Fabiola Cruz Li

Class of 2025

Faculty Advisors: Zephyr Frank and Vivian Brates

Peer Mentor: Christian Robles-Baez

Fabiola Cruz Li was born in Lima, Peru and moved to Toronto, Canada at the age of fourteen. As a refugee claimant and later refugee in Canada, Fabiola understands the challenges asylum seekers and refugees face when navigating new institutions and often in new languages. During this time, higher education often seemed out of reach to her. As a result, Fabiola is determined to show asylum seekers and refugees that these spaces are accessible. 

Fabiola holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto, where she pursued a Major in Latin American Studies and a Double Minor in History and Political Science. As an RA for Associate Professor of History Dr. Luis van Isschot, she has examined legislation across South American countries that criminalize protest and has pushed migrants out of the region. More recently, as an RA for Assistant Professor of Political Science Dr. Martha Balaguera Cuervo, Fabiola has studied changes in U.S. immigration policy and their impacts on asylum seekers’ rights.

Fabiola has been the President of RefugeAid UofT and Co-Director of World University Service of Canada (WUSC) at the University of Toronto, where she led programming for migrants within the university community and beyond. She has also worked as a Migrant Support Worker with FCJ Refugee Centre and as a Settlement Worker with Adam House, organizations that provide integral services to migrants with precarious status in Toronto.

At Stanford, Fabiola would like to examine how asylum seekers experience the effects of migration policy in Canada and the United States, and how such policy can be amended to reduce precarity amongst them. She hopes to use this knowledge to continue her advocacy for migrants’ rights. Following graduate school, Fabiola hopes to become an immigration lawyer to support refugee claimants with the asylum-seeking process.