When Borders Close

Caution – doors are now closing.

This pithy phrase, oft-repeated on trains, aptly describes our reality today. With the spread of coronavirus, international travel is shuddering to a halt. Borders are swinging shut. In March, Canada closed its borders to international arrivals with the belated exception of non-essential American citizens.

Caution – borders are now closing. Mind the gap! 

Migration is a story as old as human beings. Whether for economic reasons or to flee persecution or natural disaster, migration is part of our family stories and figures prominently in our sacred texts.

As the world shutters borders today, we wonder if movement between nation states is a human right. What would change if it was taken away?

These questions are not theoretical. My home is a nation other than the one to which my passport belongs. If borders close more tightly, I cannot go home. My studies, communities, and even several of my siblings are on the other side of borders. Without the ability to travel, my life is divided, right down the middle, into pieces.

I am one person. Last September, the UN estimated that 297 million people were international migrants in 2019, roughly four percent of the entire global population. And this number only tallies documented moves, meaning that the actual number is much higher.

Each of these 297+ million people is directly affected by closed borders. By association, their communities, families and workplaces feel it as well. How many people does that add up to?

But the impact is bigger yet. Because of the roles migrants and temporary foreign workers play in the Canadian workforce, the life of every Canadian citizen – even those who do not travel – will be dramatically implicated by the way various borders are now closing.

Looking Back: The Right to Exit

While letters from sovereigns requesting safe passage are not new (Nehemiah received one from King Artaxerxes), it wasn’t until King Louis XIV of France personally signed letters for his court that passports became a fashion.

Within one hundred years of King Louis XIV, almost every country in Europe had a system for passports. By 1914 they had fallen out of use again, thanks to the explosion in rail travel.

World War I reintroduced travel documents and birthed the “Nansen passport,” fundamental to our understanding of asylum today. The Nansen Passport was issued by the League of Nations for stateless and nationless people trapped in the shuffle of borders and wars. By 1942 it was honoured by 52 governments.

We know well of the boat emigration from Europe after the World Wars; those emigration patterns precipitated more talks on refugees, immigrants, asylum and passports.

Passports were introduced in Canada with the Confederation. At first only 25 to 50 passports were issued a year. Today over four million Canadian passports are issued annually.

During the Cold War the right to legally exit one’s own country was declared a human right – an unprecedented development in history. The Universal Declaration of the United Nations of 1948 stated, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own.”

Right to enter: Refugees and asylum seekers

Does the UN grant a corresponding “right to enter”?

No. If you leave your own country without being welcomed into another, you become what is called “an asylum seeker” (in Canada we use “refugee claimant”). You are somewhere in between nations. You have left; now you must seek permission to enter. You ask to be recognized and helped as a refugee.

Governments consider the formal definition of refugees in their acceptance or rejection of asylum claimants. The Geneva Convention of 1951 defined a refugee as a person without a nationality who has left their country with a well-founded fear of persecution and is unwilling to return because of their well-founded fear.

In the last decades an increase of passports, means of transport, and number of nation-states has led to an exponential increase of people choosing to leave their countries. At the same time an increase in restrictive visa systems increasingly blocks entrance to other nation-states. Additionally, even as the West has recognized wider grounds for eligibility of asylum, new measures (such as the internationalization of airports and ports and deterrence policies) make asylum application increasingly difficult.

Canada is hardly centre stage when it comes to welcoming refugees: 46 percent of refugees and asylum seekers in the world are hosted in Northern Africa and Western Asia, another 21 percent in sub-Saharan Africa.

Today almost all regions of the world are interconnected by arrivals, departures and transit. The same country can be both a host country, origin country and a transit country: think of Mexico or Turkey. Iran and Pakistan have taken in the most refugees in the past 10 years while Afghanistan has the record departures since the 1980’s.

Unsafe homes

How does coronavirus affect refugees approved to come to Canada for resettlement? The Government of Canada says that the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCF) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) are temporarily suspending resettlement travel for refugees and will find an alternative for refugees currently in transit to Canada. The government will still accept asylum claimants but all irregular migrants crossing the Canada-U.S. border will be turned back.

Around the world, refugee camps are bracing for the arrival of the virus. Syrian aid worker Osama al-Hussein told the CBC on March 23 that it’s hard to raise an alarm over a virus when refugees have already experienced so much:  “The huge interest of the whole globe in one virus is for Syrians something very small in comparison with the crisis, with the bombardment, shelling, killing.”

The aid workers are concerned, though. Refugee camps are often crowded. Social distancing is not an option. Aid agencies are worried that their funds will be cut as donor nations look to their own problems. They worry about getting protection equipment to refugee camps and about the psychological burden to those finally granted asylum but who are facing another delay.

As Toronto-based refugee lawyer Luke McRae points out, “Everyone’s being told to ‘stay home to stay safe’,” but what about those whose home or country is not safe? For these people, “It’s pretty heartbreaking that ‘stay in place’ means ‘stay in danger.’”

Why migrants matter to Canada

While “refugee” has a legal definition thanks to the UN, “migrant” is a shapeshifting term, depending on who is using it. An umbrella word, a “migrant” is a person who moves from one country to another for reasons other than tourism or visits. These cross-border movements could be temporal or permanent, legal or illegal. Refugees make up roughly a quarter of international migrants.

Of the 272 million documented migrants last year, around eight million were in Canada. Many factors play into where migrants go, including existing relationships, linguistic, political and geographical reasons as well as policies of the countries of origin and destination. Canada needs and welcomes international students and international workers. Migrants, particularly low wage migrants, are essential to nation-states in Europe and North America as populations age without children to replace them. They fill in the jobs which cannot be outsourced, such as caregiving and agriculture.

It is ironic, if you think about it. The Western nations muttering about immigration and shutting down their borders are the very same nations who desperately need migrant workers to maintain the lifestyles they seek to protect through tighter borders. Canada’s recent closing of borders exposed our nation’s urgent need for temporary foreign workers. Our agriculture, fishery and caregiving industries all claim they cannot survive without them.

Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau addressed the re-opening of borders to temporary foreign workers; “The participation of temporary foreign workers on our farms and in our food businesses is absolutely necessary. It is nothing less than an issue of food security. . . we now need thousands of workers on the farms for the planting season as well as the processing of foods from the land and sea.” In short, as Charles Keddy Farms in Nova Scotia recently told the Canadian Press, without temporary foreign workers there is no harvest.

Temporary foreign workers feed into Canada’s economy by paying Canadian taxes and buying from Canadian businesses. They also send money home, hence the oft-repeated claim that this is a mutually beneficial system. In 2008 on a global scale, remittance money was three times the amount of official development assistance given to developing nations.

What do we do?

Lynn Ungar writes, in her poem “Pandemic,” Know that we are connected / in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. / (You could hardly deny it now.) / Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. / (Surely, that has become clear.)

The life you know – the Canada you know – exists because of open borders. This pandemic shows the fingerprints on every single part of our lives. Our panic teaches us how every single thing we handle has passed through countless other hands, the hands of real people, before it reaches us. Everything we pass along has our touch on it too, for better and for worse. Local fingerprints, international, migrant and refugee fingerprints are all over our lives. We are beginning to see them. We owe something to them; they owe something to us. We need each other. This is both terrifying and beautiful. It is human.

Why do we care about the shutting of borders? For so many reasons: education, opportunity, economy, security, networks. For safety, asylum, escape. For family, kinship, marriage, hopes, home.

We would all be affected by the shutting of borders, yes, but we cannot only think about our own lives. What about those affected to a much greater degree? What would you do in their place?

As uncertainty grips everyone, let this pandemic grow in each of us a deep well of empathy for every refugee – risking everything for the sake of their families, another person in the panic-struggle to survive. Let it remind us to fight for those who cannot stay home without staying in danger. Know that your safety could be shattered as suddenly as theirs.

As panic spreads through households, let this pandemic grow in each of us a deep sense of gratitude and awareness for the temporary foreign workers without whom our lives would not be possible. Let it open our eyes with respect to the humans far and near whose lives intersect with ours through the goods we consume. Know that your life is held in the hands of others.

This is both terrifying and beautiful.