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Yankee may get sent home

American fined $500 is facing deportation

Lynn Lau
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Aug 03/01) - An American man who worked in Yellowknife without a permit could now be facing deportation and separation from his Canadian family.

Daniel Carlson, 32, was fined $500 Tuesday in territorial court for working in Canada illegally. He came to Canada on a six-month visitor visa in April with his Canadian wife, Carol, and their four children. Carlson told Yellowknifer the $500 fine is now the least of his problems.

Because he was caught working, Canadian Citizenship and Immigration revoked his visitor visa.

"I don't have any status at all right now," says Carlson. He'll have to wait until an immigration hearing that has yet to be scheduled, to find out if he is going to be allowed to stay in the country.

In most cases, he's been told, the answer is usually no.

Carlson's problems began earlier this year when work dried up for him in Montana, where the family was last living. He had been working in construction and in a lumberyard, and his family did some general recycling on the side. They decided to move to Yellowknife, where Carol was born and raised. The family sold their house and used their savings to make the trek here April 2.

Carol says she was unable to work because she has been suffering from chronic undiagnosed pain since 1997, and the family was subsisting in social housing on $718 a month in disability insurance.

To support his family, Carlson decided to take a job, even though he knew he wasn't supposed to. A family friend, David Beckwith, hired him as a security guard for his company, Centurion Security. Carlson started working for $10 an hour May 4 and he continued working until July 3 when he was found out. Earlier on Tuesday, Beckwith was fined $500 for giving Carlson the job.

If Carlson had applied for landed immigrant status, he wouldn't have the problems he's having today. But, with the family strapped for cash, he says he didn't have the $500 needed for the initial application form, not to mention the $975 landing fee that would come after.

He's since learned that it's possible to get a loan from Citizenship and Immigration to cover the entry costs but he says wasn't aware of the loan program at the time he broke the law.

"Basically, it all comes down to money," Carlson says. "I didn't have it to give it to them, so I couldn't get the paperwork done and I'm in trouble because I didn't pay them to stay here."

His wife Carol says the family was planning to use Carlson's last paycheque would have gone towards the permanent residency application. "It's safe to say we knew the consequences but we needed to make ends meet," she says.