The Canadian dream is worth fighting for
a memoir tracing the love stories of couples facing war, conflict and border restrictions around the world.
Five years ago, I reached out to Hassan Al Kontar, a Syrian man who had been posting videos on social media about being“I’m hoping to reach Canada,” he told me from a waiting room at the airport, where he had been surviving on scraps of food that the janitors saved for him. As a journalist who had previously been based in Beirut, Istanbul and, later, Erbil in Iraq, I was unfortunately accustomed to hearing bizarre and often Kafkaesque stories of Syrians living in limbo after fleeing their country’s civil war. But Hassan’s case was the most bizarre. As he, he had lived illegally for a time in the United Arab Emirates “to avoid fighting [his] countrymen” in Syria, but managed to fly to Malaysia on a tourist visa.
It was something that I couldn’t imagine happening in my country, the United States. While Canada welcomed 40,000 Syrians during 2015 and 2016 alone, the U.S. welcomed just 10,000 Syrians during the Obama administration, a rate that slowed to a trickle under Donald Trump’s Muslim ban in 2017 . Six years later, however, there are some troubling signs on the horizon. Canada and the U.S. recently reaffirmed their commitment to the Safe Third Country Agreement , which requires asylum seekers in the U.S. or Canada to apply for refugee status in the first “safe” country they physically set foot in. While Canada
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