Six days a week, before the sun sets, Samuel rides his bicycle for 30 kilometres, the distance that separates his basement apartment in the Toronto neighborhood of Roncesvalles to the No Frills grocery store in Mississauga, where he works the night shift as a janitor. This was not the type of job he had dreamed of after earning a civil engineering degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Mexico. But jobs there are scarce, he says, and they don’t pay well. “They expect me to intern for six months, without pay, and then, if they decide to give me a full-time job, they would pay me something like $500 (or) $600 a month. It is ridiculous, considering how much tuition costs,” says Samuel. The 23-year-old is one of three young men New Canadian Media interviewed to learn their stories of financial survival in Canada. NCM has agreed to use pseudonyms for the men to protect their identities given their precarious immigration status. Samuel decided to come to Canada on a whim, after a one-hour call with his friend, Eduardo, also 23, who convinced him he could make good money in construction in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Before arriving in Canada, Samuel was a manager at a trendy nightclub in Monterrey, Mexico at a type of bar that gathered the heirs and heiresses of the city’s most influential families. That buzz and vibrant nightlife was in stark contrast to the solitude of his current endeavour. When Samuel arrived in Toronto, on a tourist visa, pretending to be on a one-week vacation, he tried three different jobs: roofing, drywall, and insulation, none of which worked out for him. He despised the long hours of construction and was fearful of the hazardous materials he was exposed to during insulation jobs – like attics full of asbestos fibres. Then, as he was close to running out of money, a friend connected him to a cleaning company that contracted out to several grocery stores. The job didn’t require a social security number and paid him through cheques, which had to be cashed at a Latin American food grocery store as per his friend’s precise instructions. The check-cashing business operated in the back, on the other side of the wall that marked the end of the counters. The shop took a cut of his salary to cash his cheques. Samuel felt the fee was exorbitant, but it was work that would sustain him through the winter. Thus what he intended to be a job lasting a season, turned into a year. Samuel’s is not an isolated story, but rather one more example of a perennial parade of international professionals who share the same path. The Migrants Rights Network estimates there are more than 1.6 million migrants without permanent resident status in Canada. Some of them are university-educated but disappointed by the lack of opportunities for professional development in their countries of origin. They fly to the United States or Canada as tourists, and look for jobs in order to build a solid financial foundation. Take Eduardo and Agustín, for instance. The two Mexicans went to private schools, and both come from upper middle class families. Now they are both working in Canada without papers. Eduardo, in the construction trade, has been around long enough that he has made friends that got him into the union. Agustín has one of those familiar faces, and he waves at us as he hangs from the 45th floor of a building where he is in charge of cleaning the exterior windows. As we share the table at Hunter’s Landing, they reconnect with their old selves. They wear fancy-looking pants and Lacoste T-shirts. They reminisce, sure, but they also seem happy with their new lives – so much so that Agustin complains: “I wish I knew about this job sooner. I wouldn’t have spent so much money on college.” He ended up forking the equivalent to $55,000 CAD to get an international business degree through a credit-scholarship program, which meant he only needed to pay back half of the loan over time. But upon graduating, he found that the average salary wasn’t even enough to cover the loan. So, he decided to fly to Canada instead, where he initially worked pressure-cleaning a chicken factory in Markham. “It was a horror story,” he recalls while providing a list of restaurants to be avoided.