New York, Feb 6 (EFE)
A first bus with immigrants left this Monday and another is preparing for the night from Monday to Tuesday, as EFE was able to verify.
At the Port Authority bus terminal in downtown New York, a Venezuelan who identifies himself as Alfredo prepares to travel tonight for seven hours on a bus that will take him to Plattsburgh, in upstate New York, located 30 minutes south of the Canadian border and only 60 miles (96.5 km) from Montreal.
The subsidized trip ends in Plattsburgh. There, he says, he will have to take a taxi, to which he will pay 50 dollars to take him to the Canadian border.
“I’m leaving because I left three children in another country (Bolivia) and here the immigration process is slow, it takes a long time and a lawyer charges $10,000 to get you a work permit and Social Security, and doesn’t even guarantee you anything. A paralegal is cheaper but they can’t defend you in court,” said Alfredo, sitting in a corner of the huge station building.
Other Venezuelans who accompanied him said they were leaving the city for the same reasons: the difficulty and slowness of the immigration process.
Alfredo -as he prefers to be identified for security reasons- arrived on Sunday from New Jersey, -where he has been working for six months as a painter- and today, advised by compatriots, he went to the bus station.
Indeed, at the station he found staff from the Mayor’s Office, to whom he told that he wanted to go to Canada. After showing him the immigration documents, which he had been given upon arrival in the US at the southern border, the officials gave him a free ticket for the trip, he explained.
He also told EFE that they are making the trip to Plattsburgh to look for a secondary passage to Canada from there, because if he enters that country through a “legal border crossing, the Third Country Law will be applied to me” and they will expel him.
That law specifies that a possible refugee who arrives at an official border crossing and who has entered from the US is automatically rejected since they must process their asylum application in the first host country.
He assured, like other immigrants have said, that in Canada he can obtain a work permit in two months and that while he waits, the authorities will give him financial aid.
“I have always known about Canada, what I did not know was the option of getting to Plattsburgh and although there are immigration agents they let you in. The process is that you turn yourself in to the authorities, they send you to a hotel and there in two months you a work permit arrives, you don’t pay anything,” explained the immigrant, who plans to apply for political asylum in Canada.
“In addition, they give you financial help while you wait for the permit and when you start working you report it” after which “they do a socioeconomic study” to determine whether you still need the help or reduce it, argues Alfredo, a former soldier in the Venezuelan Navy.
Alfredo is among some 43,000 immigrants who have arrived in New York since last spring, mostly Venezuelans, from the Texas border. Although the city has embraced all of them, Mayor Eric Adams has declared a “humanitarian emergency” over the problem.
For months, the municipal administration has paid for free trips to other American cities, and since the last hours also to Canada. EFE
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