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A growing number of workers in the Canadian labour force have precarious migration status as participants in authorized temporary work programs, or have no status at all. This article reports the findings of a study that interviewed precarious migrants in British Columbia, and employees of agencies which provided services to them, with a view to assessing the impact of migration status on their conditions of work and on the practical availability to them of legal protections set out in provincial legislation on employment standards, occupational health and safety, and workers' compensation. Data gathered from the interviews indicate that precarious migration status was associated with deskilling, decreased job security and mobility, illegally low pay and long hours, and various health and safety risks. Provincial laws and policies regulating the workplace do not exclude anyone from protection on the basis of migration status. However, federal law gives employers a great deal of employer discretion over the status of temporary foreign workers, aggravating the employer-employee power imbalance and making those workers fearful of seeking redress for violations of their rights under provincial law. The author suggests that local initiatives emphasizing the provision of access to services "without fear" for workers with precarious migration status, or with no status, can help to overcome their marginalization and recognize their place in Canadian society.

There has been an increase in the number of incoming temporary migrant workers to Canada over the past decade. In this article, I critically assess recent changes in the law governing temporary migration to Canada by using theoretical tools from the fields of sociology, geography, and legal geography. A multidisciplinary framework to understand Canada's labour migration policies is provided. Within the socio-historical context of migrant labour regulation in Canada, I argue that political and regulatory developments function to further entrench segregation and exclusion of foreign workers by maintaining a subclass of flexible labour. Specifically, I show that Canada's current temporary migration regime retains the country's historical role as an ethnocratic settler state in which the regulation of migrant workers creates inherent boundaries. These boundaries demarcate racially identified space(s) on the basis of the economic and political logic underlying temporary migration.

The number of people with less than permanent migration status in Canada has increased in recent decades. While such people often have social and economic ties to Canada, and live and work within its territory, they do not have legal permanent membership by way of permanent residence or citizenship, and experience differential access to legal rights and entitlements. This dissertation examines the role of migration status in the lives of people who identify themselves as having “uncertain” migration status. In this study, I draw on interviews with migrants and representatives of migrant-serving agencies as well as legal and policy texts, deploying Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography as a methodology to ground the dissertation both analytically and structurally in the interview data. This study enlarges the understanding of the nature and effects of migration status as it is enacted in local institutional sites. Using the construct of “precarious migration status” as a theoretical frame, I focus specifically on the nature and effects of precarious migration status. I explore the effect of precarious migration status on working life and on migrants’ interactions with state institutions governing health care, education, and income security. I conclude that precarious migration status has a deleterious effect on the employment relationship itself as well as access to worker protections, even though the law creates no formal barrier to such protections on the basis of status. With regard to social state, individuals with precarious status are often formally excluded in the text of the law as well as through various exclusionary policies and practices within local institutional sites. I conclude that institutional sites in which precarious migration status functions to exclude should be understood as forms of enforcement. I further conclude that human rights and anti-discrimination strategies through Charter and provincial human rights statutes, while valuable, are unlikely to improve inclusion for precarious migrants, while contestation of membership at the level of local institutions has greater potential to do so.

In Canada’s liberal dream, the law extends its benefits to everyone. But the law also determines who is included in that “everyone.” Migrant workers, long welcomed in Canada for their labour, are often excluded from both workplace protections and basic social benefits such as health care, income assistance, and education due to their lack of permanent status. Enforcing Exclusion recasts what migration status means to both the state and to non-citizens. Through interviews with migrants and their advocates, Sarah Marsden shows that migrants face enforcement through law, policy, and practice, affecting their ability to address adverse working conditions and their interactions with institutions such as hospitals, schools, and employment standards boards. Canadian immigration laws create a status hierarchy; those at the bottom experience markedly different access to the protections and benefits of law. This book documents the impact of Canada’s system of migration enforcement on people’s lives and questions the adequacy of human-rights-based responses in addressing its exclusionary effects. -- Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction -- The Creation and Growth of Precarious Migration in Canada: “Illegal” Migration and the Liberal State -- Status, Deportability, and Illegality in Daily Life -- Working Conditions and Barriers to Substantive Remedies -- Exclusion from the Social State: Health, Education, and Income Security -- Multi-Sited Enforcement: Maintaining Subordinate Membership -- Rights and Membership: Toward Inclusion? -- Postscript -- Appendix A: Migrant Participant Profiles -- Appendix B: Sample Interview Script.

Although Canada’s migrant labour program is seen by some as a model of best practices, rights shortfalls and exploitation of workers are well documented. Through migration policy, federal authorities determine who can hire migrant workers, and the conditions under which they are employed, through the provision of work permits. Despite its authority over work permits, the federal government has historically had little to do with the regulation of working conditions. In 2015, the federal government introduced a new regulatory enforcement system - unique internationally for its attempt to enforce migrants’ workplace rights through federal migration policy - under which employers must comply with contractual employment terms, uphold provincial workplace standards, and make efforts to maintain a workplace free of abuse. Drawing on enforcement data, and frontline law and policy documents, we critically assess the new enforcement system, concluding that it holds both promise and peril for migrant workers.