Tag: Migration

The Temporary Foreign Worker Program has spawned a recruitment industry in Guatemala that promises workers risk-free employment in Canada, but delivers precarity and exploitation.

Technology and mobility should free us from drudgery, not throw us into competition for dead-end jobs.

A photo essay on a migrant village built in a dump in Thailand.

A shining model of what journalism as a practice of solidarity can look like.

The Urban Worker Strategy proposes a sweeping suite of overdue federal policies that respond to the plight of temps, freelancers, interns, part-timers and other flexworkers who flit from gig to gig, shift to shift, contract to contract, with no guarantee of income or future work, let alone access to benefits or pensions.

In the Filipino language, Kwentong Bayan is the literal translation of “community stories;” and Labour of Love reflects the artists’ understanding that caregiving work – like community-based art work – is rooted in love, is valuable, and deserves respect.

During the economic expansion that followed WWII, organized labour won significant gains in exchange for embracing capitalism. Long since the crises of the 1970s, and decades into organized labour’s decline, major labour organizations still talk as if a return to that postwar compromise is possible. What can be done – what is being done – to challenge this orientation?

Home n casa1 f; (for old people) residencia f de ancianos; (native land) patria

In an era of cutbacks – particularly under austerity reforms like reducing migrant wages to 15 per cent below median regional incomes – a long-simmering migrant health crisis is exploding.

If labour is imagined outside of wage work and governmental categories, it gives us the tools to further a more collective struggle against the living legacies of dispossession, colonization, and exploitation.

Evidently, the Conservatives’ “most-wanted” list has become a permanent and ongoing means of enlisting public support in the burgeoning business of deportation.

There is a mass grave here. The broken skins of some of the fruit reveal eyes, nasal cartilage, thumbs.

With the country’s largest reserves of oil, natural gas, uranium, and potash, much of which is found on Indigenous land, the Prairies will continue to be at the front lines of capitalist expansion for years to come, and are poised to become a hub of resistance. It’s time for us to imagine the West as a different kind of “land of opportunity.”

Over the past 40 years, increasing numbers of Prairie towns and villages are “dying” as people leave in droves to find work in the city. But aggressive recruitment campaigns by the hog industry are now re-populating and transforming the demographics of some of Manitoba’s smaller urban centres. What do these changes mean for these once-stereotypical Prairie towns and the growing populations of economic migrants who now call them home?

Canada’s Extradition Act allows the deportation of Canadian citizens on the simple say-so of a foreign government, even when the case against them is groundless.

In 2009, immigration enforcement entered a community garden outside a Toronto food bank and deported one of its users. The deportation was but one of the 70-odd sweeps, detentions and deportations that happen in Toronto every single day and underscored one of the barriers to food access for undocumented migrants in this country.

Farm workers and their unions have always been at the forefront of the battle to reduce the toxic pesticides served on our fruits and vegetables, fighting for environmental food standards before most consumers were aware of the concept of organic food. Yet today, many food activists seem concerned solely about directly supporting their local farmer, with farm workers’ conditions absent from the seasonal garden tour map.

Afghanistan, and the surrounding region, has been in the crosshairs of imperial expansionists for centuries. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I set the East India Company on its march northward through India. This expansion of the British empire was confronted in Afghanistan in the early 19th century by the southward expansion of the Russian empire, instigating a series of wars known as the “Great Game.”

While the Conservative government continues to fortify our borders and tighten restrictions on immigration, our culpability in the unprecedented levels of migration worldwide has never been clearer. From Canadian mining companies in Latin America to the occupation of Afghanistan, our overseas adventures continue to violently dispossess people around the globe.

In August 2010, the MV Sun Sea arrived in Vancouver carrying 492 Tamil refugees fleeing post-war Sri Lanka. All on board were immediately detained upon arrival in Canada. Nearly a year later, 19 are still in jail.