I ran into Silvio yesterday in the subway. I hadn’t seen him in two years and he didn’t look good. His eyes were red, his cheeks flushed, and his dirt encased hands were shaking.
“It’s just so hard with the kids you know, never knowing what will happen next” he said.
His wife had called him at work. She had heard about the immigration raids in Vancouver, and had demanded that he leave his job and get home. She herself was going to pick up the kids from school.
Silvio is a construction worker, one of tens of thousands of migrant workers and undocumented people working in the industry. I met him in early 2010 after four migrant workers fell to their deaths while on a construction site in Toronto. Their scaffolding had collapsed and they had no safety equipment.
I remember his words then: ‘its about money and fear .. they use our fear to make more money’. That about sums up Canadian immigration policy.
On Wednesday, four workplaces were raided by dozens of immigration officers in Vancouver. In tow were cameras from Force Four Entertainment filming the entire ordeal. Once in detention, the detainees were asked to sign consent form agreeing to be on the reality TV show Border Security: Canada’s front lines (Sign the petition calling for this show to be shut down).
This is reminiscent of the 2009 workplace raids in Toronto, when over a 100 migrants were arrested in two workplace raids. At least 40 of them were denied their right to a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment Application, forced to sign waivers and deported within hours. Border services filmed the raid themselves and released the footage to news channels all of whom ran with it simultaneously.
The intention of the made-for-TV spectacle in both cases is the same: sow panic, spread fear.
Migrants, particularly undocumented ones, woke up across the country a little more scared these last few days. Many families like Silvio’s probably kept kids home from school. Others hugged each other other that much longer before going to a job they simply couldn’t afford to miss. Around the world, families sat up next to phone lines waiting for the bad news to fall. I’ve done this too, sat by the phone while my sister hid from immigration enforcement on a blistering hot roof thousands of kilometer away. Its a cold fear. A fear that leaves you powerless and uncertain. I wish it on no one.
Fear mongering is standard operating policy for this government. Be it passing laws that would make it to mandatory to detain some refugees for up to a year, or going as far as Hungary to put up billboards discouraging applications to Canada, part of Kenney and company’s project is to spread panic and terror in migrant communities.
Scared workers make for larger profits. Many migrant workers, which make up the majoity of migrants in Canada, pay up to two years of their salaries to recruiters to get a job in Canada. To do so, entire families go in to debt. Upon arrival these migrant workers are extremely unwilling to assert their rights or fight back against employer abuse. Doing so means possible deportation which could destroy the entire family back home. Bosses know this and treat workers accordingly.
The workplace raids in Vancouver will soon appear on TV screens across the country. That’ll make a tidy little profit for the Shaw Media Group, the parent company of National Geogrphic where it will air. Force Four Entertainment will make a quick buck too. It’ll also give bosses across the country one more hammer to hold over the heads of undocumented workers, and that means the ability to cut more corners, provide less resources and abuse more rights.
Fear is meant to suppres dissent. Immigrants parents tell us to keep our noses out of trouble. Our friends remind us to be careful. Kenney lets us know that he has the power to kick anyone out on public undefined “policy considerations” and that could mean us. The aura of a frightening border force or immigration system is meant to silence critics, especially those of us without full immigration status, and it often does. It is for this very reason, Kenney releases statements calling groups like No One Is Illegal, hardline anti-Canada extremists. Doing so opens the doors to further harassment by the security apparatus, making too many of our lives more precarious.
It is fear then that we must challenge right now. Let us not be afraid. Let us challenge the detention and deportation regime, and the exploitative boosses with even more obstinacy. Let us insist that in these times of fear, we refuse to be scared.
It is no coincidence that after nine years of organizing the campaign that moved Toronto one step closer to being a Sanctuary City is called Access Without Fear. It is no fluke that the call for one of the most important immigrant youth movement in the United States calls itself Undocumented and Unafraid. Naming fear, and then fighting it is critical community work.
Nearly three years ago, I stood at the protest fence in Toronto facing off one of the largest domestic police and military operations in Canadian history, one meant to scare people into staying home and off the streets. I stood with allies from Defenders of the Land and No One Is Illegal groups, knowing that there were dozens of organizations, and thousands of people willing to challenge this apparatus. In the face of the fear we all felt, I repeated the words of my friend and mentor Macdonald Scott.
These are the same words I said to Silvio, the same words I texted to undocumented friends across the city: We have our own weapons, weapons of hope, weapons of solidarity, weapons of unity, and they will overcome these fences.
In the face of fear, let us assert hope.
Photo Courtesy: Ryan Hayes
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