Lately the discussion around temporary foreign workers has sounded an awful lot like an episode of South Park.
In the seventh season of the animated Comedy Central show, the town finds itself facing a peculiar problem. People from the overpopulated and impoverished future have found a way to travel back in time, and they start doing so in droves in order to snap up jobs in the present. Before long, businesses even start replacing existing workers with these time-immigrants who are willing to work harder for less pay. The only response the townspeople muster is one of increasing frustration: “They took our jobs!” they howl in frustration.
That phrase comes to mind as more and more stories emerge of businesses firing Canadian staff in favour of temporary foreign workers.
The controversial federal program lets employers hire from abroad only if they can’t fill job openings from within Canada, but it has allegedly been abused by businesses big and small, from multi-national banks to locally-owned restaurants. The reaction has understandably been one of anger, with many people now calling for an end to the program, which is not exactly realistic. Employment Minister Jason Kenney has responded by promising swift punishment for any employers found to be violating the rules and suspending restaurants from taking part in the altogether.
What the anger over the temporary foreign workers program obscures, however, is the overall shift in the country’s immigration strategy over the last decade that has brought us to this point, a system that critics charge treats foreigners coming to Canada as mere cogs in the economic machinery.
“Canada has traditionally been a country that brings in immigrants on a permanent basis and expects them to fully participate in Canadian society and become citizens,” said Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees. “To move to a situation where we have temporary workers who are used and then discarded is a fairly major change and means our immigration policies are more geared toward filling the needs of employers in Canada rather than what the country overall thinks is in our interests.”
The Conservative government has made a number of changes to immigration since coming to power in 2006, chief among them a focus on rich, high-skilled immigrants at the expense of family class immigrants and asylum seekers. Those are the newcomers who tend to take the low-skill jobs that many Canadian-born residents will not, but they have largely been replaced by an exploding number of temporary foreign workers who only stay for up to two years before shipping back home.
In 2008, the number of temporary foreign workers in Canada outpaced the number of new permanent residents for the first time, and in 2012 the gap had grown to 491,547 temporary foreign workers compared to 257,515 permanent residents. There are many high-skilled workers in that pool as well, but they have an easier path to permanent residency and will have their applications fast-tracked starting in 2015.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada did not respond to a question about immigration levels but did helpfully email a list of talking points about the importance of the temporary foreign workers program to the economy.
“We’ve been saying for many years that it was a major shift that was never properly discussed,” said Dench.
But in addition to the strong focus on the economy, Canada’s immigration policy has also been increasingly set in the language of law and order.
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Employment Minister Jason Kenney has vowed to punish companies abusing the temporary foreign workers program. Canadian Press/Bill Graveland
Calgary immigration lawyer Raj Sharma, a former refugee protection officer now in his 10th year of private practice, says even common-sense reforms are often coupled with measures that cast newcomers as potential fraudsters or terrorists.
“The tone of immigration has changed. No minister has ever called refugees ‘bogus’ prior to the determination of their claims,” he said, referring to the government’s crackdown on asylum seekers from so-called “safe” countries, primarily Roma people who face widespread discrimination in Eastern Europe.
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Immigration Minister Chris Alexander.
Sharma listed several other measures as indicative of a mean streak in the country’s immigration system under the Conservative government: the denial of refugee health care, threats of stripping dual nationals of their Canadian citizenship for certain offences, and the indefinite detention of some asylum seekers with whom the government doesn’t know what to do.
“We’ve never had the indefinite detention of minors,” he said incredulously.
The CCR’s Dench was similarly alarmed at what she described as the “precariousness of status” whereby newcomers to Canada encounter more barriers to becoming permanent residents, and more ways of getting booted from the country.
“One of the ways,” she said, “is this new category perversely called ‘conditional permanent residence,’ so you’re permanent but you’re not permanent if you don’t meet the conditions.” Dench warned that this new classification, ostensibly an effort to crack down on people sponsoring fake spouses, could leave many women vulnerable to abuse because the consequence of leaving the marriage is deportation.
Having a discourse that focuses predominantly on questions of abuse and fraud does increase intolerance and xenophobia
“It is clear to us that having a discourse that focuses predominantly on questions of abuse and fraud does increase intolerance and xenophobia, and feeds into prejudices against newcomers that is damaging to us as a country,” she said.
The negativity at Citizenship and Immigration Canada that started under Minister Kenney has continued apace under his replacement Chris Alexander, despite high hopes many humanitarian groups may have had for the accomplished diplomat when he took the portfolio in 2013.
Yet, paradoxically, the Conservative Party has pursued an aggressive multicultural outreach strategy even as it has tried to delegitimize certain kinds of immigrants — a masterful slicing and dicing of the electorate that has brought some socially conservative ethnic communities and Canadians suspicious of immigration under the same tent.
The danger, on the other hand, is that an electorally successful strategy for the Conservatives will leave Canadians more divided as a country. The criticism over the temporary foreign workers program has clued many people in to the iniquities of Canada’s current immigration policies, but if the only thing we take away from the debate is “They took our jobs!” the larger problems will go unsolved.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
