Asylum claims in Canada are down nearly 40 per cent in 2025. Here's why
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Imagine a Western country declaring it has zero irregular migration. It sounds impossible, but that is exactly what the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed last month.
“More than 200 days into this job, we have achieved operational security at the border,” the DHS website touted, echoing U.S. President Donald Trump’s oft-made claims of having halted illegal migration. “Zero illegal immigrants were released into the country in May, June, and July.”
No Western democracy can truly lay claim to zero illegal migration, experts say, because it’s not like irregular migrants come forward to refute the claim.
Hyperbole aside, the United States, thanks to a change in political messaging, policy, and ramped-up security efforts, has indeed seen significant drops in border activity and irregular encounters at its borders this year. This, in turn, has eased migration flows into Canada.
Following years of pro-immigration policies that have led to a huge backlog of asylum claimants, Canada is also trying to curb immigration. While political and practical shifts have led to some improvements, experts say that Canada needs to improve its screening methods and restore the integrity of its immigration system while also building a broad political consensus around immigration policy.
By the numbers
For fans of curbing migration, this year’s data looks promising.
Irregular migrant crossings — and border traffic, generally — have dropped significantly at the U.S.-Canada border. Overall, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported just 8,024 and 6,177 apprehensions in June and July, respectively, representing a 90 per cent drop for both months year over year compared to 2024.
Along the Canadian border, total apprehensions fell nearly 81 per cent in June to 702, down from 3,601 in June 2024 — and from 3,037 in July 2024 to just 554 in July 2025.
Canadian numbers are collected by various agencies, some of them with overlapping remits, including the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), and the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), but the overall picture shows that numbers are down. Total asylum claimants processed by the CBSA and IRCC in 2024, for example, hit a staggering 171,840, with 91,540 for the first six months of the year. In 2025, the first six months saw just 57,440 claimants processed, a nearly 40 per cent decline.
Canada has “gotten much better, especially since Roxham Road first broke, when it was clear that Canada wasn’t collecting data, let alone accurate data and didn’t have a (way) of capturing it,” said Christian Leuprecht, a political science professor at Queen’s University and Royal Military College.
Canada is trying to gather more data, and the Roxham Road crossing was closed in 2023 with the expansion of the Safe Third Country Agreement.
“The problem is,” Leuprecht added, “the numbers you see are the people who are intercepted, and we have roughly one-tenth of the resources on this side of the border than the Americans have on theirs.” The implication: some migrants may be slipping through the net.
Fixing a broken system
Canadians know their immigration system is far from perfect.
“Canada does not even have a border patrol,” said Kelly Sundberg, a criminologist and professor at Mount Royal University. “We do not have a very reliable way of ascertaining if we caught everybody,” he added, referring to how the CBSA controls main points of entry but relies on the understaffed RCMP to surveil the longest undefended border in the world, at roughly 5,500 miles long.
“We have a few hundred people, a thousand at best, that are responsible for monitoring that,” Sundberg said.
When it comes to screening foreigners at official points of entry, the experts also point to vastly different approaches.
“I am very concerned that Canada has done virtually nothing for screening,” said Sundberg.
“When we see these people coming in and when we see claims made, we are not screening people … (Canada is) giving visas to people without ensuring we know everything we need to know about them.”
Keith Cozine, professor of homeland security at St. John’s University, notes that while U.S. border officials inspect passports and biometrics, checking various databases for each person, that isn’t happening as rigorously in Canada. This, he said, means the real problem isn’t at the U.S.-Canada border itself but at airports and sea ports of entry.
Individuals are flying into Canadian airports, Cozine explained, but because the “screening just isn’t at the same level as the United States, what you end up seeing is individuals arriving at Pearson Airport on Thursday, and the very next day, they’re apprehended trying to enter the United States.”
Anyone who’s recently received a passport without stepping into a federal office can attest to the informality of the process.
“No longer should we be able to go to the Superstore or Walmart and have some clerk take our photo and then get our friends to sign the back of it (to get our passports),” said Sundberg.
But improper screenings and not taking biometrics of foreigners have been laid bare in more spectacular ways, too — namely through scandals like the one that saw Ahmed Eldidi pass security checks and be granted asylum, permanent residency, and even citizenship despite his links to ISIS .
“We are at a crisis point,” said Sundberg, noting how such mistakes delegitimize the system. “Our immigration program, the integrity of it — it’s broken.”
His recommendation? Buy whatever the Americans are using, whether it’s fingerprint readers, scanners, or drones.
“Whatever technology the Americans are using …. We should say we’d like to buy that, and can you please come set it up?” Sundberg said.
Another part of the problem is just the sheer number of foreigners who have entered Canada in recent years versus the number of immigration officials. The IRB reported a backlog of 294,423 pending asylum claims as of last month.
“We don’t have enough people to process that, which is very terrifying,” said Sundberg.
A lack of resources has led to years-long waits for most asylum claimants who, after waiting four or five years for their case to be reviewed, have already established lives in Canada. If they can’t get approval for their initial application, many can do so on humanitarian grounds, legal experts say, because of the long wait.
“It takes way too long. It’s not fair to people. It’s not fair to the system,” said Leuprecht. “My biggest concern is our inability to arrest the public perception of the disintegration of our immigration system.”
Eliminating Canada as a target
But he’s also concerned by the impact improper vetting has on American security, noting how allowing organized crime to leverage Canada’s immigration loopholes delegitimizes the system in Washington’s eyes as well.
“These weaknesses in loopholes are like painting a massive target on our country,” he said, explaining how it gives those in the U.S. who want to target Canada a target-rich environment to do so, with claims like: “Canada’s not a loyal ally. Canada doesn’t want to do enough. Canada doesn’t have the political will. Canada doesn’t have America’s interests at heart.”
Better intelligence and information sharing amongst domestic agencies and police — as well as their American counterparts — would help.
“Since so much irregular migration is driven by human smuggling these days,” Leuprecht added, “the best way to try to prevent it is having good intelligence on how the system is being exploited and by whom.”
To that end, Cozine was encouraged by the reportedly “productive” recent talks between Justice Minister Sean Fraser, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree, Canada’s fentanyl czar, Kevin Brosseau, and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in Washington.
All of the experts are keen to see how the proposed changes for overhauling Canada’s border and immigration policies with Bill C-2 pan out. The bill, introduced by Carney’s government in June, focuses on boosting surveillance and expediting deportations, but opponents are concerned it will lead to violations of human rights.
“C-2 is a very controversial bill,” said Leuprecht, referring to debates over the proposed one-year limitation on inland refugee claims and allowing authorities to demand information from ISPs and other service providers about subscribers without a warrant.
“We’ll see which parts of it survive and in what particular fashion,” he added, noting that more extreme parts of the bill — regarding deportations and surveillance, for example — may have been strategically added so that they could be altered in the name of compromise later.
National Post
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