Citizenship and Immigration committee  My name is Craig Damian Smith. I'm the associate director of the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. I just want to thank you and say it's a privilege to be part of this discussion. I want to open by stating that the conversat

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sure. Thank you. I'm used to just talking as much as I want and forcing students to listen. While Canada helped draft the global compact on refugees, our support for the CRRF seems remarkably less clear. The fact is that if you look at where our programming is right now, we're s

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. It's a fact that when states make unilateral decisions about irregular migration and how they're going to react to irregular migration, it necessarily affects other states and their neighbours, and there are cascading effects. The best and the only real way to deal wi

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Is your question whether or not the government feels pressure or that they should feel pressure?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think that if we leave considerations of political affiliation aside and just look at—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  They do change from time to time, but the one constant in international relations is the sovereign self-interest of states. If we consider well-regulated and well-managed international mobility in such a way so that you don't see large-scale irregular migration flows on borders

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As a political scientist, I'd say that the entire purpose of these states pulling out or saying that they won't support the global compact on migration is domestic political gain, and the audience there is the domestic audience. You're talking about Hungary, Austria, the Czech R

Citizenship and Immigration committee  —based on anti-Semitic tropes about who controls multilateral institutions.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Australia is a pioneer of a policy that was first called the “white Australia policy”, which then became known as the “Pacific solution”, which was to excise their territory from the refugee convention so that they could indefinitely warehouse refugees on small islands.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Detain.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's not a group of states that we want to align ourselves with, in my opinion.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The practice of shooting tear gas across borders and pushing people back from claiming asylum is unfortunately part of a growing trend in border control that some states—Israel and Hungary, for instance—call “hot returns”, which is to push people back over borders regardless of w

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I still think we're moving between the GCR and the GCM—the two compacts—a bit in the way that we're discussing this. If Canada wants to do something about the situation on the border with Mexico and the U.S., the provisions in the compact that allow them to do that are to addres

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'd reiterate what I said: that a world of well-governed and well-managed migration is in every state's interest and that it meets basic criteria of upholding and protecting vulnerable people's rights.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's a very important question, and the dynamics are very important. I've spent several years working in irregular migration systems, as we call them, in north Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, and now increasingly in Central America. The very basic fact of irregular migr