Canada regularization of undocumented migrants in jeopardy

MONTREAL: Canada offered hope for thousands of undocumented migrants with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promising a major regularization program. But in just a few months, political winds changed, leaving dreams of residency in jeopardy. “I had a lot of hope but now I don’t know what to think. It’s very hard,” Nina, a Colombian migrant to the country, told AFP. The 50-year-old landed in Canada with her young daughter in 2008. “Here, I found peace. I was fleeing the violence of my country and family violence,” she said. But then, in 2015, she was asked to leave Canada.

“I wanted to kill myself. I don’t know how I will cope with all this. My daughter has become Canadian, my life is here,” she said, struggling to keep her emotions in check. The government’s latest statements have created confusion among undocumented migrants and the associations that support them, after years of regularization talks with officials. There are between 100,000 and one million undocumented migrants in Canada, like Nina, according to different estimates. Immigration Minister Marc Miller continues to promise in the coming months an “ambitious” program for people who have been in the country “sometimes for years with children who grew up here.” But, he told AFP, it “won’t be for everyone.”

Canada is no longer “exempt from the toxic rhetoric on immigration that is affecting all Western countries,” he lamented. According to the last census in 2021, 23 percent of the population was foreign-born. Polls, however, have shown a discernible shift in public opinion on immigration. After years of broad support for Canada’s open immigration policy, Abacus Data found that 67 percent of recent respondents considered immigration levels in Canada to be either too high or much too high. — AFP