Having left Morocco dreaming, Yasser felt like he was living a waking nightmare when he landed at Trudeau airport in early 2020. “I was surprised to learn that my employment contract had been cancelled, without anyone notifying me,” he says, still stunned.
Like all the others without status who have agreed to confide in the Dutythis father of six children kept his real name for fear of reprisals from the Canadian authorities.
Yasser recounts that he had nevertheless been selected by a Quebec recruitment agency and that he had even concluded a hiring agreement with an employer on the South Shore of the Montreal region. But instead of a work permit, he was given a referral form by a border services officer.
Having left without his wife and children, he had also sold a small olive grove that he owned and remortgaged his house to bear the costs of settling in Quebec. “If I went back there, I was completely finished. I had nothing,” he said.
It is “easy” to slip into precarious status, argues Annick Legault, lawyer at the Clinic for Migrant Justice. Can lose their status a worker who has a closed permit with an employer but who decides to leave it because he experiences abuse, a poorly represented asylum seeker who sees his application refused and does not return home because he fears for her life or even a pregnant woman who has a study visa but who has to drop out of school because she is going through a difficult pregnancy.
“When we are here under a temporary visa, as long as we do not fulfill the obligations, we lose our status”, notes Ms.e Legault. “There is a panoply of human situations that can lead to this. »
A difficult precariousness
Originally from Mexico, Mariana, who lived through domestic violence, arrived in Quebec in 2009 to apply for asylum. Three years later, she lost her status. The reason ? “My lawyer never informed me that there was a hearing. His attempts to revive his case before the Immigration and Refugee Board came to nothing. It has been 15 years now that this mother in her forties has been living without status in Canada and that she has not seen her three children, let alone her grandchildren who have since been born. “I live with a lot of anxiety,” she said.
They have been students, temporary workers, visitors. They practically all had a permit to be here and they fell into the crack.
Eight years ago, she fell and jammed a finger in her left hand while cleaning the house. The owner of the house drove her to the emergency room, but he immediately left. “He said to me: It’s your problem! says Mariana. A doctor treated her and had to amputate her finger. Without RAMQ coverage, she walked away with a $2,500 bill, which a good Samaritan paid for her.
Taking morphine to ease her pain, Mariana says she sank into depression for almost two years, remaining practically without income. “It was very difficult,” she recalls, her eyes filled with tears.
After breaking both arms at work, Mamadou, a Guinean of origin who has been without status for 18 years, remained in pain for more than two weeks, without being able to be operated on. As he lay on a stretcher in the operating room, he was told to leave, because in the system, no medical coverage matched the name — obviously a fake — he had given. “That’s what being undocumented is all about,” he says.
live hidden
59 years old, Mamadou lived almost two decades in Montreal, hidden because without status. “People know my name, but to others I can’t tell my identity because I’m afraid of being reported to immigration,” says the man who, after 20 years without seeing his wife and children, always hopes to hold them in his arms. “We are like prisoners. We dare not go out. On the other hand, the employment agencies that offer him jobs know his situation very well. “They take me away and exploit me because they know my status. »
For David Moffette, assistant professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa and expert on immigration policies, these people who no longer have status have had one in the past. “They have been students, temporary workers, visitors. They practically all had a permit to be here and they fell into the crack,” he points out.
He makes the analogy with university lecturers who lose their seniority after a certain number of sessions without teaching. “They don’t teach anymore, but they’re still in the system. We have a whole file on them, even if they haven’t worked for years,” he said. In his opinion, the regularization program that the federal government is currently working on should make it possible to reactivate a lost status and should, ideally according to him, grant an immigrant permanent residence and the advantages that it confers.
Such a program would give “wings” to Yasser who, like many other undocumented migrants, says he is waiting for that. “I would contribute. […] and I could see my children again, they are all small,” he says. “I could also do a lot of things: continue my studies, do training, climb the ladder. Regularization is the only good that I hope for and, I pray to God, that I will have one day. »