Every weekday morning, Ariana’s three younger siblings stare out their living room window and watch other children go to school. Their Edmonton home sits across the street from an elementary school, where yellow buses unload a gaggle of backpacked children. And each morning they ask their parents why they can’t go to school too. “We don’t feel like other kids,” they say.
Ariana and her siblings aren’t like other kids. “We came to Canada because my parents felt they were in danger in my country,” 13-year-old Ariana told me on a video call last September. She didn’t elaborate on the perils her family faced back home, but many Mexicans face threats of extortion, violence or kidnapping from narco gangsters. When Ariana’s family arrived in Edmonton from Mexico in 2019 they applied to stay in Canada as refugees. The federal government denied their claim in 2022. The decision rendered the family without status and therefore required them to leave Canada. Instead they decided to remain in Edmonton illegally, joining the ranks of Alberta’s undocumented.
Most undocumented Albertans strive simply to remain unseen. But this invisibility acts as both a cloak and a curse.
According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), an undocumented migrant is, simply, “an individual who has no authorization to reside and/or work in Canada.” The number of undocumented or “non-status” people in Canada is much more difficult to know. Estimates from academic sources range from 20,000 to half a million people—a range so vast as to be practically meaningless.
The overwhelming majority of non-status individuals in Canada, and in Alberta, first entered the country through legal means. Many are temporary foreign workers who have overstayed their work permits. The rest are believed to be international students with lapsed study permits, visitors whose visas have expired, or rejected refugee claimants like Ariana’s family. Many had been in Canada for years before they lost their status. A vanishingly small number sneaked into the country or were smuggled in. In my four years of research into migrant labour—documented and undocumented both—I’ve never heard a single story of anyone coming to Alberta this way.
Most undocumented migrants strive simply to survive and remain unseen. But this invisibility acts as both a cloak and a curse. Staying in the shadows makes it harder for undocumented people to be expelled, while at the same time allowing their plight to go unnoticed. They often work multiple under-the-table jobs, usually for less than minimum wage. They endure all manner of exploitation from employers, knowing that reporting abuse could lead to their own arrest and deportation. Undocumented Albertans are also ineligible for most government services, including medical care and, as with Ariana’s siblings, basic education. Their lack of status leaves them profoundly vulnerable.
While the federal government was considering Ariana’s family’s refugee claim, the three eldest children all attended the same Edmonton Catholic elementary school. Ariana’s littlest sister was still too young. By the time the IRCC rejected the family’s application, Ariana had graduated to junior high and moved on to a different school. Her brother and middle sister remained in the same elementary, however. Her little sister, now old enough for kindergarten, was enrolled there too.
Or at least Ariana thought so. She became suspicious when she returned one day from her junior high classes to find her siblings already at home. Her parents eventually told Ariana that the school’s administration refused to enroll her sister when they learned she was undocumented. And when they realized the whole family lacked status, they kicked out Ariana’s other two siblings. Because Ariana’s junior high didn’t check her immigration status—or at least didn’t concern themselves with it—she was spared.
Both of Ariana’s parents work long hours at under-the-table jobs and can’t afford childcare, so the three children usually stay home alone. “They mostly play outside in the neighbourhood,” Ariana said. Some undocumented parents bring their school-banished children to work with them. They’ll sit in a corner and stare at their phones for hours while their parents clean offices, for example.
When I spoke to Ariana in the fall of 2025, her middle siblings had already missed two years of school. Her little sister should’ve been in Grade 2 but she’s never attended school at all. Their mother bought an English language textbook, and she tries to give her school-less children lessons when she has the time. But she isn’t a teacher. Ariana worries as much for her siblings’ social development as their education. She fears that everything they’re missing now will affect their future. “And it’s not their fault,” Ariana said.
Ariana says her parents are considering returning to Mexico, weighing the risk from the threats they came to Canada to escape. “Canada is forcing a family back to a dangerous situation where they could lose their lives,” says Whitney Haynes, executive director of the Alberta Workers Association for Research and Education (AWARE). One of AWARE’s primary missions is to support workers with precarious immigration status, and their families.
Haynes says she reached out to the Edmonton Catholic School Board on behalf of Ariana’s family. She didn’t get far. “They refuse to sit in the same room or have any kind of phone call with us,” she says. Instead, she’s met with Division Support Services and the One World One Centre, which administer registrations for Edmonton’s public and Catholic school boards respectively. Haynes has spoken at trustee meetings and reached out to teachers and school administrators. She says the situation extends well beyond one family. “We know for sure Alberta is actively kicking out kids,” she said. “Teachers and principals are too scared to talk about the issue because it’s too political.”
Ariana’s parents don’t like to talk about their status either—not to their children and certainly never in front of outsiders. Even their friends don’t know they’re undocumented. “For my family, it’s something to try and hide,” Ariana said. “I don’t know if they’re scared or embarrassed.”
Ariana is neither. In December 2024 she addressed an Edmonton Public School Board meeting. She told the story of her parents losing status. “My parents have done everything they can to fix the situation,” she told the board, and reminded them that “every child in the world, regardless of their status, has a right to education.” She may have no legal right to remain in this country, but she refuses to believe this is just.
According to Alberta’s Education Act, to be “entitled to have access to an education program” in Alberta, a person must be a legal resident of Alberta and have a parent who is a legal resident of Canada. That “and” in the legislation is important. This means that even Canadian-born children—Canadian citizens, in other words—are not entitled to public education in Alberta if their parents lack status.
This wasn’t always the case. Previous versions of the Act had an “or” instead of an “and,” which entitled all Canadian-born children to education in Alberta regardless of their parents’ status. The “or” was replaced with an “and” when the new Education Act came into force in September 2019, under Jason Kenney’s newly elected UCP. Danielle Smith’s education minister, Demetrios Nicolaides, did not respond to questions about whether or not removing undocumented students from Alberta schools is his government’s policy. But Haynes says she first started hearing stories like Ariana’s in 2023, the same year Smith led the UCP to re-election.
These bakery workers felt gratitude towards an employer who paid them considerably less than the minimum wage.
Denying services to the children of undocumented parents has precedent in this province. Until 2016, Alberta denied these children medical care too. Alberta Health regulations at the time said, “babies born in the Province of Alberta to a non-resident of Alberta are not considered residents of Alberta and are therefore not eligible for coverage with the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan.” Alberta and Quebec were the only provinces with such a restriction.
This policy was changed through the efforts of an undocumented Filipina named Evangeline Cayanan. After she gave birth to her daughter McKenna Rose in Edmonton, a local clinic refused to perform her baby’s first checkup. Evangeline was dismayed. She reached out to Migrante, the provincial chapter of a national organization that advocates for Filipino migrants. Together, they started a campaign for a law that would guarantee health services for all Canadian-born children, regardless of their parents’ status. “I’m just worried about my baby,” Evangeline says in a campaign video. “I don’t want to beg for anything here. I just want to fight for her right as a Canadian. Just give everything that my baby should have.”
The campaign succeeded. In January 2016 Alberta’s NDP government introduced a new policy, called the McKenna Rose Law, which extended health coverage to all Canadian-born Albertans, regardless of whether or not their parents were visitors, unsuccessful refugee claimants or holders of expired permits.
Haynes has recently heard concerns from obstetricians, however, that the health rights of Canadian-born children of undocumented parents might be taken away again. Premier Smith’s government has mused about withholding provincial social programs from those lacking “Alberta-approved immigration status.”
Undocumented people themselves, of course, remain ineligible for health coverage. Doctors at some clinics will provide free primary care for non-status Albertans, but these are few and far between. Even if an individual can find a doctor willing to provide a gratis examination, pharmacists require an Alberta Health card before filling prescriptions. Non-status patients might get the care, but they won’t get the meds.
Some undocumented migrants also fear that health workers will report them to immigration authorities. As a result, they tend to quietly tolerate minor ailments and not seek care at all. Evangeline told me she is exceptionally careful at work, knowing she can’t access medical treatment. When she is sick, she goes to Google instead of a doctor. “It is self-remedy,” she told me.
Google, though, can’t deliver babies. The most common reason undocumented migrants seek medical care is to give birth. Childbirth is expensive and hospitals often turn away undocumented migrants who can’t pay.
In March 2024, Perla Estrada rushed to the emergency room of Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital. An ultrasound showed she had low amniotic fluid, and the doctor told her she needed an emergency C-section. After waiting several hours, and even though Alberta Health Services policy clearly states “you will not be denied emergency medical care in Alberta even if you do not have medical insurance,” a nurse told her she needed to pay $5,000 in advance before any surgeon would see her.
Perla had suspected that she, as an undocumented person, would have to pay for her baby’s delivery. Friends had told her the hospital would charge around $10,000, and Perla had started saving as soon as she found out she was pregnant. She managed to put aside $4,000, but not enough to cover the doctor. A Spanish-speaking nurse told her that “the department” at the Royal Alex had implemented this rule for patients without status, and that she should try another hospital.
A friend took her to Misericordia Community Hospital, where doctors performed the surgery and delivered Perla’s daughter, Violet. Perla told the CBC, “If I didn’t have a friend that helped me and took me to the other hospital, more likely I would have just come home, and something completely different would have happened.” Misericordia billed Perla afterwards.
Perla wasn’t the only undocumented mother-to-be in Edmonton asked to pay up front. Omar Yaqub, executive director of Islamic Family, a faith-based service organization, recalls an undocumented Tunisian woman who showed up for a scheduled C-section. Like Perla, the patient knew she’d have to pay for the delivery, and members of the organization offered to write the hospital a cheque. The anaesthesiologist, though, demanded $3,000 in cash. The woman wasn’t prepared to hand over a wad of bills before getting her epidural, says Yaqub, with the whole scenario seeming less like a medical procedure and more like a drug deal.
Being undocumented means more than simply lacking a right to services such as education and healthcare. It also means having no right to the protection of the law. This is not merely a bureaucratic circumstance but an all-encompassing identity. In her memoir The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio expresses the unique status of the status-less:
From the undocumented people I have loved, I have learned that all of us share something a bit peculiar, fantastical and controversial, which is this: We operate in this world like we are a little bit [outside] the law. This does not mean we are not law-abiding. We have to be extremely careful not to have any run-ins with the law—because even a traffic ticket can lead to deportation. We pay taxes, too… But as an undocumented immigrant, everything we do is technically against the law. We’re illegal.
Filipinos such as Perla and Evangeline have a colloquialism for this fraught condition: tago ng tago, which means “always hiding.” Before coming to Edmonton, Evangeline and a cohort of five other undocumented Filipinos worked off-book at a bakery in Scarborough. They packed bread for $7 an hour, more than three dollars less than Ontario’s minimum wage at the time. Their employer also rented them an apartment. “We were grateful,” Evangeline told me. “All that mattered at that time is we had work, we could survive and someone was helping us.” That the workers felt gratitude towards an employer who paid them considerably less than the minimum wage shows the position non-status people find themselves in.
Being undocumented means more than having no right to services. It means having no right to the protection of the law.
Arlene and her daughter Maya know this position well. Arlene gave birth to Maya while in Edmonton on a temporary foreign worker visa in 2011, two months before her work visa at Dairy Queen was set to expire. Maya’s father had abandoned them, and Arlene’s employer declined to renew her contract. “They didn’t even give me a reason,” Arlene said.
Arlene had suffered from depression since she was a girl, when her mother was kidnapped and murdered in Mexico City. Being rendered status-less in Canada, combined with postpartum depression, made Arlene despair. “I couldn’t handle it,” she said. Her family urged her to return to Mexico. She did, but returned to Edmonton in 2016. Maya, a Canadian citizen, didn’t need any papers, but Arlene came on a visitor visa. She worked as a live-in nanny under-the-table for an employer who promised to secure a work permit for her. The employer paid Arlene only $150 per week for more than 50 hours of work. Arlene knew she was being exploited and underpaid, but she had little recourse. Who could she complain to? Like all undocumented workers, Arlene didn’t want to out herself to the authorities and felt thankful to have a job at all.
Arlene’s employer never obtained a work permit for her. “I was cheated by that person,” she said. “I had a really bad time with her. I was suffering from emotional abuse, so I had to move.” Arlene left that job and remained in Canada after her visitor visa expired. The federal government rejected her application for permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds in 2020. She’s been undocumented and living tago ng tago ever since.
Maya is 14 now and goes to a junior high in Edmonton. Arlene fears attending her school concerts and other functions open to parents. She cites how in 2021, four Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers in New Westminster, BC, tailed an undocumented mother after she dropped her daughter off at kindergarten, then handcuffed her in an alley on her way home. The agents eventually released her, but the incident spooked Arlene. “I’ve heard stories,” she said. “I’m afraid something like that is going to happen to me.”
This precarity breeds fear. Undocumented people worry that the next knock on the door could be a CBSA officer. Another undocumented teenager in Edmonton told me how after receiving a prank call from someone pretending to be from the CBSA, her terrified mother hung blankets over the windows, turned the lights off at night, and kept her children home from school for weeks.
Arlene’s greatest worry is for her daughter. “Maybe if I was single, I wouldn’t care about being caught and sent back to my country,” she said. But Maya has lived nearly her entire life in Alberta. “She doesn’t know anywhere else.”
The number of undocumented people in Canada and Alberta will undoubtedly grow because of changes in government policy. Immigration policies meant to reduce the number of non-permanent residents—such as tightening eligibility for post-graduate work permits for international students and blocking people who’ve been in Canada for more than a year from seeking refugee status—could have the opposite effect. People with no legal way to remain in the country will retreat to the shadows instead. More Albertans will join the ranks of the “always hiding.”
Marcello Di Cintio’s books include Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers and Walls: Travels Along the Barricades.
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