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THE
SMART BORDER: MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE-IMMIGRATION AND REFUGEE/ASYLUM AND OTHER
ASPECTS Copyright
?2003 by Canada-United States Law Journal; Charlotte M. Janssen
Canada, as much as I may be a big of critic of Canadian
immigration, on the temporary entry side we are still very much open for
business. There have been a lot of new measures, but they have not
affected the on-line processing or at the border point of entry
processing. They have given more authority to officers, but things are
still moving along on the same set of laws and with some predictability.
The spousal employment issue in Canada has spread to all foreign
workers. Spouses of all foreign workers can work, as can common law
partners and same sex partners. We still have walk-in service, even
though in the busier consulates, it is better to mail it in and not just
show up. So our timing at port of entry is a little bit quicker.
Canada's focus on immigration has always been quite different
than the United States. Today, I am not speaking about immigration per
se as much as I am on entry and public security. For the past four
centuries, Canada was a land built with immigrants. Immigrants and their
descendants have steadily arrived in Canada and together formed a
nation. The immigrants have forged trading alliances, as you can tell
from Bill Graham, with the countries from which they come and with their
neighbor, the United States. We depend economically and socially on the
openness of our borders.
We always had a generous immigration policy. In the past few
years, we have been allowing in 200,000 individuals on a permanent
residence basis. There is absolutely no indication that that number will
be lowered. At the moment there are fewer applicants because there was a
major change in the law, but we are still welcoming immigrants to
Canada. This 200,000 person number is in addition to approximately
285,000 temporary entries that we allowed into Canada in 2001. Of the
285,000, 94,000 are to the United States. Those 94,000 were work
permits. Of the 94,000, 24,000 were permits issued to Americans.
There were approximately 5,000 student visas. You can see more than
100,000 of our 250,000 are Americans. With the $1.5 billion in trade and
provisions of NAFTA allowing for walk-in applications,
I would gather that the vast bulk of those visas were issued at port of
entry at one of our very busy borders. PUBLIC
SECURITY
The challenge for Canada is
how to continue to allow the openness of our border and enhance public
security. We have 9,000 kilometers of shared border and $1.5 billion
worth of trade. We must allow people to continue to flow while still
addressing the concern of U.S. and public security. The focus of
immigration policy and the affect of public security on it have been
under intense scrutiny. The scrutiny from the U.S. has been especially
intense, since the Montr?l resident had Ahmed Ressam was stopped at
the Canada/U.S. border in route to bomb the Los Angeles airport during
the millennium celebration. Some may remember after September 11th, there were a lot of accusations
that Canada was a haven for terrorists. Luckily for Canada, no
connection was ever proven linking the September 11th attackers to
Canada. However, it certainly did raise an issue.
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