Tag: Migrant Justice

In Newmarket, Asian massage workers have been engaged in a battle with the town council, which is intent on shutting down their businesses by claiming that the workers are both disreputable criminals and sex trafficking victims.

Pour mobiliser les travailleuses et travailleurs migrant∙e∙s en région rurale, il faut d’abord les trouver. La seconde étape est de réussir à desserrer l’emprise de surveillance et de peur qu’exerce leurs patrons.

The first step in organizing rural migrant workers is finding them. The second step is breaking through their bosses’ iron grip of surveillance and fear.

From live-in caregivers to meat packers, Filipino workers have been at the front lines of COVID – but have received little protection or recognition.

In the small city of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, three refugee sponsorship groups are preparing to welcome five migrants who endured detention on Papua New Guinea’s infamous Manus Island centre.

Migrants are now a central part of the local working class in virtually every town and city. Organizing against capitalism involves treating migrants not as objects of charity, but as revolutionary subjects.

Nandita Sharma responds to Phil Henderson’s review of her new book, “Home Rule.” She argues that instead of providing us with freedom and justice, national liberation struggles have delivered us to capital and to sovereign power. As a result, rejecting nationalism – all nationalisms, including indigenous nationalisms “from below” – is critical to anti-colonial struggle.

A note from Briarpatch’s editor, clarifying four factual inaccuracies that existed in the baby book, and how they came to be published. 

At its best, Briarpatch stitches together the fragments of a progressive community across so-called Canada, quilting a powerful movement for collective liberation.

Indigenous people, immigrants, and settlers in Regina’s Decolonizing Relations group discuss land, labour, and solidarity.

Migrant workers are keeping us alive through catastrophes like COVID-19, but they face an impossibly complex, punitive, and high-stakes immigration system. It’s time to completely overhaul the way we value those who do the most vital, life-giving work.

When we imagine rural Canada as white, we erase the history, present, and future of rural Black life – from Black Loyalist settlers to justice for modern migrant farm workers.

Following the deaths of three workers to COVID-19, the experience of migrant farmworkers in Canada has received unprecedented media attention. As a result, workers are winning long-overdue changes to their conditions. This timeline charts the wins and losses of migrant agricultural workers in Ontario during seven months of COVID-19.

Is the idea of Indigenous sovereignty really in conflict with the well-being of migrant communities? A review of “Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants.”

Activists are determined to halt the construction of a new migrant detention centre in Laval.

Across the globe, right-wing politics are gaining ground by demonizing migrants and Others. These politics become particularly pronounced in election years. With the federal election approaching, we knew Canada was not immune.

We convened a roundtable of activists from different movements to talk about what a just transition means to them, and what it looks like on the ground.

In this world, a world where many worlds coexist, there would be no forced migration, no mass extinction.

“In the palm of my hand, I delicately finger a pair of unfamiliar ID cards printed on worn pieces of coloured paper, yellow and salmon pink. The faded type reveals they were issued in the spring of 1941 with approval from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.” Creative non-fiction winner of the Writing in the Margins contest.

I often wondered how many other young folks of Japanese ancestry had their history torn from them because of Canada’s history of Japanese internment – a pondering that eventually turned into this photography series, The Suitcase Project. Photography winner of of the Writing in the Margins contest.