Thursday’s San Jose Mercury News featured a front-page sob story, a genre that seems to be appearing more frequently [1] for some odd reason.
There’s a drunk-driving, three-times-deported illegal alien father who has a citizen wife and three US kids: they’re deciding what to do now that daddy is facing a free ride back to Mexico via Uncle Sam. The hispanic mom Lourdes Barraza says, “There’s no way I could take my daughters to Mexico,” a country she “fears.” So why did she hook up with an illegal alien Mexican? Did she think Obama would be President For Life?
So Lourdes is considering lucky Canada as the family’s next squat. However, while illegal alien pests may imagine a snowy but warm welcome [2] with lots of free stuff up north, the rescue impulse toward foreign moochers is wearing thin among the Canadian citizenry.
A Forbes article from March 20, 2017, Illegal Immigrants May Not Find Warm Welcome in Canada [3], cited a Reuters/Ipsos poll [4] showing 48 percent of Canadian respondents thought the recent border crossers should be sent back.
So perhaps Lourdes should reconsider Mexico. Not everywhere is a crime hotspot [5], and the kiddies can absorb lots of Mexican diversity which we have been told is superior to our American culture [6].
Fearing deportation, one San Jose family looks to Canada [7], San Jose Mercury News, March 28, 2018
SAN JOSE — If her husband is deported, Lourdes Barraza is set on moving the entire family — to Canada. She can’t bear the thought of moving their girls to his native Mexico, a place she fears.
With a judge’s decision imminent on her husband Fernando Carrillo’s immigration case, Barraza wonders if she and her three daughters, all U.S. citizens, will have to leave the only country they’ve known to be with him.
But would Canada accept them?
The family is part of a wave of people — concerned about an uncertain future in the U.S. under the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy — who are looking for refuge in other countries, especially Canada, flooding its border in staggering numbers with the hope of starting fresh.
But Canadian immigration officials — overwhelmed by the need for resources and an unprecedented backlog of asylum requests — are pumping the brakes and in recent months have warned people to think twice before rushing to cross the northern border.
“There’s no way I could take my daughters to Mexico,” said Barraza, 37, whose husband was arrested by immigration officers in October after dropping off one of their daughters at her San Jose daycare. “If it was just me and Fernando, we could go and start anywhere. But we’re talking about taking our kids out of the country that they were born in and that they’ve known. That’s my anxiety more than anything as a mother.”
So Barraza is prepared to leave San Jose and apply for permanent residency in Victoria, British Columbia, a place they only know through online searches as a safe, picturesque, affordable city with good schools on Canada’s Pacific coast.
In 2017, Canadian officials processed a total of 50,400 asylum claims, compared with 24,000 claims in 2016 and 16,100 in 2015, according to data from the Canadian government. By February of this year, officials had processed nearly 8,000 claims.
“It’s a massive increase of individuals seeking asylum in Canada since the start of Trump’s administration,” said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think-tank in Washington, D.C.. “It’s a lot more about the rhetoric of the (Trump) administration than it is about its policy.”
Still, getting asylum in Canada is far from a guarantee, Pierce said.
People fleeing war and persecution in their home countries often look for safe haven in the U.S. and Canada and file for asylum. The Canadian government grants this protection to people who would be in significant danger — of torture or murder, for example — if they had to return home. But proving that is difficult, especially for Mexicans, who can’t always show they’re in grave danger if they return to Mexico.
Barraza said she doesn’t want her daughters exposed to corruption and violence in Mexico, which experienced a record high murder rate in 2017. But the family isn’t seeking asylum in Canada, just a chance to apply for permanent residency. In that case, potential immigrants must show they have certain professional skills that would make them assets to Canada’s economy, according to Rudolf Kischer, an immigration lawyer in Vancouver.
Carrillo — a cable TV installer with a drunken-driving conviction and prior deportations on his record — complicates things, he said, because Canada generally isn’t welcoming of people who were in the U.S. illegally.
Most U.S. expats who file asylum claims or who apply for residency in Canada face an uphill battle. “The unfortunate thing is I think a lot of those people are misinformed,” Kischer said.
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