A young new Canadian holds a flag as she takes part in a citizenship ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 17, 2019.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Anna Lekas Miller is the author of Love Across Borders, a memoir tracing the love stories of couples facing war, conflict and border restrictions around the world.
Five years ago, I reached out to Hassan Al Kontar, a Syrian man who had been posting videos on social media about being stuck in an airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur.
“I’m hoping to reach Canada,” he told me from a waiting room at the airport, where he had been surviving on scraps of food that the janitors saved for him.
As a journalist who had previously been based in Beirut, Istanbul and, later, Erbil in Iraq, I was unfortunately accustomed to hearing bizarre and often Kafkaesque stories of Syrians living in limbo after fleeing their country’s civil war. But Hassan’s case was the most bizarre. As he explained in a piece for The Globe and Mail two years ago, he had lived illegally for a time in the United Arab Emirates “to avoid fighting [his] countrymen” in Syria, but managed to fly to Malaysia on a tourist visa. “When that expired, I planned to go to Cambodia, but when officials refused to admit me, and I wasn’t allowed back into Malaysia, the airport became my home. No other country in the world would accept a Syrian without a work permit,” he wrote. He couldn’t go back to the UAE, and certainly couldn’t return to Syria, so now he was stuck in the airport, a real-life Tom Hanks à la 2004′s The Terminal.
I didn’t know what to tell Hassan when he shared his Canadian dream with me. Even though dozens of my Syrian friends from Beirut had eventually been granted asylum in Canada, I knew that the wait times were long and that they had filled out a myriad of paperwork to get there. It seemed far-fetched to have this kind of luck from an airport terminal, where his only connection to the outside world was his cellphone. I wished Hassan luck, but was not optimistic for him. Nevertheless, a few months later, he was granted a visa to Canada largely because of a group of volunteers who banded together to support him and didn’t give up.
It was something that I couldn’t imagine happening in my country, the United States. While Canada welcomed 40,000 Syrians during 2015 and 2016 alone, the U.S. welcomed just 10,000 Syrians during the Obama administration, a rate that slowed to a trickle under Donald Trump’s Muslim ban in 2017 (Syria was one of seven countries from which travel to the U.S. was severely restricted under Executive Order 13769).
Six years later, however, there are some troubling signs on the horizon. Canada and the U.S. recently reaffirmed their commitment to the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which requires asylum seekers in the U.S. or Canada to apply for refugee status in the first “safe” country (in this case, either the U.S. or Canada) they physically set foot in. While Canada did agree to resettle 15,000 migrants from Central and South America who arrive at the southern U.S. border, the agreement has effectively sealed the U.S.-Canada border to “irregular” land-border crossings and more closely aligned Canada’s refugee policy with that of the U.S.
For Canada, this approach is particularly tragic. As I’ve witnessed the concept of the “American Dream” dwindle away for many refugees in the U.S. in recent years, Canada has remained a beacon of hope – a place where people can imagine a future where they are no longer running from place to place, living in limbo. While the U.S. tends to treat migrants as a strain on the system, Canada has traditionally seen newcomers as an asset. As many refugee and immigration advocates have pointed out, the STCA assumes that both the U.S. and Canada are equally “safe” for asylum seekers, but one country has proven itself to be far more favourable to newcomers over the years than the other.
It is not always easy to be a host country. Canada’s ambitious resettlement programs, such as the Syrian refugee program, or the more recent target of settling 40,000 Afghan refugees, can lead to asylum and immigration backlogs that slow down the process and add strain for both refugees and the governments trying to host them. But the sense of hope provided by Canada’s approach to refugees is nothing short of magical for someone who has not only survived war, but often spent years living in limbo. The global trend for many countries around the world has been to crack down on asylum seeking in recent years. Canada should not join their ranks.
As a citizen of a country that is more or less safe, it is hard to imagine exactly what it feels like to seek asylum. But I get snapshots of it when I see friends who have been resettled as refugees in Canada post pictures from their hikes through breathtaking mountain ranges and ravines, giddy from the opportunity to enjoy the nature and hospitality of their new home. It has been years since I saw many of them, but somehow they look younger, and more free.