‘Use, abuse and throw them out process’
‘Use, abuse and throw them out process’
DOCUMENTARY: “The End of Immigration?”
By Dyan Ruiz
Malcolm Guy and Marie Boti at Ryerson screening.
PHOTO: DYAN RUIZ
“We’re here to do the very manual labor that no Canadian would touch,” said a Filipina who packs produce and is interviewed in the documentary, “The End of Immigration?”
Meatpackers in Alberta, agricultural workers in Southern Ontario, fast food workers in Calgary, nannies in affluent neighborhoods all over Canada. The film is full of the stories and hardships of workers across Canada, many told with a Filipino accent, and all tinged with the sorrow that comes with sacrifice.
“The End of Immigration?” by Marie Boti and Malcolm Guy was shown at Ryerson University on the evening of May 15, 2013 as part of the “Precarious Futures Immigration Conference.” The film explores how Canada’s immigration system is based increasingly on what the filmmakers call “rent-a-workers” or people who come in through the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP).
The Philippines is the number one source country for immigration to Canada in large part because of how many temporary workers come via the TFWP. Overall, there are more people arriving as temporary workers in Canada than as immigrants. In 2011, 192,000 temporary workers arrived in Canada performing jobs that Canadians needed done, but don’t want to do themselves.
“What we realize here today in Canada is that ordinary people like our parents can no longer get in. The only way that they can get in is as temporary foreign workers on a temporary work permit for two years for a maximum of four years,” said Guy in an interview.
It’s a “use, abuse and throw them out process,” he said.
While having immigrant parents meant that Boti and Guy experienced life on the margins of Canadian society, their parents still had the freedom to improve their situation.
“Today people come and they’re totally uprooted. They don’t have their families. They don’t have the freedom to improve their lot. On the contrary they’re stuck in whatever situation they’re brought into,” Boti said. “Sometimes people put up with hell just because of the investment they made to come here and to try to provide for their families.”
“It’s a huge change and it’s not for the better,” she continued.
As Boti and Guy narrate the film with snippets of their parents’ journey, an opening scene shows black and white footage of immigrants arriving by the boatload in decades past. One or two rectangular suitcases in hand. Farmers, shopkeepers, peasants. All with nothing much in the way of possessions, but all full of dreams of a better life in their new home, Canada. A struggle to settle, as it is now, but settle they did.
But open immigration by the boatload to fill working class jobs is for past generations. That is the generation of the filmmaker’s parents who arrived as working class people. Guy’s father left school when he was 13 years old and worked on Ford’s assembly line in England and left after World War II when the jobs dried up.
Now, as the film exposes, working class people are no longer welcome.
“We are treated as secondary citizens and some Canadian labor unions treat us as someone who steals jobs from Canadians like you,” said the Secretary General of the immigrants rights organization, Migrante Canada, Perry Sorio, who fielded questions at the Ryerson screening.
Instead of being given the opportunity to settle in Canada, temporary foreign workers labor in low-paying, back-breaking jobs providing “much needed infrastructure in this country from care-giving to personal support workers, to serving you a double double at Tim Horton’s, or a nice apple pie at McDonald’s,” said Sorio. But within a few years they’re told to leave.
The question of the type of society Canada is now building is posed clearly in the film.
“We have a highly educated population with an enormous appetite for high quality of life. And yet we’re under-populated,” said Thomas Lukaszuk, Alberta Minister of Employment and Immigration from 2010 to 2011 who was shown in the film. He explains that maintaining that quality of life– from having doctors readily available, to coffee shops around the corner– will depend on Canada’s reliance on immigrants to help fill those jobs.
Perry Sorio
When The Philippine Reporter asked at the screening about the large role that Filipinos play in Canada’s new reliance on temporary workers, Sorio responded. He said there weren’t celebrations in the streets of Little Manilas within Canada’s cities when it was announced that the Philippines is the number one source country for immigrants. “In our hearts we know very well, there was nothing to rejoice. There is much more of sorrow,” he said.
“The more there’s growth of Filipinos in countries like Canada, the more of the indication of the deteriorating economic and political conditions brought about by labor export policies that started in the time of [former President Ferdinand] Marcos.”
The push factors of migration out of the Philippines were explored in the documentary as well. The filmmakers journeyed to the Philippines to the hometown of a mother who left her children and jeepney-driving husband to work temporarily in Canada. We see her face through the video calling service on a computer just as her children do before they leave for school. The film shows how raising a family in the Philippines all too often means living apart, as job opportunities for many are scarce.
This is just one of the many tragic vignettes in the documentary uncovering just how far Canada has gone in letting businesses run immigration programs where workers from around the world give Canadians what they need– meat, fruits, vegetables, childcare, coffee, convenience– and receive little in return.
“The End of Immigration?” will be aired in French by Radio-Canada and is being distributed in English through Productions Multi-Monde.
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