Vol. 79/No. 27      August 3, 2015

The event was organized by the Non-Status Action Committee, a group “fighting to get everyone living in Canada without a status to gain their permanent residency,” committee leader Serge Bouchereau told the crowd.

Immigrants affected by the end of the moratorium were given six months to apply for permanent residency on humanitarian grounds, with a June 1 deadline.

Some applications have been rejected, but so far nobody has received a deportation letter, said immigration consultant François Jean-Denis. “This is a result of the fight that we have waged, but we need to fight harder to stop the deportations entirely,” he said. There have been several vigils and demonstrations against deportations, including a march here of 500 May 31.

Jean-Denis called for pressing the Quebec government to accept the immigrants. As a product of the Quebecois struggle against national oppression in the 1960s and ’70s, the Quebec government decides who can settle here. In 2002, responding to pressure, the provincial government used this power to allow hundreds of Algerian immigrants who had fled civil war to stay.

“A quarter of a million people of Haitian descent face deportation today in Dominican Republic,” Frantz André Trouillot, spokesperson for the Actions Committee against Decision 168-13, told the meeting. He described broad international support won since 2013 against the Dominican government’s moves to deny citizenship to residents whose parents or grandparents were undocumented immigrants from Haiti. “We need to work together,” he stressed.

Some 40 people picketed July 9 at the Montreal office of the Quebec Minister of Immigration and Diversity to demand all refugee claims be accepted.  
 
 
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