Home › Political & Historical › Enclaves, Exclaves & Border Oddities
Point Roberts
A corner of Washington State that can be reached by land only through Canada
To drive from Point Roberts to anywhere else in the United States, you must cross into Canada, drive about 40 kilometers through the suburbs of Vancouver, and cross back again, passing customs four times on the round trip. This small American community at the tip of a Canadian peninsula is a pene-exclave, attached to the rest of the country by water but not by land. Its children commute through British Columbia to school once they reach fourth grade. Its gas stations and parcel depots depend on Canadian customers. And when the border closes or politics sour, as happened during the pandemic and again in 2025, the town feels it before almost anywhere else in either country.
Point Roberts occupies the southern end of the Tsawwassen peninsula, about 12.6 square kilometers of land south of the 49th parallel, with the Strait of Georgia to the west and Boundary Bay to the east. It belongs to Whatcom County, Washington, and the 2020 census counted 1,191 residents, a number that swells in summer with owners of vacation homes, many of them Canadian. The only road link is a single border crossing with Tsawwassen, in the city of Delta, British Columbia. Boats and small planes connect it directly to the US mainland. Under a 1987 agreement it buys its water from Greater Vancouver, and residents do much of their everyday shopping on the Canadian side.
The peninsula ended up American by a quirk of the 1846 Oregon Treaty, which settled a long dispute between the United States and Britain by extending the border west along the 49th parallel to the sea. Nobody paused for the small hook of land that dipped below the line. Proposals to trade it to Canada or to build a causeway across Boundary Bay have surfaced over the years without result. When Canada closed the border to nonessential travel from March 2020 to August 2021, Point Roberts lost most of its business. Crossings fell again amid US–Canada trade tensions in 2025, with vehicle entries down nearly a quarter that summer, and local businesses report that Canadian visitors had not returned by 2026.