Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada

Afro-Caribbean Writing in Canada and the Politics of Migrant Labour Mobility

153 So far as the economy of the metropolitan country is concerned, migrant workers are immortal: immortal because continually interchangeable. They are not born: they are not brought up: they do not age: they do not get tired: they do not die. They have a single function—to work. All other functions of their lives are the responsibility of the country they come from. —John Berger, A Seventh Man (64) the “metropolitan country” berger speaks of in his 1975 documentary study specifically refers to those European countries—such as Germany and Switzerland—that depended on labour migration schemes in the postwar period. Although Canada’s role as an importer of migrant labour is often rendered invisible in contemporary state discourses of tolerance and multiculturalism , Berger’s comments apply equally to Canada. Analysis of cultural forms in Canada should therefore account for the growing use of temporary migrant labour that took root in the postwar period but which has flourished since the mid-1960s.1 Yet many critical discussions of diaspora and globalization treat transnational forms of mobility as if they were untethered, seeking tropes of de-territorialization without also looking for the ways that these tropes are implicated in the re-territorializing politics of, for example, the Canadian state, which in the late twentieth century has refined and strengthened its ability to police the mobility of migrant workers.2 Other critics simply fail to acknowledge that migrant labour constitutes a central aspect of Canadian immigration and labour policy. Indeed, in his 1998 discussion of the relevance of diasporic perspectives to Canadian studies, Alan Anderson argues that “cheap migrant Afro-Caribbean Writing in Canada and the Politics of Migrant Labour Mobility Jody Mason 154 jody mason labour” diasporas, composed of labour “imported into industrialized states to supplement a labour shortage and thereby maintain capitalist economic expansion ,” are characteristic of countries like Germany, not Canada (24). Anderson ’s contention is simply false: there have been labour importation schemes in this country since its inception. Moreover, since the 1973 introduction of the Non-Immigrant Employment Authorization Program (NIEAP), more than three-quarters of immigrants entering Canada as workers have been temporary migrant labourers (Sharma 110).3 A central contention of sociologist Nandita Sharma’s 2006 study Home Economics, and one that influences my thinking here, is that temporary labour migration is now outpacing immigration for permanent residence in Canada. While the bulk labour schemes of the immediate postwar period in Canada were meant to ease temporary labour shortages, non-immigrant labour migration programs have remained in place, and have indeed grown in size, since the postwar years. Sharma argues that the introduction of the purportedly “non-discriminatory” immigration policy in Canada in the 1960s coincided with the curtailment of certain immigrant rights. By 1972, for example, workers who fell under the category of “visitors” could no longer change their status to “landed immigrants” (now permanent residents) from within Canada (Sharma 90). Not coincidentally, once this right to change status was removed, the limited and scattered postwar policy of admitting temporary agricultural and domestic workers was expanded in 1973 into the broader and more permanent NIEAP, which remains in place today. A federal domestic worker program has been in place in Canada since the introduction of the Domestic Scheme in 1955. This program has operated since 1973 under the guidelines of the NIEAP and since 1992 has been called the Live-in Caregiver Program (Silvera 7; Bakan and Stasiulus 121). The state-managed program of agricultural labour migration, which targets male rather than female migrants, began in 1966. The recruitment of temporary agricultural workers is currently administered through the NIEAP as the Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program (SAWP), which brings workers from Mexico and a number of Caribbean nations to Canada on seasonal contracts that last eight months or less.4 Sociologist Vic Satzewich contends that racialization has played a key role in the Canadian state’s differential incorporation of immigrants and migrant workers (47–51), and immigration statistics support his claim: between 1973 and 2004, the largest proportion of non-professional temporary workers in Canada came from the Caribbean region (Sharma 127). afro-caribbean writing in canada 155 Although they contribute to state programs that were developed in the context of ideas about the social rights of citizenship in the postwar period, migrant workers cannot be citizens of Canada.5 If the nation-state’s restriction of citizenship rights to those who...