Sri Lanka and Canadian Border Agents

: When we hopped off, Canadian border agents were there, ready to welcome us to our new home: "Sri Lankan refugees, this way."My story is not unique, especially in Canada, where an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Tamils reside, most in the GTA. We only make up one wave of refugees, according to NOW Magazine. The Vietnamese came in the 70s, the Somalis in the 90s and the Syrians today. We were escaping Sri Lanka after our home was looted and set ablaze during the 1983 Black July riots, an anti-Tamil pogrom in which years of ethnic tension boiled over and gave way to a full-out war between the nation army and the LTTE . We escaped to Hong Kong, then Tokyo, got a visa to Peru and a flight that connected in Vancouver. Next week, Toronto theatres will welcome a Palme d'Or-winning film that captures the Sri Lankan refugee experience like none before. They struggle to communicate in a new language, find work, acclimatize to a new culture and keep up hope. In Dheepan , a former Tamil Tiger lands in Paris with a woman and child who pretend to be his family. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.