6. Negotiating the Citizenship Divide: Foreign Domestic Worker Policy and Legal Jurisprudence

Bakan, Abigail B.; Jhappan, Radha

doi:10.3138/9781442683617-007

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“…An important instance of this was the Harper government's 2014 clampdown on temporary migrant workers through its "Putting Canadians First" rhetoric, that not only involved significant set-backs for migrant worker rights but also legitimized the hostility and suspicion of migrant workers on the part of Canadian workers. Under the Liberal Trudeau government, the federal auditor general's report criticized the caregiver stream of the TFWP for providing "an immigration loophole for families to reunite in Canada, rather than fill a labour shortage" (Press, 2017), reiterating the portrayal of migrant live-in caregivers as "system cheaters," first voiced by former Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenney (Gaucher, 2019), and conveniently ignoring an explicit, long-standing objective of the former Livein Caregiver Program -namely to provide a pathway to permanent residence for those who had fulfilled two years of live-in caregiving (Stasiulis & Bakan, 2002). While two of the 17 reasons for non-compliance listed on the non-compliant employer website spoke directly to breaches of the live-in caregiver program, including the non-provision of "private and furnished living space in the home," none of the 168 non-compliant employers were identifiably participating in the migrant caregiver program and there were no breaches listed under the two explicitly caregiver non-compliance breaches.…”

Section: Holding Non-compliant Employers Accountable?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Elimi(Nation): Canada’s “Post-Settler” Embrace of Disposable Migrant Labour

Stasiulis

2020

SSJ

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This article utilizes the lens of disposability to explore recent conditions of low-wage temporary migrant labour, whose numbers and economic sectors have expanded in the 21stcentury. A central argument is that disposability is a discursive and material relation of power that creates and reproduces invidious distinctions between the value of “legitimate” Canadian settler-citizens (and candidates for citizenship) and the lack of worth of undesirable migrant populations working in Canada, often for protracted periods of time. The analytical lens of migrant disposability draws upon theorizing within Marxian, critical modernity studies, and decolonizing settler colonial frameworks. This article explores the technologies of disposability that lay waste to low wage workers in sites such as immigration law and provincial/territorial employment legislation, the workplace, transport, living conditions, access to health care and the practice of medical repatriation of injured and ill migrant workers. The mounting evidence that disposability is immanent within low-wage migrant labour schemes in Canada has implications for migrant social justice. The failure to protect migrant workers from a vast array of harms reflects the historical foundations of Canada’s contemporary migrant worker schemes in an “inherited background field [of settler colonialism] within which market, racist, patriarchal and state relations converge” (Coulthard, 2014, p. 14). Incremental liberal reform has made little headway insofar as the administration and in some cases reversal of more progressive reforms such as guaranteed pathways to citizenship prioritize employers’ labour interests and the lives and health of primarily white, middle class Canadian citizens at the expense of a shunned and racialized but growing population of migrants from the global South. Transformational change and social justice for migrant workers can only occur by reversing the disposability and hyper-commodification intrinsic to low-wage migrant programs and granting full permanent legal status to migrant workers.

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Section: Holding Non-compliant Employers Accountable?mentioning

confidence: 99%