Living With Undocumented Migrants - Three Encounters

Originally published  in April 2024 on Heaven on Earth. Revised for republication on Journeys of Other Kinds in June 2026.

In the past couple of years, I encountered a number of temporary residents whose visas had expired. These were people who entered Canada before the border lockdown in March 2020 and later became undocumented, either by choice or because of the backlog in visa extension applications. While most international students, foreign workers, and working holiday visa holders returned home during the lockdown, some "migrants" remained in Canada without status. Between July 2020 and the writing of this piece, I crossed paths with more than a dozen people in this situation, often because I was renting basement suites and sharing common space with them. Three encounters stood out enough that I want to recount them here, not as a representative sample, but as the experiences that shaped how I think about this issue.

Ms. A came to Canada in 2017 with her family as refugees from Tunisia. Her family settled in Quebec, and after a year in a small Quebec town, she moved to Vancouver on her own. She did not work after her refugee settlement allowance expired in 2018, and instead collected income assistance. She told me she couldn't find work because her English was poor, but she never enrolled in ESL classes, and her attempts to earn money through social media didn't go anywhere either. Most days she stayed home, played music, and spoke with her parents on the phone. I don't know enough about her personal circumstances to comment on it, and in hindsight that's not really relevant to the point of this story — what stayed with me was watching someone with real barriers to employment make no visible effort to address them, year after year, while drawing on a system meant for people actively trying to get back on their feet.

Ms. B came to Canada from mainland China in 2018 as a foreign worker in the hospitality industry. When the pandemic hit, she was laid off and her contract was terminated. She collected CERB benefits during the lockdown, and when her employer reopened, she simply didn't go back — she moved without leaving a forwarding address and started working off the books as a cleaner, paid in cash. She also had a habit of hoarding: at one point she had five vacuums, fifteen oversized hard cases, and ceiling-high piles of garbage bags, kitchen items, and small appliances stacked in our shared common areas. The relationship deteriorated to the point that she physically assaulted me twice; both times I went to the local police station and reported it, showing them the bruises.

Ms. C came to Canada from Mexico in 2019 on a one-year student visa to study English. Her visa expired on August 15, 2020, and I don't know whether she ever extended it. I shared a basement with her starting in March 2024. She was rarely home, and when she was, she spent most of her time on the phone speaking Spanish, fiercely protective of the broom closet she'd filled with her belongings. What made the situation feel unsafe rather than just inconvenient was the steady stream of visitors who'd show up outside the house at odd hours and vanish just as quickly — and on one occasion, someone threw a rock at my window. I never found out exactly what she was doing, but after a while I began to suspect she was involved in moving stolen goods.

I'm aware that three stories — even a dozen — don't make a policy argument on their own, and I'm not claiming they do. What I can speak to is what it's like to live alongside this situation as an ordinary tenant: the sense of having no real recourse when a roommate won't work, won't leave, or won't stop crossing lines, with the added complication that their uncertain immigration status can make the situation harder to resolve through the usual channels. That's the part of this issue I don't see discussed enough — not the politics of who should or shouldn't be allowed to stay, but the practical toll on the people who end up sharing a house, a hallway, or a broom closet with someone the system has lost track of.