hostile border architecture that channels migrants towards a narrow section of the Quebec-New York border known as Roxham Road. This generated pressures on Quebec's migrant settlement resources, providing the elements for a framing of these arrivals as a "crisis" and paving the way for the implementation of exceptional measures within a very tight framework, with massively expanded budgets, and with the participation of a range of public and private actors at times unfamiliar with the international protection system and unprepared to meet the needs of asylum seekers. The discussion concludes with an examination of two main legacies of the Roxham Road events: the articulation of a Canada-specific form of border humanitarianism and the solidification of an old policy aspiration – the elimination of the agentic asylum seeker.