This action-research project had two objectives:
- To assess the ways in which refugees to Canada attempt to bring their families to Canada, and to record where they have encountered success and obstacles, and using this context
- To produce training materials that will guide refugees, and their support communities, in identifying effective ways to bring family members to Canada.
What was our approach?
This research project aimed to construct a “how-to” guide that provided refugees, and their support communities, with instructions and guidelines for bringing their families to Canada as efficiently as possible. In so doing, it directly contributed to the building of resilience among refugees.
It was essential that we developed an understanding of what legal instruments refugees have available to them to support the migration of their families and what kinds of obstacles they face in accessing them. In this research project, this material was collected and collated to produce clear and effective background and training materials, to enable newcomers and their support communities (including both sponsors and lawyers), to identify the best pathways forward in their attempts to reunite refugee families in Canada. This project brought together community partners across Ottawa, which has received thousands of refugees in the last several years (Miller 2016; Mussa 2016), to collaboratively support the building of resilience among refugees to Canada. This research was being done with a specific focus on refugees -who face unique challenges in re-uniting with their families -but the resources generated will be valuable to a wider set of newcomers to Canada.
September 2018:
- Legal Report Draft: On complementary pathways for refugee family admission. This working report was be made publicly available by the Refugee Hub and OLIP. It detailed the opportunities for family members of refugee refugees to migrate to Canada as well as how frequently/effectively they are used to resolve family separation. The first draft of this report was available in September 2018, in conjunction with the training materials. We circulated it at this time to legal experts and immigration settlement stakeholders for their comments and amendments. The goal was to produce a full report by December 2018.
- Training materials: The legal research that we conducted was collated in usable and accessible form to produce training materials available for rapid use by refugees, their sponsors and their legal teams. Our objective was to have a working draft of these training materials available for public use by September 2018. Over the year of the grant, we revises and edited the training materials to make them better able to meet the needs of their users.
- Academic articles: I produced two academic articles. One article drew on interview data and will examine how newcomers to Ottawa cope with the challenges associated with family separation. This article contributed to the small but growing academic literature on the experience of refugee newcomers to Canada, especially as it pertains to their long-term resilience in the face of the struggles of integration. A second article examined the extent to which the challenges faced by refugees in achieving family reunification violate their basic human right to be with their family. This article contributed to the political theoretic debate on the duties possessed by host states to the refugees they welcome. These were written and submitted for publication in June 2019. Additionally, I had opportunities to present both these articles at appropriate conference and workshop venues.
Principal Investigators:
- Luisa Veronis, lveronis@uottawa.ca
Co-investigators:
- Patti Tamara Lenard, patti.lenard@uottawa.ca
Community Partners:
- Refugee613
- Refugee Sponsorship Support Program at the Refugee Hub
- Refugee Sponsorship Training Program
- OLIP
- Lenard, Patti Tamara. (Forthcoming). ‘Family reunification: A social resilience approach to integration’ (with Stéfanie Morris), accepted for inclusion in N. Sultana, J. Shields and V. Preston (eds.) Resilience and Integrating International Migrants in Canada, McGill Queen’s University Press.
- Research Digest: Refugee sponsorship and family reunification in Canada
- Research Digest: Parrainage de réfugiés et réunification familiale au Canada
- Lenard, Patti Tamara. (2021). ‘Refugee sponsorship and family reunification; (with Stéfanie Morris and Stacey Haugen), Journal of Refugee Studies, 34/1, pp. 130-148.
- Morris, S. & Lenard, P. (2021, May). “Family Reunification: A Social Resilience Approach to Integration”. In BMRC-IRMU Webinar on Migrant Resilience in Canadian Cities: People, Institutions and Policies webinar on Immigrant families: A Source of Resilience, May 26, 2021.
