Description
The Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement’s (STCA) 2023 amendment brought an end to the Roxham Road route by extending the STCA’s coverage to include unofficial ports of entry. Roxham Road, an unofficial crossing between the Canada-US border, saw 4,517 asylum seekers cross via the Road into Canada in February 2023, but only 69 in April 2023 following the March 2023 amendment (Government of Canada, 2024). Its closure has pushed migrants with the hope of seeking asylum in Canada to treacherous, and sometimes deadly, routes to avoid being sent back to the US (Cone, 2023). Critics have called for Canada to withdraw from the agreement, citing the US’s human rights violations, procedural differences which disadvantage asylum seekers in the US, and broader US policy that is unsafe for LGBTQ refugees (Moore, 2007; Arbel, 2013; Hartsoe, 2021). This focus on potential destinations’ safety is state-centric and elides the agreement’s effects on asylum seekers’ journeys. Going beyond a state-centric approach, this paper uses a viapolitical lens to examine unofficial routes into Canada. Viapolitics calls attention to how roads and vehicles can help us think critically about migration, displacing border- and state-centrism (Walters, 2015). Heeding this call, this paper asks how asylum seekers’ experiences of unofficial routes, particularly via Roxham Road, have changed pre- and post-amendment. Referring to periods pre- and post-amendment, I will use archival materials including information about taxi services to Roxham Road and advice on crossing from migrant-facing organisations to understand the changes in routes and experiences. A viapolitical approach to examining the Roxham Road route invites new ways of thinking about the Canada-US STCA and the harms it produces by thinking beyond the border, and instead how journeys to, through, and from borders come to be, and importantly, what this means for asylum seekers.
