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 News from Around the Americas | August 2007 
Mexican Refugee Requests Skyrocket
 Nicholas Keung - oronto Star
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| | Leonardo Zuniga, who filed a refugee claim on the grounds of being a victim of homophobia, is facing deportation. Mexican cases are heard within six months compared to 12 to 18 months. (Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star) |
Middle class wants to escape drug cartels, corrupt authorities
Manuel Lanveros could have come to Canada through normal immigration channels as a skilled immigrant.
Instead, the Mexican citizen simply hopped on a plane and asked for refugee asylum here because, he says, he couldn't afford to risk his life on the two-year wait.
An architect with 15 years of experience, Lanveros represents a new wave of Mexican refugees who contradict the desperate day-labourer stereotype: educated, upper-middle-class professionals who claim corrupt authorities are failing to protect them from drug cartels, abusive spouses or gay bashers.
According to the Immigration and Refugee Board, Mexican asylum claims have skyrocketed in a decade, from fewer than 1,000 a year to 5,000. For the past two years, Mexico has been Canada's top source country for refugee claims.
With the defeat this spring of a U.S. immigration bill that would have provided a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants – and the increasing hostility of many Americans – observers worry that Mexicans hoping for a safe haven will instead file claims in Canada.
Francisco Rico-Martinez, of the Faithful Companions of Jesus (FCJ) Refugee Centre, says 85 per cent of the advocacy group's clients are now Mexicans. As many as 15 new cases arrive at his door each week.
"My concern is we're going to be swarmed by Mexicans in the U.S. who don't have status there and can come to the border because they don't need a visa to come to Canada," says Rico-Martinez, himself a refugee from El Salvador. "We're starting to get calls from Mexicans in the States, five to six a week, hoping to file refugee (claims) in Canada. But we may not even know half of the Mexicans here who are without status, because they don't need visas to come."
Mexicans in Canada
Total visits to Canada (2006): 214,000
Asylum claims in 2006: 4,948
Acceptance rate: 28%
Asylum claims filed in first half of 2007: 3,036 (27% of all claims received)
Pending decisions: 5,730
Why Canada? Like Americans, Mexicans don’t need visas to visit. As such, they’re exempt from Canada’s bilateral Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States, which stipulates that asylum seekers must file refugee claims in the first country they enter. |
Anticipating a continued influx, the refugee board is now treating Mexican cases as a top priority. Some cases are heard within six months, compared with the more typical 12 to 18 months.
Last November, the board even sent a fact-finding mission to Mexico, "to address information gaps related to witnesses of crime and public-sector corruption, women victims of violence, and victims of discrimination or violence based on sexual orientation." In February, the researchers issued guidelines to help adjudicators make decisions.
Advocates argue that most Canadians view Mexico through the benign lens of a tourist – as a free, democratic country – and fail to recognize how corruption there can leave people vulnerable to crime. That blind spot, they say, is reflected in the high rates of rejection for Mexican refugee claims. "Our concern is whether Mexicans can get a fair hearing, when most people simply assume they are economic migrants," says Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees. "And we've seen our share of prejudice against the Mexicans."
Lanveros says he, wife Trisya and daughter Andrea, 8, fled to Toronto in March last year after a drug-trafficking ring demanded at gunpoint that he help them smuggle cocaine into the U.S.
"This bad guy paid me to build a big house for him in Hidalgo. One night, I left my laptop in the house (still under construction). When I went back, I caught them moving bricks of cocaine. There were more than 100 of them in many plastic bags," Lanveros recalls. He went to the state police for help, "But the cops said they needed me to bring evidence to them. That's impossible for me to do," explains Lanveros, whose son, Ruben, was born in Canada last year.
"And they asked for $150 to protect me. They just wanted my money and were not interested in protecting me."
Though he even provided immigration authorities with a copy of a police report from Mexico, Lanveros's refugee claim was rejected earlier this month.
Mary Jo Leddy, of Toronto's Romero House, says the Lanveros case isn't untypical. Since last spring, the resettlement agency has received a growing number of educated, professional Mexicans who "don't fit the image" of typical economic migrants.
"We've had lawyers, engineers, people working for non-governmental agencies, accountants and architects. They are the ones who do well in their country and can afford the plane tickets to Canada," she notes. "Their stories always relate to the collapse of the country to drug cartels. The issue is always about the lacking state protection due to the corruption situation there."
Mauricio Guerrero, a spokesperson for the Mexican Embassy in Ottawa, insists many of the new arrivals are "economically and socially driven," and that his government does safeguard citizens against corruption and drug lords.
"The reason we are seeing more Mexican refugees in Canada is related to the dishonest coyotes who are promoting Canada to people who want to immigrate here. They leave Mexico for Canada with the idea of a better experience, a better life," he says. "The government is on the right track to fight against drug dealing and corruption."
Leonardo Zuniga's refugee claim – on grounds of persecution because of his sexual orientation – failed in June last year.
He says Mexican authorities adopt laws and policies to crack down on corruption, discrimination and criminal activity that look good on paper.
But, "the reality is we have a big corrupt government. People simply do things in front of you, blatantly asking you for money. It's not just gay people; even straight people have no rights," says the 25-year-old, who studied marketing in university and now works as a mailroom assistant in Toronto. "People think, we have a gay pride parade in Mexico City, then it's safe. They don't know many gay people get killed in Mexico. It's a very macho country," adds Zuniga, whose claim was denied because the refugee board believed the state there could protect him.
"I think people here only have superficial knowledge about Mexico."
Citizenship and Immigration Canada says department officials meet with Mexican authorities on a regular basis, and the refugee board is being guided by three "persuasive" decisions issued last October.
But those decisions are themselves controversial, says Gerri MacDonald, president of the Refugee Lawyers Association of Ontario. All three were negative rulings, based on claims 18 to 30 months old.
"It raises the perception that some in the system want to reduce the number of positive decisions for Mexicans," complains MacDonald, whose group asked the refugee board to withdraw the decisions, to no avail. "It also undermines the legitimacy of the fact-finding mission."
The FCJ Refugee Centre's Rico-Martinez thinks it's only a matter of time before Canada imposes visa requirements on Mexicans, as it did on Zimbabweans and Argentines when it felt a need to curb the inflow of refugees.
"But we can't have a blank-cheque solution that discriminates (between) people who need to come for protection (and) those with resources to come," he says. "To address the issue, Canadian officials need to reach out to the Mexican public and educate them about our immigration and refugee system."
One key area both governments need to tackle, says the embassy's Guerrero, is the "coyotes" who thrive on the ludicrous business of selling the Canadian dream to Mexicans. |
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