The Mayor’s Office new York promotes and finances the voluntary transfers of Venezuelan migrants in Canadaaccording to several testimonies collected by the press agency ECE of the beneficiaries of this trip which is processed at the same bus station.

A first bus with immigrants left on Monday and another was preparing for the night from Monday to Tuesday, as he was able to verify ECE.

At the bus station Port Authorityin downtown New York, a Venezuelan who identifies as Alfred was about to travel last night for seven hours on a bus that would take him to Plattsburghin upstate New York, located 30 minutes south of the Canadian border and only 60 miles from Montreal.

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 a work permit and social security , and doesn’t even guarantee anything. A paralegal is cheaper, but they can’t defend you in court,” Alfredo said, sitting in a corner of the huge station building.

Other Venezuelans accompanying him said they were leaving the city for the same reasons: the difficulty and slowness of the migration process.

Alfredo -as he prefers to be identified for security reasons- arrived on Sunday from new sweater-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 papers they gave him when he arrived in the United States at the southern border, the officials gave him a free ticket for the triphe explained.

He also indicated that they are making the trip to Plattsburgh to seek a secondary passage to Canada from there, because if he enters this country through a “legal border crossing, the law of third countries is will apply to me” and they will expel him.

This law specifies that a potential refugee who arrives at an official border crossing and who entered from the United States is automatically rejected since he must process his asylum application in the first host country.

He assured, like other immigrants, that in Canada, you can get a work permit in two months and that while you wait, the authorities will give you financial aid.

“I’ve always known about Canada, what I didn’t know was the ability to go to Plattsburgh and although there are immigration officers, they let you in. The process is you go to the authorities, they send you to a hotel and there, in two months, you get a work permit, you don’t pay anything,” explained the immigrant who is considering seeking political asylum in Canada.

“In addition, they give you financial aid while you wait for the permit and when you start working you report it”, after which “they do a socio-economic study” to determine if you still need the aid or reduce it, argues Alfredo, a former soldier in the Venezuelan navy.

Alfredo is part of approximately 43,000 immigrants who have arrived in New York since last spring, mostly Venezuelans, from the Texas border. Although the city welcomed them all, the mayor Eric Adams 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.

(With information from EFE)

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