Comment by keneda7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keneda7 | Hacker News Reader

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Do you happen to any stats to support that?

I took a quick look. Canada seems to accept around 430k legal immigrants and had another 30-40k illegal crossing in 2022.

The US seems to have admitted 1 million between July 2021 and July 2022 so lets say somewhere around 1 million legal immigrants were accepted in 2022. Illegal crossing were around 2.7 million for 2022.

I take a look at these numbers I scratch my head at your statement. The US has orders of magnitude more illegal crossings. In fact the US average for 1 month is 225k which is almost 6 times as high as the YEARLY average for Canada. The numbers are pretty clear about where they are going. Nothing is stopping those entering the US illegally from entering Canada illegally too. Yet I can't seem to find any numbers that support that idea that even a fraction of the ones entering the US want/try to go to Canada.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...

https://irb.gc.ca/en/statistics/Pages/Irregular-border-cross...

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/12/net-internati....

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/migrant-border-...

I agree with this, but I wonder if the stats aren’t biased a bit because it probably is harder for someone from Central America to get to Canada than the US. I mean you have to go through the US to get to Canada.

It sounds like, objectively, Canada is a better place to be if you’re an illegal immigrant (if you don’t mind the weather).

Ya I would agree the stats are probably biased based on the US border vs Canada's.

However at the same time it would not be difficult to travel from the southern US border to the US-Canada border. I would wager its easier than making the journey from south america to the Mexico-US border.

But being a better place does not always equate to more people wanting to immigrate there. If it did we would see more people coming to countries like Canada than the US. I think part of the major appeal of the US is the basically open southern boarder and very lax immigration law/policies. You have entire states that advertise they flout federal law and are a sanctuary state. That has to be a major major appeal for someone considering an illegal crossing. Basically you get to one of those states or cities and your likelihood of being deported drops significantly.

I am not super familiar with Canada's policy or system but based purely on numbers it seem like they keep a much tighter control on the number coming in.

True. Getting to CA once you are in the US is probably the easier part of the overall journey.

You probably can't consider yourself "safe" (in the baseball sense) by merely being in the US, you have to get out of Texas or Florida (if that's where you landed).

It's no more than a greyhound ticket from anywhere in the US to Roxham Road.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/the-national-roxham-road-immi...

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