#Canada’s immigration system

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"In these circumstances, the commercial economy of the fur trade soon yielded to industrial economies focused on mining, forestry, and fishing. The first industrial mining (for coal) began on Vancouver Island in the early 1850s, the first sizeable industrial sawmill opened a few years later, and fish canning began on the Fraser River in 1870. From these beginnings, industrial economies reached into the interstices of British Columbia, establishing work camps close to the resource, and processing centers (canneries, sawmills, concentrating mills) at points of intersection of external and local transportation systems. As the years went by, these transportation systems expanded, bringing ever more land (resources) within reach of industrial capital. Each of these developments was a local instance of David Harvey's general point that the pace of time-space compressions after 1850 accelerated capital's "massive, long-term investment in the conquest of space" (Harvey 1989, 264) and its commodifications of nature. The very soil, Marx said in another context, was becoming "part and parcel of capital" (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

As Marx and, subsequently, others have noted, the spatial energy of capitalism works to deterritorialize people (that is, to detach them from prior bonds between people and place) and to reterritorialize them in relation to the requirements of capital (that is, to land conceived as resources and freed from the constraints of custom and to labor detached from land). For Marx the

wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil... created for the town industries the necessary supply of a 'free' and outlawed proletariat (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977) - drawing on insights from psychoanalysis - capitalism may be thought of as a desiring machine, as a sort of territorial writing machine that functions to inscribe "the flows of desire upon the surface or body of the earth" (Thomas 1994, 171-72). In Henri Lefebvre's terms, it produces space in the image of its own relations of production (1991; Smith 1990, 90). For David Harvey it entails the "restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes," and postpones the effects of its inherent contradictions by the conquest of space-capitalism's "spatial fix" (1982, ch. 13; 1985, 150, 156). In detail, positions differ; in general, it can hardly be doubted that in British Columbia industrial capitalism introduced new relationships between people and with land and that at the interface of the native and the nonnative, these relationships created total misunderstandings and powerful new axes of power that quickly detached native people from former lands. When a Tlingit chief was asked by a reserve commissioner about the work he did, he replied

I don't know how to work at anything. My father, grandfather, and uncle just taught me how to live, and I have always done what they told me-we learned this from our fathers and grandfathers and our uncles how to do the things among ourselves and we teach our children in the same way.

Two different worlds were facing each other, and one of them was fashioning very deliberate plans for the reallocation of land and the reordering of social relations. In 1875 the premier of British Columbia argued that the way to civilize native people was to bring them into the industrial workplace, there to learn the habits of thrift, time discipline, and materialism. Schools were secondary. The workplace was held to be the crucible of cultural change and, as such, the locus of what the premier depicted as a politics of altruism intended to bring native people up to the point where they could enter society as full, participating citizens. To draw them into the workplace, they had to be separated from land. Hence, in the premier's scheme of things, the small reserve, a space that could not yield a livelihood and would eject native labor toward the industrial workplace and, hence, toward civilization. Marx would have had no illusions about what was going on: native lives, he would have said, were being detached from their own means of production (from the land and the use value of their own labor on it) and were being transformed into free (unencumbered) wage laborers dependent on the social relations of capital. The social means of production and of subsistence were being converted into capital. Capital was benefiting doubly, acquiring access to land freed by small reserves and to cheap labor detached from land.

The reorientation of land and labor away from older customary uses had happened many times before, not only in earlier settler societies, but also in the British Isles and, somewhat later, in continental Europe. There, the centuries-long struggles over enclosure had been waged between many ordinary folk who sought to protect customary use rights to land and landlords who wanted to replace custom with private property rights and market economies. In the western highlands, tenants without formal contracts (the great majority) could be evicted "at will." Their former lands came to be managed by a few sheep farmers; their intricate local land uses were replaced by sheep pasture (Hunter 1976; Hornsby 1992, ch. 2). In Windsor Forest, a practical vernacular economy that had used the forest in innumerable local ways was slowly eaten away as the law increasingly favored notions of absolute property ownership, backed them up with hangings, and left less and less space for what E.P. Thompson calls "the messy complexities of coincident use-right" (1975, 241). Such developments were approximately reproduced in British Columbia, as a regime of exclusive property rights overrode a fisher-hunter-gatherer version of, in historian Jeanette Neeson's phrase, an "economy of multiple occupations" (1984, 138; Huitema, Osborne, and Ripmeester 2002). Even the rhetoric of dispossession - about lazy, filthy, improvident people who did not know how to use land properly - often sounded remarkably similar in locations thousands of miles apart (Pratt 1992, ch. 7). There was this difference: The argument against custom, multiple occupations, and the constraints of life worlds on the rights of property and the free play of the market became, in British Columbia, not an argument between different economies and classes (as it had been in Britain) but the more polarized, and characteristically racialized juxtaposition of civilization and savagery...

Moreover, in British Columbia, capital was far more attracted to the opportunities of native land than to the surplus value of native labor. In the early years, when labor was scarce, it sought native workers, but in the longer run, with its labor needs supplied otherwise (by Chinese workers contracted through labor brokers, by itinerant white loggers or miners), it was far more interested in unfettered access to resources. A bonanza of new resources awaited capital, and if native people who had always lived amid these resources could not be shipped away, they could be-indeed, had to be-detached from them. Their labor was useful for a time, but land in the form of fish, forests, and minerals was the prize, one not to be cluttered with native-use rights. From the perspective of capital, therefore, native people had to be dispossessed of their land. Otherwise, nature could hardly be developed. An industrial primary resource economy could hardly function.

In settler colonies, as Marx knew, the availability of agricultural land could turn wage laborers back into independent producers who worked for themselves instead of for capital (they vanished, Marx said, "from the labor market, but not into the workhouse") (1967, pt. 8, ch. 33). As such, they were unavailable to capital, and resisted its incursions, the source, Marx thought, of the prosperity and vitality of colonial societies. In British Columbia, where agricultural land was severely limited, many settlers were closely implicated with capital, although the objectives of the two were different and frequently antagonistic. Without the ready alternative of pioneer farming, many of them were wage laborers dependent on employment in the industrial labor market, yet often contending with capital in bitter strikes. Some of them sought to become capitalists. In M. A. Grainger's Woodsmen of the West, a short, vivid novel set in early modern British Columbia, the central character, Carter, wrestles with this opportunity. Carter had grown up on a rock farm in Nova Scotia, worked at various jobs across the continent, and fetched up in British Columbia at a time when, for a nominal fee, the government leased standing timber to small operators. He acquired a lease in a remote fjord and there, with a few men under towering glaciers at the edge of the world economy, attacked the forest. His chances were slight, but the land was his opportunity, his labor his means, and he threw himself at the forest with the intensity of Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale. There were many Carters.

But other immigrants did become something like Marx's independent producers. They had found a little land on the basis of which they hoped to get by, avoid the work relations of industrial capitalism, and leave their progeny more than they had known themselves. Their stories are poignant. A Czech peasant family, forced from home for want of land, finding its way to one of the coaltowns of southeastern British Columbia, and then, having accumulated a little cash from mining, homesteading in the province's arid interior. The homestead would consume a family's work while yielding a living of sorts from intermittent sales from a dry wheat farm and a large measure of domestic self-sufficiency-a farm just sustaining a family, providing a toe-hold in a new society, and a site of adaptation to it. Or, a young woman from a brick, working-class street in Derby, England, coming to British Columbia during the depression years before World War I, finding work up the coast in a railway hotel in Prince Rupert, quitting with five dollars to her name after a manager's amorous advances, traveling east as far as five dollars would take her on the second train out of Prince Rupert, working in a small frontier hotel, and eventually marrying a French Canadian farmer. There, in a northern British Columbian valley, in a context unlike any she could have imagined as a girl, she would raise a family and become a stalwart of a diverse local society in which no one was particularly well off. Such stories are at the heart of settler colonialism (Harris 1997, ch. 8).

The lives reflected in these stories, like the productions of capital, were sustained by land. Older regimes of custom had been broken, in most cases by enclosures or other displacements in the homeland several generations before emigration. Many settlers became property owners, holders of land in fee simple, beneficiaries of a landed opportunity that, previously, had been unobtainable. But use values had not given way entirely to exchange values, nor was labor entirely detached from land. Indeed, for all the work associated with it, the pioneer farm offered a temporary haven from capital. The family would be relatively autonomous (it would exploit itself). There would be no outside boss. Cultural assumptions about land as a source of security and family-centered independence; assumptions rooted in centuries of lives lived elsewhere seemed to have found a place of fulfillment. Often this was an illusion - the valleys of British Columbia are strewn with failed pioneer farms - but even illusions drew immigrants and occupied them with the land.

In short, and in a great variety of ways, British Columbia offered modest opportunities to ordinary people of limited means, opportunities that depended, directly or indirectly, on access to land. The wage laborer in the resource camp, as much as the pioneer farmer, depended on such access, as, indirectly, did the shopkeeper who relied on their custom.

In this respect, the interests of capital and settlers converged. For both, land was the opportunity at hand, an opportunity that gave settler colonialism its energy. Measured in relation to this opportunity, native people were superfluous. Worse, they were in the way, and, by one means or another, had to be removed. Patrick Wolfe is entirely correct in saying that "settler societies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies," which, by occupying land of their ancestors, had got in the way (1999, 2). If, here and there, their labor was useful for a time, capital and settlers usually acquired labor by other means, and in so doing, facilitated the uninhibited construction of native people as redundant and expendable. In 1840 in Oxford, Herman Merivale, then a professor of political economy and later a permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office, had concluded as much. He thought that the interests of settlers and native people were fundamentally opposed, and that if left to their own devices, settlers would launch wars of extermination. He knew what had been going on in some colonies - "wretched details of ferocity and treachery" - and considered that what he called the amalgamation (essentially, assimilation through acculturation and miscegenation) of native people into settler society to be the only possible solution (1928, lecture xviii). Merivale's motives were partly altruistic, yet assimilation as colonial practice was another means of eliminating "native" as a social category, as well as any land rights attached to it as, everywhere, settler colonialism would tend to do.

These different elements of what might be termed the foundational complex of settler colonial power were mutually reinforcing. When, in 1859, a first large sawmill was contemplated on the west coast of Vancouver Island, its manager purchased the land from the Crown and then, arriving at the intended mill site, dispersed its native inhabitants at the point of a cannon (Sproat 1868). He then worried somewhat about the proprieties of his actions, and talked with the chief, trying to convince him that, through contact with whites, his people would be civilized and improved. The chief would have none of it, but could stop neither the loggers nor the mill. The manager and his men had debated the issue of rights, concluding (in an approximation of Locke) that the chief and his people did not occupy the land in any civilized sense, that it lay in waste for want of labor, and that if labor were not brought to such land, then the worldwide progress of colonialism, which was "changing the whole surface of the earth," would come to a halt. Moreover, and whatever the rights or wrongs, they assumed, with unabashed self-interest, that colonists would keep what they had got: "this, without discussion, we on the west coast of Vancouver Island were all prepared to do." Capital was establishing itself at the edge of a forest within reach of the world economy, and, in so doing, was employing state sanctioned property rights, physical power, and cultural discourse in the service of interest."

- Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), p. 172-174.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The governments of Quebec and New Brunswick have told the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) they will stop incarcerating migrants detained for administrative reasons, Radio-Canada/CBC has confirmed. Seven provinces have now cancelled their contracts with CBSA under which they were paid to imprison foreign nationals detained under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. "It is excellent news," said Montreal immigration lawyer Chantal Ianniciello, who represents many detained migrants. "It is not a place suited to their needs". Ianniciello said when migrants are cut off from the world and put in jail alongside criminals it creates "a lot of psychological stress." CBSA can detain migrants if it considers their identity is not clearly established, they are a danger to the public or they represent a flight risk. According to its own statistics, most are detained for the latter reason, meaning the border agency believes they will not appear for immigration processes such as a removal. [...]

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Tagging: @politicsofcanada, @vague-humanoid

[br1ghtestlight]

anyway ppl who are gonna be like "im moving to canada!!!!" after this election uhhh. well i wouldn't recommend it lol

[lebizcanada20]

[youreonyourownkid]

am in toronto 🥳

[olivergisttv]

Canada’s Latest Updates on Express Entry: What You Need to Know

If you’ve been keeping an eye on Canada’s Express Entry system, you know it’s one of the fastest and most efficient pathways for skilled workers to immigrate. But what’s new? Let’s dive into the latest updates and how they affect you!   1. Recent Round of Invitations: January 8, 2025 The most recent draw, held on January 8, 2025, targeted candidates from the Canadian Experience Class. A total of…

[jamesanderson97]

Canada Express Entry System: Unlock the Opportunities in Maple Leaf Country

The Canada Express Entry Visa is perfect visa policies for high skilled professionals who want to move to Canada. With careful preparation you can proceed with the Canada Express Entry System to navigate through the opportunity the country has to offer.

[expresswayimmigration]

Canada Express Entry Draw 325

Express Entry Draw #325 | 174 Invitations Issued in PNP Specific Draw On November 18, 2024, IRCC issued a total of 174 ITAs to candidates within the PNP stream to apply for permanent residence in the Latest Express Entry draw 325. The minimum Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) score required for consideration was 816. This represents the year’s smallest PNP draw to date, featuring a…

[tearsofrefugees]

Canada hints at fast-tracking refugee refusals

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's immigration minister says he plans to propose measures to reform the country's refugee system, potentially fast-tracking refusals of cases deemed to have little chance of succeeding.

[abhishekdigi-blog]

Dreaming of Practicing Dentistry in Canada? Here’s How!

Are you a dentist looking to immigrate to Canada? The Express Entry Program is your golden ticket! Here’s a quick guide to get you started:

Eligibility: Hold a dental degree and have at least 1 year of work experience.

Language Proficiency: Aim for a strong score in English or French.

Create Your Profile: Set up your Express Entry profile on the IRCC website.

Receive an ITA: Get an Invitation to Apply based on your CRS score.

Submit Your Application: Complete your application for permanent residency.

Canada is actively seeking skilled dentists! With high demand, excellent quality of life, and career growth opportunities, it's time to take the leap!

[credasmigrations]

Now is the perfect moment to begin your journey to Canada by using in-depth Express Entry Programme information! We can help you with everything from the eligibility examination to getting your Confirmation of Permanent Residence.

[lebizcanada20]

Top Strategies for Maximizing Your Chances in Category-Based Draws

Category-based draws may seem like a game of chance, but there are strategic ways to increase your chances of coming out on top. By analyzing past winners and understanding the selection criteria, you can gain valuable insights into how to position yourself for success.

Play to Your Strengths

One effective strategy is to focus on entering categories where you have a competitive advantage. By showcasing your expertise and experience in a specific field, you can set yourself apart from other participants and increase your chances of being selected.

Diversify Your Entries

While it's important to play to your strengths, it's also beneficial to diversify your entries across multiple categories. This not only increases your overall odds of winning but also allows you to explore new opportunities and expand your skill set.

Stay Up to Date

To maximize your chances in category-based draws, it's crucial to stay informed about the latest trends and developments in your chosen categories. By staying ahead of the curve, you can tailor your entries to align with current industry standards and preferences.

Network and Collaborate

Building connections within the community of participants can also work in your favor. By networking with other entrants and potential collaborators, you can gain valuable insights and support that may improve your chances of success.

In recent weeks, several outlets have indicated that many immigration candidates are expressing concern over high CRS cut-off scores. Thus far in 2024, there has not been a general Express Entry draw with a minimum/cut-off CRS score below 524.

CRS scores for category-based selection draws in 2024

IRCC has conducted eight category-based Express Entry draws to date this year.

Compared to IRCC’s nine general and program-specific draws this year, the department’s CRS cut-off for category-based draws has been at least 33 points lower in every 2024 draw.

Specifically, IRCC’s eight category-based draws so far this year breakdown as follows:

Accordingly, Express Entry candidates who are concerned about obtaining a CRS score that is high enough for IRCC’s general draws may find value in pursuing an ITA through IRCC's category-based Express Entry draws, as this allows eligible candidates to benefit from a generally lower CRS cut-off requirement.

Am I eligible for category-based selection?

To be eligible for an ITA through a category-based Express Entry draw, candidates must meet a unique set of criteria depending on the category they fall under.

More: Visit this dedicated webpage for more details on all six categories, and to see if you may be eligible for IRCC’s category-based draws, depending on your NOC code and other criteria.

Specifically, in addition to meeting all the requirements included in the instructions for a specific round of invitations, applicants must meet additional criteria depending on the applicable category.

French language proficiency category

Have a minimum score of 7 in all four language abilities (speaking, reading, writing and listening) on the Niveaux de compétence linguistique canadiens (NCLC)

More: In April, IRCC announced that French language proficiency will account for the majority (30%) of ITAs issued through category-based draws this year.

Occupational categories

In 2024, IRCC has chosen to focus on immigration candidates with eligible work experience in the following five industries:

Healthcare

STEM

Trades

Transport

Agriculture and Agri-Food

All occupational categories eligible for category-based selection require candidates to have at least six months of eligible full-time, continuous (or equivalent part-time) work experience in the last three years. This work experience may have been obtained in Canada or abroad.

Note: Although the list of eligible National Occupation Classification (NOC) codes varies based on the occupational category, qualifying work experience must have been obtained in a single occupation under one of the qualifying NOCs in a given category.