This winter and spring the Migrant Mothers Project has been traveling around Ontario to get a sense of how folks in different regions of the province are responding to the many policy changes that impact immigrant women and children. As a Toronto-based project, we knew that our perception of immigration issues is influenced by the scale of Toronto, the visible presence of immigrant populations here, the diverse and well-organized advocacy networks that have been raising awareness about immigration issues, with attention to how intersections of racism, gender violence and economic insecurity contribute to the marginalization of immigrant and refugee women.
To help us get out of our Toronto-centric thinking, we have been organizing community forums to invite 25-30 service providers, legal advocates and community members to engage in dialogue and knowledge sharing. In February, we hosted our first forum Kitchener-Waterloo (see our summary MMP-Community Forum in Kitchener-Waterloo Feb 13 2013). In March, we collaborated with Windsor Women Working with Immigrant Women (fondly referred to as W5) to host a forum in their fabulous location in downtown Windsor; and most recently this May, we collaborated with Niagara North Community Legal Assistance and Niagara Immigrant Employment Council to host a forum that drew folks from around the Niagara region.
The folks attending our forums include people who work in the areas of immigrant and refugee settlement services, anti-violence against women services, health and social services, child protection and education. We were delighted to have support from Joanna Hayes, Tamar Witelson, and Silmi Abdullah from METRAC and Karin Baqi from SALCO who joined us at different forums to present legal information regarding new rules for Conditional Permanent Residency for sponsored spouses. At each forum we also invited people working with a range of social issues to share their work and strategies to advocate for immigrants who are international students, temporary foreign workers, and refugees.
We are still distilling all that we learned at each of these forums, however it is clear that people around the province are scrambling to understand the implications of policy changes on the communities they serve. There is also an added challenge to learn about new rules and regulations that impact immigrants and refugees, as new changes seem to roll out each month.
Some major themes that arose in all of the forums include:
- Cuts to funding reduce organizational capacity to work with immigrants; many organizations are not funded to work with temporary foreign workers, international students, or non-status immigrants, which leaves many people without access to health and social services;
- Federally funded programs and services restrict work with immigrants who have precarious status. Many organizations do not document when they do see immigrants with precarious status which leads to a lack of knowledge within and among organizations on how to respond to these marginalized populations;
- Deportation has become a key issue for immigrants and a tool to control and abuse immigrants who have a precarious status. We heard many stories of immigrants who faced detention, deportation or loss of status as a consequence of: seeking services, getting an arrest or a conviction, having a spouse/partner who is arrested or convicted of a crime, being “profiled” for looking or speaking like a foreigner, and advocating for rights when dealing with an employer’s abuse, among others;
- Live-in-caregivers continue to be a group that remains underserved by many organizations. While live-in-caregiver groups have been organizing to lobby the Government of Canada with incremental changes that make it easier for women who have temporary visas as live-in-caregivers to become permanent residents, women working in this area are still burdened with long periods of separation from their families, harsh and exploitative work conditions, and constraints on their rights as temporary foreign workers who are classified as “low-skilled labourers”;
- With cuts to funding for immigration settlement services, Legal Aid, and new restrictions on refugees’ access to Interim Federal Health, many service providers expressed feeling poorly informed about who has access to health care and what rights an individual has depending on their status; while there has been a push for webinar trainings, forum attendees shared that they have fewer opportunities to attend face-to-face trainings and thus have fewer opportunities to network and share information and strategies with other advocates and service providers in the province.
It has been an incredible learning experience for the Migrant Mothers Project staff to be able to connect with and learn from people around Ontario who are passionate about immigrant and refugee rights. We are in the process of writing up summaries of each forum which will be posted on our website under the Community Forum link.
Our next steps include organizing community forums in Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, and Vancouver. If you have any questions about our previous or future work, please get in touch.
In solidarity,
Rupaleem