This article explores perspectives and opinions from 35 Venezuelan community leaders and nonprofit representatives regarding the needs and challenges of the Venezuelan newcomer and refugee population in five Canadian cities as well as their struggle for community engagement and political participation in the domestic context. The analysis sheds light on how Venezuelan immigrants have navigated the complexities of migration in North America and how they have faced the difficulties of coming from a country with an immigration rather than an emigration history.

This chapter sets out the legal and policy framework of Canadian refugee resettlement programs and highlights where there are tensions between and within the different resettlement programs. It argues that the private sponsorship program and government-assisted program are meant to operate complementarily, while BVOR program situates in the middle. According to the author, while all programs focus on protection needs, the differing selection processes influence where that protection response is targeted. Whereas government sponsorship responds to the protection prioritizations of UNHCR, private sponsors often provide protection to those outside of UNHCR’s submission categories.

This chapter reviews how global and local policies affect the social conditions of health for refugees resettled in Canada, with a brief introduction to social determinants of health, and Canadian health and settlement policies. A social determinants of health lens is particularly valuable in considering the relationship between policies and experiences of resettled refugees, as it points to ways in which policies can be strengthened to create equitable conditions for these newcomers.

Using nationally representative cross-sectional survey data from 2019, this article reports that Canadians generally overestimate the number of refugees and asylum-seekers coming into the country but are comparatively less prone to overestimating the overall number of immigrants. Canadians also rely on mental images about the reasons for immigrating to Canada that diverge from the realities of Canada's immigration program. The authors document how reliance on these numbers and images is driven by the type of media consumed, feelings of threat, and individual-level characteristics of Canadians. In doing so, this article demonstrates that mental images strongly influence Canadians’ attitudes toward immigration; numerical estimates also matter, but less so.