April 2025

 Our law student, Songyun Lu, will be writing our newsletters this spring/summer. Songyun immigrated to Canada with her parents when she was 12 years old. This newsletter is grounded in her personal experiences.

The name ‘immigrant’ can entail various implications depending on who you are asking. Is there a difference between my friend, whose British grandparents immigrated to Canada decades ago, and me, who immigrated to Canada one decade ago? Then again, is there a difference between the 18th-century British colonial settlers in Canada and the newcomers settling in Canada today? How about between the Chinese immigrants who had to pay the Chinese head tax under the Chinese Immigration Act in the late 19^th to early 20^th century and Chinese immigrants like my family today? Didn’t we all leave our birthplace, lured by the promise of a better life, and migrate to a foreign land? Yet, we are not all ‘immigrants,’ or at least not immigrants of the same sort.  

After two years in law school, I have learned a crucial yet unconventional truth: the duality of law as a powerful tool to both liberate some and exclude others, all under the veil of objectivity and neutrality. Immigration law, on one hand, invites newcomers and provides refuge for those in need. Still, on the other hand, it excludes those whom Canada deems to be unfit for Canadian society or unworthy of Canada’s protection. In one of the first few classes of my Immigration Law course, we looked at the objectives of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) including: “to protect public health and safety and maintain the security of Canadian society” and “to promote international justice and security by fostering respect for human rights and denying access to Canadian territory to persons who are criminals or security risks.” Then we learned about inadmissibility, where it is a low threshold for a foreign national to be found inadmissible on grounds including health, financial ability, and misrepresentation. The whole class was shocked to learn that someone could be found ‘inadmissible’ because they would be a ‘burden’ to Canadian society due to excessive medical needs, or they had innocently mispresented information. Anyone who has tried navigating the IRCC website would understand how incredibly confusing and complicated it can be to find clear instructions at times, even for lawyers! It is very easy to misunderstand an instruction and therefore innocently commit misrepresentation—how relevant is this in protecting public health and safety and maintaining the security of Canadian society? This is just one of many examples of the immigration system affirming the narrative that immigrants must be guarded against the resources and safety of Canadian society. While it is a very reasonable and valid objective to protect the security of Canadian society, many people are found inadmissible for trivial matters that can hardly be argued to be a ‘danger’ or ‘threat’. I realized then that one can be legally admitted into the Canadian borders, yet without being welcomed into Canadian society. This distinction is reflected in the bureaucracy of the immigration system, the unnecessary complications in the process, and the uncertainty of immigration policies. Everywhere in the immigration system, a foreign national is treated with the level of caution that is closer to a criminal than a mere stranger. The effects of this, with the intersectionality of racism, is why the label of ‘immigrant’ is forever attached to certain Canadians and even to their descendants, and why some others never get asked ‘where they are really from’ even if they had landed in Canada just yesterday.  

My parents immigrated to Canada from China when I was 12 years old—an age when the conscious identity begins to take shape in the bluntness of a child. Normally, we only take on the responsibility of finding our identity in relation to the world when we already know who we are as an individual. But many immigrant children are burdened with this question while figuring out who they want to be, before ever even having met their grandparents. I am now 24 years old, and I just finished my second year of law school with only one year left before graduating. Once a burden, my immigrant identity is now a valuable experience that led me to immigration law and this fabulous job. I am grateful and have decided that I am even grateful for the Canadian immigration system, even if it is far from perfect. The flipside of immigration law is the wonderful stories of finding freedom and refuge in Canada. I often hear about these stories, my parents’ being one of them, and I think, humbly, I am drawn to this area of law because I want to hear more of them.