Introduction

This study is an attempt to understand Canada’s economic-based immigration as settler colonialism.^[1] In doing so, introductory discussions about settler colonialism and Canada’s economic-based immigration are necessary. The starting point presents a brief discussion on what settler colonialism is. It is followed by an in-depth critical appraisal of Canada’s economic-based immigration. After presenting the distinct mode of domination of settler colonialism and the overt/covert discriminatory processes of economic-based immigration, I argue that labour migrants are settled structurally by the settler colonial state through economic-based migration. The argument, concludes the paper, serves as an analysis on why Canada’s economic-based immigration is a contemporary and historical processes of Canadian settler colonialism.

I begin my study of Canadian settler colonialism as self-interrogation of my lived experience through labour migration as an economic-based immigrant who sought permanency in Canada, which in turn became my adopted social location and positionality. I find this important to recognize as positionality is not only central to the issue in settler colonial discourse, but is the issue (Wolfe 1999). As a disclosure of positionality, I would like to acknowledge at the outset my entry point to this study (or project): I am a first generation racialized economic-based migrant in the appropriated/expropriated land called Turtle Island (what is now Canada) and, to borrow Wolfe’s words, with no pun intended, I “come to stay” (2).

Foregrounding this study, my question, as in the questions of settler colonialism, is: As I assert permanency, not only because I came and intended to stay, but because in staying I also acquired appropriated/expropriated land, what are the implications of my settlement as a racialized economic migrant? Drawing on my lived experience, I would like to further complicate the settler colonialism discourse by implicating myself as a racialized settler migrated via an economic-based category through the mobility of commodified labour as human capital. Beyond settlers’ “moves to innocence” (Tuck & Yang 2012; Lawrence & Dua 2005), what meaning is generated when my permanent presence as an exogenous Other becomes implicated in the enduring dominance of the settler colonial state against the dispossessed Indigenous people? In the agency of my volitions, labour participation and land acquisition, am I a settler? And, hence, a settler colonizer? These questions are posed to signal resistance to settler colonialism by unsettling the settlement and integration practices in Canada’s economic-based immigration policy.

Settler Colonialism

As a sequel to Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Veracini 2010), Lorenzo Veracini (2015) contends in The Settler Colonial Present that the seminal work of Patrick Wolfe (1999), Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, marks the “settler colonial turn” (1). Consequently, Veracini (2015) calls for the establishment of “settler colonial studies as an autonomous scholarly field” (6).      Veracini gives the call with high regard and suggests that Wolfe’s important discovery of the distinction between colonial and settler colonial studies is worthy of an equivalent to that of a Nobel Prize recognition.^[2] This appraisal of the discovery seems an exaggeration and, indeed, settler colonialism is critiqued as a developing scholarly field (Veracini 2017). Yet, Veracini (2015) insists that the discovery of the distinct logics of domination between colonialism and settler colonialism “should help imagining more effective ways of theorising and practising the decolonisation of settler colonial formations” (30). What then is in Wolfe’s “settler colonial turn” that distinctively makes settler colonialism a different field of a study? What makes settler colonialism different from colonialism? In short, what is settler colonialism?

Wolfe (1999) asserts in his ground-breaking book Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event that in settler colonialism “[t]he colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event” (2). And, indeed, in the article “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” which he published almost a decade later, Wolfe (2006) re-asserts the same contention (388). Importantly, the assertion not only describes the nature of settler colonialism but also markedly differentiates it relative to colonialism and, hence, signals the turn of the settler colonial studies. This differentiation is a “turn” which can be of two forms: it is either a turn within the colonial studies field (hence, is the creation of a subfield), or because it is an autonomous field of its own (in fact, a critique of colonial studies).

Following the authoritative claim of Wolfe (1999; 2006), one can posit two related arguments: on the one hand, colonizers in settler colonialism come to stay; and, on the other hand, settler colonialism is not an event but a structure. Interpreting these arguments, it follows that colonizers in colonialism return home to the metropole after benefiting from the invasion while colonizers in settler colonialism envision becoming permanent settlers in the “new home.” It also follows that invasion in colonialism is considered a historical event belonging to the past while invasion in settler colonialism is a historical but ongoing structure. In other words, the logic of invasion in colonialism is extractive while in settler colonialism is that of enduring assimilation and/or elimination (Hurwitz & Borque 2014; Morgensen 2011; Veracini 2010, 2015; Wolfe 1999, 2006). As Wolfe argues, “settler colonies were not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour. Rather, they are premised on displacing indigenous from (or replacing them on) the land” (Wolfe 1999, 1).

On the basis of colonialism’s historical nature, this is perhaps why one can speak of post-colonialism in reference to an “event” (history) proceeding from colonization. Using Bobby Sikes’ questioning, Veracini playfully asks the same question: “What? Have they left?” (2017, 1, 7). Contrary to the temporal nature of colonization as happening in time and space with colonizers returning to the metropole, settler colonialism is an invasion that constructs a structure of “elimination of the native” as colonizers assert permanency in settlement. So, the answer is: “No, they stayed.” Suffice to say, what becomes permanent would then become always present. Veracini’s (2015) coining of the phrase “settler colonial present” captures the nature of settler colonialism as the present. Taking up Wolfe’s argument and his attention to the nature of settler colonization as not an event but a structure, Veracini (2015) explicates that the meaning of “structure” is “not ‘an event’ that can be ascribed to a past and no longer impinges on the present” (Veracini, 9). Settler colonialism for Veracini is a form of colonialism with a specific mode of domination in the settler colonial present (1-2). For Veracini (2015), “settler colonial studies developed as a comparative and interdisciplinary field that insisted on the unreformed immanence of fundamentally unequal relations between indigenous people and their nonindigenous counterparts: the settlers” (1).

Inevitably, it has to be asked: Who is a settler? It is apparent that the answer is a rhetorical affirmation as it is within the claim of Veracini, i.e., the “nonindigenous counterparts.”  In this regard, the non-autochthones are therefore settlers. This is the same point that Amanda Morris (2019) reiterates: “settler-colonialism means understanding that all non-Indigenous people are settler-colonizers, whether they were born here or not.” The emphasis is on “fixity” where “settlers are defined as those who have not stayed where they were” (Veracini 2015, 2). Consequently, what/who is a colonizer? How does “colonizer” differ from “settler colonizer”?

In agreement with Wolfe’s main assertion, Glenn articulates two major differences between colonialism and settler colonialism: Firstly,

In contrast to classic colonialism whose aim is to take advantage of resources that will benefit the metropole, settler colonialism’s objective is to acquire land so that colonists can settle permanently and form new communities. […] Settler colonists do not envision a return home. Rather, they seek to transform the new colony into ‘home’. (2015, 57)

Secondly, as Glenn continues:

In classic colonialism, the object is to exploit not only natural resources but also human resources. Native inhabitants represent a cheap labour source that can be harnessed to produce goods and extract materials for export to the metropole. […] In settler colonialism, the object is to acquire land and to gain control of resources. To realize these ambitions, the first thing that must be done is to eliminate the indigenous occupants of the land[…]. The second thing that must be done is to secure the land for settlers. (2015, 57)

Laurent Dousseet (2004), drawing from Wolfe’s (1999) pioneering discourse on settler colonialism, contends that “the ‘native’ was superfluous and the land itself the principal leitmotiv (whereas in other colonial contexts the ‘native’ was a means of production as an indispensable provider of labour)” (215). The land theft is famously (un)justified by the Marshallian formulation of the Doctrine of Discovery and the idea of terra nullius (Veracini 2015, 4). In one sense, Indigenous people’s land appropriation/expropriation by the state is central in settler colonialism discourse, and in another sense, as Dousseet expressed, includes Indigenous peoples’ indispensable labour (Douseet 2004). The question is, as Wolfe aptly asks: “But what if the colonizers are not dependent on native labour?” (Wolfe 1999, 1). In the North American historical event, Wolfe theorizes that Indigenous people were cleared from their land rather than exploited for their labour, in part through the enslavement of Africans who were forced to provide the labour which was mixed in with the expropriated land. In contemporary times, as a rejoinder, I argue, the enslaved labour (“black labour” as Wolfe puts it) is replaced with economic-based commodified labour through global migration. Despite the distinction between colonial and settler colonial logics of domination, in a globalising context that is fundamentally shaped by colonial relations, colonial and settler colonial formations often coexist and mutually support each other (Veracini 2015, 29).

As discussed, settler colonialism is often framed as a binary relationship between dominant white settlers as oppressors and Indigenous people as the oppressed. Or, as Phung (2011) puts it, “a problem that has often been framed as a white settler-Indigenous issue” (291). Patrick Wolfe theorizes that settler colonialism is about enduring domination, demand of labour, as settlers come to stay. Lorenzo Veracini expanded settler colonialism to mean not only for settlers to come and stay but also for Indigenous people to disappear by assimilation and/or elimination. The logic of settler colonialism is therefore to assimilate and/or erase Indigenous peoples. Amanda Morris (2019) succinctly explains this: “the goal of settler-colonization is the removal and erasure of Indigenous peoples in order to take the land for use by settlers in perpetuity” (par. 1). Central to settler colonial discourse is the idea that Indigenous people are superfluous to state sovereignty, that final authority over land lies with the state rather than Indigenous peoples, and that their labour is only useful insofar as it serves state-led agendas. Once settler colonizers are no longer dependent on Indigenous peoples’ indispensable labour, settler colonial domination turn to global colonial relations to exploit Others for cheap labour (e.g., via economic migration). This exploitative process consequently mixes within the geopolitical spaces to not only create unequal relationships between the Indigenous Peoples’ land expropriations but also sustains Exogenous Others’ precariousness. The settler colonial state’s structural imposition of sovereignty ultimately shows the exercise of a naturalized power at present, rather than simply inherited from a violent colonial past, as settler colonialism’s logic of domination.

While both colonizers and settler colonizers are exogenous, the differentiation of settler colonial phenomena relative to coloniality, as analyzed by Veracini, is the “distinct functioning of colonial and settler colonial modes of domination” (2015, 15). The mode of domination is distinct as colonialism reproduces a fundamentally unequal relationship while settler colonialism reproduces a biopolitical entity (Veracini 2015, 27). Biopolitics, as Veracini (2015) follows the work of Morgensen (2011), refers to the idea that the colonial era has never ended, since settler colonialism remains and sustains with the assumption of naturalized activity of colonial biopower. The concept of biopower originates in the work of Michel Foucault (1976) who theorized, including “migration,” the “explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” as the birth of biopower (140). Such colonial biopower persists as it becomes the structure that controls the population in the settler colonial present. As Morgensen (2011) argued, “[s]ettler colonialism performs biopower in deeply historical and fully contemporary ways” (52). For example, the Doctrine of Discovery (The Bull Romanus Pontifex (Nicholas V) 1455; Reid 2012; Assembly of First Nations 2018) and the idea of terra nullius (Fitzmaurice 2007; Asch 2002) are exercised at present. Reid (2010) clearly pointed out, in the case of land disputes today, that “[t]he Doctrine of Discovery, is not simply an artifact of colonial history. It is the legal force that defines the limits of all land claims to this day and, more fundamentally, the necessity of land claims at all” (337). Using the Doctrine of Discovery as a legal justification for colonial dispossession of the land further led to “practices that continue through modern-day laws and policies” (Assembly of First Nations 2018, 2).

Im/migration, as the main concern in this paper, is another form of technique in exercising colonial biopower to control the population. It is in these examples that the naturalization of colonial biopower continues to reproduce the settler colonial present and its governmentality that is biopolitical. Biopolitics in this sense can be understood as a “political rationality which takes the administration of life and populations as its subject” (Adams 2017).

The following discussion will describe the settler colonial formations that take place through the commodification of labour in global colonial relations. By critically examining Canada’s economic-based immigration, specifically that of labour migration, I hope to further substantiate the claim that the economic-based immigration is an expansion of settler colonialism.

Canada’s Economic-Based Immigration

To understand Canada’s immigration policy, the Government of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA 2001) is a good reference as it provides clear explanations of its objectives and legal processes. The Government of Canada, following the main legal statute detailed in IRPA, enables the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to regulate and implement immigration to Canada and is responsible for the administration of IRPA (IRPA 2001; Elgersma 2015). Under Canada’s Constitution Acts, immigration to Canada is a shared jurisdiction between the federal and provincial or territorial governments (Elgersma 2015; Government of Canada 1867, 1982, 2022; Johnson et al. 2021). In 1991, under the Canada-Quebec Accord relating to Immigration of Temporary Admission of Aliens, the province of Québec and the federal government agreed that “Québec has sole responsibility for the selection of immigrants destined to that province” (Government of Canada 1991). The authorizing immigrant admissibility remains under the federal government for the rest of the nine provinces and three territories. However, other provincial/territorial governments are granted the responsibility to select or nominate potential immigrants under the collaborative agreement in the provincial nominee program (Elgersma 2015). In Saskatchewan, for instance, under the Canada-Saskatchewan Immigration Agreement, 2005, the province can collaborate with the federal government “to foster an effective partnership between Canada and Saskatchewan for the promotion, recruitment, selection, admission, control, settlement and integration of immigrants to the province” (Government of Canada 2005).

There are three main statuses under which one may migrate to Canada. Section 12 of the IRPA, which applies in all Canadian provinces and territories except Québec, provides the selection and admission of immigrants pursuing permanent residency in Canada as categorized under three main streams: 1) Economic Immigration, 2) Family Reunification, and 3) Refugees.

The first category, economic immigration, is the main focus of this paper, since the second category is contingent on the first and the third is a commendable humanitarian action (except, of course, when humanitarian action is premised as pressured under international calls for justice). Under economic-based immigration, IRCC lists further various classes: Federal skilled workers (FSW); Canadian experience class (CEC); Federal skilled trades (FST); Start-up business class, Investors, Entrepreneurs and self-employed persons; Self-employed persons class; Quebec Economic Classes; Provincial nominees (e.g., Saskatchewan Immigration Nominee Program or SINP); Atlantic Immigration Pilot Programs (AIPP); Atlantic Immigration Program (AIP); Caregiver classes; Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot Program; Agri-Food Pilot (AFP); Temporary Resident to Permanent Resident Pathway; and Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot (IRCC 2022). Among these various classes, this study focuses on direct labour migrants. In other words, the analysis excludes the Investors as a class even though it falls under the economic immigration category, as it does not solely include labour as a human capital for migration.

Section 3 of IRPA provides the main objective of Canada’s immigration: “to permit Canada to pursue the maximum social, cultural and economic benefits of immigration” (IRPA 2001; my emphasis). Specifically, under section 14.1 of IRPA, the purpose of the Economic Immigration category is to support “the attainment of economic goals established by the Government of Canada” (IRPA 2001). The 2020 annual report makes this goal apparent: “immigration will continue to be a key driver in advancing Canada’s economy” (IRCC 2020, 5). This emphasis is also displayed in the Economic Immigration category statistics, as it included approximately 58% of the total immigrants in 2019 (IRCC 2020, 17). Related information from Statistics Canada supports this data trend. Statistics Canada’s census (2017) shows that 6 out of 10 new immigrants were admitted under the economic category. In 2021, 75% of Canada’s population growth came directly from economic immigration (Statistics Canada 2021c). Undoubtedly, Canada’s statistical immigration trajectory emphasizes the economic immigration category relative to family reunification and refugee streams.

In every Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration, IRCC highlights Canada’s immigration as “a proud tradition of welcoming immigrants. Our immigration system, refugee system and network of organizations to help newcomers settle and integrate are among the best in the world” (IRCC 2017a). Further, IRCC contends that Canada’s immigration is “a world leader in… an immigration program based on non-discriminatory principles, where foreign nationals are assessed without regard to race, nationality, ethnic origin, colour, religion or gender” (2018, 5; my emphasis). Throughout this paper, non-discriminatory principles refers to this claim and its operative definition.

The most basic questions that need to be asked regarding IRCC’s claim in the 2018 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration that “Canada’s immigration tradition” is based on “non-discriminatory principles” are: What are the non-discriminatory principles upon which Canada’s immigration is based? Are these principles, in fact, non-discriminatory? What is unjust in such a principle? What is wrong with the institutionalized arrangement of economic-based immigration? I propose that the answers are intricately embedded in the settler colonial mode of domination. This then explains why Canada’s economic-based immigration as settler colonialism. More specifically, I argue that IRCC’s non-discriminatory principles are based on the settler colonial structure. They espouse unjust economic arrangements based on the neoliberal practices which further globalize capitalist social relations (Sharma & Wright 2008).

The following discussion will attempt a twofold critique and interrogation of these principles. First, it will elucidate the overt discriminatory historical perspective of “Canada’s immigration tradition” and, second, it will articulate the structurally covert discriminatory economic-based principles embedded in IRCC’s contemporary immigration policy of admissibility or exclusion (thus hinting at invasion as the structure of settler colonialism). The Immigration Regulations, Order-in-Council PC – 1967-1616, 1967 reform serves to differentiate between the overt discriminatory historical context and the covert meritocratic liberal policy of contemporary immigration (Chan n.d.; George & George 2013; Laus 2020).

In parallel, I argue that the current economic-based immigration is rooted in the inherent inequality and oppression created by historical immigration policy. This reality runs counter to the non-discriminatory principles asserted in IRCC’s 2018 annual report. As a critique of Canada’s contemporary economic-based immigration, presenting the obvious historical institutionalized discrimination of Canada’s immigration will show its inherent inequality as structured and embedded within immigration policy. Discussions to follow are examples, though not exhaustive, of Canada’s historical immigration discrimination (or, in colonial terms, domination). In my view, the 1967 Immigration Regulations reform demarcates pre-1967 and post-1967 with the former being overt and the latter covert immigration discrimination.

Canada’s Overt Immigration Discrimination

Let us start with the obvious. Historical discrimination against immigrants was overt up until the 1967 Immigration Regulations reform. Two years after the birth of Canada as a nation in 1867, the Canadian Confederation legislated the country’s first immigration policy – the Immigration Act of 1869. The jurisdiction of immigration in Canada is shared between the provinces,, and federal governments as specified under Section 95 of Canada’s 1867 Constitution Act (originally enacted as The British North America Act of 1867). Since the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1869, Canada has had a long history of laws and regulations governing admissibility or undesirability and of inclusion or exclusion. Today, IRCC is the federal government department responsible for Canada’s immigration. As Dirks (2020) explains,

Three different federal government departments or agencies have been responsible for immigration policy since the Second World War: the Ministry of Mines and Resources (1936-1949), the Department of Citizenship and Immigration (1950–66, 1992–2016), the Department of Manpower and Immigration (1966-77), and the Canada Employment and Immigration Commission (1977–1992). Since 2016, immigration is primarily the responsibility of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

Van Dyk captures the changes in Canada’s overt discrimination immigration regulatory policy by detailing that:

Immigration legislation has evolved and changed over time, shaped by the shifting social, political and economic climate, as well as dominant beliefs about race, desirability and integration. The open-door approach of the late nineteenth century gradually gave way to more restrictive measures that discriminated on the basis of race, ethnicity and national origin. Overt discrimination remained a part of Canadian immigration policy until the latter half of the twentieth century, when skill and education became the main criteria for determining entrance into Canada. (n.d., par. 1)

The latter half of the twentieth century to which Van Dyk refers is the moment of establishment of new standards of admission or denial of potential immigrants under the Immigration Regulations, Order-in-Council PC – 1967-1616, 1967 [henceforth, IR 1967]. According to Kelly and Trebilock (2010), “the 1967 regulations finally removed all explicit traces of racial discrimination from Canada’s immigration laws” (357). Dirks further explains the reform introduced in IR 1967 that started “a points system… to rank potential immigrants for eligibility. Race, colour, or nationality were not factors in the new system; rather, work skills, education levels, language ability (in speaking French or English), and family connections became the main considerations in deciding who could immigrate.” (2020) For example, under the more recent Federal Skilled Worker Program (Express Entry), eligibility for immigration under the qualification required in this category must satisfy 67 points or higher out of 100 points. There are six selections factors being assessed under this category: language skills (maximum 28 points), education (maximum 25 points), work experience (maximum 15 points), age (maximum 12 points), arranged employment in Canada (maximum 10 points), and adaptability (maximum 10 points) (IRCC 2020b). Demarcation, therefore, has to be drawn between the periods before and after the IR 1967 immigration reform in Canada to situate and better understand the claim in IRCC’s 2018 annual report of Canada’s immigration tradition as based on non-discriminatory principles. Semantically, does “tradition” in IRCC’s claim refer only to post-IR 1967? Should it be the case, the claim is confused, and outright false. Canada’s immigration is by tradition not based on non-discriminatory principles. In fact, its tradition is undeniably based on discriminatory principles. There are many accounts in history that portray immigration discrimination. For example, based on ethnic origin, The Chinese Immigration Act, 1885 (with amendments in 1887, 1892, 1900, 1903), drawing from Vyn Dyk (n.d.), Kelley and Trebilcock (1998) stated that such enactment “was the first piece of Canadian legislation to exclude immigrants on the basis of their ethnic origin” (107). The same pretext of racial discrimination was also imposed in “banning all ‘negro’ immigration” in 1911 under the guise of climactic unsuitability (Vyn Dyk n.d.). The undesirability based on religion was clear in the Canadian government’s exclusion, through refusal by the Director of Immigration, Frederick Blair, to accommodate the Jewish German passengers of the MS St. Louis who were fleeing the Nazi regime (Schwinghamer n.d.-b.).

There are, of course, examples in the history of Canadian immigration based on humanitarian reasons that at the surface are highly commendable. The pre-IR 1967 immigration resettlement in 1955-1956 of 100 Palestinian refugees and their families displaced by the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 (Raska 2015) or the post-IR 1967 resettlement of 228 Tibetans in 1971-1975 (Raska 2016) were seemingly humane gestures. We can note, however, that the immigration inclusions of Palestinian refugees were experimental for future selection of non-Europeans that otherwise would have not qualified based on the pre-IR 1967 immigration policy (Raska 2015, 2016). Palestinian refugees were selected as “skilled workers” and may have paved the way for the immigration reform in 1967. The Tibetans were admitted, on the other hand, as a result of the pressure to meet an international humanitarian obligation.

Indeed, discrimination was overtly inherent in Canada’s immigration tradition pre-IR 1967. This debunks Canada’s immigration tradition based on non-discriminatory principles that is asserted in IRCC’s 2018 annual report. On the other hand, the demarcation need not be construed to justify the claim of the tradition of non-discriminatory principles of immigration because tradition is supposed to encompass spatio-temporal reality separated by the reform in immigration.

 Canada’s Covert Immigration Discrimination

The discussion above presents the overt discrimination against immigrants pre-1967 Immigration Regulations reform. As discussed above, there are three main categories of immigration in Canada: economic, family reunification, and refugee. Of the three categories, it is in contemporary economic-based labour migration that this study finds an interest in the claim of IRCC’s policies being based on non-discriminatory immigration. “Foreign nationals,” to repeat, “are assessed without regard to race, nationality, ethnic origin, colour, religion or gender” (IRCC 2018, 5).

The following are  examples that contest IRCC’s claim of “non-discriminatory principles” in its immigration system after the 1967 Immigration Regulations reform. The current admissibility of immigration applicants under the economic-based policy since the inception of Immigration Regulations, 1967, as Green and Green (1995) interpret it, is to “address occupational gaps in the economy” (Green & Green 1995, as cited in Anwar 2014, 170). If it were the case that such a program would be beneficial to immigrants, data would show the reverse of the current alarming reverse reality. For instance, the Federal Skilled Worker Program (Express Entry), under the guise of the principle of non-discrimination, assigns points to qualify for immigration eligibility. However, stories of immigrant lawyers or doctors flipping burgers and driving cabs because they are unable to qualify as professionals in Canada have become familiar (Habib 2017; Heuser 2017; Kelly et al. 2012). As assessed and given merit in the point system, two critical aspects of immigration are not recognized, if not devalued (Osaze 2017): foreign credentials and work experience outside Canada (of course, as an immigrant, one cannot have Canadian experience to start). The reality is that immigrants are seen increasingly in precarious jobs despite their educational qualification as predicated by the merit-based immigration policy (Liu 2019; Subedi & Rosenberg 2016; Somerville & Scott 2009).

The Office of the Fairness Commissioner (2010) in Ontario conducted a study whose results showed that 76% of Canadian-born and educated professionals were employed in their field, while 44% of internationally educated professionals were employed in their field of training, and an additional 26% were unemployed. The disparity reflects the structural barriers that impede immigrants from practicing their profession for circumstantial reasons of being immigrants rather than on the basis of their abilities. This also affects Canada’s economy, as the Foreign Credentials Referral Office (FCRO 2008) reports: “Canada’s economy also suffers when we don’t use the skills immigrants bring: the cost has been estimated from $2.4 to $5.9 billion in lost income annually” (15; also, Osaze 2017, 103).  If the economic-based policy were, in fact, based on non-discriminatory principles, the income gap and the under-utilization of immigrant skills would not exist.

One explicit experience a Canadian consumer may have is the apparent presence of immigrants serving hot beverages on their quick stop at any coffee shop. The same is true in the workforce behind the grills at restaurants, the laundromat in the basement of hotels, the intensive farms, or the floor of slaughterhouses. Research shows further that “a significant number of foreign-trained skilled workers are employed as taxi drivers, convenience store workers, and gas station workers” (Subedi & Rosenberg 2016, 57). These immigrants are the example of human capital exploited by the global market-based economy made possible by the settler colonial realities. The manner in which these immigrants are treated in their work, frequently experiencing unsafe and dehumanizing situations (e.g., Vahabi & Wong 2016), is beyond this analysis. What this analysis problematizes is the structural policy behind this phenomenon—the settler colonial structure. While it seems to empower immigrants earning an income, which otherwise would have been unavailable in their country of origin, they are fundamentally discriminated against as a result of the structure of economic opportunities. They are economically disadvantaged and are being held hostage by the economic injustice perpetrated by immigration regulations to the benefit of others—by the settler colonial state through labour migration.

What has been clearly argued so far is that, firstly, pre-IR 1967 immigration policy determined admissibility based on race or nationality and, secondly, even though post-IR 1967 economic-based immigration considers skills, education, language, work experience, age employment, adaptability as the criteria for inclusion or exclusion of potential immigrants as assessment parameters based on non-discriminatory principles, discrimination is experienced by labour migrants as highlighted by the non-recognition of foreign credentials and work experience once in Canada.

Beyond this structural discrimination embedded in economic-based immigration policy, the intent of the background discussion is not to explain how each of the categories or classifications operates but rather to present their fundamental basis as, one, the immigration policy is overtly and covertly discriminatory to applicants and, two, those admitted are to benefit the government as co-opted by the neoliberal market system that characterize the settler colonial present.

Are Labour Migrants Settlers?

I now turn to the question of how the increasing settlement of economic-based migrants in Canada, affects the relations of migrants, firstly, towards the dispossessed Indigenous people and, secondly, towards the settler colonial state. Are labour migrants arriving through economic-based immigration in a colonial state themselves settler colonizers, or are they as well colonial subjects? If economic-based migrants are settlers, are they implicated to the continuity of settler colonization? Are they an extension of colonial projects of the historic European settlers? Hence, colonizers themselves? If economic-based migrants are colonial subjects, in what manner are they dominated and being oppressed? And, importantly, by whom? Are economic immigrants who seek permanency, and indeed those who are settled permanently, in fact an extension and expansion of settler colonialism?

One field-defining debate expanded settler colonial studies discourse, namely whether people of colour are implicated as racialized migrants in settler structures. Phung (2011) asks this very question: “Are people of colour settlers too?” (291) In this analysis, I more narrowly and concretely interrogate economic-based migration as a state apparatus that accesses global labour migration to sustain the settler colonial state. So, specifically, are labour migrants settlers? In particular, the notion that settlers come in variegated gradation, might imply that people of colour are complicit in the ongoing settler colonial present. However, while it is important to identify the ways in which people of colour are complicit and implicated as settlers, a critical focus on the state is necessary because agents serving the state establish an institutionalized global apparatus to sustain settler colonialism.

Within settler colonialism’s apparatuses, what then is the connection between Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and racialized labour migrants complicitness? I view economic-based immigration as an apparatus that undermines efforts of resistance to settler colonialism—in other words, efforts toward realizing Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty. Whether racialized labour migrants through economic-based migration are themselves complicit or not is a complex question, which can be answered by looking at the manner in which they are structurally implicated by co-option through the settler colonial state’s immigration policies and overt/covert discrimination. The connection is, at least as I view it, that the settler colonial state affords (facilitates?) the implication of racialized settler migrants who seek permanency to acquire, for example, appropriated/expropriated land. Racialized labour migrants, despite being discriminated against, in this sense are complicit in as much as they become beneficiaries of settler colonialism. However, the connection is not primarily between Indigenous people’s dispossession and racialized economic-based migrants’ precariousness and co-optation. Rather, their contested relation is brought about insidiously by the settler colonial state’s biopolitical/biopower exercised through economic-based migration that perpetuates Canada’s settler colonialism.

On the question of whether or not racialized migrants are settlers or colonial subjects, the anti-racism works of Lawrence and Dua (2005) and Sharma and Wright (2008) foreground an “exemplary exchange” (Veracini 2015, 98) within the “field-defining debate” (Chatterjee (2019654). Lawrence and Dua (2005) argues that “[p]eople of color are settlers” (134). As settlers who live on land that is appropriated and contested, racialized immigrants’ entry into Canada as migrant laborers, refugees, or naturalized citizens, and their settlement have been implicated in colonial actions that “participate in, or are complicit in, the ongoing colonization” (Lawrence & Dua 2005, 134). In other words, racialized immigrants’ colonial relationships with Indigenous peoples is conceptualized as positioning them as settlers for being complicit in and benefitting from the settler project of White Europeans historic settlement that dispossessed Indigenous peoples in Canada, and elsewhere (Lawrence & Dua 2005).

In contrast, Sharma and Wright (2008) criticize the argument laid out by Lawrence and Dua (2005) by challenging the “conflation between the processes of migration and those of colonialism” (121). Sharma and Wright (2008) question the category of “settler” or “colonizer” as well as the negative duality between migrants benefiting from settler projects and the dispossessed Indigenous people as creating “oppositional categories that are wholly unrelated” but “emerged within the context of the political consolidation of neoliberalism” (122-123). As neoliberal practices further globalized capitalist social relations, people became increasingly mobile and migration, ironically, became an escape route from colonial projects (e.g., from being colonized or dispossessed of livelihoods) (Sharma & Wright 2008). By being cognizant of the necessity of anti-capitalist decolonization, Sharma and Wright (2008) conclude that there is a need “to undo the divide between ‘indigenous’ people and ‘migrants’ by working toward practices of decolonization” (122). As Chatterjee (2019) aptly interprets Sharma and Wright (2008), migration has become “a key act of resistance in struggles for decolonial freedom – with settlement/occupation as ‘colonization of resistance’” (645). Interestingly, to add to its complexity, while migration is a form of resistance to colonialism elsewhere, migration to Canada has also become a form of “recolonization” to migrants whose nations were also previously colonized (Bannerji 2000; Melançon 2021, 439, 440 footnote 7).

Recognizing the staunch argument of Lawrence and Dua (2005) that immigrant integration and Indigenous dispossession are in conflict, as well as Sharma and Wright’s (2008) call in undoing the divide, Chatterjee (2019) further “grappled with the intricate processes of global imperialism and the multiple and compounding logics of White supremacy that bring immigrant and Indigenous peoples in contested geopolitical spaces” (645). The intersection of contestations results in the concept of immigrant settlerhood which commits to the Indigenous unique and sovereign claim over the contested lands in Canada and a politics of accountability for immigrant settlement on this land (645). In other words, as settler migrants seeking permanency on appropriated/expropriated land, immigrant settlerhood is by itself also a call for accountability towards the furtherance of settler colonialism. Following Tuck and Yang (2012) in the acknowledgment of the irreconcilability of immigrant and Indigenous justice projects, but also upholding the arguments made by Lawrence and Dua (2005), as well as that made by Sharma and Wright (2008), Chatterjee (2019) finds a way through the divide by “de-linking immigrant labour exploitation and Indigenous land dispossession that contributed to the mystification of settler political economy that thrives on the separation of both political subjects and projects” (645). In this sense, immigrant settlerhood should offer the ground for an analysis of settler colonialism as it simultaneously dispossesses Indigenous peoples and precariously resettles immigrants (Chatterjee 2019).

Given, on the one hand, the gap between the exploitation of the labour of migrants and the injustice of Indigenous dispossession and, on the other hand, the call for linking the divide of the categories despite the gap of two forms of injustice, i.e., exploitation of labor and dispossession of land, how ought I view myself and my experiences of settlement and integration: as a settler colonizer or as a colonial subject?

Migrants, Veracini (2015) argues, are not settlers. I tend to agree, with the caveat that migrants are not necessarily settlers. For ease and clarity of this position, Veracini (2015) convincingly differentiates that:

‘settler’ remains a term that often applies to any individual or community that ends up permanently residing in a particular locale. Conversely, ‘immigrant’ can apply to all individuals or communities that have originated somewhere else. Thus, even if ‘settler’ and ‘migrant’ should identify very different groups, they are often treated as interchangeable synonyms. (32)

The interchangeability or synonymy established solely on the basis of seeking permanency in a “new home” is wrong, Veracini argues. Though settlers and migrants are both exogenous and non-Indigenous, what separates them is the capacity of the former of being the sovereign and the subjugation of the latter to the same sovereignty as Indigenous people (Veracini 2015, 7).     However, while migrants are not settlers, the structure into which they migrate is settler colonial. I argue that labour migrants are settled structurally by the settler colonial state through economic-based migration. Labour migrants are not the issue; rather, the problem of labour migration within settler colonialism is the co-opting of migrants who seek permanency by the settler colonial state that asserts sovereignty over the expropriated land. For truly, by imagining the undoing of settler colonialism, where Indigenous peoples retain (or, regain) sovereignty over the land (decolonization is not a metaphor as Tuck and Yang (2012) argues), migrant-Indigenous relationships and formations cease to be the issue. Really, what would it be like if immigration is shared if not run entirely by the original inhabitants of Turtle Island? Perhaps, there will be no such thing as “uninvited guests” (migrants)?

Conclusion

To conclude, I would say that migrants are co-opted and are caught in the workings of a settler state. It is in this case that labour migrants, though not settlers but unequal colonial subjects relative to Indigenous people, are implicated and complicit in the settler colonial present. This study points specifically to contemporary labour migration under economic-based immigration category in Canada co-opting people of colour (as well as white and Indigenous people from across the globe) to participate in colonial state apparatuses that undermines efforts of decolonial activism and resistance to settler colonialism. It examines how Indigenous resurgence is covertly structurally hampered by the state’s instituted economic-based immigration processes in the settler colonial present. I argue that economic-based immigration is a part of the contemporary and historical processes of Canadian settler colonialism. The current immigration system, therefore, needs to be disrupted in its normalizing discrimination of labour migrants that are co-opted to perpetuate settler colonialism in Canada.

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