Are we there yet?

Our final day in Colombia. This is the day that we meet with Jeff Rogers, the person who leads the section of the Bogota visas office that looks at the refugee visa applications. He and his boss made a strong appeal to us: take more Visa Office Referred (VOR) cases.

Perhaps a little primary on refugee sponsorship is in order at this point. Most Sponsorship Agreement Holders (SAH), like MCC, that work with Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) do sometimes called “Named Sponsorships” almost exclusively. That means that typically someone will come into my office or to a Mennonite church and say that they have a friend or relative who they would like us to help them get to Canada. If they look like they meet the criteria of being a refugee, we can submit their name, along with a sponsorship agreement from a church, to be evaluated by the Canadian visa office near them. The process can take years and the success rate is not high, though we try and weed out cases which do not think will meet the criteria.

On the other hand, a VOR case is a file that the visa office has already processed and approved and the person or family is ready to go in a matter of months. Back in 1979, when MCC Canada got involved in helping churches sponsor “the boat people” all the cases were VOR. However, shortly after the first Southeast Asian refugees arrived, they started trying to get friends and family who were still in the camps to Canada. These were the first “echo” sponsorships.

Why does the Bogota visa office want us to take more cases they refer? There are a number of reasons. First they have a quota of how many cases they can refer each year as cases that the Canadian government sponsors (GARs). They have been busy the first part of this year and they filled about 55% of their quota this year. In theory there is no quota on how many Privately Sponsored Refugees (PSRs) they can send, though in practice their ability to process them is a limiting factor.

Jeff Rogers said that they get 35,000 applications for refugee status in the Bogota office and they only have room in their quota for about 5% of those. Unfortunately, he estimates that about a third of the cases that they process are in need of protection. So they want to do more, but they quota will not allow them to do this. He basically said that they can send us as many VOR refugees that we can handle.

This was a compelling proposal for us. We too had seen the need in Colombia for resettlement to Canada. The pressure to deal with the named sponsorship in our office is heavy and it takes up a lot of time. We will need to “re-tool” to get sponsoring churches interested in taking VOR refugees. We will have to promote awareness about Colombia among Mennonite Churches in Canada so that they will take on this challenge. Re-tooling and re-directing is something that we have been talking about; our program has just finished a major review and that was one of the recommendations. For me, this seems right at this stage in MCC’s history. It could be that this could be the next “Boat People” or Bosnian stage of our refugee sponsorship. It’s not clear to me how we can promote this passion among our constituents. It goes against current Canadian government policy that is focusing on a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Colombia based on its improvement in the realm of human rights, an improvement that MCC staff and human rights organizations are not sure they see.

At the airport, as we wound our way to the Air Canada ticket counter, we saw a family from the Caribbean coast in front of us with multiple suitcase. It was clear to us that they were refugees—probably Canadian Government Sponsored. Orlando, our coordinator from Alberta, started reminiscing about journey out of El Salvador 28 years earlier. He left that country two days after he visited a Canadian visa office with nothing but a small backpack and a plastic bag from the IOM.

Over at the side of the queue, we saw several IOM staff in their blue windbreakers and white plastic IOM bags that we had met the previous day. They were guiding a group of about 20 temporary Colombian workers on their way to work at a meat packing plant in Brooks, Alberta. They were mostly young men with no families with them. When they land in Toronto, They will be given a two year work visa that allows them to work at that one employer. The refugees in the line in front of us will have permanents resident status when they land in Toronto and they will be able to apply for citizenship in three years.

Our journey was coming to an end and their journeys were just beginning. Or was their journey just beginning? When does a journey begin? When does it end?