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I am currently living in Canada with my young family. My husband is a South African lawyer with honors in political science.
We went through a lot of violent crime and poverty while living in south Africa and my husband was not able to find a decent job because of aggressive affirmative action. The only work he could find was pizza delivery! There were lots of murders in our areas and the children were not allowed to play outside without supervision. Often while walking outside we would be called "white dogs". Our neighbor was burned to death..My children witnessed everything. IT was a racial attack and we then made a decision to try and get out of the country. IT took my months of continues effort only by cel phone to try and get messages through to lawyers in the US. We had no internet facilities. Finally we got ONE positive reply. My husband was offered a j1 visa and the attorney offered to pay for our family to fly to the US.
During our stay in the US my children improved from being withdrawn and afraid to excelling at school! To them it was a privilege to be able to ride a bike and play outside! It all ended too soon as the visa was almost expired but somebody in Canada offered to employ my husband temporarily just to prevent us from being sent back to SA. The job only lasted three months and we found ourselves out of status. We filed refugee in Canada but have since discovered there could be an issue because of the third safe country agreement and we should have filed in the US. We have also since heard about another SA case. The person was granted refugee status in Canada but the South African government got involved and the case was sent back to trial. The SA government called the Canadian government"racist". a Canadian lawyer as recommended we withdraw in Canada as it will most certainly drag our case down and our chances of winning is almost nil. I have not been able to find a US lawyer confident enough take on our case as it is too "complicated". We are also told if we arrive at the US border we will be detained. I don not know what to do and we are running out of time!
We went through a lot of violent crime and poverty while living in south Africa and my husband was not able to find a decent job because of aggressive affirmative action. The only work he could find was pizza delivery! There were lots of murders in our areas and the children were not allowed to play outside without supervision. Often while walking outside we would be called "white dogs". Our neighbor was burned to death..My children witnessed everything. IT was a racial attack and we then made a decision to try and get out of the country. IT took my months of continues effort only by cel phone to try and get messages through to lawyers in the US. We had no internet facilities. Finally we got ONE positive reply. My husband was offered a j1 visa and the attorney offered to pay for our family to fly to the US.
During our stay in the US my children improved from being withdrawn and afraid to excelling at school! To them it was a privilege to be able to ride a bike and play outside! It all ended too soon as the visa was almost expired but somebody in Canada offered to employ my husband temporarily just to prevent us from being sent back to SA. The job only lasted three months and we found ourselves out of status. We filed refugee in Canada but have since discovered there could be an issue because of the third safe country agreement and we should have filed in the US. We have also since heard about another SA case. The person was granted refugee status in Canada but the South African government got involved and the case was sent back to trial. The SA government called the Canadian government"racist". a Canadian lawyer as recommended we withdraw in Canada as it will most certainly drag our case down and our chances of winning is almost nil. I have not been able to find a US lawyer confident enough take on our case as it is too "complicated". We are also told if we arrive at the US border we will be detained. I don not know what to do and we are running out of time!
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