Carving Stories
These are some among countless stories that need to be heard.
They share direct experiences of being detained, deported, and living with the daily indignities of poverty and precarity. They tell the impact of unjust migration policies and practices on people’s lives and families.
These accounts come from (im)migrant, refugee and nonstatus communities forced to live in the shadows. Individual identity markers have been removed. Yet each of these stories reveal broad, systemic patterns that must be recognized and understood as we build towards freedom for all (im)migrants and refugees and cultivate anti-colonial migrant justice.
We are all human.  People’s worth is not measured by their value in capital or labour, and are not inferior or undesirable due to their migration status, race, gender, class or ability. We envision and actively strive for a humanity where everyone has the right to sustenance and the ability to provide it, where we are all free of oppression and exploitation, where each of us has control over decisions that affect our bodies and our communities, and where everyone is able to live meaningfully in respectful and responsible relationships to one another and the earth.
 The story of a father of three
A nonstatus low-income father of three died the first week of January 2014. He lived in the Lower Mainland for over twenty years, but deemed ’illegal’ and without a work permit he was forced to work in the street economy. continue reading
A young woman arrived to the Lower Mainland to work as a domestic worker under the Live-In Caregiver migrant worker program. She worked for just over a year in the home of a middle-class family under abusive conditions: working over 14 hours a day, faced verbal abuse from her employers, and was forced to perform domestic chores beyond providing childcare. continue reading
