Lindsay Larios

Within the liberal democracies of the global north, fears associated with migrant maternity are a long-standing part of immigration politics. This article raises concerns about what narratives political and public debates on migrant maternity are mobilizing, who they are targeting, and how these narratives shape the experiences of a wide range of migrants in Canada as they access prenatal and obstetric care. The article uses policy and media analysis to examine how migrant maternity is problematized in Canada through the “passport baby” narrative alongside interview data, which illustrates how this narrative impacts the lives of mothers with a range of migrant trajectories. This article argues that this problematization relies on overgeneralizations that overlook the complexity of migration, continues to be shaped by racial discrimination and stereotypes, and results in increased vulnerability for pregnant migrants within Canada.

Understandings of citizenship have increasingly come to include the recognition of family care and reproduction as practices of citizenship and a recognition that migrants who are not citizens nonetheless engage in many practices of citizenship within their host state and rely on their host state for the fulfilment of basic human rights. This paper conceptualizes this intersection of immigration and reproduction as precarious reproductive citizenship, arguing that gaps in entitlements for pregnant precarious status migrants constitute reproductive injustice and present an important challenge for how we understand citizenship and human rights. This conceptualization is illustrated through interviews with women concerning their experiences of pregnancy and new motherhood while having precarious immigration status living in Montreal, Canada. It highlights three employment-related policies: employment discrimination protections, maternity and parental leave, and childcare. In each case, immigration status (directly or indirectly) acts as a barrier to accessing protections and programs meant to support gender equity and overall family thriving.

Open political debate on immigration and integration policies (IIP) among Canadian political parties has been relatively limited. As Canada's immigration and integration systems become more decentralized, what about political debates about IIP in Canadian provinces? This article examines how IIP evolved across time by focusing on political parties’ claims, frames and pledges in party platforms and newspapers, using the cases of Ontario and Quebec. In Ontario, IIP were primarily framed as an economic and social resource. However, following the event of 9/11, new frames began to be introduced, contributing to a heightened salience and polarization. In contrast to Quebec, however, this politicization was not sustained. In Quebec, IIP were only marginally a matter of debate until the mid-2000s. This changed following the Hérouxville event, as these topics became salient, and dominant frames of immigration as economic and social resources were challenged by those of immigration as economic and cultural threats.

This research develops an analytical framework for theorizing the lived experiences of pregnant women in immigration detention, and then applies this framework in considering possibilities for transforming citizenship and the allocation of rights. We focus on the Canadian case, examining the 2.5-year detention of a refugee claimant who was detained while 3 months pregnant. In line with feminist intersectional and critical migration scholars, we argue that immigration detention is a form of structural violence against noncitizens that is gendered, raced, and classed. However, our analytical framework extends existing scholarship by centring reproductive justice as a key axis along which the structural violence of noncitizenship is enacted. Our findings are thus critical of reforms to detention that frame pregnant women as biologically vulnerable: we instead argue for a structural understanding of vulnerability that centres reproductive justice as a fundamental component of migrant justice in envisioning a decarceral future.

In this paper, we explore the role of social empathy in policymaking. Social empathy extends empathy from an interpersonal disposition to the social and political structures that inform policy processes and outcomes. Empathy requires an emotional understanding of phenomena, which we suggest can be cultivated through an emotional analysis of policy, and can result in more socially just outcomes. Building on social work and emotional policy analysis research, we present a framework for both nurturing and applying empathy in policy contexts, which is then applied to the case of Canada’s Caregiver Program. We demonstrate how emotional discourse analysis exposes the various subject positions of both the analyst and policy subjects, implicating disciplinary forces that hinder connection between actors. Once such forces are illuminated, policymakers can reconfigure policy in more socially just ways. We thus emphasize the transformative potential of fostering empathy in and through policymaking.

It is well understood that women’s work situations are critical to their well-being during pregnancy and in terms of potential risks to the fetus. It has also long been known that undocumented women workers face particularly difficult work conditions and being undocumented precludes access to key social benefits (i.e. public health insurance, paid maternity leave, child benefits and subsidized daycare) that support pregnant women and new mothers. Yet, this paper aims to write about the intersection of undocumented women’s pregnancy with work experiences. Drawing on the results of a broader qualitative study that was focused on access to healthcare for undocumented (and therefore, uninsured) women who were pregnant and gave birth in Montreal, Canada, the authors begin this paper with a review of the relevant literature for this topic related to the work conditions of undocumented women, how work exacerbates barriers to accessing healthcare and the resulting health outcomes, particularly in relation to pregnancy. The authors highlight the social determinants of health human rights framework (Solar and Irwin, 2010), before presenting methodology. In conclusion, the authors discuss how an understanding of undocumented women’s work situations sheds light on their pregnancy experiences. The authors then present participants’ work conditions before becoming pregnant, working conditions while pregnant and employment options and pressures after giving birth. The authors emphasize that attention to undocumented pregnant women’s work situations might help health and social service practitioners to better serve their needs at this critical point in a woman’s life and at the beginning of the life of their children, born as full citizens.

Private, for-profit recruitment and employment agencies are key intermediaries connecting migrant workers from abroad to employers in Canada. Despite this, there is a lack of effective regulation of recruitment agencies by the Canadian federal and provincial governments. The objective of this article is to provide a snapshot of the problem, based on the empirical analysis of the casework of one community organization in Montreal, PINAY, highlighting the multiple compounding effects of this type of exploitation and to highlight the role that community-based organizations play in supporting migrant workers faced with them. Our analysis identifies three types of exploitation: exploitation of financial need, exploitation of immigration precarity, and exploitation of relationships. We conclude the article by discussing community level responses to the exploitation migrant works face in their interactions with recruitment agencies and reflect upon the implications of Quebec’s recent amendment of its Labour Standards.

Access to transportation has long been recognized as key to people’s employment outcomes. Being able to get to work affordably, safely and on time makes all the difference in terms of job security and satisfaction. Recently, the rise of temporary placement agencies, especially as a door of entry into the labour market for many newcomers to Canada, raises new questions. In this article, we present the findings of a 3-year longitudinal study that followed 42 (im)migrant temp agency workers in 5 sectors to explore the trajectory of their experiences. We analyze the role of transportation within their employment and make the argument that access to transportation—and especially the lack of it—is an important factor in temp agencies’ control and exploitation of workers. At the same time, those seeking to organize workers can look to the moment of transportation to and from work as an opportunity.

Within immigration politics, refugee women are often constructed as care receivers, and the value of their care work in their homes, in their communities and transnationally is absent from immigration politics. The research explores how refugee women understand and situate their relational identity, the meaning of their caring actions and how this is shaped by their relative position within Canadian society. The goal of this analysis is to highlight the importance of care work and how it is shaped by and reproduces inequalities, and to offer counter-narratives to those that have emerged within immigration politics on the contributions of refugee women to Canadian society.

Canadian immigration policies went through numerous changes under the Conservative party leadership of Stephen Harper from 2006 to 2015. This article provides an empirical account of immigration policy change during this era and suggests that of state-centred venue shopping can effectively account for the Harper's immigration record. In particular, it documents the ways in which immigration policies have expanded into international and regional venues, opened new venues to non-state actors, further decentralized into subnational venues and reinvested into traditional administrative and executive venues for policy making. The analysis suggests that the redeployment of the state into new and expanding venues aims to demonstrate state capacity and legitimacy as a nodal actor in immigration policy.

For newcomers to Canada, placement agencies (or temp agencies) are a common path into a labour market that is difficult to access. It is widely documented that temp agencies are linked to precarious work conditions, dangerous occupational health conditions, racialized and gendered division of labour, and the exploitation of precarious immigration statuses. Our study shows that gender plays out strongly in (im)migrants’ experiences of temp agency work. Regardless of their previous education or experiences it is their immigration status, race and gender that seemed to dictate the types of work available to them. We discuss five elements of workers’ experiences that were strongly shaped by gender: their sectors of work; their tasks within the workplace; gender-normative bullying; sexual harassment and assault; and their management of work-life balance.

Domestic and caregiving work have been part of the Canadian fabric since our colonial founding and have long represented one of the most easily accessible routes for migration open to women. Until very recently the Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP) operated as the primary program in Canada facilitating this labour migration. While the LCP has been replaced by the Caregiver Program (CP), it has yet to be determined how these changes will impact migrant caregivers. We suggest that many lessons can be drawn from our knowledge of migrant caregivers’ experiences under the LCP that can help us understand the dynamics of new immigration policies. Using the global care chain framework, we consider here whether Canada’s caregiver migration policy demonstrates a concern for the wellbeing of migrant caregivers as workers, as family members and as citizens. Our analysis suggests that the CP does not adequately address the concerns raised through the global care chain critique. Rather, the CP continues and deepens the trend of using immigration policy to hold people in substandard employment, with very little care for migrant caregivers whether in terms of their labour rights, their family relationships or their sense of belonging and citizenship.