ABSTRACT
For many disabled people, home is out of reach. Home can be a memory that evokes geographic borders and borders barring access to essential supports. There may be more than one idea of home: the home that was left behind and the home we are struggling to create. As a result of these complicated relationships to home, migrants with disabilities and people with intellectual disabilities face unique challenges when it comes to securing a safe and dignified life in Canada. Yet the challenges faced by these communities bear resemblance and overlap in many ways. Isolation, trauma, poverty, intimate and structural forms of violence are among the many inequities that can characterise their journey to settling in Canadian society in a way that allows for meaningful participation. These problems and the many other issues facing migrants with disabilities and people with intellectual disabilities often stem from processes of displacement, where individuals and families are forced to leave their homes and are denied the choices, supports and opportunities to settle and secure a sense of home and belonging elsewhere. In this chapter, we look at how displacement shapes the different pathways and barriers that confront people with intellectual disabilities, refugees and migrants with disabilities as they work to establish a good life. We encourage researchers, community organisers and advocates to approach local disability issues such as institutionalisation through a transnational framework that conceptualises displacement beyond the crossing of borders.
