It was a chilly Wednesday evening in February, and the city of Montreal was settling down. Through the frosted glass walls of his office, Frantz André could see the silhouettes of people bundled in winter coats shuffling through the halls, heading home. But André’s work was only getting started.
On his desk towered precarious stacks of manila folders stuffed thick with immigration paperwork. Each represented a family that André was helping seek refuge in Canada. These dossiers, as he called them, contained the contours of entire lives – decades of addresses, jobs and migration histories. After that night, André would go on to spend another 48 hours holed up in this office, weaving those details into formal applications for asylum.
André isn’t an immigration lawyer. A retired businessman with a background in the hospitality industry, he started lending his time to migrants’ issues as a volunteer a little over a decade ago. His involvement picked up over time, and eventually he became well-versed in the labyrinthine workings of Canada’s immigration system. When he retired in 2017, he decided to dedicate his newly vacant schedule to helping people apply for asylum on a full-time basis, and at no cost to migrants themselves.
Today, André has more than 400 dossiers open, each corresponding to a claim. Across the province of Quebec, word has spread about the kindly retiree who helps people get their “brown papers”, a colloquial term for the documentation that denotes official asylum-seeker status. The papers are valuable because they allow people to get work, housing and other forms of assistance while they wait out their claims. Though André has always been busy, he’s become particularly sought-after over the past year.
In recent years, Canada has seen a significant increase in asylum seekers, many driven by civil unrest or natural disasters in their countries of origin. In 2022, immigration and border agencies processed more than 91,000 asylum claims, a more than threefold increase compared to the year prior. When compared against 2019, the year before pandemic restrictions curtailed travel, last year’s numbers still represent an over 40% increase.
In January of 2023 alone, the most recent month with available data, nearly 11,000 people filed asylum claims, double the number for the same time a year prior. Nearly half of these claimants entered the country through unofficial border crossings; the most notable of these is a path called Roxham Road, a junction between New York state and the province of Quebec that has recently become the subject of political consternation and heavy news coverage. (The crossing was closed in late March.)
Amid this backdrop, an informal network composed of WhatsApp group chats and word of mouth is directing an unprecedented number of newcomers André’s way. He rarely turns people down, and he bristles at what he perceives as a hostile tone in the press and among the public toward recent migrants.
“They’re not numbers,” André said. “They’re human beings.”
***
André himself knows just how isolating and uncertain migration can be. Born in Haiti in 1955, he was separated from his parents at the age of six, when they moved to Canada for work and left him and his sisters behind. For four years, André didn’t see them, and he didn’t know if he ever would again.
“I never got angry at my parents, but I was angry at the situation, angry at life,” he recalled of the time. He acted out in school and was often sent to the principal’s office for defying his teachers. “I thought that my sisters and I didn’t deserve that.”
His longing for his parents always grew particularly acute around Christmas. He envied his classmates who could count on spending the day with their parents. Even now, at 68, André struggles during the holidays.
When he learned at the age of 10 that his parents had finally found a way to bring him and his sisters to Canada, he was ecstatic. He recalls looking down toward the earth from his first plane ride, bewildered that the islands and waters of the Caribbean weren’t actually labeled by name in a neat font the way they are on maps. When he finished the first leg of his journey in New York and caught sight of his mother after four years apart, his eyes stung with tears, though he can’t recall if it was due to the longing or the unfamiliar cold.
Today, he sees these personal experiences mirrored in each of the families he helps.
“Every time there is a success, it’s my success,” he said. “It makes me think of how my parents felt when they finally got their citizenship.”
Often, when migrants obtain permanent legal status, it enables them to sponsor their relatives to join them in Canada. When he hears about such cases, particularly those involving children, he’s transported back to the moment he learned his own family would be reunited.
For many, applying for asylum on one’s own can be confusing or even impossible. The process has been digitized, but many asylum seekers don’t have reliable internet or easy access to a computer to complete it. Or they can’t communicate in English or French, the country’s official languages. (André can also speak Creole and Spanish, and he enlists Google or his friends to interpret for native speakers of other languages.) In technical language, André takes on the role of a “non-paid representative” for the people he helps. In reality, this looks like a hybrid of translation, bureaucracy navigation and tech assistance.
But perhaps André’s biggest responsibility, and the most time-consuming one, is that of storytelling. To be granted asylum, migrants have to provide a convincing basis for seeking refuge in Canada. These personal stories are the bedrock of every application, and André helps migrants write them in a way that effectively conveys the risks they face if sent home.
“When people go through trauma,” André said, “often they cannot articulate what happened. They don’t remember dates, they don’t remember names. A lot of things that have been forgotten.” Unlocking the key details needed to reconstruct one’s personal history often requires a lot of interrogation, sensitivity and patience.
Because he isn’t a licensed attorney, and because he doesn’t charge anything, André doesn’t refer to the people he helps as clients. They’re his protégés, he said in French. People he protects, as much as he can. Many of the protégés come from Haiti and Central America and fear gang violence back home. More recently, he’s been seeing more people from Turkey, who have been displaced by recent earthquakes.
But migrants who seek help from André don’t just rely on him for legal aid. He also hears them out on personal problems and family disputes, and uses social media to flag resources like local food and winter coat drives. In January, André flew to Miami to return the ashes of a migrant who had recently died to his widow, because she couldn’t travel to Canada to retrieve them herself.
“He has been a mentor for us,” said one of André’s protégées, who asked to be identified by her middle initial, T, because her status is uncertain. T said André had helped welcome her into the Haitian community in Montreal. He has invited her family, including her husband and their child, to migrants’ rights rallies, and has lent her an ear when she faced abuse in her workplace.
T applied for asylum with André’s help in 2019, after hearing other migrants mention his name at a YMCA. At the time, he had an office in the city’s downtown, and the queue of protégés waiting for help “was like a McDonald’s line, but longer”, she recalled with a laugh. Just a week before we spoke, she had passed his name on to another newcomer.
Today, André schedules people into specific time slots. Even with some semblance of a system in place, the work keeps piling up. Every morning, he wakes up to multiple messages from unknown numbers, often new arrivals referred to him by other people he’s helped in the past. During one of our interviews, he had to pick up three urgent calls, and declined 12 less urgent ones. He stresses that he’s not a hero or a saint, and that the nature of the asylum process means that many people who apply for it will get rejected.
“Have I disappointed people? Yes,” he said. “I’m not perfect. Most likely, there are people that are upset with me.”
When a migrant’s asylum claim is rejected, and they run out of opportunities to appeal the denial, they’re ordered to leave the country. Sometimes, André accompanies them to the airport to see them off, so that they’re not alone in their final moments here.
He sees his work as a way to act meaningfully, after years of working in a career that he now occasionally feels ambivalent about. For decades, he worked for lucrative hospitality chains such as the parent companies of Olive Garden and Tim Hortons, helping them expand their markets across North America. “I was making companies rich, and enriching myself,” he said. He sees his work helping migrants seek and obtain asylum as a way to embody his long-held values, as opposed to simply articulating them.
“We have a responsibility to be coherent,” he said. “We have a responsibility to walk the talk. And I’m going to keep on walking until, I guess, I’m dead.”
•••
For the sake of his own health, André does try to maintain some limits, including dedicating days to himself and turning his computer off every now and then. Despite these efforts, he still ends up working long nights, which sometimes stretch into the next day. He admits that he occasionally even prefers the solitude of being the only person in his building. ”There’s no distraction,” André said. “There’s no noise.”
To keep himself company, he’ll often blast music, typically rock or French classics that his family enjoyed growing up, like Neil Young and Edith Piaf. He doesn’t have to worry about bothering others when he has the entire building to himself, he laughed. When I asked him if he takes breaks for meals, he smiled and pulled a tub of Dan-D Pak brand nut mix out of a desk drawer.
André’s family knows that he’s always been a workaholic, so his long nights aren’t all that surprising.
“He’s at the core of a lot of issues that are happening across the diaspora,” said Niki André, Frantz’s youngest child. “He has ultimate compassion. That’s what makes him so good at his work, but it also has such a physical and emotional strain on him, because he’s always thinking about the people that he’s working with and the people back home.”
Though he works mostly on his own, André says he draws from an informal network of support. His friends help with translation. He often directs protégés to lawyers if their cases are complex. While he works for free, he does accept money that migrants have offered to cover the cost of making copies of their paperwork, though he never demands it. The office he works from in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood in the north of Montreal is a room offered to him free by a local non-profit. He recently ordered a lounge chair for it, the kind that can lie flat and that vacationers bring to the beach, except he plans to use it for naps.
Most of the time, André leaves his office around midnight. The emptied winter streets make him feel like he’s on his own planet. As he pushes through rain or snow, he only wishes there were more hours in the day, more days in the week, so that he could do more work on the towers of dossiers that remain stacked on his desk.
In some ways, he believes the work helps him as much as it helps new migrants. André suffered from a severe bout of depression in 2010, a time during which he was hospitalized and then moved back in with his own parents. Though the help he provides asylum seekers now consumes the bulk of his days, he insists that it buoys him in ways he never anticipated, imbuing what would otherwise be long stretches of idle time with a sense of purpose.
“What motivates me is to feel and to know that I exist,” he said. “What I’m doing here justifies that I’m alive and that I’m well.”
