What is Going on With Immigration?

Or, why we need to unionize Timmy's

For most of my life I shared the belief common in Canada that immigration is unambiguously a good thing. Before you stop reading, I haven’t turned into some kind of anti-immigration crusader, or even anti-immigration in general. But, as Trudeau’s Liberals and provincial governments have succeeded in more or less destroying the long-standing pro-immigration consensus in Canada by jacking the numbers of immigrants, temporary foreign workers, and foreign students up enormously over the past few years, I’ve begun to think more about this issue from a leftist perspective.

I’ll begin by saying that any attitude toward immigration that is directed primarily at immigrants themselves is cretinous and should be immediately dismissed. That goes even more for anti-immigrant sentiment based primarily in hysteria about their ‘race’ or ethnicity being ‘incompatible’ or ‘alien’. These are the talking points of right-to-far-right populism, have a long and ugly history, and are irrelevant to a left-wing discussion on immigration. I’ll also note that although immigration levels are currently very, very high, Canada has always been, from its inception, a capitalist project whereby a powerful elite imports enormous numbers of workers from elsewhere in the world in order to staff what is basically three mining companies and a logging company in a trenchcoat (these days the trenchcoat also includes UberEats and Tim Hortons). Canada’s population has grown enormously since its colonization, pretty much doubling every fifty years, and a large proportion of that growth has always been through immigration. So in that sense there is nothing totally unprecedented about an immigration boom.

However, that last fact should probably give us pause as socialists. While liberal institutions have very successfully convinced us all that openness to immigration is a fair stand-in for anti-racism, we need to be clear that immigrants are not admitted to Canada because of anti-racism. Immigrants are admitted to Canada because of economic policy overseen by the aforesaid powerful elites, who have long held that growing the population quickly and ensuring a ready supply of labour is the way to go. In other words it is very good for business. If it wasn’t, immigration would be marginal. Although it’s not always a zero-sum game, it’s true that what’s good for business is rarely particularly good for workers, and when the corporate world gets its way, the working class tends to get fucked. So when we keep that in mind, what observations can we make about immigration policy?

Right off the bat we can notice that this enormous immigration boom coincides with a period in which wages were rising rapidly in Canada for the first time in forever. Liberal economists like to call this situation a ‘labour shortage’, also known as a ‘situation in which employers have to pay people more because otherwise they’ll just find another job’. Basically, a lot of Boomers retired early during the pandemic, and a lot fewer people were moving across borders, and the workforce shrank a bit, forcing some employers to actually have to compete with one another for workers for the first time anybody can remember. This was seen by the powers that be as very bad news. The cost of labour is crucial to doing business, and the powers that be all like doing business a great deal. There was also the concern about inflation. Ghoulish economists noted that when people get paid more, it can lead to prices going up, which can lead to too much inflation. Much better to just have the prices go up, without the people getting paid more! Tidier that way.

Well, if the issue was a ‘shortage’ of labour, there’s always more where that came from: India, China, the Philippines, Pakistan. With companies like Tim Horton’s clamouring for more hyper-exploitable workers to hyper-exploit, and agricultural industries whining that their supply of indentured temporary foreign workers had dried up, the government rose to the occasion, raising immigration targets and overseeing a huge increase in the number of temporary workers and foreign students (who, conveniently, could register as students, come to Canada, and work at a Timmy’s for 40 hours a week without ever going to class). Wage growth was successfully clamped down on, and fast food joints got their supply of desperate people willing to put up with whatever.

When we look at things that way, it starts to seem less like the kind and benevolent spirit of generosity and anti-racism and more like a cynical ploy to continue to exploit poor people and give the capitalist class whatever they want. Essentially, the capitalist class have a lever that they can pull, whenever they want, to push wages down: more workers in the labour pool equals less reason for any company to pay decent wages. The working class, conspicuously, does not have an equivalent lever. They used to, and it was called the union; the ability to withdraw labour en masse is more or less the only thing that can force capitalists to grant higher wages and better benefits to their workers, but the union movement was crushed decades ago and has yet to recover. Certainly there is no union for the people working at Subways and Tim Hortons across the country. We’re left with a very one-sided situation.

I was talking to my friend Kai Cheng Thom about this recently and she voiced the thought that a lot of us have had: basically, wouldn’t it be wrong to stop people from developing countries to come to Canada? From a progressive perspective, Canada, as one of the heirs of European world colonialism, is at least partly to blame for the conditions of underdevelopment that persist in large parts of the world. This is a common, almost reflexive thought, I think, among people on the left, and one which I used to have myself. I have a couple main things to say about it.

The first is that obviously, not all of Canada’s immigration program is temporary workers being paid pittances. A very large part of our immigration program is geared toward attracting well-educated professionals from other countries and putting them to work in places where Canada has labour needs. Nurses and doctors are a good example of this: we need them, we can’t seem to produce enough of them ourselves, so we source them from elsewhere. They’re happy to come; we’re happy to have them. Never mind that some such people arrive and find that their degrees aren’t recognized, and end up driving taxis — lots of them do end up doing professional work in Canada, and this has always been one of the ways that Canada’s immigration system has worked well. But when I take a step back, this migration pattern constitutes an obvious brain drain from developing countries to rich countries. Large numbers of their professionals emigrate, leaving the home country with acute shortages.

The second has to do with a really fascinating account of slavery that I came across in David Graeber’s work. Graeber noted that around the ancient world, and up until the industrialized chattel slavery pioneered by European colonialism, slavery usually took the form of war captives being rounded up, brought back to the motherland, and being forced to work. While it was undoubtedly brutal, there usually wasn’t the idea that the slaves constituted a completely separate kind of humanity. Manumission was relatively common, and in many places the children of slaves were not automatically regarded as slaves themselves, unlike with American ‘race’-based chattel slavery. In such a scenario, a primary economic motivation for slavery was this: it takes an enormous amount of energy, time, and commitment to raise a child to adulthood, and by stealing large numbers of captives from an enemy society, you were not only taking the people themselves. You were also stealing that energy, time and commitment. You were essentially making it so that workers popped up, without your own society having to actually expend any resources on creating them. You were stealing the reproductive labour of another society.

With this in mind, Western immigration programs quickly can look quite a bit uglier, because in many ways they operate with the same logic. Other, much poorer countries produce human beings, with all the labour that that entails. They are loved, fed, housed, clothed, and educated for a couple of decades, at enormous expense, and then ‘we’ take them, fully formed into adults capable of work. The reproductive labour that goes into them is invisible because reproductive labour usually is. And the capitalist class ruling in Western countries does not have to pay for the expense of producing these workers, unlike with native-born workers, who depend on infrastructure and public programs financed by taxes.

Right-wing populists convinced of plots to destroy the ‘white race’ through immigration and similar are unable to grasp any of this because they lack an analysis of capitalism. Cut off from an accurate understanding of ruling-class interests, they are relegated to conspiracism instead to explain why anything is happening. They are also fed a constant drip of anti-immigrant sentiment from the reactionary rags marketed to them. Consequently, the only real stance they have is that both immigration and immigrants are wrong and dangerous, which is not helpful from a socialist perspective. So what would be?

I confess I don’t know, but I have a couple of ideas that have been kicking around in my mind. I think that extremely aggressive unionization of industries making heavy use of immigrant labour would be a start, though I concede this will be extremely difficult. But destroying the economic motivation for corporations to hyper-exploit immigrant labour, by protecting those workers with strong unions, would undoubtedly protect all workers in Canada from the depredations of the kind of bootlicking economists who want to keep wages as low as possible. Because immigration in Canada is not the result of a plot by anti-white cabals to destroy Western Civilization, but rather is the result of economic policy formulated by neoliberal monsters trying to exploit the working class as efficiently as possible, this would likely have the result of lowering immigration numbers ‘naturally’, but would also result in both immigrants and Canadians having a higher standard of living. We need to make sure that the working class — the whole working class, including migrants — also has a lever. And unions are, and have always been, our best bet.

So basically, we need to unionize Timmy’s.

More to come on this topic as I work my thoughts out.