Long, slow path to Canada

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This article was published 22/09/2017 (2948 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Refugees and their sponsors who wait years and fulfil a multitude of requirements before Canada welcomes them say they’re frustrated by the delays — especially when they see others simply walk across the border from the U.S. and make a claim.

“They’ve done everything they were supposed to do,” said Jim Mair, chairman of Winnipeg’s North End Sponsorship Team (NEST), which recently welcomed a Congolese family that waited nearly a decade to get to Canada.

“We could not believe we would ever come to Canada,” said Mbuyi Jean Kazadi, who arrived Wednesday with his wife, Martha Mukendi, their four children and Mukendi’s three sisters.

They are one of three refugee families who fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo and were privately sponsored by NEST. They had waited almost a decade to have their applications processed and approved.

“Nine years is a long time,” the man who speaks Tshiluba, one of the Bantu languages spoken by close to six million people in Congo, said through an interpreter.

Two other families sponsored by NEST are still waiting. They’re single-parent families living in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. Their files have been buried under a massive pile of refugee cases at Canada’s visa office in Nairobi for years.

“It’s one of the busiest visa offices in the world,” Mair said.

It covers 18 countries, including Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Burundi and Rwanda — countries from which large numbers of refugees come. The Nairobi office is by far the slowest in the world for privately sponsored refugees, the Canadian Council for Refugees said in a 2010 report.

The Kazadi-Mukendi family who landed in Winnipeg on Wednesday, lucked out when their file was transferred from the Nairobi visa office to the office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Mair said. “Things moved along at light-speed compared to past years.”

The other two Congolese families — led by two single parents who are sisters — are still waiting.

Betty Ejira has four children under 10 years of age and has endured more than eight years of living in the refugee camp, and can’t understand why it’s taken so long to process her application. She thinks Canada has forgotten about her and her children.

Her elder sister, Rose Ejira, has 11 children. Her family completed and passed all of Canada’s requirements in the spring and has been waiting for the green light to get here.

In July, Rose and her family were thrilled when they got a call to go to the International Organization for Migration office. “(It’s) where you go to make travel arrangements,” Mair said.

When refugees travel to their new home country, they’re given white plastic IOM bags containing documents that help with their resettlement. Rose and her family — including one of her daughters who was attending high school 10 hours away from the refugee camp — made the trip to the office. They were stunned when they arrived and found they’d been duped.

“The IOM staff said, ‘What are you all doing here? We never phoned you,’” Mair said.

“It was a dirty, lousy trick. It gave them false hope.”

Now the clock is ticking for Rose and her family. If they don’t get into Canada by Oct. 8, their medicals will expire and they will have to arrange for new checkups and tests and have to wait many more months.

Her younger sister, Betty, has seen what Rose has endured for eight years and told NEST she’s considering withdrawing her family’s application for sponsorship. Their file hasn’t moved as far along as Rose’s family, and Betty is wondering if it ever will, Mair said.

“She’s very despondent and frustrated,” he said.

Extremely long processing times have “multiple and profound” impacts on those applying, as well as on others involved, the Canadian Council for Refugees says. While they’re waiting, refugees are not protected and sponsors may lose motivation, it says in its 2010 report.

The longer the wait, the more likely it is an applicant’s information will change as people get married, have children, or lose a spouse, Mair noted. NEST’s sponsorship of the three families originated with 16 people; nine years later, there are 25 people in the three families. The changes can add to their processing times, Mair said, adding Betty’s husband left her last year.

“Applications that take eight or nine years to complete are exceptional and typically due to circumstances outside of IRCC’s control,” said Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada spokeswoman Faith St. John.

Delays from local governments in issuing exit permits necessary for refugees to leave the country or changes in family composition over time require new or repeated processing steps, she said in an email.

Mair understands why asylum-seekers are taking a much quicker — if not guaranteed — route into Canada through the U.S. He said half-jokingly the NEST families might have been better off getting into Manitoba that way.

“If I had known — if I had a crystal ball — I could have sent them money to fly here,” he said. “It’s a crime and a shame that the government has made them wait all these years.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca