Cynthia Oka is a coordinator at the Vancouver Status of Women. She is a passionate and unflinching supporter and organizer of campaigns against racism, colonialism and sexism as systematic structures that damage women and their families. This is Cynthia’s second bloggin’stallment of a four part contribution.
This is also the second in a series of guests posts leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Dec. 6th École Polytechnique shootings. Read previous posts here.
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Violence against migrant women
Women with citizenship in this country – whether we work or not – can go about our daily business without worrying about our right to occupy the public sphere (even if our unequal participation and influence in that sphere is to be lamented). Meanwhile, undocumented women who have been driven out of their homelands must contend constantly with the threat and reality of detention and deportation. The reasons for displacement also typically originate with state and corporate-sponsored violence, such as in the case of Mexico, where NAFTA-induced land grabs have displaced millions of indigenous peasants and transformed them from independent farmers to urban slum dwellers dependent on maquiladora employment with horrific conditions of labour or migrants risking death, imprisonment or expulsion as undocumented workers in the United States or Canada. One of the large-scale raids conducted by the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) in spring 2009 rounded up nine women workers of Lakeside Produce– one of whom was pregnant – and detained them in the Windsor County Jail.
Border rapes are also increasingly being documented along the US-Mexico border, where 10,653 women were detained in 2008 alone. The immense discretionary powers of border officials, heightened by their militarization in the years following 9/11, combined with the utter lack of protection and desperation of the women involved, have understandably resulted in under-reporting of these incidents. While for these reasons there is no conclusive account of border rape victims, advocates counselling some of these women have reported that while some of the rapes have resulted in pregnancies, the women in detention are not permitted to access abortion services. We as residents of Canada should be concerned, firstly because Canada is a member and beneficiary of NAFTA and secondly, because of Canada’s Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States which prohibits displaced peoples from making a refugee application in Canada if they have passed through the United States.
Furthermore, there is Canada’s unspoken policy of refusing refugee status to Mexican women fleeing violence under the rationale that their lives would not be in danger if they were deported because the Mexican state is able to provide “adequate” protection. As part of this policy, CBSA thugs are known to lurk around Ontario shelters in wait for undocumented women, and at least one woman has been killed since her refugee status application was refused and she was deported back to Mexico.
Immigrant women of colour in general are disproportionately commodified as cheap, flexible labour in the textile, electronic and care-giving industries. My mother is one of these women. She came to Canada as a registered nurse and as a result of Canada’s decertification policy, has worked as a low-waged electronic assembler for the past fourteen years. Two years ago, she underwent carpal tunnel surgery and lost full use of her right hand as a consequence of the intense, repetitive and monotonous labour demanded by her job. She was laid off the following year. At least my mom’s got her citizenship at this point. Unlike her, many Filipina women are forced into indentured labour under the Live-in Caregiver Program, where access to citizenship is conditional upon completion of two years of service as a live-in caregiver. As has been documented by the Philippine Women’s Centre, live-in caregivers are subject to arbitrary treatment by their employers, some working for as low as $2 per hour and are constantly threatened by the prospect of deportation over draconian regulations and circumstances out of their control.
The spectre of deportation is a powerful deterrent for women living and working with precarious status to report experiences of violence, even as that very same precarity makes them more vulnerable than the average female citizen to abuse of all sorts.
