It’s been almost a year since New York Mayor Eric Adams has faced the immigration crisis en masse.
Everything worsened when Arizona and, above all, Texas began to charter buses to send to the Big Apple, a city of refuge by definition, hundreds of undocumented immigrants who were detained when crossing the border with Mexico.
Adams tried to put on a brave face and find solutions. The shelters filled up quickly, leaving thousands of homeless people unattended. The attempt to create a refugee-style camp failed amid criticism and rejection, in addition to the fact that the place was flooded to which four drops fell, still unused.
Later, those affected rioted in a Manhattan hotel because the municipality ordered their accommodation in an old, poorly equipped Brooklyn port warehouse.
After criticizing, and a lot, the governor of Texas, the ultraconservative Greg Abbott, for using immigrants as bargaining chips for his political interests, the mayor drew his own conclusions. Faced with Washington’s refusal to help the city financially, Adams copied and pasted, so the municipality began handing out free bus tickets for immigrants who wanted to travel to the Canadian border and cross there on foot.
“We are not going to force them, but we are going to help those who seek to go anywhere else in the process to achieve their dreams,” declared the mayor.
The option of Canada arose, although not a few of those interested have already regretted it. They come from warm territories and in that destination they peel from the cold.
The journey ends at Roxham Road, the most famous crossing point used by undocumented immigrants to leave the US and request asylum in this other North American country.
Suddenly, the residents of that area of ??Canada have expressed their discomfort with the notable increase in people without papers arriving from the Big Apple. “There is no political will to fix this,” Hélène Gravel told The New York Times.
This woman resides in the Roxham Road area. “Canada is soft, and the United States is not concerned because this is nothing compared to what is happening on its southern border,” he added.
Nearly 40,000 immigrants crossed the northern border illegally in 2022, more than double the number in 2019. Recent numbers mark an even higher increase, with at least 5,000 people in January alone.
And add and continue. Because many of those who are in New York did not find the promised land, after a trip of several weeks risking their lives, but experienced being homeless or even suffered sexual abuse.
Faced with this increase in immigrants without documents, the Prime Minister of Quebec, François Legault, asked the Canadian president, Justin Trudeau, to close the Roxham Road crossing. Legault and other leaders asked Trudeau to renegotiate the treaty that Canada signed in Washington because they consider that this pact has done nothing more than encourage the arrival of immigrants without complying with the legally established procedures.
This situation only intensifies the pressure on Prime Minister Trudeau to reach a new deal with President Joe Biden and close virtually the entire border area to more asylum seekers.
Sean Fraser, Canadian Immigration Minister, held talks this week in the US capital with Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security, while Trudeau has already announced that he will bring up this matter during Biden’s next visit to Ottawa on the 23rd and 24th of this month. .
Many of those who cross into the United States from Mexico with the intention of staying abandon their plans to seek refuge, deterred by the lengthy process and the restrictive definition of the concept of asylum.
Neither the New York City Council nor the mayor give numbers on the tickets provided to travel to the border with Canada. For many activists it is an affront that the city does not respect their generous welcome and limits itself to exporting the problem.
