Three eras, three ways of experiencing the border. The duty spoke to asylum seekers affected differently by Canadian border policies before, during and after Roxham Road. First of a series of three texts.
Not big enough to carry the suitcases, she has a pink bag on her back. The 6-year-old girl walks towards the border, clinging to her stuffed animal and her mother’s hand. “I remember I asked her a lot of questions,” but she was evasive in her answers, she said.
Tamara Noemi Valdivia Herrera arrived in Canada through the land border in 2002. Her family requested asylum at the Lacolle border crossing, “because of family problems”, she says, not wishing to specify.
Leaving Peru with her mother, brother and sister, the girl first arrived in the United States with relatives. His mother had told him: “We are going on vacation to see the family, so really take the essential things. »
Until their installation in an apartment in Montreal, several months later, she thought she was “on a trip”, oscillating nevertheless between the uncertainty and the blind confidence of the children whom the parents protect from the worst.
After a short visit to her aunt’s house in New York, “person X”, of whom she has few memories, drops them off near the Canadian border.
Some details are imprinted deep in his memory, while others are covered in the veil of childhood. “It’s very vague. […] You still had to walk a bit,” she says.
There were probably uniformed officers. Forms, tons of forms. Meals on paper plates.
His mother fills out papers. She and her children are directed to a “container with other families”, a kind of mobile home, rather overcrowded. “There were people sleeping on the floor,” says Tamara. A few images also remain: benches in a waiting room, cartons of milk on the floor, toilet paper strewn on the floor. She also never forgot that the toilets “were really not clean”.
Historic Era Rush
In three years, between 2000 and 2002, Canada received more than 115,000 asylum seekers. They obviously did not all go through the land border at Lacolle. In June 2002, when Tamara’s family arrived, many people nevertheless gathered there. It was then permitted to seek asylum there, because the Safe Third Country Agreement did not yet exist.
On June 29, 2002, The duty publishes in a text which reports a “crisis” to which the government responded by tripling the number of agents. There is no shower and the forced cohabitation prevents any intimacy in uncomfortable places, it is then written there.
In the same edition, a text refers to a “safe third country agreement in principle” between Canada and the United States which has just been concluded. The federal Minister of Immigration at the time, Denis Coderre, however, assures that the border will not be closed, while deploring a “certain panic” created by ill-informed American lawyers, it is reported.
The Valdivia Herrera family spent almost a week at the Canada Border Services Agency facilities in Lacolle. All the other members are called into an office, then we come to get Tamara too to ask her why she doesn’t want to go back to Peru. “My mother still tells me that if I hadn’t cried during the interview we had at customs, I think maybe they wouldn’t have accepted our case. »
Once the application was filed, it took another five years for Canada to recognize their refugee status and then grant them permanent residence as a result. The family was first directed to the facilities of the downtown Montreal YMCA, a residence that still houses asylum seekers today.
This “very long-term” journey, ironically the 27-year-old young woman today, turned out to be a difficult journey which forced her to “become mature very quickly”. His 14-year-old sister, his 12-year-old brother and his mother regularly went to work together in the fields of Montérégie. “They got up at 6 a.m. and came back very late at night,” says Tamara. “I had to learn to take care of myself very young, out of necessity,” she adds, revealing that she actually spent long hours alone. Even though I was very young, I understood why. »
His mother had to work double shifts to support her children, but she always sought to maintain the illusion that they lacked for nothing. “She always found a way so that I wouldn’t see the difference with my friends, for example,” says the young woman.
Still, she understood very young the importance of providing for her own needs. “After everything we’ve been through, I’m currently finishing my bachelor’s degree in career development at UQAM,” she describes. She has already obtained an immigration certificate and is an employment counselor in a Carrefour jeunesse emploi centre. Among her future projects, she would like to work on the integration of newcomers.
A bit of its identity also remains at the border between two countries. Although she is proud to live in Quebec, she describes herself as Peruvian when asked. “When I go to Peru and I speak Spanish, they know I’m not from there. […] Then when I’m here, they know I’m not from Quebec, maybe because I’m a little darker or I speak Spanish,” she says. That may be all the “journey” her family has been through, she reflects, but she feels like she doesn’t quite “have a home.”[soi] “.
With Jonathan Allard