Preparing for the worst: What to do with Refugees from America's Collapse?
Photo Credit: (NBC News / Google Images)
Written by: Adam Riggio
Last column, I discussed the pieces falling into place for the United States to collapse into civil war while disease ravages its population. Today, I consider what the Canadian state and people can do for our neighbours. However, I also consider the many dangers that Canadians face from the collapse of a country that we have considered our closest ally for so long.
Refugees Coming Through America
Canadians have already faced the problem of what to do with refugees from the United States. Refugees and immigrants who themselves had first come to the USA, they began significantly crossing to Canada shortly after Trump’s inauguration in 2017. Since then, more and more refugees have travelled in secret through the USA, waiting to file for refugee status until they were in Canada itself. The likelihood of the United States accepting an asylum claim plunged under Trump, and American culture’s considerable social licence to be aggressively racist contribute to nightmarish conditions for refugees.
Canada presents a much less ugly alternative, even though refugees’ journeys here are complicated by the need to travel through the USA in secret, often at great risk, especially in our harsh winters. This is because of our Safe Third Country agreement with the United States: the treaty invalidates any refugee application for Canada made after reaching the USA. Its core presumption is that the United States will always be a safe place for refugees to arrive.
Those were the days, weren’t they?
As it is, Canada’s Supreme Court recently challenged the government to scrap the Safe Third Country agreement precisely because of that fact: the United States is no longer a safe country for refugees. Justice Ann Marie McDonald ruled that conditions in the USA had become so hostile to immigrants and generally unstable that the country was no longer safe at all. The ruling offered a beacon of hope for Canada: she ruled that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms constitutionally forbids the Canadian state from sending a person back without some judicial process to a country where they will face threats to their human rights.
Even with our land borders closed due to the catastrophic COVID-19 contagion in the United States, Canadian border security still permits refugee claims made at regular border crossings. So as long as you check in with the border patrol, the Safe Third Country agreement is practically, thankfully, meaningless.
Refugees From Actual Civil Conflict in America
In ordinary circumstances, Canadians could stand behind the Safe Third Country agreement with the United States because our more powerful neighbour supposedly had fair civic and governance institutions. The growing hostility among American culture to refugees and immigrants, as well as the institutionalized violent extremism of agencies under their Department of Homeland Security meant that refugees from other countries can no longer be considered safe there.
Even those terrifying circumstances of Homeland Security agencies taking their cue from would-be Ethnic Cleansing Czar Stephen Miller, may be considered ordinary compared to this year’s successive explosions of crisis and disaster. As of my writing this draft, the USA had just confirmed its five millionth COVID-19 case, as the contagion spreads beyond all control throughout the American populace. Federal and local police agencies have cracked down brutally on protestors across the country, demonstrating that thousands of armed officers are happily willing to smash and disappear citizens.
President Trump, meanwhile, has openly stated that he is making massive funding cuts to the US Postal Service with the express intention of sabotaging the November elections. That Trump will refuse to accept negative results is now all but a certainty. Loyalists take up the full ranks of entire government security agencies, and unpredictably pepper the many different police agencies at federal, state, and local levels. Even the archaic law enforcement office of the county sheriff contained a large sub-culture of extremists who believe that sheriffs have higher authority than the federal government, and may enforce laws without respect for human rights.
If the extremist police and private militias throughout the United States declare war on democratic Americans to install Donald Trump and the Republican Party in federal power permanently, then no one in that country will be safe from immediate threat of violence. More democratically minded police, security agents, and armed citizens will resist this violence by any means necessary. Given the size of police alone in America, even if only a quarter of them take up arms for Trump, he will have a domestic army of 200,000 or more ready to kill for him.
Economic Convulsions, Millions in Financial Ruin
In such circumstances, Canadians have to take seriously the possibility that a new category of refugees will appear in Canada from the United States: US citizens themselves. They will be coming to Canada largely for two reasons.
One is to escape political repression. Activists and political organizers in Black communities in America have been mysteriously killed, and their deaths ruled innocuous or barely worth investigating. Six organizers of the Ferguson Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2014 have been killed in suspicious circumstances since then. Robert Fuller’s killing is especially chilling, as the California teenager was found hanging from a tree in a public park, and police quickly ruled his death a suicide without any investigation.
It is sensible to plan for a massive upswell of violence against Black activists, community leaders, and even places of worship, at the hands of militia groups, police, security forces, and radicalized members of white communities. In the worst case, we will see mass police and military violence against entire Black communities, as if US police and military forces will have nationalized the mob violence that destroyed Rosewood, Florida and Greenwood, Oklahoma. Should Americans at risk from political and racist violence seek asylum in Canada, our government must grant their request.
This will be a matter of great controversy, because the Trump White House will, during the civil conflict following his fraudulent hold onto power after November, declare any such activist an enemy of the state. Given how easily the Trudeau government did Trump’s bidding in the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, we can expect little from them to protect ordinary Black people from torture and murder by US police and security forces. A sustained and popular campaign of advocacy and protest must pressure the Trudeau government to protect political activists who face violence and murder from agents of their government.
Economic Convulsions, Millions in Financial Ruin
Activists seeking political asylum will, however, be a small number of those potentially seeking refuge in Canada. The core causes of any streams of people fleeing the United States are the COVID-19 pandemic and its catastrophic economic effects.
Unemployment crises have rocked the American economy as COVID-19 forced countless businesses to close, and temporary closures rapidly became permanent, thanks to the corrupt roll-out of the Trump Administration’s business relief program. The government’s failure to address the pandemic properly, or even at all, has caused its uncontrollable spread across the United States. As a result, many of the employment losses will be permanent, as entire business sectors that depend on people gathering in close quarters indoors will shut for who knows how long.
Alongside mass unemployment is mass homelessness, as there is virtually nothing at any level of government in the United States to prevent mass evictions on a scale not seen since the economic and ecological disasters of the Great Depression. More than 40 million people across the United States face imminent eviction and have nowhere else to go. People across that country are organizing demonstrations to force their state and city governments to intervene, but there are slim chances that these will be at all effective outside a few pockets of responsive politicians.
These millions of jobless, homeless people with no access to medical care, and who will likely be unable to vote in the upcoming election will have nothing for them in the United States. If they are from racialized minorities, they will face clear threats of violence from radicalized police, security services, and soldiers. We Canadians must prepare for a flood of desperate Americans crossing our borders, despite pandemic-related closure of crossings, claiming refugee status.
What Can Canada Do As a Country? As People?
Canada already has infrastructure to handle a relatively limited number of refugees. For example, even after more than a decade of cuts and funding stagnation, the federal government’s health plan for refugees is far superior to what many fully-employed citizens can access easily in the United States at the best of times. However, our relative generosity will be tested.
Canada currently resettles an average of just under 30,000 refugees every year. This is nothing compared to the more than two million that have fled for Europe from the war zones of Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan over the last decade. Canada did not experience this influx, and the popular backlash against their arrival in such high numbers that has fed support for fascistic and white nationalist political parties across the European Union, despite these refugees being horrifyingly vulnerable and having barely avoided death. This is for the obvious reason that there are no overland routes to Canada from any countries undergoing collapse.
Until now, that is. Because we will be faced with at least 30,000 refugees coming to Canada from the United States, who face genuine crisis. They will be jobless, homeless, persecuted violently by police, security services, their own government, and radicalized citizens who support the Trump agenda. I consider 30,000 a conservative estimate of the size of this movement of desperate people, so the size of the refugee influx alone will intimidate and frighten many Canadians.
Because of the horrifying inequities of American society as it collapses from the pandemic, mass homelessness, and Trump’s fascist coup, most of the refugees will likely be Black and Hispanic people. Already suffering from direct and systemic racism in the United States, fascistic media in Canada will target all these people as criminals, rapists, communists, and terrorists, just as similar outlets describe immigrants and refugees in America. So Canada’s capacity to absorb these American refugees will be tested by extremists radicalizing many of us to hate refugees and foreigners.
Strengthening Continental Terror Networks
Worse, the coming waves of American refugees will include actual terrorist cells. I am, of course, talking about white nationalist terror organizations. These armed groups of racist murderers and their fellow travellers have long organized throughout Canada and the United States. One prominent case of a Canadian army reservist joining his American terrorist comrades in a plot to kill black people and Democratic Party politicians in Virginia is the tip of an iceberg.
Not only are American terror groups organizing and networking in Canada, but Canada has many extremist militias of its own. Racist militias that originated in the United States or Europe, but have a strong foothold in Canada include the Soldiers of Odin, Three Percenters, and loosely connected groups of Boogaloo enthusiasts. A wave of Black Americans fleeing their country’s collapse into mass poverty, deadly contagion, and state violence will present many opportunities for terrorist groups to link across our two countries to carry out deadly attacks on both the vulnerable refugees themselves, and on Canadians to turn them against helping our most desperate neighbours.
Canadian activists have been successful in breaking up these movements, as in the campaign against Quebec’s once-fearsome, now-pathetic La Meute that united anti-fascist and queer activism. Canadian police and armed forces, however, may not be the reliable assistance in this fight that many among our comfortable classes believe them to be. Remember that terrorist organizer, army reservist, and explosives expert Patrik Mathews was only able to escape to the United States for months because the RCMP released him. This was after the Mounties seized a disturbingly large arsenal of weapons from his home.
The 2020s Will Not Be a Fun Decade
The Canadian government can mount the resources necessary to welcome the tens of thousands of Americans who will be fleeing across the border after what feels like this November’s inevitable violent Trumpist coup against the Democratic Party, Black Lives Matter, countless progressive activists, and democracy in America itself. We will need to deploy both emergency shelters and COVID-19 testing and treatment facilities, especially since the free arrival of thousands of scared Americans will happen in the coldest months of next winter. We will need to help transition them into jobs or other ways they can earn income, as well as secure housing that many American refugees will likely not have had for months.
Most importantly, we progressives will have to mobilize against forces that will demonize American asylum seekers. Many of those anti-refugee voices will come from mainstream places. Expect the pro-Trump extremists who have a happy political home in the Conservative Party and Rebel Media to demonize the largely Black and Hispanic mass of refugees. Those fascistic forces in our own politics can easily tap into rising hatred within the general Canadian public for refugees, and will likely push our mainstream politics in a more militarized, authoritarian direction.
Faith in the goodness of humanity can no longer be taken for granted. We progressives must confront and defeat the racism, fascism, and cruelty coming from our governments, our leaders, and from within a lot of our personal family and friend networks as well. The odds are stacked almost entirely against our success. Nonetheless, we would be cowards if we did not try.