[ The closure of the border crossing is a living embodiment of
Canada’s continued white supremacist and Eurocentric foundations]
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ROXHAM ROAD AND THE CANADIAN UNCONSCIOUS  
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Rinaldo Walcott
April 26, 2023
Canadian Dimension
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_ The closure of the border crossing is a living embodiment of
Canada’s continued white supremacist and Eurocentric foundations _

Former Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer tours the Roxham Road
crossing in 2018, (photo from Flickr)

 

Joe Biden paid an official visit to Canada in late March. While he was
here, the United States and Canada struck a new deal
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Roxham Road that will allow both countries to turn away a rising surge
of asylum seekers and refugee claimants from their borders. Roxham
Road straddles the Québec and New York state border at the towns of
Champlain on the US side and Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle on the Canadian
side. It became an “irregular” border crossing at some point
between 2016 and 2017. The deal was reported as having secretly been
worked on for months in advance. With the deal, the Trudeau government
was able to interrupt a partisan debate in which Conservative Party
leader Pierre Poilievre could stoke fears of migrants swarming the
Canadian landscape. I have been sitting with the information of the
new agreement. Prior to President Biden’s visit I had simply tweeted
a few times that Roxham Road represents the Canadian unconscious. What
did I mean?

In 2017 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent Liberal MP Emmanuel Dubourg
(who reportedly spoke Haitian Creole) as a special envoy
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Miami to dissuade Haitian migrants from traveling to Canada. It was
alleged that so many migrants had crossed Roxham Road that they had to
be housed in Montréal’s Olympic stadium that year. Since then,
Roxham Road has been a sore point in Canadian federal and provincial
politics. Migrants fleeing Donald Trump’s America, where his
presidency began with attacks on migrants from the nomination stage
through to the campaign and all the way to the White House, saw an
increase in numbers crossing unmanaged Canadian border points.
However, Roxham Road stood out because it was alleged that it was
mostly Haitians crossing the border there. The Trudeau government’s
response to the allegation that Haitians made up the majority of those
crossing Roxham Road must be understood in the context of Canada’s
anti-Black migration legislation and practices. When I say Roxham Road
is Canada’s unconscious, I mean Roxham Road is a reminder that
Canada thinks of itself as a white nation and that Black people here
are always understood to be too many already. Roxham Road and what it
has come to represent in contemporary struggles around the freedom to
move exposes this racist unconscious.

In 1997, R. Bruce Shepard published _Deemed Unsuitable: Blacks from
Oklahoma Move to the Canadian Prairies in Search of Equality in the
Early 20th Century Only to Find Racism in Their New Home_, a work that
revealed the Canadian state’s successful effort to end Black
Oklahoman migration to western Canada. One thing the Canadian state
did was to send immigration agents to the US to dissuade against
emigration, claiming the weather up north was inhospitable to Black
people. Legislation by the government of Prime Minister Wilfrid
Laurier concerning Black people “deemed [them] unsuitable to the
climate and requirements of Canada.” Shepard’s work on uncovering
the order-in-council and the measures Canada took to keep the nation
white should be much better known. In the 1960s, Black people in
Canada led the movement for immigration reform that moved Canada from
race-based immigration policies to a points system. This has been
further elaborated as a model driven by market requirements. That
system opened up the demographic changes that we witness and live with
today. However, even with this system the fear of a ‘too Black’
Canada remained a central element of the white racial unconscious.
Trudeau and his government, at least with respect to its policies,
inhabits this historical white racial consciousness as an unconscious
anti-black racist response to the movement of Black people. Roxham
Road represents that racial unconscious for the moral panic it has
engendered among Canada’s elite politicians. The once secret
orders-in-council of the early part of the last century now mirror the
secret negotiations with the US in the present.

The wealthy West is concerned that it will be overrun by the Black and
brown hoards of the world’s global poor moving towards where the
planet’s riches are being hoarded. And to avoid such movement, to
prohibit it, all kinds of planned migration schemes have been hatched
(and to respond to unplanned migrations other schemes have been
hatched, too). The Roxham Road agreement is one such scheme. It might
appear mild compared to others like those being unveiled in the EU and
the UK, but it is not. In fact, we already have reports of deaths that
might be an outcome of the deal. Suella Braverman, the UK Home
Secretary, and her government might offer a vulgar policy decision to
deal with migrants, which is to ship them elsewhere
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But Canada and its government offer a ‘gentler’ approach that is
rooted in the same vulgarity: tell them not to come before they even
try to leave. These positions are ultimately not that different. And
with the multicultural and multiracial representatives of the state
presenting and representing these policies, what stays firmly in place
is the assumed and unquestioned whiteness of the nation.

The unplanned migrations of the world’s oppressed is a refusal of
the conceit that the wealthy West, which has exploited the peoples,
lands and waters of the Global South, can also govern their movement
across this earth. The Roxham Road deal is not just a bad policy
decision or a lapse in thinking that will be corrected later. It is
part of a deeply conditioned ideological position that sorts out who
gets to live and who gets to die. Indeed, Roxham Road is more than a
crossing—it is the embodiment of Canada’s continued white
supremacist and Eurocentric foundations. The multicultural adjustment
and the reconciliation rhetoric in no way changes this.

I sat down to write this column as war rages in the Sudan. I have been
reading the tweets of Sudanese Canadians as they despair about the
information that is coming out of the region. And I have noted the
federal government’s agonizing delay in creating an emergency
program that would allow Sudanese refugees to migrate to Canada. Of
course, the opposite has been true for Ukrainians, and before that
Syrians (because Alan Kurdi’s death shamed the world). Why is this
the case? We all know what Haitians and Sudanese share in common, as
much as we also know that it would be entirely a surprise to see Prime
Minister Trudeau greeting Sudanese refugees at a Canadian airport
anytime soon. We cannot deny that because Canada thinks of itself as a
fundamentally and foundationally white nation state that its response
to global catastrophes is coloured by this deep-rooted consciousness.
Indeed, this consciousness is why reconciliation with Indigenous
peoples will continue to fail. Whiteness is the place from which all
policy proceeds, and it is hell bent on keeping the darker races out
or at least believing it can plan when, how, and where they enter.

Since the abolition of transatlantic slavery and the various
indentureships that proceeded in its wake, Euro-America has believed
that it can manage global migration as a distribution to the unequal
wealth it has acquired. From labour migration including domestic and
farm work schemes, to limited family reunification programs, a range
of reasons for planned migration has meant that Euro-American policy
and interest have attempted to impede global movement. But if Roxham
Road is to mean something other than the brutal and exclusionary
nature of the nation state it could become the first volley in Canada
moving towards an open borders nation. But let’s be clear: our
leaders do not possess the visionary imagination that would make such
a demand a lived reality.

_Rinaldo Walcott is a writer and critic. He is also professor and
chair of Africana and American Studies at the University of Buffalo
(SUNY)._

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* Immigration
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* Canada
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* colonialism
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