American Refugees Aren’t Welcome

As an immigration and refugee lawyer for more than 25 years, I’ve watched in horror as violence of all kinds has erupted south of the border. Most recently, that includes the escalating hate speech directed at LGBTQ+ people and an aggressive crackdown by ICE, ostensibly to deal with illegal immigration. ICE agents have descended on communities like stormtroopers, targeting and detaining Americans regardless of their citizenship status or age—including Liam Ramos, a preschooler from Minneapolis. 

Related: Americans Are Renouncing Their Citizenship. This Lawyer Makes It Happen.

One-third of my current caseload is now made up of Americans, from every corner of the country, asking whether Canada can offer them a safe home. When I receive these calls, at least one each day, the voices on the other end all say different versions of the same thing: this is not the America I grew up in. Most of my U.S. files are spousal sponsorships, claims from Canadians who moved south decades ago and are now desperate to return with their American partners. Of the claimants who aren’t married to Canadians, only the ones who meet our recently elevated immigration thresholds are getting in—many of them educated, white professionals in academia or STEM. Everyone else is left behind. 

One couple I’m working with has lived together in the U.S. for years. The husband, originally from El Salvador, is undocumented, but like millions of other people, he has worked, paid taxes and built a life in the States. His wife is Canadian, so they’ve been trying to figure out how to get across the border and resettle here. The main problem: they’re afraid to fly or drive, worried that any movement, even the smallest provocation, could put them on ICE’s radar, potentially resulting in the husband’s arrest or deportation. For them, there is no clear route forward.

Related: The U.S. Wants Canada to Become A Police State

Then there are the Americans whose cases I’ve had to reject outright, even if I empathize with their situations. One particular call that stayed with me came from a woman in upstate New York whose husband is a Syrian citizen. She wanted to move to Canada, then sponsor him to come over—he didn’t feel safe moving to the States given all the looming anti-immigrant sentiment. I had to tell her that there was no path to Canada. She didn’t meet the level of education or work experience necessary to qualify for permanent residency. They’re still living apart.

Canada’s reputation as a safe haven has unravelled over the last decade. After years of swinging open our doors to international students and temporary foreign workers, a drastic imbalance between infrastructure capacity and population growth caused the Trudeau government—and, more recently, the Carney government—to slam those doors shut. In 2024, the federal government announced it would reduce the number of temporary residents admitted annually to five per cent of the population over three years. That same year, the CBSA deported more than 16,000 people and committed to increasing removals by another 25 per cent in 2025. 

Related: Should Canada Give Asylum to Trans Americans?

Mark Carney’s first immigration plan drastically reduced opportunities for permanent residency on humanitarian grounds, cutting the number of spots from 10,000 to 6,900 this year and to 5,000 in both 2027 and 2028. Canada is now deporting nearly 400 people a week, most of whom are refugee claimants—the fastest pace in a decade. Refugee lawyers like myself worry those numbers could climb even higher if Bill C-12 becomes law. The proposed legislation, now just shy of its second Senate hearing, would replace in-person hearings with written assessments for any claimant who failed to seek formal protection during their first year in Canada. This change would make vulnerable people even more vulnerable: a paper process favours claimants who can afford lawyers and know how to frame legal arguments. The system will tilt even further away from respite and toward refusal.

Americans are allowed to claim refugee status in Canada, but there are only a few hundred cases pending. Most are quickly dismissed because the claimants hail from what’s politically categorized as a “safe” nation under the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement. There are likely thousands more at-risk Americans who will never call my office, either because they don’t have the money to attempt a move or because they realize Canada won’t formally recognize the danger they’re in. 

Should we do more to admit them? I’ve heard my colleagues say things like, “Americans voted for Trump twice. Why should Canada become the release valve for a society that freely chose its path?” With a devastating tariff war already raging, others question whether it’s smart for Canada to poke the bear by taking in asylum seekers. My own instinct would be to offer sanctuary regardless.

Related: Can Trumpugees Move to Canada?

To do this, Canada doesn’t necessarily need to scrap its recent limits on immigration or revoke the Safe Third Country Agreement. In fact, we don’t need any new laws; a tool to ramp up passage already exists. Under Section 25 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, Canada could process more of their humanitarian applications today. If a U.S. claimant says, “I have a job offer, and I have skills, but I also have real fears about remaining in my country,” the federal government has the discretion to approve them. 

If Trump’s authoritarian tactics continue to intensify, the number of calls to Canada will only grow. Right now, the culture of our immigration system is to keep people out, which is evident even in run-of-the-mill administrative dealings, like reasonable applications bouncing back due to the smallest of technical mistakes. If that culture shifted back to one of compassion, our bureaucracy could adjust accordingly. 

For much of the last half-century, Canada positioned itself as a place people could call home when they were forced to flee their own. This included the tens of thousands of Americans who came here in the wake of the Vietnam War—many of them draft dodgers who eventually became citizens. Today, a new wave of Americans is looking north again, only to discover a different, more closed-off Canada. The Carney government would do well to consult our history when deciding what kind of country it wants to build for the future.

Greg Willoughby is an immigration and refugee lawyer practising in London, Ontario.