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

Abstract

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.

The Macro Context of Immigration

“…The common element in current debates on the relationship between immigration and settler colonialism is the recognition that rigid categories of immigrant, Indigenous, and settler can miss the constitutive links between struggles against racialized precarity, White supremacist capitalism, and the project of settlement (Chatterjee, 2019;Walia, 2013). Stasiulis (2020) demonstrates how the settler-colonial project distinguishes between 'legitimate' Canadian settler-citizens and undesirable racialized populations residing in Canada, often for a long time. Thus, the Canadian narrative of a nation of immigrants, Perzyna and Bauder (2022) argues, 'denies Canada's colonial roots and expunges the violence of settler colonialism, racist immigration policies and the continuing discriminatory neoliberal bias toward economic migrants and government-approved refugees' (p. 1).…”

Springing Amir

“…Th e settler-colonial state thesis advances the idea that Canadian national belonging is strategically defi ned in political, not ethnic, terms in order to displace and discredit Indigenous peoples in order to appropriate their lands (Bashford 2014;Bauder 2011;Coulthard 2007;Dauvergne 2016;Stasiulis 2020;Wolfe 2006;Wright and Sharma 2008/9). Recruiting ambitious, entrepreneurial immigrants to "advance" the Canadian economy is part and parcel of the state's ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples from the land.…”

Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker and International Mobility Programs: Charting Change and Continuity Among Source Countries

“…While much scholarship has demonstrated how exploitation occurs through these programmes, and key interventions underline the role of elements of unfreedom (see, e.g. Sharma, 2006;Strauss and McGrath, 2017;Gordon, 2018;Stasiulis, 2020), how certain variants are situated vis-a-vis historically racialized relations of expropriation has received less attention.…”

“…By examining the relationship between the TFWP and the IMP and their major source countries, the ensuing analysis seeks to help correct what Walters (2015, 11) calls the “amnesia that inflects migration studies when it comes to the colonial.” Looking through this lens shows that while twenty‐first century temporary migration for employment to Canada might appear to represent the dawn of a new era of hypermobility characterized by fewer restrictions tied explicitly to source country (or citizenship), many familiar dynamics perpetuating precariousness (in employment and residency status) among programme participants continue to operate, disproportionately affecting those enrolled in subprogrammes of the TFWP that emerge from a legacy of immigration policymaking rooted in racialized relations of exploitation as well as expropriation of migrants from sources which were colonized or otherwise caught up colonial projects (Satzewich, 1989, 1991; André, 1990; Calliste, 1991; Daenzer, 1993; Mongia, 1999, 2018; Miles and Brown, 2003; Trumper and Wong, 2007; Sharma, 2020). As Stasiulis (2020, 26) suggests, in these ways, Canada’s temporary migrant worker programmes are a “reiteration” of the settler colonial project.…”