WORKERS WITHOUT BORDERS
Part 1 of 6
The first time Reylene Punzalan saw snow five years ago, she couldn’t resist tasting it.
“I was so excited because the snow was so beautiful,” recalled Punzalan, 28, a Filipina woman with a freckled face and pin-straight black hair. That was back in 2011, months after she landed in New Brunswick to take up a seasonal job as a “ringer” picking meat out of lobsters at a seafood processing plant.
The anxiety Punzalan felt upon arrival in Shediac, the self-proclaimed Lobster Capital of the World, dissipated when she felt welcomed by friendly Canadians who greeted her on the streets.
But Punzalan must leave Canada in November. She’s caught up in the so-called “four- in- four- out” rule, a regulation that limits temporary foreign workers, or TFWs, to four years of total employment in Canada, after which they can’t return for four years.
The Conservative government enacted the rule in 2011 to prevent TFWs from taking jobs from Canadians and to ensure the roles they filled were truly temporary.
But employers say many of their jobs are simply filled by new migrant workers or left vacant, rather than going to Canadians, who have little interest in many low-paying industries.
Instead, the rule is pushing many underground.
“I didn’t even think to go home,” said a worker from Bangladesh who lost his temporary foreign worker permit, but stayed in Canada as a refugee claimant. “There’s no jobs. If you work in Bangladesh, you’ll work 10 hours and just get $5 a day.”
No one knows the exact number of foreign workers who have stayed and how much the four-year cap has contributed to the expansion of Canada’s underground economy.
I’VE HEARD REPORTS FROM, IN PARTICULAR B.C. AND TORONTO, WHERE THE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY HAS SWOLLEN. — MARYANN MIHYCHUK, FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT MINISTER
“I’ve heard reports from, in particular B.C. and Toronto, where the underground economy has swollen,” said federal Employment Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk, noting several members of Parliament told her they have met former TFWs who stayed.
“We don’t know because we don’t track exits,” said Mihychuk. “Somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000 are the numbers that people have suggested to me.”
They are part of an underground economy dominated by the construction industry, retail, hotels and restaurants that Statistics Canada estimated was worth $45.6 billion in 2013.
An RCMP report almost 10 years old said there could be up to half a million undocumented immigrants.
Solidarity Across Borders, a Montreal-based activist group, estimates there are up to one million today.
Dan Davidson, regional programs manager at the Canada Border Services Agency, said it isn’t clear if many TFWs are staying past the four-year limit.
“We are not seeing a significant increase in that area,” he said. “It’s always been a concern, even before the rule, because work permits would expire and people would stay outside of those.”
In a coffee shop in New Brunswick, Punzalan breaks into tears. She can’t apply to stay in Canada permanently because she has a seasonal job that does not make her eligible for permanent residency through the provincial nominee program.
Now, she can barely speak when she thinks about how giving up her job in Canada will affect her family back home. Punzalan has been working to support them since graduating from high school. In the Philippines, she worked in a factory assembling cordless phones.
Then, in 2008, after her father had a mild stroke, she left home for Taiwan to take a better-paying job building circuit boards.
But her wages were not enough to cover her family’s expenses, so when she heard a recruitment agency was looking for people to send to Canada, Punzalan seized the opportunity.
She now earns $12.50 an hour in Shediac. Her earnings go toward remedies for her mother’s heart disease and diabetes, and her younger sister’s schooling. Her father died in 2013.
Punzalan doesn’t think she will find a job in the Philippines that pays enough to cover her family’s costs, so she plans to return to Taiwan after leaving Canada.
“I am scared,” she said before bowing her head to cry.
Punzalan’s job will likely be filled by another temporary foreign worker, rather than a Canadian.
Shediac Lobster Shop Ltd. advertises openings in local newspapers and social media, in addition to running a bus to its facilities from Moncton, the closest major city.
But there are not enough locals who want to handle lobster guts to fill the jobs.
“As an employer, you are losing a loyal, trained, retained employee,” said Lana Desruisseau, who manages human resources at the Shediac Lobster Shop. “The cost of that is enormous.”
At least as far back as 1980, economists warned guest worker programs lead to long-term residency, but Canada didn’t heed those lessons when ramping up its migrant worker program or creating the “four-in-four-out” policy, said Dominique Gross, an economist at Simon Fraser University.
The experience of other countries, including Germany and the United States, supports this theory.
In 1973, after the German government shut down a guest worker arrangement with Turkey, many migrants didn’t leave. Instead, they brought family members into the country. By 1984, Germany’s Turkish population had swelled by 40 per cent to more than 1.4 million.
A series of guest worker programs in the U.S. starting in the 1940s contributed to illegal immigration from Central America over several decades. By the 1980s, there were so many undocumented workers in agriculture, the U.S. government decided to grant amnesty to more than one million.
Across Canada, front line workers, activists and lawyers say they’ve met many former TFWs who chose to stay beyond the four-year rule.
Novie Sanchez, an organizer with Migrante Alberta, a TFW advocacy group, estimates about 80 per cent of low-skilled TFWs in the Calgary area stayed after hitting the four-year limit, in spite of the downturn, because it made economic sense.
Many find under-the-table jobs in the cleaning or food industry, she said.
Some stayed past the four-year rule in hopes of obtaining permanent residency, such as through a provincial immigration program, an application for the right to stay in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, or as refugees.
Some have a realistic chance of being accepted. Others don’t.
A market of immigration consultants, some of whom offered inaccurate advice but charged desperate workers hundreds or thousands of dollars, sprang up around April 2015, when the fouryear rule went into effect.
The connections between undocumented immigration and the temporary foreign worker program run deeper than the four-year rule.
Critics of the program say that one of its biggest problems is that the program leaves low- wage workers open to exploitation because their permits are tied to a specific employer. If workers lose their jobs or are fired, they are supposed to go home.
While it is possible for TFWs to change jobs if they find another employer who has obtained a permit to hire migrant workers, it’s not a certainty.
The situation is further complicated by recruitment fees, often amounting to thousands of dollars, that many workers pay to secure their low-wage jobs in Canada.
“To get this money, people take debt, put their houses up for loan,” said Syed Hussan, spokesman for the Migrant Workers’ Alliance for Change, an advocacy group.
Some decide it makes more sense to stay than to leave.
This is the case for Luis, a former TFW who could easily be mistaken for a college student. He asked his full name be withheld for fear of deportation.
He sends most of his earnings to his mother and four sisters, all single mothers themselves, in Honduras, and to a daughter from a previous relationship. The youngest of five siblings, he speaks little English and went to school for just four years.
“I had to come here and give my life to help them, due to my being the only man in the family,” said Luis, who arrived in Canada in late 2015 to work at a greenhouse in southwestern Ontario.
To secure the job, Luis took out a loan of more than US$5,000 to pay a $6,000 fee to a recruiter, who arranged for a three-month contract and guaranteed that it would be automatically renewed once Luis was in Canada.
But it wasn’t and earning enough to pay back the money in Honduras would be an impossibility, Luis said.
So, Luis is trying his luck in Toronto, where his cousin, another former TFW, has already gone underground.
Now, Luis works in the construction industry and is paid at the end of each day.
For those who have stayed past the four-year limit, many say it’s not just because they want to keep sending money home.
Joseph, a TFW whose permit to work in seafood processing expired in January, lost the opportunity to become a permanent resident through New Brunswick’s provincial nominee program.
His employer supported his application with a fulltime contract but he failed the required English exam 10 times.
It cost him more than $3,000.
Though Joseph was able to be interviewed for this article in English, he struggles with written grammar. It seems all the more unjust to him because he was dedicated to his job, often working 12-hour days, and the language requirement for low-skilled workers was only put in place in 2012.
During his time in New Brunswick, Joseph became an active member of a local church, where he sings and plays the guitar during services. His wife, Billi, joined him in Canada in 2013 to take a job at the same company.
Last November, the two had another child in Canada.
Billi has to continue earning money in Canada to support their children, but they are not sure how they will care for their baby girl if Joseph has to go home. Billi works long hours six days per week.
Joseph has applied to stay in Canada on humanitarian grounds, but a decision could take months.
“I always doubt what will happen to my family if I go back home,” he said with a tear in his eye. He has already received a notice from CBSA telling him to leave the country.
It is not just a loss for Joseph, but a loss to the local community if he leaves, says Rev. Brock Symonds, the Baptist pastor at Shediac Bay Community Church.
His shrinking church was transformed by an influx of Filipino migrants.
When he started working there at 35, he was one of the youngest people in the church by two decades.
Now his congregation is filled with Filipino workers in their 20s and 30s. They’ve livened up services, infusing them with devotional rock music that has replaced 200-year-old songs on the piano, while a new enlarged building wouldn’t have been constructed without them, said Symonds.
“Our church is very anxious about what will happen to our Filipino community. The thought of losing them is devastating.”
For now, the Trudeau government’s review of the temporary foreign worker program offers a glimmer of hope for some workers still in Canada.
“I’m okay I guess :( ” Punzalan says via a text message after a day picking apart lobsters in the summer.
“I only have till November to stay here in Canada … I’m hoping and praying that the law will change.”
This year-long project is a result of the annual Michelle Lang Fellowship program in memory of the Calgary Herald reporter killed while covering the conflict in Afghanistan.