Canada and United States not facing asylum seeker crisis: UNHCR official
OTTAWA — Neither Canada nor the United States is experiencing a crisis in asylum claims, says the United Nations’ assistant high commissioner for refugees.
Volker Turk, an Austrian in charge of refugee protection for the UN, was in Ottawa this week to meet with Canadian border officials. He said in an interview that Canada’s recent spike in irregular migrants is nothing compared to the millions of refugees who pour every year into much poorer countries.
Likewise, the migrant caravan making its way through Mexico toward the United States, numbering in the low thousands of people, is small compared to the vast migrations borne in recent years by countries like Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, which have taken in over five million Syrian refugees.
“A lot of the media debate that we often see is that there are hordes of people coming to the industrialized world — that’s absolutely not true,” Turk said.