Illegal immigration from U.S. to Canada

to get illegal immigration into Canada, you'd need the odd situation where the US is both hurting economically

In that case the Canadian economy would also have been flushed down the crapper. The two are that interlinked. We could be better of, as in '08, but 'better' is a relative term. If the US economy were to be so bad that mass emigration starts looking like a good idea, then the likeliest destination will be in no shape to take them, and will obviously not look like the promised land.

and repressive politically, while Canada is freer

And here is where we definitely go off into ASB land. Canada's national security apparatus cooperates closely with it's US counterpart. Legislation tends to follow similar trends as the US. And one of the unofficial standards for various bits of legislation seems to be 'will this offend the Yanks in a way that we can't get away with?'

and harsher on immigration than it is now.

This makes sense. If the Yanks somehow ended up as a police state with a shitty economy, we'd be a harsher police state with a slightly better economy. While we'd accept legal immigrants from the US (probably be a lot of hoop-jumping involved on both ends), we'd also have categorized the US as a 'safe country' for the purposes of refugee claims, and thus claims coming from the US would be denied. (It's actually something that we already do, along with automatically denying claims from those who'd stopped in a 'safe third country' and may or may not have had a claim denied there.) Oh, and we're apparently better at deportation that the US, so they would be sent back to whatever welcome awaits them.

How you get all that, I have no idea...

Ditto. Arbitrarily put the conditions into effect, and I can tell you how it'll play out. But getting it to happen? Whole different ball game.
 
Top