IMPERIALISM, GLOBALIZATION AND MIGRATION: A TREATISE
The reality of migration is one that reveals the asymmetrical relations between “rich” and “poor,” and between North and South, where the effects of colonialism and corporate globalization have created political economies that compel people to move. Such forces are the same forces that have perpetuated genocide and dispossession of indigenous peoples within the colonial project of "North America." A salient example of the impact of capitalism and neo-colonialism on migration trends is the US-Mexico border. As part of its inclusion in NAFTA in 1994, Mexico was forced to adjust its constitution’s Article 27, which guaranteed rights to communal lands (ejidos). An emblematic illustration of NAFTA’s effects is the fate of Mexican corn: the Mexican government was forced to eliminate subsidies to corn, meanwhile corn produced in the US remained subsidized, thus making it cheaper to buy US corn inside Mexico than Mexican corn. Over 1.5 million Mexican farmers who subsequently lost their farms migrated North to work in low-paying sectors and maquila factories. Wages among California’s 700,000 farm workers, half of whom are undocumented, is approximately $6.75 an hour.
Furthermore, the nature of the refugee determination system is far from being a simple exercise in humanitarianism. It can more accurately be labeled as a manifestation of Canada’s aggressive foreign policy. For example, Canada towed the ideological line of the US by being slow to react to the admission of Chilean refugees who were supporters of Salvador Allende after the violent US-backed coup of Allende's socialist government in 1973. By comparison, Canada was far more “humanitarian” in accepting approximately 60,000 refugees from South-East Asian, Vietnam and Laos who fled Communist regimes in the wake of Saigon's fall in 1975.
Economics of the Immigration system and (Im)migrant labour
It is not a novel assertion that while free trade agreements open borders to capital, borders are increasingly tightening to those whom capital has displaced. In 2001, the Canadian government signed the Canada-US Smart Border Accord which ensures that border restrictions will not impair the economic necessity of ensuring free flow of goods and services. However, it is also important to note that while repressive immigration policies are intended to exclude those deemed undesirable, they are not intended to act as fortresses against all racialized people. It is not in the best interests of the Canadian economy to deport all non-status migrants. Instead, border controls serve to create a constantly internalized fear of instability and vulnerability. The legally-sanctioned right of the state to deny permanent legal status to most who migrate guarantees that a growing number of migrants will constitute a highly exploitable pool of labour.
Therefore the efforts to achieve a borderless capitalist global economy depends on securing territorial borders against undesirable outsiders while creating a pool of non-citizens upon whose hyper-exploitable labour free markets depend. The notion of “illegals” is a constructed one that allows for the maintenance of social hierarchies based on race and class. The term “illegal” does not conjure up images of American students who have illegally overstayed their tourist visas. As Nandita Sharma argues, “Categories of legality and illegality are … deeply ideological. They help to conceal the fact that both those represented as foreigners and those seen as Canadian work within the same labour market and live within the same society.”
In 1947, Canada established a contract-labour program under which potential employers in the mining, logging, or lumbering industries would forward applications to the Department of Labour requesting that a certain number of labourers be brought in under prearranged contracts covering minimal wages and living conditions of servitude. Shortly after its introduction, the program was expanded to include other industries and specialized agricultural workers.
This form of contract agricultural labour continues today under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Approximately 18,000 migrant farm workers from the Caribbean and Mexico arrive in Canada to work the fields, orchards and greenhouses every year, typically for periods of 3 to 10 months. Temporary migrant workers are separated from their families performing rigorous rural labour that few Canadians choose to do. The low wages of migrant workers has contributed to the multi-million dollar agricultural industry, while the structure of the SAWP- particularly the lack of secure work and status- silences the struggles of the workers.
Migrant women of colour on temporary work visas most directly experience the hypocrisy of liberal democracies that promise opportunity while creating categories of exploited workers. The Foreign Domestic Movement Program came into effect in 1981, which allowed migrant women into Canada if they could find employment as a domestic worker, but the women were not granted citizenship. In 1992, the Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP) replaced the Foreign Domestic Movement Program. Under the Live-in Caregiver Program migrant women- predominantly Filipinas- enter Canada as temporary workers. Although the program calls for a 49-hour maximum workweek, the live-in aspect allows employers to call on the caregivers at any time and renders the women subject to labour rights violations and gross abuse. Women are required to work for two years within a window of 36 months in order to qualify for permanent residency. Many advocates have called for the abolition of the LCP and to allow women with domestic and caring work skills to immigrate and access full rights of residency.
Yet even immigrants with permanent residency rights face conditions of underemployment and inequities in income. For example under provincial employment standards in BC, it is possible for workers who are “new” to the labour force to be paid a $6 per hour "training wage", instead of the regular $8 per hour minimum wage, for the first 500 hours of work. A more endemic issue is that immigrants who are trained within non-western educational or scientific traditions experience great difficulties in gaining recognition for their training and skills. A Statistics Canada study indicates that even after 10 years in Canada, one-fifth of university-educated immigrants are still working in low-income jobs. Research by the National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women of Canada conducted over ten years reveals that the poverty rate amongst Canadian-born in the year 2000 was 14.3%, compared to a poverty rate of 20.2% amongst all immigrants, and 35.8% amongst recent immigrants. Therefore the oppression of migrants is inextricably linked to the systemic oppression of all racialized people.
White Nationalism and Racialization of the Enemy
Patriotic discourses emphasize the nation as a contained entity threatened by outside forces. The illusion of the nation as a place of safety and security is reified through state bureaucratic organizations, such as the military, federal intelligence organizations and immigration departments, which produce the sense that “The Enemy” is outside the realm of “us.” For example within days of the attack on Pearl Harbour, Japanese in North America were seen as enemy aliens. A Minister of Parliament in the British Columbia government announced, "Let our slogan be for British Columbia; no Japs from the Rockies to the seas." And upon the enactment of the “War Measures Act” in 1942, about 22,000 Japanese were relocated, 75% of whom were naturalized Canadians.
With the “War on Terrorism” the identities of North Americans versus the terrorists are being re-imagined. Although "The Enemy" was Osama bin Laden, his image personified all Arabs in the Western imagination and the nation was reconfigured to exclude all Arabs. By comparison, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was considered to be the act of one lone man, therefore resulting in no mass profiling and there was no exclusion of the entire white race from social-political spaces. Borders and nation-states are historically specific systems that shape distinctive cultures and within this culture, terrorism is perceived as a Third World import (without any recognition of Western state-sponsored terrorism whose victims predominantly reside in the Third World and indigenous territories of the First World). Such imagery reinforces the normalization of whiteness in the Western imagination and renders racialized communities as hyphenated citizens- a colonial construction of identity and entitlement. The ability to control immigration reveals a deep-rooted system of apartheid whereby the Canadian state and all those entitled to make pronouncements on immigration (not racialized migrants themselves since they are too “biased” to weigh in) maintain the power to construct migrants as problems to be managed and contained. Thus phrases like “immigrants” do not actually reflect one’s legal status; rather the seemingly innocuous term is actually a euphemism for racialized migrants from the Third World.
Finally, it is worth noting that Canada’s Anti-terrorism Act, which amends the Criminal Code, is scarcely being used to combat “terrorism”. Instead IRPA, which gives the state the powers to charge, detain, and deport non-citizens, is being used through the provision of Security Certificates. While the Anti-Terrorism Act gives the police extraordinary investigative powers, it still requires that those accused are charged with some defined act. Under the Security Certificates regime, however, detainees can be held without charge. Much has been written about how security certificates violate principles of due process; however more significantly, security certificates are a form of legislated racism in only applying to non-citizens. Law professor Audrey Macklin points out, “immigration law has long done to non-citizens what the Anti-terrorism Act proposes to do to citizens–without public outcry and with judicial blessing.”
Although different eras have been dominated by different perceptions of threats to the nation-state, each era has formulated threats as being external to the nation-state thus justifying exclusionary immigration policies. Catherine Dauvergne has written, “one reason why the concept of ‘national interest’ is so vital to immigration law is because of the role this law plays in constituting the nation.” It is not enough to simply defend the “civil liberties and human rights” of immigrants and refugees- a demand that has come to dominate the leftist landscape. Human rights standards have not altered the reality of the immigration and refugee system. For example the UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which came into force in 1954, sets standards of treatment for refugees yet does not alter the fundamental fact that states are not obligated to admit those who are not their nationals. Sunera Thobani offers the challenge "What makes it alright for us to buy a t-shirt on the streets of Vancouver for $3, which was made in China, then stand up all outraged as Canadian citizens when the woman who made that t-shirt tries to come here and live with us on a basis of equality?" Instead we must also confront and challenge the nationalistic processes and logic of racialized notions of belonging and entitlement.
Harsha Walia is an activist and writer based in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories
