Undocumented.Stories: Hand-written stories from Torontonians living without permanent status
In 2022, Access Alliance collected over 125 anonymous stories from Toronto residents, describing their daily realities of living without permanent immigration status. Many of them were patients of our Non-Insured Walk-In Clinic in west Toronto. We share some of these stories to highlight the systemic barriers and exploitation these residents face based on their status.
Publication overview
Canada is a nation that heavily relies on, and exploits, temporary migrants. During the last two decades, there has been a four to sevenfold increase in the annual number of people coming to Canada through one of the temporary migration streams (e.g. temporary foreign workers, international students, refugee claimants). They are used to “fill labor shortage gaps,” subsidize the Canadian education system, and for other short-sighted instrumentalist goals. In contrast, the annual number of permanent residents accepted in Canada has risen only marginally during the same period.
While the Canadian government has begun introducing some pathways to permanent residency for temporary migrants, these have been highly conditional, time limited, and uneven.
As a result, thousands of temporary migrants are getting trapped in lengthy permanent residency application processes and risk losing their status due to exclusionary conditions. According to estimates by Migrant Rights Network, there may be more than 500,000 people without status in Canada. Many non-status people, particularly those who come as political refugees, are unable to return to their home countries for fear of discrimination, violence, or even death. Thousands more are being pushed into this pool every year.
People living in Canada with no status or temporary status often experience high levels of discrimination and mistreatment in the labour market, within the education system, and during the immigration review process (e.g. in immigration detention centres). They face systemic barriers accessing basic services like healthcare, mental health services, settlement, and banking. Non-status and precarious migrants may be exposed to acute levels of social isolation/exclusion and live in constant fear and anxiety due to their precarious immigration status.
These worrying trends reflect a fundamental problem in Canada’s immigration system that encourages temporary migrants without providing corresponding equitable pathways for them to permanent residency. After many decades of tireless advocacy by migrant rights organizations, the Canadian government started to consider broader regularization for non-status people.
When developing regularization programs and immigration reforms in Canada, it is important to draw lessons from past regularization initiatives from within Canada and other countries. The success of these programs in Italy, Spain and Germany highlight that broad, inclusive and proactive regularization (including at a scale of 500,000 or more) is not just operationally feasible but has multiple positive benefits both to temporary migrant families and to the host country. Rather than viewing immigration as a way to meet the short-term labour market needs of a country, it should be considered a transformative human rights and social justice tool for promoting equity and prosperity at the national, regional and global level.
The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration promoted by the United Nations Network on Migration serves as a key guidepost for a universal human rights-based framework for immigration. The Global Compact is centered on “23 objectives for State action” such as ensuring that all migrants, irrespective of background, have rights to “a legal identity” and “basic services, including health, education, and social support, without discrimination.” Other commitments focus on proactively minimizing vulnerabilities, exploitation, and human rights violations that migrants can face during migration journeys, at the borders, during the immigration/refugee application process, and after settlement.
Importantly, the Global Compact also calls for commitments from member states to expand and diversify “availability of pathways for safe, orderly and regular migration, taking into account the particular needs of migrants in situations of vulnerability” and “protecting the right to decent work and other labour rights for migrants.” On a more basic human level, it requires member states to protect “the right to life in the context of migration.”
As a signatory of the Global Compact, Canada is bound to implement and routinely report on these actions. Canada has a very long way to go to meet these 23 objectives.
Access Alliance and many community/advocacy organizations have called on the federal government to move forward with a comprehensive, transparent, and equitable regularization program to provide a pathway to permanent residence status for all people with precarious/undocumented immigration status in Canada.
The stories
The publication contains a sample of 26 stories and two illustrations from those 125 stories. The authors speak of incredible struggle and loss, fear and exploitation, humiliation and intimidation. Their hopes and dreams are to live in a society where they can fully contribute to the communities where they live.
The stories are grouped based on the primary themes that arise within each as they relate to the action areas of the Global Compact:
- rights to access services
- rights to decent work
- rights to information and safety
- the need for an inclusive and just immigration system.
Publication authors
This book was curated and produced by the Access Alliance Social Action team (Miranda Saroli, Fei Tang, Manuela Correa Escobar & Axelle Janczur). Special thanks to volunteers Greice Monteiro and Elda Dakli (story collection), Dr. Yogendra Shakya (call to action) and all the anonymous authors for their invaluable contribution to this product.
Content warning: Some of these stories mention abuse of a minor, domestic abuse, violence against women, and loss of family and loved ones, as well as other material of a sensitive nature that may be triggering for some individuals.
You can also view an Undocumented.Stories flipbook version here.
Related Access Alliance Activities & Products
Our Community-based Research Tools
We strongly advocate for community agencies (community health centres, settlement agencies) to start doing research and/or take a critical approach in how they collaborate on research projects conducted by academics. Our toolkits can enable research teams to involve historically marginalized and under-represented communities in leadership capacities as co-creators of knowledge and agents of positive change.