This argument for the regularization of people without immigration status was constructed by the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC) of Montreal in September 2022.
The Immigrant Workers’ Centre is a popular education and collective advocacy organization for labour and immigration rights for precarious workers. Since 2000, the ILC has supported workers in their struggles for dignity, respect and justice, including campaigns to demand better working and living conditions.
In the spring of 2022, a Canadian government working group began to look into the possibility of granting permanent residency to a number of non-status people in Canada. For the time being, nothing is certain. Regularization has not yet been submitted to the parliamentary debate. Despite good intentions, the program that will be implemented at the end of this process could be much more restrictive than what is being considered behind closed doors.
In response to these talks, worker members of the ITC have decided to lead a campaign to convince as many citizens and advocacy groups as possible of the merits of a broad, inclusive and permanent regularization program. The bet is big. There are an estimated 1.7 million non-status people in Canada. Not surprisingly, conservative forces are strongly opposed to this amnesty. But beyond human rights arguments, in the current context, even economic arguments, which are generally popular among supporters of the political right, point to the need to regularize non-status people.
Initially, this argument was intended as a training tool for the committee of spokespersons for the regularization campaign. However, we realize that everyone could benefit from the information it contains. We are therefore making it available to the general public in the hope of rallying as many people as possible in this historic struggle.
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