“Illegals – they're
coming to the U.S. with their criminal element. They're bringing in
drugs and harboring Muslims. They are crossing the border to live
illicitly in America.”
While President Trump demands a wall on
the southern border of the United States, the question arises “Isn't
that (building the southern wall) like closing the front door, and
leaving the back door (the Canadian border) open?" What about
securing the porous Canadian border? Threats from the north are real,
and some believe these threat are even more dangerous than warnings
of invaders from Mexico.
Does the government believe a northern
wall is also needed to stop illegal entry? Even though everything
changed after 9/11 when Congress more than doubled the budget of
Customs and Border Protection, the Canadian border remains a
significant problem.
Illegals
CBS News reports that the number of
people caught illegally crossing the United States' northern border
is up 142 percent during the first six months of 2018. Border Patrol
agents apprehended 445 people entering the U.S. from Canada during
the first six months of 2018; that compares with 184 during the same
period last year.
The northern border is very easy to
cross, which was actually the original intention. But it also makes
it very difficult to secure. An unguarded metal fence is the only
thing keeping smugglers from entering a remote corner of New York
State – a small part of the physical security infrastructure along
America's northern border.
Norm Lague, the Border Patrol agent in
charge here, says it's impossible to cover 100 percent of the entire
5,525-mile-long U.S.-Canadian border, the longest and busiest land
boundary in the world. And, Porter Fox, author of Northland: A
4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border says, "It's
generally agreed that the northern border is more vulnerable to a
terrorist sneaking into this country.”
Notably, of those apprehended along the
northern border, nearly half (1,489) were from Mexico. Mexican
citizens don't need a visa to enter Canada, and one-way flights to
Toronto and Montreal only cost about $300. Once there, Border Patrol
agents say, they can slip into the U.S. Just over 2,000 agents patrol
America’s northern border, compared with 17,000 down south.
While the number of arrests is tiny
compared with the southern border, the human smuggling is just as
sophisticated. For example, people crossing the border between
Vermont and Quebec have paid smugglers up to $4,000, usually payable
when the immigrants reach their U.S. destination, according to
officials and court documents.
Suspected Terrorists
FBI reports reviewed by The Daily
Beast reveal that far more suspected terrorists try to enter the
country from the northern border with Canada than from the south.
Leaked FBI data collected between 2014 and 2016 that showed the
number of "suspected terrorists" trying to enter the U.S.
from Canada at land border crossings was in some months twice that
encountered at the Mexico-U.S. border.
FBI Terrorist Screening Center monthly
reports show New York, Michigan, and Washington have the most
encounters with suspected terrorists at land border crossings. North
Dakota and Vermont encounter one or two per month on average. The
numbers at the southern border were comparatively small. In April
2014, for example, there were 12 border encounters in California and
Texas combined and 17 in Washington, New York, Michigan, and Vermont.
In the same month the following year, southern states reported two
encounters; northern states: 18.
Drugs
The northern border sees the world’s
largest bilateral daily flow of goods and people, on average $190m
and nearly 400,000 respectively. It offers more opportunities for
illegal crossings: in many places a small white obelisk somewhere in
a field is the only marker of the border.
Long-established smuggling routes exist
across America’s notoriously porous northern border, which has 120
points of entry, and stretches more than 5,500 miles while
encompassing large areas of remote wilderness and numerous waterways.
In recent years, Canada emerged as a
global epicenter of synthetic and counterfeit drug manufacturing and
processing—with everything from MDMA (ecstasy) to fake Viagra
flowing from clandestine labs north of the U.S. border. A 2005 State
Department cable identified Canada as a “significant producer and
transit country for precursor chemicals used to produce synthetic
drugs,” and a “hot spot” of rising clandestine lab activity.
Smuggling of OxyContin and deadly fentanyl from Canada to the U.S.
has spiked.
Criminal syndicates that control
chemical factories in China’s booming Guangdong province are
shipping narcotics, including fentanyl to Vancouver, washing the drug
sales in British Columbia’s casinos and high-priced real estate,
and transferring laundered funds back to Chinese factories to repeat
this deadly trade cycle, a Global News investigation shows.
Organized crime groups known as Triads
have infiltrated Canada’s economy so deeply that Australia’s
intelligence community has coined a new term for innovative methods
of drug trafficking and money laundering now occurring in B.C. It is
called the “Vancouver Model” of transnational crime.
In 2016 alone, U.S. Customs officials
reported 2,015 drug arrests at land crossings at the U.S.-Canada
border, while Canadian officials made more than 18,000 drug seizures.
Trafficking groups routinely engage in so-called double exchanges in
which designer drugs passed from Canada to the U.S. are exchanged for
other narcotics, such as cocaine, for shipment back to Canada.
One drug trafficking operation based in
Calgary, Alberta—just a three-hour drive north of the Montana
border—was capable of producing an estimated 18,000 counterfeit
pills an hour for export to the U.S. and Canadian markets.
Canadian Illegals in U.S.
Canadians can be illegals. Did you ever
consider that? They can be, and they are.
According to a new U.S. government
report from the Department of Homeland Security (August 7, 2018), the
largest group of people who enter the U.S. legally and then overstay
their welcome aren’t coming across the southern border at all.
They’re coming from Canada. Department of Homeland Security August
7, 2018
It seems that an army of Canadian
citizens – despite coming from a place of relative affluence and
opportunity – already live illicitly in the U.S. One research
institute estimates the total at 100,000, while a recent American
government report said nearly that many Canadians outstayed their
legal welcome – and failed to leave – in one year alone. What
policies lie in store for deporting these law breakers?
To close, according to a Bloomberg poll
released in 2015, more than four in 10 Americans would support
building a wall across the Canadian border. 41 percent of Americans
would favor a "brick and mortar" wall along the Canadian
border.
Shocking, isn't it? In my wildest
imagination, I cannot envision a northern wall. Still, isolationism
is growing as is fear. President Trump, himself, is a self-proclaimed
nationalist who is often at odds with Canadian Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau over trade and tariffs. Maybe Canada will build its own wall in response.
Yet, walls – no matter their size or
sophistication – will never extinguish the yen for freedom and
asylum, nor will these walls diminish the wrath of terrorists or end
the insatiable demand for opioids. The answers to the problems lie in
failed policies deep rooted in violence, revenge, greed, and
addiction. The United States, while struggling to remain the land of
liberty, is dealing with its own crippling problems including
devastating health and gun violence epidemics.
Walls to the south and north and oceans
to the east and west merely serve as obstacles to those bent on
personal gain. International walls are ultra-expensive structural
divisions birthed in great visions of bravado, nationalism, and
controversy … they are neither conducive to developing good
neighbors nor to creating good political policy.
Sources
Tom Blackwell. “Northern aliens:
Around 100,000 Canadians live under the radar in U.S. as illegal
immigrants.” National Post. March 17, 2017.
Sam Cooper. “How Chinese gangs are
laundering drug money through Vancouver real estate.” Global News.
June 5, 2018.
“Illegal U.S. northern border
crossings up 142 percent from last year.” CBS News. August 6, 2018.
Christopher Moraff. “Trump Is
Freaking Out About the Wrong Border: Killer Fentanyl Is Coming From
Canada.” The Daily Beast. April 9, 2018.
Wilson Ring. “With focus on Mexico,
apprehensions grow at Canadian border.” The Associated Press. July
24, 2018.
Diana Swain. “'The real bad guys'
are coming from Canada, not Mexico, Daily Beast report
alleges.”
CBC News. February 11, 2017.
Casey Tolan. “At the Canadian
border, there's no wall—but plenty of people watching.” Splinter.
October 14, 2016.
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