Canadian Politics Today

It's not that easy to assess a refugee claim, which is a claim for permanent residence.  You have to go to the often third world country with crappy governments and get police checks from them (which could take time if the governments are slow), you have to do medical checks by a doctor here, you have to do investigations on the claim itself to see if this person's story checks out, which means contacting & investigating people in the home country, possibly involving CSIS agents in that country etc. etc.

Oh please don't tell me you think we do any of that now. 

I mean, do you imagine we could actually get honest police checks from a brutal dictatorial government which someone has fled from? And how would we 'check out' their story anyway? Send agents to Syria or Iran or wherever to interview government officials and ask them if they're trying to murder some innocent person? You know we don't actually have any foreign agents, right? CSIS CAN go abroad, but only with the permission of the other government involved. They are not spies. We are the only G7 nation with no foreign intelligence service.

All we do with asylum claimants is check their prints to see if any western country knows them from somewhere. Then it's simply up to whatever story they tell. If the story kinda, sorta sounds legit (and they have a year with an immigration lawyer to concoct it) then that's mostly it.

BUT

We could simply screen most of the applicants coming across the border right away because they don't have any valid claim to fleeing persecution based on race, religion, nationality or membership in a specific group. I don't think the Haitians can really claim they're afraid all the anti-whatever in Haiti want them dead. There's no racial, religious or ethnic thing going on there or in Somalia or Nigeria that requires people come here to claim asylum. I mean, Nigeria does have some small insurgency in parts of the north, but the rest of the country is perfectly safe.

The notwithstanding clause is controversial, i sympathize with your argument, but these people also deserve basic due process,[/quote]

Which is why I said give them a hearing, and then an appeal process. You don't actually need to equate 'basic due process' with 'eight years of repeated appeals on multiple grounds through the court system at our expense'.

I understand that Canada is a country of immigrants, and that the country is known as one of the most welcoming to immigrants as any on the planet. So maybe I'm more Canadian that you are.

But Canada is not welcoming to cheats and queue jumpers, not even the newer Canadians. They're probably the LEAST sympathetic. If you made that referendum only open to immigrants you'd get an even higher agreement.

But you do finally seem to comprehend that provinces do have influence over immigration streams as opposed to your previous comments.

You mean like when I said
The federal government has 100% responsibility and authority for immigration. It might allow certain provinces, like Quebec, to select certain immigrants, or arrange with certain provinces to sponsor some people, but it's still the fed's decision.

Many of those "millions" emigrated because they knew they would be welcomed by US farmers who were happy to have cheaper labor than they could get locally. That flow has slowed considerably because of declining birth rates in Mexico and an improving economy which makes it more lucrative to say home.

Yes, and both the immigrants and the employers are complicit in breaking the law.  Government has turned a blind eye in part because big companies with big money benefit from this.  Absolutely anything the government does to avoid prosecuting and/or removing these people is a gift to these folks, because if they willfully broke the law they're criminals and cue jumpers, and getting away with it encourages more law breaking.

Quebec already controls it's own immigration and the other provinces want the same power. The IRCC gives the provinces powers to select who they need and they do it through the PNP.

But that's only because the federal government lets them.
And anyway, none of the provinces would object to this so it's a pointless discussion. The feds could implement such a system for migrants without any problem with the provinces.

It's not only a gift to these folks it's a gift to the people who employ them. Americans don't want to pick their own tomatoes but Mexicans will happily do it and keep that farm producing.

Of course it's a gift to the employers.  They'd rather pay dirt cheap wages to illegal migrants and skirt the law rather than pay enough wages so that Americans do want to pick tomatoes so that narrative is nonsense.  If you want to bring in farm workers, it can be done legally, but there's lots of people always looking for jobs.

To put illegal border crossing in perspective, the US Department of Homeland security just released a report saying there was a 203% increase between March 2017 and March 2018. It seems Canada is not alone.

These migrants probably want to get into the US before Trump plugs up more of the holes where it would be harder for them to get in.