Canada's domestic shame

..i offer you a sample of what you have in store if you decide to explore this piece beyond what i have posted.

“Perfected in Canada”: the racist exploitation of migrants

An interview with Harsha Walia on border imperialism in Canada

Though largely kept out of sight, migrant workers play a key role in every sector of Canada’s economy. Due to their temporary status, they are often kept in extremely precarious situations and denied access to unions or the ability to protest working conditions.

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We often think about borders as just maps and marking territory. But the creation of nation states is bound up in the expansion of empire, whether that’s the British empire carving out its colonies, the French empire carving out its colonies, and what’s known as the “scramble for Africa” by colonial powers. That’s all fueled by colonialism and enslavement and indentureship. To think about borders today, we have to look back and think globally about how borders really were an attempt to solidify territorial expansion.

In the Canadian context, it is this whole history of the dispossession of Indigenous lands and migrant exclusion—everything about the border is tied up in that history.

So the solidification of the border in the Pacific Northwest, where I’m based, is very much rooted in the history of Chinese American exclusion in the 1800s. Some of the first federal legislation anywhere in Canada and the United States were laws of anti-Chinese exclusion, which connects to the control of labour.

All of these different processes of racial capitalism, of racial citizenship, of imperialism, of settler colonialism are deeply connected to how and why borders came to be.

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Canada has perfected the model of the temporary foreign worker program as a key method in which the border works to control labour. That program has many names and many visas under it—the seasonal agricultural worker program, what used to be the live-in caregiver program and is now the caregiver program, and many other kinds of temporary permit visas. 

The Black Marxist tradition has put forward the idea that capitalism is always racial and that it doesn’t create a universal kind of class of wage labour—that capitalism always requires the segmentation of labour, and creates racist material structures to enforce it. What the border does is further segments labour.

So what we have is entire pools of cheapened labour, migrant labourers—workers, who, despite living in our communities, despite working alongside us, despite working in the farms and fields and homes and construction sites within Canada, are basically considered an entire other class of workers. In my view it really is a euphemism for third world workers, who operate as a pool of cheapened labour.

I want to be very clear here that there is no such thing as cheap labour. Labour is cheapened due to manufactured conditions of vulnerability. And one of the primary ways in which migrant workers are kept precarious or kept vulnerable is through the threat of deportation. So when migrant workers may wish to organize or unionize or complain, or to stand up for their rights against their employers, employers can do what’s called blacklisting, which is to make it impossible for workers to return to work in Canada. Employers can terminate workers’ visas, which means they have not only been terminated, but they can then also be deported. They can withhold wages. They can force workers—as is very common—to work long, dangerous hours. 

In the case of caregivers, many of them live in the home of their employer. Many farm workers are forced to live in cramped conditions in the homes or in the fields of their employer. This is literally a form of segregation, right? Where you are segregated, and you are kept in cramped quarters. You are kept away from other people, you are subject to curfew.....