What impact will the Charest government’s plans to “re-engineer the state” have on (im)migrants, refugees and non-status people in Quebec? In many ways, the true logic of this re-engineering — which pretends to reduce the role of the state (by denying public support and services to people in need) while actually augmenting state power to regulate and police people and facilitate their exploitation -– has long been operative in Quebec and Canadian immigration policy.

Quebec’s Minister of Citizen Relations and Immigration, Michelle Courchesne, is calling for a consultation on the number of immigrants Quebec should accept and “integrate” over the next three years. It will begin on February 10, 2004. In a document called “Consultation 2005-2007: Planning Immigration Rates” submitted to the National Assembly on December 9, 2003, Courchesne discusses the importance of using immigration as “a tool for development.”i She goes on to say that according to Emploi-Quebec, over 640,000 vacancies in the labor market will need to be filled between 2002-2006. The document asks how to attract “ideal” immigrants at a rate adequate to ensure a labour force to fill those positions. (“Ideally,” according to the December 9th document, is “young, adaptable, qualified, with children, and already speaks French.”)ii

Quite clearly, for the government of Quebec, immigrants are tools for the economic development that will profit Quebec’s bourgeoisie. And while the government talks neo-liberal jargon restructuring government, it in fact is spending an increasing amount of money regulating who and how many people are allowed to settle here. Hence it will pour funding into the February consultation process, during which the question of whether the target numbers of immigrants should, for the purposes of economic development, be increased, decreased or kept stable over the next three years. Population engineering for profit…

In this way, the government commodifies human beings and human rights – the right to move freely, the right to safety and security, the right to appropriate food and shelter, the right to education. It reduces people to their value as cheap labor.
Indeed, (im)migrant workers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation, precarious employment and substandard labour conditions. Although a number of classes of immigrants are selected by Quebec according to criteria that gauge their employability in professional sectors and in sectors in which there is a shortage of specially trained individuals, even the MRCI admits that frequently people arriving in Quebec are unable to find a job in their field — either a result of their qualifications not being recognized or as a result of straight up discrimination.iii They end up working low-paying jobs unrelated to their training.

Moreover, a great many people who make the difficult choice to leave their country, families and established lives to seek refuge in Canada or Quebec (for legitimate humanitarian and economic reasons) find themselves without permanent resident status. The government – via Revenue Canada – regulates them by granting them social insurance numbers that begin with the number nine, as well as the date they are supposed to leave the country. The nine alerts prospective employers to the fact that they are “temporary” workers, and consequently serves to dissuade employers from hiring non-status migrants for long-term, stable jobs.

This takes place in a context in which non-status people and new immigrants are denied the social services that help people with precarious employment to survive. They have limited access to public health care, no right to day-care subsidies, and, if they wish to study at CEGEP or University level, they must pay exorbitant international student fees, making post-secondary education nearly impossible. Many people without status simply do not have access to welfare. And although some non-status people in Quebec are, in theory, eligible for welfare, it is well-known to people applying for permanent residence in Quebec that it is almost impossible if you are or have been on welfare. Thus, there exists tremendous pressure for non-status people to take any job, no matter little relation it has to previous (and oftentimes very extensive) professional training they might have, no matter how hazardous or how poorly-paid.

While the Liberal government cuts public services for both citizens, permanent residents and non-status people, it shows no sign of cutting the budget of the Immigration selection department whose job it is to recruit ‘ideal’ immigrants and measure the ‘level of integration’ of people without status applying for permanent residence from within Quebec. (And there is so much to be said about the racist and anti-poor ways in which a notion of Quebec’s society is constructed and a person’s ‘integration’ is evaluated that it could fill this entire paper.)This takes place in a Federal context in which a new Ministry of Public Safety and Security has taken over the responsibility for policing borders and deporting those (im)migrants that Quebec’s MRCI has judged insufficiently integrated – maybe because they haven’t worked or have taken welfare, maybe because they don’t speak French well enough, maybe because they wear hijab and pray at a mosque...

In the end, the cycle of precariousness is perpetuated, and a wealthy class of citizens profits from the regulation of (im)migrant movement and labor. But organizations of (im)migrant workers and groups of refugees and non-status people in Quebec and across Canada, such as the Action Committee for Non-Status Algerians, the Coaltion Against the Deportation of Palestinian Refugees, and the Action Committee Against the Racial Profiling of Pakistani Refugees are fighting for status, and publicly denouncing their exploitation as a class of virtual slaves, as well as the mercenary and racist selection processes of the MRCI and Immigration Canada. As the fight-back against the Charest government builds, we need to demand that the state be TRULY re-engineered – by eliminating its Immigration bureaucracies and Immigration police, and opening the borders!

i “Consultation 2005-2007: La planification des niveaux d’immigration,” La Direction de la population et de la recherche de la ministère des Relations avec les citoyens et de l’Immigration, 11.

ii Ibid. 11.

iii Ibid., 23.