Understand | Migrant life

Millions of them take the road to exile every year to escape disaster or poverty. A tiny proportion of them arrive in Quebec via Roxham Road. Before being figures, these migrants are people who aspire to a better future. François Crépeau, full professor at the Faculty of Law of McGill University, offers four sources to better understand their reality.

1. Find answers

“We are a migrating species, we all came from elsewhere”, launches François Crépeau, for whom population movements are normal. Always. In the Middle Ages, he recalls, the construction of cathedrals took advantage of the mobility of craftsmen from all over Europe. It was in the 1980s that borders began to close. Migrants have always experienced precarious conditions, their rights being little recognized, but politicians have only recently made them “symbols of risks and threats”, sums up the former United Nations special rapporteur for human rights immigrants. Because the question has become very political, separating facts from beliefs is sometimes a perilous exercise. Although primarily concerned with the situation in Europe, the book Migrants & Refugees – Response to the undecided, the worried and the reluctant, signed Claire Rodier, comes to the rescue here. How many migrants are there? Wouldn’t it be better to help them stay at home? Are the walls good for anything? “It’s up to date and very well done,” says Mr. Crépeau. The lawyer answers useful questions without being contemptuous. It’s normal to be badly informed about migrants, because little information circulates. »

Migrants & Refugees – Response to the undecided, the worried and the reluctant

Claire Rodier, with the collaboration of Catherine Portevin

Discovery

96 pages

2. The “zone” of broken dreams

At the end of a long journey, between 15,000 and 20,000 migrants each year end up in the “waiting area” of Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Paris, where they sometimes stay for 20 days, before learning whether they will be able to stay in France… or not. After having met dozens of migrants there for six months for his thesis, the anthropologist Chowra Makaremi has composed the portrait of asylum seekers who have seen their migratory dream come to an end very close to the goal. With the help of the illustrator Matthieu Parciboula, the exercise gave birth to the comic strip Prisoners of the Passage. “Thanks to these portraits, we can identify with these young people – 80% of migrants are between 20 and 40 years old – who tried to do everything right, but who got caught and who will be sent back to their country of origin, despite the violence that awaits them, underlines François Crépeau. In these stories, there is all the distress in the world. “The book comes to counter the speeches that dehumanize migrants, yet “harmless in 99.9% of cases”, says the lawyer. “From the moment we know these people, they become people like the others, like our neighbors, not a fantasized threat,” he continues.

Prisoners of the Passage

Chowra Makaremi and Matthieu Parciboula

Steinkis

159 pages

3. The faces of a tragedy

Along the same lines, the novel Mediterranean wall, written by Haitian author Louis-Philippe Dalembert, tells the story of three women who embark on a trawler to reach Italy. Coming from Nigeria, Eritrea or Syria, fleeing drought, a dictator or war, rich or poor, they put their fate in the hands of smugglers – for lack of visas. This story inspired by a real tragedy and which has been repeated thousands of times at the gates of Europe is beautiful and touching, says François Crépeau. Even if it depicts the cruelty with which some exploit human misery. “He gives names to the bodies that we see in the newspapers. In passing, the text establishes how “politics create and subsidize crime,” explains Mr. Crépeau. “We must realize the responsibility of States” in the precariousness of migrants. When a country erects a barrier, criminals circumvent it. This is true even for those who have crossed borders irregularly and then worked undeclared for starvation wages. They are more than 10 million in this situation in the United States. “Hunting these employers” would discourage illegal migration and criminals, Mr. Crépeau believes.

Mediterranean wall

Louis-Philippe Dalembert

Sabine Wespieser

336 pages

4. The problem is the border

In 1976, there were 600 asylum applications in Canada, recalls François Crépeau. However, many more foreigners came to the country. However, before the 1980s, most of them did not aspire to refugee status. Here as elsewhere, “they were satisfied with a work and residence permit”. But these crossings have been closed, and today “refugee status is the only way to cross the border”. “We have created monsters in terms of the recognition of refugee status, because we have secured the borders and defined migrants as a security problem”, insists the professor. The podcast Migration in questions, produced in 2020 by the Research Team on Immigration to Quebec and Elsewhere, addresses this transformation of the border. “It’s a conversation about migration and borders here,” explains François Crépeau. I thought it was well done. Faced with a growing number of migrants, there is no need to close the passageways, such as Roxham Road, believes François Crépeau. It is rather necessary to reopen the borders by multiplying the visas, as in the past. This is also what the signatory countries of the 2018 Migration Pact are advocating… including Canada!