How Canadian immigration has moved toward exclusion and temporary permits">
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  • Protesters outside the Burnaby youth detention center

    Protesters outside the Burnaby youth detention center | Photo: Vancouver Media Co-op

Published 3 September 2015
Opinion
How Canadian immigration has moved toward exclusion and temporary permits

It’s the morning after my wedding, and I am standing outside the Burnaby youth detention center with Tamil music playing from a portable stereo behind me. Everyone in the crowd has eyes fixed to a small window hundreds of meters above the secure gate we are not allowed to cross. Soon enough we see four children pile on top of each other as they peer out a barred window. The crowd bursts into cheers and tears, our pots clanging, as we euphorically scream, “Welcome!” Indigenous matriarchs drum the Strong Woman song a beat louder.

We return every week for six months, with our pots and Tamil music, even though the distance between us holds the expanse of the ocean they have crossed. We try to transcend the gulfs of language, of citizen and refugee, of us versus them, willing our voices to carry to these 44 detained Tamil children and their 25 mothers.

In August 2010, 492 Tamil women, children and men aboard the MV Sun Sea landed in B.C. after a treacherous three-month journey. As poet Warsan Shire writes, “No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.” Yet, politicians fermented hysteria that the asylum seekers – including children – were terrorists and they were all immediately jailed upon arrival. Within two years, the federal government passed wide-ranging legislation to make it harder for refugees to remain in Canada. Asylum seekers now face a discriminatory two-tier system based on nationality with restricted legal avenues. Contrary to international law, refugees designated as “irregular arrivals,” including those as young as 16, face mandatory incarceration.

How did we get here?

“No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”

Some would argue this is nothing new – from the Komagata Maru and SS St Louis to the Chinese Head Tax and Japanese-Canadian internment, exclusion based on race and class have been key to solidifying colonial Canada. Still, the current federal government has been one of the most hostile when it comes to just and inclusive Canadian immigration and refugee policy.

A new multimedia project Never Home: Legislating Discrimination in Canadian Immigration chronicles a decade of drastic immigration changes by the federal government and its devastating impacts on families in Canada. With one of the longest election campaigns underway, this overhaul is already a hot-button issue in many immigrant communities.

Over the past decade the federal government has vastly expanded the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Since 2008, more migrants arrive through migrant worker programs that grant temporary status than via avenues that grant permanent residence. Workers in the low-wage Temporary Foreign Worker Program have no access to unionization or guaranteed access to social services, despite often paying into them. Migrant workers are not granted permanent residency upon arrival and as Hessed Torres, a certified nurse from the Philippines who came to Canada as a Live-in Caregiver, explains, “The reason why the caregiver program is precarious is because our work permits are tied specifically to our employer.”

RELATED: Three Things About Canada's Election and Immigration

Meanwhile, avenues that grant permanent residency, such as those that facilitate entry of skilled workers, refugees or family members, have plunged. Between 2006 and 2011, the number of family-class immigrants dropped 20 percent, while the number of accepted refugees dropped 30 percent. The federal government eliminated nearly 280,000 applications under the Federal Skilled Worker Program. Furthermore, permanent residency and citizenship are becoming conditional. Most parents and grandparents can now only arrive on a temporary Super Visa that requires the purchase of private Canadian health care insurance. Many spouses now have to come on a two-year conditional sponsorship, leaving immigrant women more vulnerable to abuse since their legal status is contingent on their partnership. As of this year, two-tiered citizenship is in effect and dual citizens are at risk of losing their citizenship.

Legal challenges have been filed at the Federal Court of Canada to end this new regime of second-class citizenship. While that outcome is pending, in July 2014 the Federal Court did strike down the Conservative government’s cuts to refugee healthcare. Even though the Court ruled these cuts were cruel and unconstitutional, the government is appealing the decision and has spent more than US$1.4 million in taxpayers’ money to fight this in court. In 2014, the Federal Court also struck down the ban on niqabs at citizenship ceremonies. Last month, the court ruled against the government's new two-tier refugee system.

These court decisions lay bare the federal government’s unconstitutional and punitive agenda against migrants and refugees. Over the past 10 years, the federal government jailed an average of 11,000 migrants per year, including up to 807 children, without charge. In some cases, young Canadian children like Alpha Anawa have spent their entire lives behind bars. Canada is one of the only Western countries to have indefinite detention. This means that some people, such as anti-apartheid icon Mbuyisa Makhubu, are jailed in Canada for over a decade without charges or trial. Permanent residents are also being torn apart from their families and face deportation for traffic offences!

This government’s linguistic contortions – militarization as liberation, indentured labour as immigration, refugee as terrorist – that have justified immense indignities against families in Canada.

Never Home sets the record on immigration straight.

Harsha Walia (@HarshaWalia) is a South Asian activist and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Indigenous Coast Salish Territories in Canada. She has been involved in community-based grassroots migrant justice, feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous solidarity, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements for 15 years. She is the author of Undoing Border Imperialism.

A version of this article first appeared in the Vancouver Sun.

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