by Mark Clayton

About the author: Mark Clayton is a staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor.

In early morning darkness, Safeyban Hashi set out on the first boat trip of his life—a 10-minute dash across the St. Lawrence River from Canada to the United States in an outboard driven by a “native man.”

The price to smuggle Mr. Hashi, a young Somali, into the US on Nov. 7, 1996 was cheap: $370. Let off on the US shoreline, he was directed by the smuggler to walk up a path to a road, where a taxi waited to take him to a nearby bus station.

The Canadian Gateway

While some 1 million Mexicans illegally cross the US southern border each year, a smaller but fast-growing number of Asians, Europeans, and others are being smuggled across...