With one of the longest election campaigns in Canadian history underway, media headlines are focused on Canada’s next rich white male prime minister. Over the next two months, national conversation – which tends to ignore those marginalized from the “nation,” especially Indigenous communities, undocumented people and those surviving in street economies – will be saturated with electoral propaganda. Much of this propaganda is geared toward immigrant communities who have been key for any Canadian political party to win a federal election.

Since 2006, the Conservative Party has been courting immigrant voters across two of Canada’s largest cities, Toronto and Vancouver. Its “Ethnic Strategy,” as the party calls it, includes targeted advertizing, close media monitoring, and regular interviews for community media. Microtargeting of immigrant communities is not unique to the Conservatives, but they have made it a priority. Given that two decades ago it would be unthinkable for the Conservatives to have inroads in immigrant communities, this is quite unprecedented.

According to the CBC, the Conservatives actively targeted more than 30 ridings (voting districts) in the 2011 election explicitly based on their high proportion of ethnic minorities, what they referred to as “very ethnic ridings,” and won two-thirds of them. There are diverse opinions on what caused this Conservative Party upsurge in immigrant communities – from putting up racialized candidates and symbolic presence at cultural events, to policy promises of tax cuts and reduction in immigration wait times.

Ultimately all major political parties have sought the immigrant vote by, in some way, branding themselves as a pro-immigration party. This usually involves platitudes to allow in “record numbers of immigrants” and create a “fairer and more efficient” system. Here are three things to know about these tired clichés on immigration:

1) The majority of migrants to Canada are temporary

Federal governments always boast about “record levels of immigration,” but a growing number of migrants are coming on a temporary basis.

It was under a Liberal government in 2002 that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program was drastically expanded to include low-wage workers. This trend has continued under the Conservative government. Since 2008, more migrants arrive through migrant worker programs that grant temporary status than via avenues that grant permanent residence. Avenues that grant permanent residency, such as those that facilitate entry of skilled workers, refugees or family members, have plunged 20 percent, 50 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

The number of temporary migrant workers in Canada has tripled over the past decade. Temporary migrant workers are indentured laborers: they are tied to a single employer with no guaranteed access to social services or labor protections and they do not have permanent residency upon arrival. Their temporariness is precisely what makes these migrants precarious: it ensures legal control by bosses, while their categorization as “foreign” signals their position as permanent outsiders – even to the left-of-center New Democratic Party which has called for a moratorium on migrant workers.

Canada has yet to ratify the U.N. Convention on the rights of all migrant workers and their families. The Convention upholds the right to free association and unionization for migrant workers, equal rights to employment insurance and other employment benefits, and the right to remain in the country when pursuing a complaint against an employer. No political party has made the U.N. Convention a part of their platform.

2) No, politicians don’t really care about our families

All federal parties love appealing to “family values,” but the number of family-class immigrants has dropped by 14,000 people, or 20 percent.

After a complete two-year moratorium and then quota on sponsoring parents and grandparents, the government initiated a (you guessed it!) temporary visa program that requires the pre-purchase of private Canadian health insurance. Many sponsored spouses now arrive with conditional status for two years. This makes immigrant women more vulnerable as their legal status is contingent on their partners. Stricter income requirements for sponsoring any family member are in place and wait times have, despite claims otherwise, doubled or tripled.

In a Manifesto on Family Reunification, over 70 organizations call on the federal government to remove all barriers to family reunification, including the “excluded family members” category first implemented by the Liberal Party. No political party has endorsed this manifesto.

3) Migrants are increasingly incarcerated and surveillanced

More migrants than ever are being incarcerated and deported. In fact, migrants are the only population in Canada who can be jailed simply on administrative grounds without being charged. Over the past 10 years, the federal government has detained an average of 11,000 migrants per year, including up to 807 children. In some cases, young Canadian children have spent their entire lives behind bars.

Worse than the U.S. and EU, Canada is one of the only Western countries to have indefinite detention, which can mean incarceration without charges for over a decade. And now Canada is one of the few Western countries to adopt the internationally condemned Australian model of mandatory detention upon arrival for some refugees.

For the first time since records are available, the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention strongly chastised the Canadian immigration detention system in 2014. But no political party has spoken out against this medieval system. No political party has endorsed the demands of the End Immigration Detention Network. No political party is taking steps to move forward the dozens of recommendations from inquiries and inquests into deaths in immigration custody over the past fifteen years.

With the government’s ‘tough on crime’ and ‘tough on terror’ agendas, immigrants and refugees are being torn apart from their loved ones and facing deportation for minor offenses, including traffic offences, or for being alleged security risks. The new “Stealing Citizenship Act” allows for revocation of citizenship in certain circumstances, while anti-terror legislation expands government powers of surveillance, preventative detention and secret trials. Heightened Islamophobia casts Muslim, Arab, and Sikh communities as omnipresent threats, leaving migrant families, especially women wearing the hijab or niqab, susceptible to hate crimes and legislated racism.

Beyond Elections    

In an era of state-mediated reconciliation – from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and apology for residential schools to the Komagata Maru and Chinese Head Tax apologies – it can be easy to relegate racism and exclusion to the past. But even today certain racialized migrants, especially those who are poor, continue to be treated as “terrorists,” “criminals,” or here to “steal jobs.”

Opportunistic politicians sell us strange paradoxes – occupation as liberation, austerity as prosperity, refugees as terrorists, temporary migration as immigration. So while they try to fan the flames that turn some immigrants against others, or feed us false propaganda about their party’s immigration record, we have to strengthen our relationships and solidarities to transform structural injustices.

Harsha Walia (@HarshaWalia) is a South Asian activist and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Indigenous Coast Salish Territories in Canada. She has been involved in community-based grassroots migrant justice, feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous solidarity, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements for 15 years. She is the author of Undoing Border Imperialism.

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