Driving back and forth along Wellesley Street in Toronto, Iris looks for a sign that she belongs. It’s late at night and raining, and she’s been blown off by a date. The woman she met on the dating website Plenty of Fish lives in Niagara Falls, and Iris rented a car for the weekend to see her, flowers and gifts she bought in the back seat. It’s the first time Iris is heading to Toronto’s LGBTQ Village—and she can’t find it.

It is 2008, and Iris has been in Canada for only a few months, on a visa from Saudi Arabia, here to learn English. (Her name has been changed to protect her identity.) Her female teacher is openly gay, but Iris doesn’t feel comfortable being out herself among the students in her class, many of whom are also from the Middle East and not accepting of LGBTQ people. When Iris asks her teacher where she can meet women, she directs her to Church and Wellesley.

Living in a homestay as part of the program, Iris asks her host how to get to the intersection, unaware she was asking about the Village and that it might be a problem. The woman, a Canadian, asks why she would want to go there. (Afterwards, Iris says, she felt the host treated her differently, being “nasty” and accusing her of sneaking around.)

That weekend, she had been looking forward to getting out of the house, but when her date cancelled, she didn’t know where else to go. After asking strangers for directions, Iris eventually finds the Village. Her teacher had written, “Go to the bar,” on a piece of paper, and when she comes across a group of women she asks in broken English where she can find The Bar. They laugh and ask her what she is looking for, then tell her to go across the street where there is a place for gay women; they are going there later.

Iris sits alone at a table in the Japanese restaurant where she thought they had pointed to, after a while asking the waiter, “Are there any women here?” He smiles, but shakes his head. She gives up and decides she will drive to a hotel. But stepping outside, she notices a long line snaking around a restaurant. “What is this?” she asks. They tell her it is a lesbian bar. “This is the place I am looking for.”

Iris is one of likely thousands of LGBTQ newcomers in Canada who are searching for home, community, and their own image of settlement. Each of these journeys is made for a different reason, but barriers to accessing supports and services are commonplace and go beyond the existing challenges a refugee faces. Many are fleeing situations of violence and persecution because of their sexual orientation and gender identity and perceive Canada as a safe haven, a place where they can be themselves.

For newcomers, being open about their sexual orientation and gender identity can be difficult. “It’s been ingrained in them since birth, this shame and fear of being who they really are,” says Habibi Feliciano-Perez, who coordinates LGBTQ newcomer settlement services at The 519 community centre in the Village.

“That continues throughout their life in Canada as well.” Feliciano-Perez works with LGBTQ refugees at every level of their settlement processes, and has seen the difficulties they face in their first years of settlement, from finding a community to navigating institutions. “What I’ve noticed is there’s difficulty socializing with people and trying to find friends because of language barriers and cultural barriers, and they’re still in kind of a culture shock,” he says.

In 2017, the Canadian government welcomed about 7,500 refugees, with an additional 16,000 from private sponsorship groups. In 2019 the Canadian government plans to admit 9,300 refugees, with a further 19,000 via private sponsorships. By contrast, in 2017, the number of asylum claimants climbed to 50,000—up from 23,000 in 2016. It is difficult to know how many of these refugee claimants identify as LGBTQ, since not every person will disclose that information upon arrival, and what the government does know is not publicly available.

Recent data obtained by Sean Rehaag, an Osgoode Hall Law School professor, shows that 13 percent, or 2,371, of the 18,221 asylum decisions made between 2013 and 2015 were based on sexual orientation. While various organizations, particularly in urban centres across the country, do their best to aid LGBTQ refugees, they say the numbers keep growing—and don’t show any signs of slowing.

For a demographic who can be especially vulnerable in their resettlement—they’re often referred to as “minorities within the minority”—there’s a dire need for social care and access to programs as they navigate life in Canada. But the resources they need, in the abundance that they need them, often don’t exist.

AT FIRST, IRIS WAS SHY WHEN SHE STARTED frequenting Slack’s, the Village’s now-defunct trademark lesbian bar. She didn’t drink alcohol and was not used to so many openly gay women in one place. “It freaked me out. I told myself to stand near the door so I would have the option to leave.”

But she soon found it felt like a second home. The bar opened around mid-afternoon, where it was a casual hangout for women, before the crowds would gather at night for comedy shows, dancing, and dirty bingo. The venue closed down in 2013, but Iris remembers sitting and talking with other women after her language classes and watching television shows like The L Word, a drama that portrays the lives of a group of lesbian women. She would walk down Church Street and women would call out to her by name. The people she met there still remain some of her closest friends.

I met Iris at a round-table event about LGBTQ refugees and access to housing last February. She spoke animatedly to a group of people about her first months in Toronto, illustrating her initial cultural ignorance to LGBTQ communities in Canada. Once, she told the room, she approached a woman on the subway because she was wearing a plaid shirt and had short hair.

“I was told that’s what lesbians look like!”

Today Iris is open about her experiences, and she talks about them with a smile and light-heartedness that belies the isolation and uncertainty she felt at the time. When we later met for a coffee, she told me the less humorous side of her settlement story. In the 10 years since she arrived, she has struggled to feel comfortable in Canada, finding herself pinned between two identities—being Middle Eastern and being gay—and her future dependent on a settlement system and society she believes is not set up to receive her.

Iris came to Canada knowing she might never leave. In Saudi Arabia she had advocated for women’s rights, and when she felt it was no longer safe, decided to leave the country temporarily. While choosing where to go, she Googled the top 10 countries with the best human rights records, and Canada came up on top. After living in Toronto for four months, she heard that her name was on a list of persons to be arrested and decided to make a refugee claim to the Canadian government to stay.

Saudi Arabia is one of 13 countries in the world where homosexuality may be punishable by death, and although Iris had been in relationships before in her country, she also knew there was no future for her there.

The different types of refugees in Canada can be loosely gathered into three categories: Government-sponsored refugees are hand-picked from camps and waiting lists in their home countries, and are invited into Canada with the promise of financial, housing, and other settlement support for up to one year. Private sponsorship works similarly, through which eligible groups or organizations are usually connected with a person on a list and raise money to fund their travel and first year of settlement. Refugee claimants, on the other hand, arrive in Canada without warning or invitation, and once on Canadian soil make their claim to a border officer. More often than not they arrive without knowing anybody and are faced with a government and system that is reluctantly required to aid them.

This last group of refugees is extremely vulnerable. Once their asylum claim is made, they are given a date for their hearing, where the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada will determine whether they will be given refugee status. Canada is a signatory to the UN’s Geneva Convention, which means it must allow any person the chance to prove their need for protection and sanctuary; they also have the right to housing, education, and employment until they can make their case.

To be considered for refugee status, the individual must have a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country and be unable to go back. It is a rigorous process, one they must spend their initial months preparing for, and with such a backlog of applicants hearing dates may extend up to two years or longer. (As of July 2018, the average wait for a hearing is 20 months, four months more than the year before.)

During this period of limbo refugees are “claimants.” They are eligible to apply for a work or study permit, receive social assistance and basic medical care, and sometimes legal help (six of Canada’s 10 provinces provide legal aid free of charge). Otherwise, they are on their own.

When Iris went to the border services office to make her claim, she could hear the officer talking to another about her case, saying he was surprised she was asking for asylum coming from such a wealthy country; she must be in real trouble. It was a small but significant invasion of privacy. She was told to wait for a hearing date, which wouldn’t come for another two years. By that time she had experienced another side of Canada’s friendly image.

Refugee claimants have access to English-as-a-second- language (ESL) classes, and Iris soon found herself in one of these classrooms. Like her other English classes, the students around her were other refugees, many from other Middle Eastern countries. She hid that she was a lesbian, but she was still exposed to homophobia.

A classmate once told her he thought all gay people were sick, and that if he could, he would gather them all together and burn them alive. On another occasion, when the teacher found out she was a lesbian, she moved Iris to a different seat so she wouldn’t be sitting next to another woman.

Iris went to five different ESL locations before deciding to quit altogether. “I could not stand it. I did not feel safe,” she says. She decided she would rather pay for private classes than risk sitting in a classroom with other newcomers. She took language courses at both George Brown College and Humber College, where she hoped there would be more education around LGBTQ people.

Still, Iris didn’t always feel accepted. The courses were in the evening and students were allowed to bring their children. One day the teacher warned the class they might not want to bring in their kids for next week’s lesson because she would discussing “inappropriate” material. “I thought she was going to show us sex or something,” says Iris. It was about LGBTQ communities.

ON A WARM NIGHT IN OCTOBER 2017, CARLOS arrived at a bus stop in Barbados, where a group had already been waiting. He was alone. The group first called out to him, then surrounded him. They said people like him needed killing, and if they caught him by himself they would show him who was a real man. He had recently started hormone treatment and wearing more masculine clothing. Carlos, whose last name has been withheld to protect his identity, knew he was male at five years old, but it wasn’t until puberty when he realized he wasn’t allowed to be.

“Barbados is a very hyper-masculine place,” says Carlos. “They are very threatened by anything that looks like an infringement on their masculinity.” As he slowly began his transition, binding
his chest and paying a doctor under the table for hormone treatment, he experienced a great deal of transphobia and verbal abuse.

After the incident at the bus stop, he realized his life was in danger; within two weeks he quit his job and sold all of his belongings. He told his mom he was deciding between the Netherlands, Spain, or Canada. His mother suggested the latter, a place Carlos had been before.

Arriving on a visitor visa and making an asylum claim, Carlos’s experience was much different. “I expected a red carpet, everyone dancing around with unicorns and fluffy bunnies, rainbows everywhere! Because that’s the kind of picture Canada puts out there,” he says. Instead, he says, it felt empty: “I was alone and knew nobody and had nothing.”

After clearing the border and making his initial claim, an officer asked if Carlos had anywhere to go. Carlos had been in contact with The 519, who had told him they would help him find a safe place to stay upon arrival, but they weren’t picking up. “The guy looked at me dead in the eye and said, ‘Look, I do not want to detain you. That’s not a place for you to be in.’”

Carlos was given a number for the Canadian Red Cross, who are often the first contact for refugees landing on Canadian soil. To find him a shelter, they asked if he was a man or a woman. He told them he is a man, a trans man. And they said, “So what does this mean?”

The Red Cross First Contact program does not have a specific policy on how to communicate with LGBTQ persons. A representative of the organization expressed in an email that their goal is to be the first point of contact for refugees when they arrive at the airport, where they try connect them to information and resources, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation.

Carlos was taken to a refugee shelter in downtown Toronto, but when he got there nobody knew what to do with him. He was told they could not put him in the women’s shelter, but he wouldn’t be safe staying with men, either. “I think the hardest thing for me was being told that Canada was going to protect people like me, and the first person I had a conversation with blatantly said there is no safe space for me here,” he says. Carlos would remain there until his hearing.

In refugee hearings, a board member listens to the claimant’s explanation of their need for Canada’s protection. Refugees who are LGBTQ face unique challenges when preparing their cases. When the basis of claim is their sexual orientation or gender identity, individuals are expected to prove they are in fact queer or trans, and must describe in detail why this puts their lives in jeopardy. This can be extremely difficult, especially for those who haven’t come out yet, or have been living in fear of violence or rejection if they were open about their identities.

In effect, the purpose of the hearing is its danger; individuals are re-traumatized over the same circumstances that would buy them protection. The more open and specific they are about their experiences back home—especially when describing stories of violence or social exclusion—the better their chances of convincing the board they deserve asylum.

“In the best situation it’s more delicate; in the worst situation it feels more invasive,” says Elizabeth Wozniak, an immigration lawyer in Halifax.

Nova Scotia is one of the provinces that doesn’t provide legal aid to refugee claimants, and Wozniak sometimes works pro bono. “We definitely have to prepare the person for the kinds of questions they will get asked and sometimes it can be a bit harsh, but you have to get them ready for it. You don’t want them to be blindsided at the hearing when in the hearing the judge asks them why don’t they have a Grindr account.”

After the hearing, which can extend from two hours to multiple days, refugees will either be granted a positive decision, meaning they become a “protected person” and can apply for permanent residency (usually granted), or they must wait for a written decision—“which usually means ‘no,’” says Wozniak. The current rate of acceptance hovers around 65 to 70 percent, the highest since 2012.

Carlos says he was lucky: His hearing took place after only a year. After successfully convincing the board and being granted refugee status, his energy turned to finding a new place to live. He was receiving $733 a month from social assistance—$390 of which was meant for housing.

This amount varies throughout Canada, but not by much, and is not adjusted according to the region. A single refugee claimant in British Columbia will receive $710 in a comparable market—even in Vancouver, one of the country’s most expensive cities to live in. In Quebec where prices are much cheaper, claimants would receive $633 a month; in Manitoba it is $820.

For Carlos, searching for a home in Toronto, where rental prices averaged almost $2,000 for a one-bedroom last year, the task felt insurmountable. Carlos wanted to be open with landlords about his gender identity—he didn’t want there to be any surprises if they saw needles lying around. He looked at multiple places across the city, but nobody was calling him back.

He eventually found a room in an apartment with three cisgender men. It was way above what he could afford to pay, but it was close to the refugee shelter, whose staff had become the closest thing to family he had in Canada.

In the house Carlos kept to himself. His roommates didn’t know he was trans, and he lived in constant fear of them finding out. Two of them were from Jamaica, a country with a culture that is notoriously anti-LGBTQ, and he wasn’t sure how they would react. They all shared a bathroom, and he would change in there, or dart to his room before they saw him in a towel.

“The public has a general understanding of LGBTQ communities, but transphobia and homophobia are still very prevalent,” says Darae Lee, acting senior manager of settlement and integration programs at the Vancouver-based charity Mosaic. “So when we put those two identities together it is even more difficult to find safe, welcoming housing.”

Lee names affordable housing as one of the most pressing issues for LGBTQ claimants in Vancouver, something that can also affect mental health and community participation. Few shelters in the city are LGBTQ friendly, and what is available is overrun; Lee says most people in Mosaic’s I Belong program, which serves LGBTQ newcomers, rely on social media and word of mouth for safe places to stay.

“They are really lucky if they have a friend who can share their room, but in most cases that’s very rare,” says Lee. “They just don’t have the connections.”

In these cases, refugee claimants are forced to hop from shelter to shelter—there is no maximum but stays rarely exceed 10 days. In extreme situations, newcomers are forced to sleep in abandoned storefronts and on park benches. Canadian cities only host a handful of shelters that specifically serve refugees or LGBTQ communities; none are designed to shelter both. In most cases those seeking asylum are placed wherever there is space—which in itself is a big feat, as emergency shelters in Canada’s major cities continue to burst at the seams.

The last national shelter study found Canada’s shelters were operating at over 90 percent capacity—Toronto is currently at 96 percent with their handful of refugee-specific shelters running wait lists. In June 2018 it was estimated that more than 40 percent of those in the city’s shelters were refugees, propelling the City to house the increasing number of refugee claimants in motels and temporary shelters erected in parking lots—makeshift buildings that are little more than glorified tents.

Even when there is space, these can be rough environments, where newcomers live in close proximity with those experiencing substance abuse and mental health issues. For a refugee who is LGBTQ the first few weeks can be dangerous and upsetting, and securing a roof over their head can make a world of difference on the path to settlement.

BY THE TIME I SAT DOWN WITH ZULFIKAR FAHD from Indonesia, he had been in Canada for just eight months but had already secured a job and apartment, started a blog, and had plans that weekend to drive to Oakville, a suburb of Toronto, to buy a dog, a cockapoo. He planned to name her Phoebe, after the character in his favourite show, Friends.

Fahd took a different approach to settlement. Three weeks earlier he posted an ad to Toronto’s Bunz Home Zone, a popular Facebook group where members upload posts offering or looking for vacant rooms and spaces for rent. In his post was a photo of himself, a picture of a cockapoo, and a paragraph of his story coming to Canada as a gay Indonesian refugee.

It is not illegal to be gay in his home country, but police and neighbours often punish queer men and women with public whippings. Last year in Indonesia, while he had another man over at his apartment late one night, there was a knock at his door, which turned out to be multiple neighbours and a police officer there to kick him out of his home.

Fahd moved but experienced other instances where he felt unsafe, eventually quitting his communications job and making his way to Canada, a place he heard was welcoming. He says he hasn’t experienced any of the roadblocks to settlement other gay refugee claimants may have, and much of that has to do with his proficient English and the money he brought with him.

He was able to avoid the shelters and had a few friends in the city who let him stay in their homes until he could find his own place. He also studied law in Indonesia, so he didn’t require legal assistance. His only qualm, he says, is that he has to wait for his hearing—it’s been pushed back indefinitely for reasons unknown, but he wants to start his life, and is confident Canada will accept him.

By the time he wrote his Facebook post, he didn’t consider his refugee status as a negative thing. “When you want a better life and when you work hard, I don’t think that’s something you have to be ashamed of,” he says. “That’s more like a superpower.”

UPSTAIRS IN THE TWO-BEDROOM APARTMENT IN Toronto where he now lives, Carlos is lounging in basketball shorts, playing FIFA ‘16 on his Playstation 4. Soon after arriving Carlos met another trans refugee at the Metropolitan Community Church while he was volunteering. Desperate to get out of his housing situation, Carlos jumped at the opportunity when a friend told him there was a vacant space in the building. He invited his new friend into the lease and today they are best friends.

Around the time of Carlos’s “Manniversary”—the six-month mark since he started taking the right dose of testosterone (in Barbados he was just using what he could get)—Carlos started
the process to a full transition. First on his list: top surgery. He has also been seeing his girlfriend for a few months, and they recently went camping together. Sitting on his couch beside a
window, I ask him if he feels more at home now. “I always felt at home,” he says, “I’m starting now to not feel as displaced.”

Iris, meanwhile, met her partner online, and two years ago they decided to have a child, her partner giving birth to a baby girl. The couple has since separated; Iris is now fighting for
shared custody of their child. To be close to her daughter she moved out of Toronto to the suburb of Mississauga, a place she says doesn’t have much of an LGBTQ community.

But she’s finding life easier, and she says she’s become more comfortable in her own skin. The Village has remained her safe place, but outside of the city she uses Facebook groups for gay and
bisexual women to stay connected. She has friends across the world, and she was recently speaking to a woman who lives in Miami, Florida.

As her English improved she also began volunteering at the Metropolitan Community Church. That eventually led to a job at another organization, where she works with other refugee
claimants and newcomers, drawing from her own experiences to help with the settlement process.

“People will come here with this idea that they can be themselves, so when they come here it is like this picture is breaking in pieces,” she says. “When they come here they don’t have family. They try to build family but it is so hard. They have been lonely in their countries but now they’re truly alone and lonely.”

Like the protagonist in his book, The Clothesline Swing, Ahmad Danny Ramadan is a hakawati, a storyteller, at heart. He has listened to countless tales of hardship and love, and has carefully crafted his own novel—and life—around them. From his house in war-torn Damascus to the pride parade in Vancouver, he has dedicated much of his life to making a difference in the LGBTQ-refugee community.

Ramadan is Syrian-Canadian author, journalist, public speaker and LGBTQ-refugee activist living in Vancouver. He volunteers with the Rainbow Refugee Society, helping to bring LGBTQ-refugees to Canada. His annual fundraiser, “An Evening in Damascus,” has raised over $100, 000 in support of refugees since 2015. For his efforts, he was the Grand Marshal for the Vancouver Gay Pride Parade in 2016.

The Clothesline Swing, his most recent novel published in May 2017, explores the life of a storyteller and his dying partner, dealing with the aftermath of the Arab Spring. With Death lurking in the background, the protagonist shares stories each night of his childhood in Damascus, of the homophobia he faced in Syria, of war, and how he met his partner. His next book, The Foghorn, is expected in 2019.

This spoke with Ramadan about his experiences with refugees, his writing, and more.

You left Syria in 2012 for Lebanon and arrived in Vancouver in 2014. Why did you leave when you did, and what was your life like before you came to Canada?

I left Syria when I was 19, travelled a bit from the Middle East, and went back to Syria in 2011, specifically because I wanted to be part of the revolution against the regime of [Syrian president] Bashar al-Assad. At the time, the revolution was led by free thinkers and social justice activists—folks who really wanted to change the country from the dictatorship that it has been under for 40 years, to a democracy, the way that Syria was in the early 1950s and ’60s.

I found myself quite interested in representing the lesbian, gay, and bisexual, trans [and queer] (LGBTQ) community. I found the community had been struggling quite a lot because the Iraq war around Syria denies any kind of information from accessing the country and denies people who identify outside of the social norms from understanding their own identities to begin with. I was fortunate enough to be travelling around the world to know more about what happened within the queer community, and I wanted to spread that knowledge.

I turned my house [in Damascus] into an underground LGBTQ centre where I was sharing this knowledge. We had a lot of gathering circles where everybody shared their stories, whatever they were comfortable sharing. We had an illegal movie download night, where we downloaded new and illegal movies to watch together. We had playing card tournaments, chess tournaments, and party nights. It was it was actually quite the loving community until I was arrested for it. Part of my terms of release was that I had to leave the country, so I left Syria in 2012.

How long were you in jail?

Six weeks.

What was your refugee experience like in Lebanon?

I used to be a journalist back in Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, so I ended up being hired by the Washington Post, which helped me avoid ending up in a refugee camp somewhere. I ended up living in my own little apartment, which slowly but surely turned into an extension of the house that I used to own in Damascus. It became this beautiful place where a lot of folks with refugee experience would come crash for a while, until they could stand on their own two feet.

A lot of queer folks, a lot of lesbians and gay people would hang out in my space and find refuge there. It was it was a very eye-opening kind of experience: You hear all of those beautiful stories and you connect with all of those beautiful people, and at the same time you are faced with the xenophobia of some—not all—of the Lebanese folks (which, to be honest, is an understandable reaction towards the Syrian refugees because Lebanon is a tiny country). You can fit five Lebanon’s on Vancouver Island, and then two million Syrian refugees just cross the borders into it. Basically there are almost as many refugees as people in the country.

Imagine if Canada had 35 million refugees landing here overnight. It would cause a lot of reaction from the community and it would be an understandable reaction because that’s a huge number of people. So I understand why I was seen as a foreigner and I understand how they reacted to that. But at the same time, I created that safe space for myself and I managed to survive in it.

With the recent influx of Syrian refugees in Canada, is that same response an understandable one?

It’s a different circumstance. We’re talking about, I don’t know, 40,000 or 50,000 refugees who came here to Canada, mostly from minority groups, and all of them through legal ways. Nobody swam across the ocean to come here. So it’s not an understandable reaction here in Canada. I haven’t actually seen that strong of a reaction against the Syrian refugees. If anything, the Canadian people were quite welcoming and continue to be welcoming of Syrian refugees.

If the same reaction came through, it would be difficult to understand, because the Canadian community is a one that is based on many immigrants coming here and settling on the lands of the First Nations people. Welcoming new immigrants and opening the doors for folks is what made Canada the beautiful country that it is.

So you think we should keep our doors open?

If anything, we should open the doors even more. There are seven million refugees at the moment in host countries across the world. Countries that are designated as first-world countries took only one or two percent of that number. So it’s a drop in the bucket. Most of the refugees that left because of the civil war in Syria ended up in Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan. And those are countries with their own challenges, and they don’t have the resources or the ability to support all of those refugees. Here in Canada we actually do. And we actually need them. We need new refugees. I’ve supported 22 refugees since I came here, and every single one of them is paying their taxes; they’ve got jobs, are getting to know the communities here, renting houses and adding to the economy, and bringing their beautiful stories to Canada.

How does the experience differ for LGBTQ refugees?

When you’re a queer or trans refugee, the easiest challenge to face is that when you come here, you don’t have a community to belong to. If a family of say, four—a father and a mother and their two children—ended up here in Vancouver, they will find support from the community that arrived here before them. Many Syrian immigrants who came here ages ago or who arrived a year or two ago form communities, they can get to know each other. They can have a social structure that is similar to their homes, which will ease the burden of the integration experience.

But a queer person who wants to live their full identity can’t actually belong to the same community. They can’t go to the Syrian communities and say, “I’m queer,” because the same community will bring with them the homophobia that is a part of the Syrian tradition. Which is not to say that this is acceptable, but it is the reality of things. I always felt like an outsider in Damascus as a queer person. So I carry with me the trauma of feeling like an outsider throughout my life, and that is challenging and changes how I’ve dealt with the refugee experience.

How do we end any stigma towards refugees?

Read our literature. Eat our food. Get to know who we are. Start to regard it as an interesting and productive part of the Canadian community. Recognize that we are trying our best and we’re not coming here to be a charity case, we’re coming here to become bigger than who we are and to become something beautiful.

Could you touch on your experience with the Rainbow Refugee Society?

I saw a lot of challenges in my first year here in the Vancouver, and the members of the Rainbow Refugee Society are the people who stood by me, who carried me forward, and who helped me get where I am at the moment, so I carry that that privilege and that good will of them forward.

I also run an annual fundraiser called “An Evening in Damascus.” It’s going to happen for its fourth year this coming July. It is a way to introduce the Vancouver community to what it means to be Syrian, and to change the mainstream narrative from civil war, desert, bearded men, beheadings, and all that horribleness, to a culture of beautiful music, yummy food, lovely dancing, storytelling, and spices. And to get them to donate a lot of money so I can sponsor some refugees.

What role, if any, does your book, The Clothesline Swing, play in your activism?

I’m a person of many hats, and one of my hats is that I am an author. I see myself as an author and as an activist, and I believe that my identity as a queer person of colour with a refugee experience informs both sides of my personality. But I wrote the book because I thought of a great story that I wanted to tell, and I do activism because I felt a great cause that I can support. So I think the only connection between the two is really my identity and how it forms the work that I do and the structure I want to put into my life.

How much of it was shaped by your own experience?

It’s modelled after my own journey. I would say it is a fictional telling of many true events, but those true events are not necessarily mine. I have met many queer and trans refugees from Syria, who shared with me many beautiful stories, and the book has a lot of resilience, a lot of courage, and I can’t claim that to myself. I dedicated the book to the people who shared their stories with me.

You are in the process of writing your next book. Will it share the same concepts as Clothesline Swing?

I am quite comfortable being typecast as a gay author. I have four books in my mind. The Clothesline Swing is the first of them. The Foghorn is my second book, and all of the books will be led by queer people from Syria with refugee experience. It’s the Damascus apocalypse and it is going to be told.

 
Photo by J. Walton

It has been nearly one year since the Liberal government enacted a program to admit 25,000 Syrian refugees arrived in Canada. In their first year, many of the families faced several challenges to overcome: getting to know a brand new country, finding suitable accommodations, and trying to find a job in our country’s tough economic climate, all while facing systemic racism upon arrival. The resettlement process is not easy, and many are still trying to find their way here in Canada. While the Canadian government and private sponsors have helped—offering financial assistance, medical coverage, and housing—the biggest challenge many Syrians have faced is finding community.

What often connects community members is a good home-cooked meal. The table is where we gather, not just to eat, but to talk, share, and connect. Food gets people talking; it facilitates conversation. Many Canadians are privileged enough to forget our ready-access to kitchens and supermarkets filled with endless foodstuffs, and the power it has to bring communities together.

After witnessing in the Canadian media many Syrian refugees stranded in hotels and with little opportunity to cook and gather for regular meals for weeks at a time, Len Senater, owner and operator of The Depanneur, offered his drop-in kitchen space for Syrian women to cook. From there, Toronto’s Newcomer Kitchen was born.

It has been almost six months since Newcomer Kitchen launched and in that time, several families have utilized Senater’s space as their own. The program has given many newcomers the opportunity to not just cook alongside other Syrian families but to carve out and build for themselves their own identities and communities here in Canada. The kitchen has become a space to gain agency and legitimize traditions in a new country.

For the refugees who have come through the space, the act of cooking was simple and natural. In many Syrian homes, the kitchen is a focal point, and food brings loved ones together at the end of the day. A home-cooked meal can be seen as a seal of friendship. The space emphasizes the need to celebrate this culture—not to assimilate and mask it.

Many of the women who have used Senater’s space have not only connected with one another but also disconnected from the everyday struggles they face in the resettlement process. While Westerners often try to dismantle the gender stereotypes about women’s roles in kitchens, the Newcomer Kitchen program empowers women to showcase their culture. And it has created opportunity: those involved in the program catered 1,200 meals during Toronto’s Luminato Festival, and cooked for Toronto Mayor John Tory.

Meanwhile, some newcomers have started their own enterprises. In Hamilton, Ont., three Syrian women—Manahel Al Shareef, Dalal Al Zoubi and Rawa’a Aloliwi—launched a new catering business , along with co-founder Brittani Farrington. Their meeting was a bit cosmic in nature: Farrington explains she had planned a welcome dinner for a handful of displaced families at her church. Yet, it was these families who ended up cooking for her and the other volunteers that evening. The food planted a seed with the newcomers, as Al Shareef shared with CBC via Google translate: “We weren’t surprised when you were happy trying the Syrian food, because we know very well that the Syrian food is the best, especially if we are cooking it.” That evening spurred the creation of Karam Kitchen.

The catering company, which markets itself as a way to “empower Syrian newcomers to build a new life in Hamilton and contribute to [the city’s] vibrant community,” is just getting off the ground and recently launched a Kickstarter campaign that brought in $6,500 to fund its capital costs. Since its launch, the founders have worked on refining their catering menu to include a mix of Syrian classics and recognizable dishes to locals, such as tabouleh and hummus. So far, the business model is paying off, and the women have a packed few months ahead of them. “We Syrians are such a hard working people, we love to work and earn our own money and build ourselves even in the worst circumstances,” Al Shareef told CBC. As more Syrian families are welcomed into Canada and face the adaptation and acculturation process, these newcomers face the task of finding employment—and these kitchens can change that. “The biggest barrier to employment is a lack of a network, whether that be social, professional, or otherwise,” Jeremy Dutton, program coordinator for Immigrant Services Calgary’s integrated mentorship program, told the Globe and Mail. By connecting and networking through these programs, newcomers are building a professional network they need to make and create professional opportunities for themselves.

Utilizing their own skills, culture, and cuisine, these women have created the opportunity to not only build a community but build a career from it. Food has connected these families with other Canadians—and it is bound to continue empowering these Syrian-Canadians to create opportunities for themselves in the future.

Ratna Omidvar. Illustration by Antony Hare.

“This journey of learning how to become a Canadian has been one of the most exciting and one of the most frustrating journeys in my life,” says Ratna Omidvar.

Born in India, Omidvar earned her bachelor of arts before going on scholarship to Germany, where she met her Iranian husband. The two moved to Tehran before fleeing the Islamic Revolution. They landed in Germany with few prospects, ultimately seeking asylum in Canada.

Both arrived with a wealth of education, skills, and experience, but it took them six years to find stable employment. She remembers befriending other credentialed immigrants who worked in unskilled labour or drove taxis, all seeking the elusive but vital Canadian work experience that would lead to better jobs.

Profiled by The Globe and Mail as this decade’s nation-builder for citizenship, Omidvar now works to ease immigrants’ path to prosperity as president of the Maytree Foundation, a private Canadian charity dedicated to reducing poverty.

Maytree sees systematic poverty as the main threat to Canadian society, and uses more than just money to fight it. Among the foundation’s tools at hand are grants, training programs, research, networking, policy proposals, and scholarships.

Instead of just studying the problem of poverty, “we have the capacity to put some of these really good ideas into action, and see if they work or not,” says Omidvar. In that way, Maytree has become a kind of angel investor for poverty-reduction schemes, experimenting with pilot projects, scaling up the ones that work and learning what they can from the ones that fail.

Since Omidvar joined Maytree in 1998, the foundation has oriented its focus to immigration, integration, and diversity. Two recent Maytree projects aim to empower new Canadians and help those in power to reap the fruits of diversity. One Maytree project, for instance, the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council, helps skilled immigrants get Canadian credentials, teaches businesses how to hire, train, and integrate immigrant employees, and lobbies government to adopt policies that encourage immigrant employment. DiverseCity, a program launched in 2008, aims to increase racial diversity on boards of directors and in the media by building a directory of experts from minority communities.

With an appointment to the Order of Ontario, an honorary diploma, and a book set to launch in September, Omidvar has thrived in Canada. But she laments the lost time and productivity she and many immigrants endure.

“I lost 10 years—the best 10 years of my working life—and I’ve kind of dedicated myself to making sure others don’t lose 10 years, 20 years of their working life; that they can ease into life, far better and quicker than we were able to.” But Omidvar says the real reason she advocates for immigrants is because when they thrive, everyone does.

“It’s because I know, intuitively and substantively, that the well-being of immigrants leads to the well-being of Canada,” she says. “And what’s good for Canada is good for immigrants.”

Mijok Lang may not know how old he is, but he has no doubt where he comes from. He remembers, as a child, singing a familiar tribal song with friends. It was the only way, he says, that they could keep lions and other animals at bay in the jungles of Sudan and Ethiopia as they ran from would-be killers.

Mijok, now more widely known by his hip hop pseudonym Hot Dogg, is one of more than 30,000 refugee children known as the “Lost Boys,” who were victims of a civil war that overtook Sudan in 1983 and continued into the 1990s.

Today Hot Dogg—the name is a product of a cultural misunderstanding at a McDonald’s—is a hip-hop artist who has taken his harrowing journey and turned it into positive, spiritual messages expressed through the music he embraced when he first arrived in Canada in 2004.

Of his life during the civil war, he says, “That’s when I became myself; that’s when I lost my family.” Women and young girls were often raped and taken as slaves. “They have to get rid of the elders first. They took all the men. They tortured them, they killed them. When all this torture was happening, that’s the time we ran into the jungle,” he says.

After what Mijok says were months of trekking through the jungles, he and his brother Thirik found themselves in Kenya, where a measure of stability finally began to enter Mijok’s life. His outgoing, humorous personality came out and, thanks to an aid agency, he ended up studying at a private school. He did well enough to receive a scholarship.

Thirik and some other Lost Boys were given the chance to move to the U.S., but Mijok missed his opportunity due to bad timing. Hearing that the Canadian and Australian governments would be visiting a camp in the north, Mijok made his way to the camp where, miraculously, he found his sister, Nyokjak Lang.

That’s where his story takes an unusual spiritual turn. He says his prayers were answered after writing a letter to God one night, asking him why he had found himself stuck in Kenya without family. Even though he never mailed the letter to anyone, a pastor on TV, he says, responded. Mijok says the pastor, the Reverend Benny Hinn, mentioned him by name on TV and told him to sit tight because he would get good news in two weeks. Two weeks later, Mijok got word that he had been accepted as a refugee to Canada.

He ended up moving to Winnipeg, where his sister had already relocated. He enrolled in high school and began a new life. To this day, Mijok desperately wants to know how old he actually is. After much soul searching over the path he should take, Mijok says God told him in a dream to become a musician and tell the stories he had experienced in his youth.

Following chance meetings with hip-hop artists Fresh IE and K’naan, Mijok has grown as a musician and has begun receiving attention for his work and the stories he shares. He released his first album, Lost in War, in 2008, and since then he has toured Canada, the U.S. and Australia. He donates proceeds from his performances to charities doing humanitarian work in Sudan.

And in a fitting bookend to his story, Mijok recently came into contact with his mother again. He hopes his next album, slated for summer 2011, will earn enough for him to visit her.

Collectively, the camps in Dadaab are the largest refugee settlement in the world. Built to house 90,000 displaced people, they now hold upwards of 250,000, mainly from neighbouring Somalia. Camps which were supposed to provide temporary shelter for refugees before they could be resettled have instead become distressingly permanent, with many people living in limbo for years.

Goodwin builds a relationship with each student, meeting the families and friends they will have to leave behind as they move, alone, to various universities across Canada. There are wonderfully light moments, and the strength and dignity with which the students face their various challenges is incredibly inspiring. But this is not a happy story. The feelings of dislocation that come when trying to adapt to an alien culture are accompanied by the constant pressure to do well enough, quickly enough, to pull their families out of the camps.

Expectations are high partly because of the perception in the camps that everyone in Canada is “rolling in money” and that once they break through and make it here, they — and their families — are set. Only after arriving in Canada do they learn that this is not the case. It is here that the book offers a look at Canada through the eyes of some very intelligent newcomers. Some wonder why their new Canadian friends don’t seem to care very much about Canadian politics. Others wonder why, in a country so much richer than the ones they were born in, homelessness and poverty are allowed to persist.

The students also struggle with questions of identity, with each having to decide how strongly to hold to lifelong religious and cultural beliefs. Often there is an eagerness to try new things, accompanied by a deep reluctance to leave behind customs which remind them of home. Their views on the interaction between women and men in Canadian society are varied, as are their recollections of gender relations in the camps. More than one of the male students has had the word “feminist” used against him as a severe accusation, and more than one of the female students believes the hijab is a central part of her wardrobe.

As a journalist, Goodwin gains the trust of the students and reports their experiences and observations in their own words. As a mother with a daughter the same age as the students she is writing about, she becomes part of the story herself. For most of them, she is the only outsider who has seen them both as they used to be, young leaders in Dadaab, and as they are now, young leaders in Canada.

Bodies lie in a ditch in rural Mexico, as police look on. Photo by Tomas Bravo/Reuters

The first of Juan Escobedo’s many trials began in 2007 when his common-law wife, Lisbeth, then just 31, was diagnosed with cancer. The couple had four children and little money. At the time, Escobedo (not his real name) drove a bus he rented by the day around the city of Oaxaca and Lisbeth worked as a cleaner at the Mexican Social Security Institute. As a state employee, she qualified for free radiation and chemotherapy treatment at a public hospital, but doctors there held out little hope. It quickly became clear Lisbeth did not have long to live.

Escobedo’s second trial began in July 2008, when a gang of masked, gun-toting men burst into his house in the middle of the night. They blindfolded and tied him up along with Lisbeth and bundled them both into a van. They drove them to the Huayapam reservoir, where Escobedo was held underwater until he almost drowned, then beaten while Lisbeth was forced to look on. Their assailants identified themselves as members of “Los Zetas,” and said they wanted the couple to work for them. “They said, ‘We want a place from which to make sales and you are going to work for us, you understand?’” Escobedo recalls. “My wife was sick, and even so they made her sell drugs from our house.”

In a region known for corruption, electoral fraud and strong-arm politics, the Escobedos were just the kind of people the Zetas knew they could control and extort—average citizens without resources or connections. “They forced me to sell drugs, but others, they were forced to keep an eye on us,” he explains. “So anyone who said anything or made an accusation, for sure they would kill them.” The Zetas made copies of the couple’s identification cards, but that wasn’t the only factor that trapped them. What really stopped the couple from trying to escape, says Escobedo, was the fact that outside Oaxaca, Lisbeth’s cancer treatments would no longer be paid for by the state, and there was no way Juan could afford to pay for them himself.

He describes this period as “very painful. Like something you might see in a movie, but I was living it. I couldn’t do anything, and this put me into a kind of shock. I wanted to die.” By then, his wife was in constant pain and unable to sleep, “crying and moaning all the time,” he recalls. Every day for four months, dealers and addicts would climb onto his bus and purchase small bags of cocaine and crack, which he kept in his change box beside the steering wheel. Passengers and police alike took no notice. At one point, the couple was once again blindfolded and taken to a house where they joined a circle of people similarly bound. Two men brought in a third and beheaded him with a machete in front of the group’s horrified eyes—his punishment, they were told, for trying to escape. This was where Escobedo saw the one person he could identify, a uniformed police commander named Castillo.

In September 2008, Lisbeth died and Escobedo sent his children to stay with relatives. Mourning and hopeless, he also stopped working. Two weeks later, Castillo came to see him. “He said, ‘You’ll keep on working for us because you work for us.’ I really didn’t want to, so he said, ‘Here it’s not whether you want to or not,’ and he pulled out a knife. I didn’t know if he wanted to kill me or what his intentions were, but he stabbed me twice in the leg.”

In desperation, Escobedo’s father called Juan’s older sister, who lives in Canada, to see if she could help. She paid for his passport and a plane ticket, and in April 2009, with $5 to his name, Escobedo landed in Canada and immediately applied for refugee status. With his application to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, Escobedo became one of the unprecedented 9,309 Mexican migrants seeking Canadian refugee status last year.

Though Escobedo’s status as a refugee applicant allowed him to go on welfare, he found work in Toronto instead. “I am not here to take anything from this country,” he says. “I am here for the second chance I wouldn’t have otherwise. And because I am more use to my family alive than dead.”

As drug-related violence sweeps across Mexico and the death toll rises, Canada has responded by shutting out more and more Mexican refugees fleeing the mayhem. In 2006, when 4,955 Mexicans applied, the Immigration and Refugee Board accepted 28 percent of those applications. That acceptance rate steadily dwindled to just eight percent, and in July 2009, the immigration ministry placed a visa requirement on all Mexicans travelling to Canada, essentially halting the flow entirely.

Lawyers and others who work with Mexican refugee claimants readily agree that there are opportunists using the violence as a pretext to enter Canada for short-term, higher-paid work than they can get at home. The dilemma they face is not gang-style execution, but a profound lack of economic opportunities.

“You have people in Mexico selling stories,” says Francisco Rico-Martinez, who heads the Faithful Companions of Jesus Refugee Centre and has been helping refugees for more than 20 years. “You come and the only detail is to say that you will be killed in Mexico if you go back. So we have those cases as well—people who are desperate for the lack of future and the poverty in Mexico, and they use any way to get out.”

Rico-Martinez estimates that roughly 60 percent of Mexicans claiming asylum here fit that profile, while 40 percent are at genuine risk of violence or murder. Yet Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney routinely refers to all Mexican asylum claims as “bogus,” fostering a climate of skepticism even toward legitimate claimants who can document the persecution and death threats they have experienced. In these cases, says lawyer Mordechai Wasserman, the IRB “skips any consideration of credibility whatsoever. They jump to state protection. They say that Mexico is a democracy, that there’s a presumption of state protection.”

For the IRB, Mexico is a sunny travel destination, a functioning democracy where citizens have ample recourse within its domestic laws to deal with serious crime. When Wasserman points to the murders of police, soldiers, and members of the judiciary as evidence of the lack of state protection, the IRB says that evidence simply indicates that the police were killed in the line of duty and the government is making an effort to root out corruption. The absurdity of that rosy view drives Wasserman crazy. “I just want to tear my hair out,” he says.

Wasserman isn’t alone in his frustration. Aviva Basman, a lawyer at Toronto’s Refugee Law Office, describes her Mexican clients as “some of my most traumatized and most compelling cases.” Many are battered women, whose husbands have backchannel connections to Mexico’s public security apparatus that allow them to repeatedly track down and attack them. “I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall,” she says, “because you go in and make what you think are very strong legal arguments based on facts as they now are in Mexico, that is so dire, and then you get a kind of boilerplate answer back.”

Among the most prominent cases of those refused is that of Wasserman’s client Gustavo Gutierrez. A detective commander with the Ciudad Juárez police force investigating the murders of more than 200 young women, Gutierrez fled to Canada after 36 of his colleagues were killed and he himself began receiving death threats from traffickers.

Another is Toluca lawyer Alfonso Vega, who was represented by Andrew Brouwer of the Refugee Lawyers Association of Ontario. Thanks to two legal cases Vega was pursuing against their members, he ran afoul of the shadowy yet powerful Atlacomulco Group. Wasserman had a client who was actually told by an employee of the Public Prosecutor’s Office that he would be killed if he did not leave the country. His claim was also denied by the IRB.

However, one of the most gruesome consequences of an IRB decision affected a Mexican woman identified only as Nuemi.

She came to Canada with two daughters in 2004, after she and her family received death threats from the Familia Michoacana cartel. The family’s claim was rejected, but the women stayed in Canada fighting deportation orders until, in August 2008, the elder daughter returned home to visit her dying grandmother.

Detected by La Familia and raped, Nuemi’s daughter flew back to Canada—which promptly deported her back to Mexico in December. Nuemi and her younger daughter were deported the following February, and all three women went into hiding at the home of an elderly friend. Only weeks later, then seven months’ pregnant as a result of the rape, Nuemi’s elder daughter was kidnapped. Police found her body in June; not only had she been beaten and shot in the back of the head, but the baby she had been carrying had been removed by Caesarean section. The elderly man sheltering them was also killed. His family, not surprisingly, told them to leave.

After receiving various desperate email messages from Nuemi, Rico-Martinez and Basman succeeded in bringing her and her surviving daughter back to Canada on temporary residence permits. Adding insult to injury, the condition of Nuemi’s return was that she reimburse Citizenship and Immigration Canada for their original deportation costs— including those of her murdered daughter.

While Nuemi’s assertion that she and her family lived in fear of their lives—and that Mexican authorities were incapable of protecting them—was tragically and graphically proven by her daughter’s grisly death, the IRB continues to rely on the “Internal Flight Alternative.” It suggests that applicants move elsewhere within their own country, such as Mexico City, where, in the words of one ruling, “I am convinced that state protection would be reasonably forthcoming.”

For lawyers defending what they feel are clearly meritorious refugee claims, their clients risk becoming victims of the Mexican government’s stated intention—but demonstrated inability—to protect its own citizens.

“There’s this belief,” says Basman, “that it’s okay as long as the government is trying to protect—even if it can’t.”

It is early summer and Mexico City bathes in the sweltering heat of a dry season stubbornly refusing to give way to the rains. Even as the number of deaths from the government’s struggle against organized crime reaches past 23,000, even as one of the nation’s most powerful men (former presidential candidate Diego Fernández de Cevallos) is himself kidnapped, life goes on in the vast metropolis and in towns and cities across the country. In Oaxaca, an international aid and human rights caravan is attacked and two activists killed, but no police investigation will take place and everyone accepts this. It is as if an alternate reality, a webbing of uncontrollable criminality, lurks below the surface of daily life. It’s a reality to which Mexicans, appalled as they may be, are becoming accustomed.

“It’s not like you’re fearful just walking down the street,” says John Mill Ackerman, professor at the Institute of Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, “but if you’re targeted by a drug cartel, there’s really nothing you can do. And this,” he adds, “is an inheritance of the authoritarian system of government. This has been the big problem of the democratic transition of the last 10 years. We are still working with the same state apparatus, the same institutions. The changing colours of the party has led to different groups or mafias coming in or out of government— but not to a real conquest of formal institutions over informal institutions.”

Mexicans who, like Juan Escobedo, have for one reason or another fallen afoul of what Ackerman calls “powerful informal actors” should be seeking protection from the federal attorney general, or PGR. Its Ministerio Publico, or Public Prosecutors Office, has the job of not only investigating crimes, but deciding which cases will be prosecuted. “The Ministerio Publico is in total control of every part of criminal proceedings,” says Ackerman.

While the 2000 ousting of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party from government may have cracked open the political system, the judiciary remains mired in a culture of favouritism, secrecy, and corruption.

Judges rarely question or even see defendants during trial. There are no juries, no oral arguments, and no public access to evidence until the trial is over. Evidence gathered under torture is admissible, and most suspects are found guilty without scientific proof like fingerprints or DNA. In this system, prosecutors have unusually broad powers, deciding if a suspect is guilty before their day in court and using their own police force to gather evidence to support those decisions.

For José Rosario of the non-governmental Miguel Agustin Pro Juárez Human Rights Centre, the probability of such a system offering protection is “almost zero. There are many inequalities in Mexican society,” he says, “and those same inequalities reproduce themselves in the justice system.” What’s more, Mexican law severely limits the effectiveness, and so the likelihood, of people from one state accusing anyone of so-called “common” crimes like extortion, threats, kidnapping, or even murder in another. To seek justice, victims must stay within the jurisdiction where the crime has occurred, putting themselves in even greater danger. And, says Ackerman, “that’s not going to happen because the person knows the Ministerio Publico itself is, if not totally corrupt, that at least a criminal gang will have eyes and ears there. They’re going to see who is actually charging them. So there’s a very strong disincentive to even accuse these people.” The entire apparatus allows organized crime to flourish. “Most Mexicans,” says Edgardo Buscaglia, a law professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and an expert on organized crime, “consider the judicial system corrupt at all levels. By being conceived as corrupt by society, people do not report crimes, do not collaborate with the authorities and therefore any effort of the state is hampered.”

Originally trained by the Mexican army in the 1990s as an elite crime-fighting squad, a Mexican version of the Green Berets, the Zetas were soon co-opted by Osiel Cárdenas, leader of the Gulf Cartel. When Cárdenas was captured, “they slowly became more and more independent in many of their operations,” says Buscaglia, “at first with kidnappings, later extortions. And at some point they acquired so much economic power that they were able to divorce themselves from the Gulf Cartel.”

By now, he says, they are much more than a drug-trafficking gang. “They are a transnational organized crime group involved in 17 types of crimes, and present in 23 countries around the world.” Branching out into weapons and human trafficking, along with contract killings, protection rackets, and the kind of small yet profitable business of forcing non-members to retail drugs, “they have made fortunes out of this huge diversification,” he says.

Their financial clout and violent methods have allowed the Zetas to infiltrate police and judicial systems in several states, including Chiapas and Oaxaca. Infiltrating the federal government has been more of a challenge for them, says Buscaglia, but that’s only because their main rival, the Sinaloa Cartel, “has had a long-term monopoly on the capture of federal authorities at the highest level.”

There are 982 “pockets” in Mexico, where “the authorities and organized crime are one force,” Buscaglia adds, “and that’s the essence of a failed state. Mexico is facing limited symptoms of a failed state—and it’s expanding.”

Although President Felipe Calderón has continually proclaimed his desire to vanquish organized crime, dispatching the army throughout the country to do so, he seems unwilling to overhaul its dysfunctional justice system. “That system,” says Buscaglia, “is quite cosy for the political and business elite.”

Mexico’s congress did pass new acts designed to reform the justice system in 2008. With reform, says Buscaglia, “the capacity of organized crime to capture the judiciary would be limited.” But the president has done nothing to actually implement those changes. For Buscaglia, judicial reform is “a joke—two years have gone by and nothing substantive has been done.”

“The big opportunity of democratic transition,” says Ackerman, “the possibility of reforming our institutions, of bringing democracy into the state itself? Calderón just hasn’t done it.”

The third trial of Juan Escobedo is still under way. The ruling that will, in one way or another, change his life is yet to come. An April 2010 hearing was interrupted, as the IRB grappled with the fact that he took part in criminal activity, even if it was against his will. Another hearing in June was postponed. He remains convinced that if he does return to Mexico, the Zetas will somehow find him and subject him to the same gruesome death they have historically inflicted on so many others. “You don’t ask how they can find you,” he explains. “They have all your documents and that’s why they go and look for you.”

For her part, Basman is convinced that the IRB will carry on making negative rulings against Mexican claimants. “Because of the sheer number of claimants, there’s a fear,” she said, “that if you give positive decisions, you’re just encouraging more to come. If you recognize Mexico as a refugee-producing country, then more are going to come and they’re just going to be overwhelmed at the board.”

Yet in Mexico, said Buscaglia, “this nightmare will never cease until the violence and the suffering of average Mexicans reaches the political and business elite—when their families, their persons, and their net worth is actually hampered by organized crime, and the monster they created starts to eat them.”

Watch out! The terrorists are coming! They’re human smugglers too, all of them. They’re smuggling themselves. And there are many more boats on the horizon, watching and waiting to take advantage of our natural generosity. Xenophobic? Not us. We value immigration. In fact, there are thousands of good immigrants out there waiting patiently to get in, and these bad refugees are trying to jump the line!

If pollster Angus Reid’s projections are accurate, something about this infuriating line of reasoning appeals to half the country. Polling data released on August 20th and confirmed on September 14th suggests that half of Canadians want the 490 passengers and crew from the MV Sun Sea to be deported—even if their refugee claims are legitimate and they have no discernible links with any terrorist organization.

Uzma Shakir, past executive director of the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA), warned early on that Canada’s treatment of the people on board the MV Sun Sea would be a defining moment for the country. Damn.

Allegations of “queue-jumping” ignore the difference between asylum seekers and other immigrants. Sharry Aiken, Associate Dean in the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University, explained last week on The Agenda that “Canada has an in-land refugee determination system that is premised on the assumption that it is entirely legitimate for people to self-select and arrive on our shores and claim asylum. That’s what our system is set up to do. We recognize that the refugee resettlement program, which resettles refugees from overseas, doesn’t work for everybody.”

Public Safety Minister (and lead narrator) Vic Toews has acknowledged that this is a case of human smuggling and not human trafficking, but the conflation of the two terms has hardened hearts against the smugglers and the refugees. Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, emphasizes the difference between the exploited and their exploiters.

The CCR has released a statement saying that while it in no way condones the activities of smugglers, “many refugees have no choice but to use irregular means to flee persecution and international law prohibits them being penalized for illegal entry.  Many Canadians would not be alive today if they or their parents had not paid smugglers to help them escape persecution.” Professor Aiken points to security measures adopted internationally after 9/11 which closed the “front door” and forced desperate refugees to look to the black market.

Protestors march down Toronto's Yonge Street as part of anti-G20 All Out In Defense of Rights Rally, Monday June 21 2010. Photo by Jesse Mintz.

The Toronto Community Mobilization Network kicked off its themed days of resistance to the G20 on Monday with activists converging around a mixed bag of issues including income equity, community control over resources, migrant justice, and an end to war and occupation. It’s an ambitious start­ for the week-long campaigns. On their own, each issue is complex. So wouldn’t combining them create one massively hopeless problem? Not necessarily.

Uniting the struggles sends a clear message:  justice for one means justice for all. Organizing in solidarity weaves together the various conditions of oppression and injustice affecting populations around the world. It gives us a deeper understanding of these conditions, and how to act against them.

In effect, you can’t talk about income equity without addressing migrant justice. The fact is, so-called developed states have built their economies on the labour of underpaid and overworked “temporary” migrant labourers. A recent Stats Can report suggests that throughout the 31 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (compare these to the countries that have ratified or signed the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families, or to the G20 roster for that matter), the “temporary migration of foreign workers has increased by 4 percent to 5 percent per year since 2000.”

The same report states that over 94,000 non-permanent residents worked in Canada full time (30 hours per week or more) in 2006. Many came to this country as part of temporary foreign worker programs, such as the Live-in Caregiver Program or the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. Activists, academics, journalists, filmmakers, politicians—pretty much everyone—have denounced the current state of both programs for their exploitative policies, racist legacies and harmful social effects. And it only seems to be getting worse for migrant workers as third-party recruiters become increasingly popular.

The fact that business is booming for recruiters means there’s a pool of people willing to put up whatever money they have for the promise of work abroad.  And here’s where we connect the dots from migrant justice to ending war and occupation and restoring control of resources to the people—what has compelled, and continues to compel, the estimated 214 million migrants of the world to leave their home countries in the first place? That’s what migrant justice group No One Is Illegal wants us to think about:

Government and public discourse fails to address root causes of forced migration. On the one hand, because of free trade policies—including Canadian free trade agreements—and structural adjustment programs, governments throughout the global South have been forced to adopt neoliberal policies that have restructured and privatized their land and services, resulting in the displacement of urban and rural workers and farmers. On the other hand, capital mobility has led corporations to create millions of low-wage jobs and to seek vulnerable workers to fill them, both in sweatshops in the global South and exploitable labour sectors in the global North.

Sure, not all migrant workers are explicitly forced to come to Canada as a labourer, as one analyst with the Fraser Institute griped in an interview with The Dominion, but then again lots of people are. Forced migrants are refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced and trafficked people, as well as survivors of developmental displacement, environmental and manufactured disasters.

Huge construction projects like dams, roads and airports squeeze people out of their homes. Stephen Castles, the former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, writes that many of these initiatives are funded by the World Bank and displace as many as 10 million people annually. Though World Bank offers compensation for resettlement, Castles concludes:

Millions of development displacees experience permanent impoverishment, and end up in a situation of social and political marginalization.

People displaced by environmental change, by industrial accidents, and toxins generally face similar fates.

That’s why war and conflict, immigration and refugee flows, jobs and wages, and global economics are, together, a “focus” of protest. Far from being separate and unrelated problems, they’re inextricably entangled. And the solutions will be too.

Abdelkader Belaouni, who spent nearly four years living in church sanctuary before being granted status. Illustration by Todd Julie.

Free at last. After three years and nine months thwarting a deportation order in the sanctuary of a Montreal church, Abdelkader Belaouni became a Canadian citizen in October 2009.

Belaouni was one of the refugees I spoke to for my article “Gimme Shelter” in This Magazine’s July-August 2009 issue. At the time, he was living in the shelter of a century-old house on the grounds of Saint Gabriel church, in the Pointe-St-Charles neighborhood in Montreal. [That article is nominated for a National Magazine Award, by the way! – Ed.]

In June 2009, after almost four years of tireless campaigning on the part of his supporters (and just after the issue went to press) victory came in the form of a telephone call. Belaouni’s lawyer Jared Will, called to say the Quebec government was going to allow him to stay in the country on humanitarian grounds.

First though, he would have to complete a medical examination in Tunisia, which borders his native Algeria. The Canadian government demands such examinations for all immigrants in an effort to prevent strain on Canada’s health care system. Belaouni was worried that he might not pass the examination; he is legally blind and suffers from diabetes.

Nonetheless, he began fundraising for the trip. With the support of his friends, Belaouni collected over $10,000 from donors across Canada. He flew to Tunisia on September 23. Four weeks later, Belaouni received a call from the Canadian embassy in Tunisia. He had passed the medical examination and his Canadian visa was ready.

On October 22, he was back in Canada, now his home. His almost four year stay in sanctuary paid off. He joins the more than 150 refugees who’ve avoided deportation with a stay in church sanctuary.

The congregations act as safety nets for what they see as holes in Canada’s immigration system, namely the lack of a formal appeal system in the refugee determination process. A bill (C-291) that would see a formal appeal system implemented was being tossed around parliament at the time “Gimme Shelter” went to print. But in December 2009, it was defeated at third reading in the House of Commons. The vote was tied. The speaker broke it with a vote against.

Belaouni is grateful for the safety net his friends at Saint Gabriel’s church provided. He and his supporters say he was unfairly treated by the refugee determination system, and that a stay in sanctuary was the only remaining option. Today he lives in Saint Hubert, just east of Montreal, in a one-bedroom apartment. He looks healthier than the last time I saw him. He tells me he lost 10 lbs—credited, he says, to his daily exercise routine and raw-food diet.

He is also fulfilling many of his dreams. The album he completed while living in sanctuary is now available on iTunes. He has two books in the works, one about his life and the other about the Algerian revolution. He is also set to start work at an immigration center in Montreal at the end of May.

I caught up with him on May 17, the day before his 43rd birthday. Here are a few minutes of our chat.