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HOW CANADA HAS USED AND ABUSED MIGRANT WORKERS: AN UPDATE ON THE POSITION OF TEMPORARY FOREIGN WORKERS AND UNDOCUMENTED WORKERS
The position of Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs) and undocumented workers in Canada in 2025 is more precarious than ever. In recent years the number of TFWs given entry to the country has surpassed the number of landed immigrants allowed to enter. That means that Canada has favoured the entry of people who are de facto slaves over the entry of people who have a path to citizenship and have human rights in the country from the time that they enter. In early 2025, there were an estimated 1.2 million people in Canada with work permits that will expire before the end of the year along with 500,000 undocumented workers, all of whom are being treated as human garbage by the country whose citizens they have served with their labour.
Over the last several years, inflation has risen far faster than the incomes of most of the population and a severe housing shortage has developed with a consequence of increased rents and out-of-sight costs for purchasing homes both in terms of housing prices and mortgage rates. Young Canadians have particularly been victims of these economic changes though older Canadians who do not own their own homes have also suffered.
A rational examination of why the cost of living has risen so much points to increasing corporate profits at the expense of wages and social wages (the latter refers to income from government programs such as pensions, employment insurance, disability payments, prepaid medical costs, rental subsidies, and the like). Governments have largely failed to impose rent controls to protect existing renters or to build social housing for households that cannot afford either “market rents” or mortgages.
But, thanks to corporate-dominated social media, a largely corporate-dominated conventional media, and social prejudices, the blame has fallen on immigrants, who ironically include a far larger percentage than average of the group that government inaction and the treachery of for-profit and sometimes government interests have hurt most. International students, who pay steep fees to attend both public and private educational institutions, are a good example of how bad public policies meant to cut taxes for big corporations and the wealthy have reverberated throughout the economy. Governments have been cutting their grants to universities and colleges since the 1990s. This has resulted in big increases in tuition for Canadians but those alone cannot make up for the lost funding. So those institutions have charged foreign students three or four times what they charge Canadian students without spending some of that money on accommodations for those students. The governments that had cut funding for educational institutions looked the other way, rather than insisting that adding more foreign students required either the educational institutions or the government to add accommodations. So the foreign students had to compete with Canadians to find cheap apartments in the private sector, and although many of those students doubled and tripled up, uninformed and often prejudiced Canadians bought the media interpretation that these students, by their very presence, were causing living costs to rise. In reality, without them, underfunded universities and colleges would have had to dramatically increase tuition or reduce the number of Canadian students that they could accommodate. That would have meant an even larger transfer of skills and professional training from government institutions to private, for-profit rip-off institutions. That’s no way to reduce the cost of living for Canadians.
Similarly, migrant workers are often accused of stealing jobs from Canadian workers and taking accommodations that could be made available to Canadian citizens. In reality, migrant workers are mostly hired for low-paying jobs that Canadian workers don’t want at the wages on offer. The exploitation of the migrant workers results in lower prices for Canadians when they buy the fruit that the migrants have picked, or eat in restaurants where the migrants do most of the work, stay in hotels where migrants do the cleaning, or rent offices in buildings or shop in malls where again migrants do the cleaning and often provide the security.
Migrant workers, like many foreign students, double or triple up. When they are doing farm work, they often live in barns or out-buildings. The notion that the accommodations that poorly paid migrant workers, both temporary foreign workers, and undocumented, are accommodations that Canadians are missing out on is delusionary. The housing problems that Canadians face reflect market failure and government indifference, not the presence of migrant workers.
In any case, with migrant workers, as with landed immigrants, it is one thing to close the door on new entrants; it is quite another to throw them out of the house that they have built with their bare hands. No one should ever have been brought to Canada as a low-paid migrant worker to do essential and often dangerous work without a path to citizenship. Anyone who is currently here as a TFW or as an undocumented worker—a former TFW who chose to remain in the country after their TFW period expired in the hope of finding a pathway to citizenship—should be given landed immigrant status and therefore a path to citizenship. It is a blot on Canada that we have allowed both Liberal and Conservative governments to bring hundreds of thousands of individuals into Canada whom we treat as disposable slaves for a particular employer and then order them to leave as if they have not earned the right to remain here. Migrant workers pay provincial and federal taxes but have limited access to either social programs or social protections (nominally, they enjoy the latter if they are TFWs but if they complain about abuse of any kind by their employer, the employer has the right to dismiss them, which leads to automatic deportation; undocumented workers have no rights at all).
In 2024 the federal government reduced the possible length of stay in Canada for a low-paid migrant worker from two years to one year. In cities with an unemployment rate of 6 percent or higher, there can be no application by a migrant worker for a position. The number of low-wage migrant workers that an employer can hire is now restricted to 10 percent of an employer’s staff. Unsurprisingly there are resultant labour shortages in tourist towns including those of Alberta mountain towns. Many urban hotels and restaurants also report shortages that in some cases have led to closures of businesses.
Organizations that are taking up the fight for migrant workers welcome your participation in their efforts. Check out:
migrantrights.ca
migrantealberta.ca
Interviews and Videos relating to Temporary Foreign Workers in Alberta
More information from ALHI concerning Temporary Foreign Workers in Alberta