Migrants crossing from US into Canada

Why a specific point of the US-Canadian border on dead end Roxham road became the favoured place to cross from the US into Canada is anyone’s guess. But once they did, word spread on social media.

Now Canadian soldiers have been deployed to erect tents to temporarily house hundreds of asylum seekers coming from New York state.

“we will have approximately 25 large tents, including heating and lighting, as well as hard flooring, and this will house approximately 500 individuals.”

Seeing uncertainty in US and hope in Canada, migrants flock to a back-road border crossing, WRingAP reports. Story: https://t.co/AQ9kYWXnIy pic.twitter.com/wxOiszecIM— AP Eastern U.S. (APEastRegion) August 9, 2017


Migrants dream of the liberal Canada of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In a quirk in Canadian law, if migrants arrive at a location other than a port of entry, they are allowed to request refugee status.

Canadian lawmakers were quick to point out that it’s not guaranteed.

“It is not a free ticket for refugee status. Not at all. And we would actually like to make that very clear that regardless of what people are reading on social media and so on, crossing the border here does not guarantee automatic entry.”

Many migrants say they’ve been driven to move out of the US by the rhetoric of the Trump administration, who called for an end to an asylum programme for Haitians which has existed since the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in the island nation. That combined with the proposed ban on people from some Muslim countries mean that the United States of America may no longer the destination of the world’s dispossessed.