Emerging from the shadows 20 years ago, undocumented migrants continue to aim for the light

Before 2002, they were invisible. In a Switzerland very attached to legal immigration, undocumented migrants never imagined being able to be publicly defended. It was counting without the courage, or the insolence at the time, of Byron Allauca and his friends. Arriving in Lausanne in 1992, the Ecuadorian emigrant had himself been undocumented for 10 years when an event brought him out of his silence: “A wave of police checks on buses in Pully. All the ladies with a South American physique were checked, because they were necessarily suspected of moonlighting as cleaning ladies. Nobody was defending them… We had to act.”