By her own admission, Jona Zyfi’s life has been an “adventurous story:” one marked by the kind of fear, hope, resilience and relief most people will never know.
At age seven, Zyfi was a child refugee claimant smuggled into Australia under a false name. At 16, after a forced return to her native Albania, she emigrated to Canada carrying only a suitcase and teddy bear.
Today, she’s a PhD candidate with the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, examining how public policy shapes the plight of asylum seekers and migrants in Canada. Her work is shedding valuable light on some of the little-known — and sometimes shocking — injustices faced by refugee claimants in a country widely thought to be among the most welcoming and multicultural in the world.
“The work that I do is very much informed by my lived experiences,” she says. “It’s where I find the strength to do it.”
One might ask: why is Zyfi examining the refugee experience through the lens of criminology, and not political science?
“Lots of people have asked me that,” she says. “Even I had moments when I’d wonder, am I in the right department? But the deeper I go into my research, the more confirmation I get that I am doing the right thing.”
This is due to the phenomenon of “crimmigration” — a term that’s widely used to describe how refugee claimants are regularly subjected to processes traditionally associated with criminal justice.
“Immigration is an administrative field, while the criminal justice system is a lot more heavy-handed,” Zyfi explains. “And yet, we’re using criminal justice mechanisms to deal with what should be an administrative process. That doesn’t make sense.”
In some ways, she says, Canada’s approach to refugees is a good news story. In the last decade, for example, the country has welcomed over 40,000 Syrian refugees, and has been in the vanguard of acceptance for those fleeing persecution on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.
But there is bad news too. Many of us are unaware that children can be held in detention with or without their parents. Or that adult asylum seekers unable to be accommodated in holding centres have been detained in provincial jails, undistinguished from those serving criminal sentences.
Canada is also one of the few countries in the Global North where there is no legal limit on detention — meaning that claimants can spend years in jails or holding centres before their cases are heard.
“They rarely get access to legal aid, and many of them can’t speak the language,” Zyfi says. “So they don’t even understand what’s happening. They’re unaware of their rights, and terrified of being deported.”
Zyfi is particularly interested in the role technology plays in immigration and asylum processes and application assessment procedures. In an effort to reduce dependence on migrant detention, some asylum seekers are now granted temporary freedom but monitored in ways that are highly controversial.
These methods include the use of electronic ankle monitors as well as voice reporting via cellphone— both of which can fail if batteries or cell reception run out. Facial recognition software is also gaining in popularity.
But even a small technical mistake, Zyfi argues, can place a claimant’s life in danger. “There’s this idea that technology is going to solve all our problems,” says Zyfi. “It’s going to make faster decisions, better decisions. The decisions are faster, but that doesn’t always mean that they are better.”
Zyfi’s deep concern for the rights of asylum seekers is natural: she was once one herself.
Born shortly after the fall of communism in Albania, her early life was spent amid the anarchy and civil insurrection that followed the collapse of the country’s economy. “We had to hide under the tables, because bullets could fly through at any minute,” she remembers. “One flew through our balcony window. The arms depots were open; anybody could get bullets, a grocery bag full of grenades, whatever they could find. It was a free-for-all.”
Using a false name, Zyfi made her way with her mother and sister to Australia through a human smuggling network. But in 2005, the family was expelled from Australia when a calmed Albania was deemed a safe country of origin. “I remember my mother packing up our entire life in a shipping container,” she says.
Four years later, Zyfi came to Canada; and two years ago, after a lengthy series of applications and various immigration statuses, she was finally granted citizenship.
Now, she is firmly committed to making life better for other migrants and refugees. That means, among other things, granting them a bigger say in decisions that affect them. In policymaking, “our stories are not being incorporated in a meaningful way,” she says. “To me, that is the saddest part.”
The groundswell of private support for Syrian refugees — Zyfi herself was an enthusiastic sponsor — shows that caring for survivors of global crisis is a Canadian value. But she says that civil society alone cannot provide the support needed, and the government can do more: not only for immigrants deemed to be economically desirable, but for those whose lives are in jeopardy.
“Historically, immigration has been key to the Canadian economy. It has also been a fundamental tenet of nation building and multiculturalism,” Zyfi says. “But we are doing the bare minimum. We have the capacity to do so much more.”