Alex Dobrota

Ahmed Mustapha (right) with wife Émilie Laporte

The cab dropped Ahmed Mustapha a few hundred meters away from his destination, in sight of the Lacolle U.S. border station. Across the barren field and into the pitch-black night was Canada —the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. With a mix of excitement and fear gnawing at his stomach, the Palestinian refugee started walking towards the brightly lit Canadian flag in the distance.

But on the steps of the Canadian border office, he came to a rude awakening.

"I told the lady 'I'm here to claim refugee status—I am from Palestine ,'" recalls Mustapha. "She said, 'Is that a country?' I said that it was a country. I was so offended. This moment was a turning point. I never knew there was such a group of people who were stateless."

Three years later, Mustapha, now 26, still belongs to that group. He is part of close to 40 Palestinian refugees who live in Montreal and are facing deportation back to the refugee camps of the Middle-East.

During his three-year stay in Canada , Mustapha married a Canadian woman, learned to speak French with a Quebecois accent and learned to like Canadian winters. He enjoys ice-skating and skiing, and he misses the Expos dearly. Some students might recognize him from behind the counter at Al-Taib, a Lebanese restaurant that is a popular Concordia hangout.

But although he adopted Canada , Canada never adopted him. Last year, his refugee claim was rejected by the immigration board. And to this day, he remains a stateless refugee—a fate that was laid out for him even before his birth.

Barred from opportunities

His grandparents fled Palestine in 1948 when the state of Israel was created. Frightened by rumors of massacres, they made their way into South Lebanon , and settled in the camp of El-Buss, where Mustapha was born in 1978.

He lived in a two-bedroom house with his brother and his five sisters. Water shortages, blackouts and lack of food were his daily reality, punctuated at times by bombings and military raids on the camp. Among children of the camp, Ahmed distinguished himself by his skepticism towards religion.

"Although I grew up in an Islamic school, religion was like mathematics and physics for me. I'm not comfortable with religion."

It turned out he would be more comfortable with chemistry.

At 17, he won a scholarship to study chemical engineering at the Middle-Eastern Technical University in Ankara , Turkey . But upon graduating in 2000, he was faced with a dilemma.

He couldn't go back to Lebanon and live with his family, because Lebanese law bars Palestinians from occupying qualified jobs such as engineer. Staying in Turkey would have meant a long waiting period before obtaining the Turkish citizenship and the benefits that came with it.

"I wanted to have my kids raised with a citizenship," he says. "I wanted to give my children the opportunities I didn't have."

At that time, the U.S. was issuing student visas to Palestinians, he recalls. So he jumped at the opportunity. After entering the U.S. with a student visa, he crossed the border at Lacolle, south of Montreal and stepped on Canadian soil. Canada , he says, had a much better reputation than the U.S. in Middle-Eastern countries.

Coming to Montreal

Two weeks after settling in Montreal and excited by the prospect of a brand new life, Mustapha took up a frantic schedule of working full-time and studying French, which he now speaks fluently. In his free time, he started taking swimming classes at Collège Rosemont, where he met Émilie Laporte, then a 17-year-old CEGEP student and swimming instructor.

The two started dating, seeing each other over coffees and at movies. It seemed like Ahmed's life had finally taken a turn for the better. "She's funny a lot," he says. "She makes me laugh all the time. I smile a lot, but I don't laugh loudly. She makes me laugh loudly."

But in July of 2003, Mustapha received a devastating blow.

When Immigration Canada refused his claim, his future was once again shrouded into uncertainty. He says that at his hearing, the immigration officer told him that his life wouldn't directly be in danger if he went back to Lebanon , that there aren't enough grounds to believe he would be directly persecuted and that therefore, he does not qualify as a refugee.

"Nobody has more the right of a refugee than Palestinians," replies Mustapha with a tinge of anger as his voice rises slightly over the clatter of the coffee shop in which we're sitting. "Maybe I won't die [if sent back to the refugee camps] but it's not a life I want to live."

Outraged by what he perceived as an injustice towards himself and towards other rejected Palestinian refugees, Mustapha joined the Coalition Against the Palestinian Refugees from Canada shortly after his refusal.

"Ahmed has constantly tried to inspire confidence," says Stefan Christoff, an active member of the Coalition. "Especially with the older refugees, I see Ahmed speaking to them and making sure that things are okay, that they're feeling okay."

In the meantime, Ahmed's relationship with Émilie was growing stronger though uneasiness remained. He didn't yet tell her about his situation. Suspicious, she started researching facts about the Palestinian refugees on the Internet and in spring of this year, she confronted him.

"He told me 'Émilie this is my situation, but I don't have a lot of chances of getting accepted,'" she recalls.

Though realizing the hard times ahead, the two decided to get married.

"A lot of people have a lot of urban legends to tell, about marriages and bad experience," says Émilie. "But I believe in it, and Ahmed believes in it; and I have close friends who believe in it, and my family believes in it too."

They tied the knot at a notary's office last summer, and they celebrated at La Menara, a Moroccan restaurant in Old Montreal.

Ahmed and Émilie now live together in an apartment in Côte-des-Neiges and, by both their accounts, they lead a happy life. But they're scared of making plans, says Ahmed. He has filed an application to stay in Canada on humanitarian grounds, but has yet to receive an answer.

"This is the worse nightmare in my life since June 2003," he says. "And I'm afraid. I'm afraid to check my mail in the mailbox. And I count every week. Every week.

"I'm more relaxed Saturday and Sunday not because I don't work—because sometimes I work weekends—but because there's no mail. It's so stressful. Stressful. And Émilie, she knows that and sometime we meet outside, and we go home and I, I..."

He stops. Two big tears roll slowly down his cheeks. He sighs, takes a deep breath and sighs again.

"So yeah, you live a daily stress."