Let us offer newcomers a welcome worthy of the hopes they place in us.
For all sorts of reasons, both personal and professional, the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 holds a special – I would even say sentimental – significance for me. I had the chance to visit it and I consider it to be one of the top immigration centers in the country.
It is located in Halifax Harbour, on the very wharf where more than a million immigrants first set foot on Canadian soil between 1928 and 1971.
Two members of my immediate family and a professional mentor arrived there in the 1950s. They told me about the experiences of newcomers, as they passed through the doors of the building and met the Canadian immigration authorities .
During my visit, I walked through those same doors and I could imagine the excitement that inhabited these people, as they set foot on what they considered to be the promised land. In the words of my father-in-law, they had come to “see with their eyes if money really grew on trees”.
I admired the photos of the boats on which they had crossed the Atlantic and the crockery used during the trip. I sat on one of the benches of the train that brought them to Montreal. There, they were sometimes expected by members of their family, but often they did not know anyone there and had to build a new life.
I remember the joy of the museum’s curator when it finally received national museum status. Until then, he lived on the support of Halifax residents and immigrants, grateful for the welcome they had received decades earlier.
A parallel
I did not visit Roxham Road, although the interest is there. Unlike Pier 21 at the time, Roxham Road offers no heated buildings. It’s a dirt road, definitely not a gateway.
Let’s be clear, this is not regular immigration. Asylum seekers and refugees are not welcomed there by officials whose role is to help them settle in our country, but rather by agents who ask them what they are doing here.
These new arrivals suffer from the inaction of the authorities and are caught in the “least worst” of solutions. When we dwell on the legal question of Roxham, we find an explanation in an international convention which is to the advantage of our neighbor to the south.1. It is in the interests of the United States to keep the Roxham Road open.
These people who succeed and who are carried by hope leave everything behind, in search of a better life. Is it the fault of the administrative maze that prevents so many newcomers from settling down properly and finding a job? This job so desired is difficult to obtain for a person with precarious status, employers not knowing on which foot to dance. For tens of thousands of people who arrive here with their concerns, there is therefore added anxiety linked to the slowness of our authorities to regularize their situation.
Beyond this first reception by the authorities, it is the community organizations that do most of the reception work, an essential contribution that I have already mentioned in these pages (and for which the organizations are not remunerated adequately)2. The reception is therefore sometimes wobbly – certainly not for lack of compassion, but for lack of resources.
There don’t seem to be any short-term solutions. In the meantime, can we agree on the need to review reception and its funding?
Currently, the wait-and-see attitude and the absence of clear direction only accentuate the phenomenon of irregular immigration, the clear route of which leads asylum seekers and refugees to precariousness.
Not only is this not responsible, not to say inhuman, but it is a direct contradiction with this collective idea that we are a land of welcome.
It is urgent and imperative that we address this situation. And the first step could be to take inspiration from our far more honorable history of welcoming immigrants.
It is hard to imagine that Roxham Road could one day house a national museum highlighting the magnificent contribution of all the asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants who have arrived there. But if that happens, it should be called the Canadian Museum of Precarious Immigration.