While Montrealers went to the polls last week, undocumented migrants felt neglected. They are the big ones forgotten in the municipal elections, notes Hady Kodoye, spokesperson for Solidarity Without Borders. His association campaigns for the rights of irregular migrants and calls for the granting of permanent status to all migrants.
In the standoff between the current mayor, Valérie Plante, and her main rival, Denis Coderre, “nothing has changed on the issue of immigration,” said Mr. Kodoye. While the two candidates say, behind the scenes, for the regularization of all undocumented migrants, “during their campaigns, they always play abstraction around that”, he adds, during a demonstration last Sunday in front of Mr. Coderre’s office. The latter was the former mayor and federal minister of immigration under the government of Jean Chrétien.
The protesters wanted to remind candidates of certain promises they said had not been kept. In particular, the proposal to make Montreal a “sanctuary city”.
The idea comes from some American cities which, especially during the Trump era, tried to prevent the deportations of migrants from their territories while making public services more accessible to migrants with precarious status.
In fact, the idea of a sanctuary city has been abandoned. If it was Mr. Coderre who proposed it at the start, it was Valérie Plante, elected on a progressive platform in 2017, who finally put aside the adjective “sanctuary” in favor of a less loaded label: a city that is “responsible” and “committed” to its entire population.
According to Guillaume Rivest, spokesperson for the City of Montreal, the municipal administration did not want to “create false expectations among its vulnerable residents”.
Among newcomers to Quebec, seven out of ten settle in the metropolis. Thousands of people find themselves there without legal status or are in precarious status.
Most of them are from developing regions such as Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa.
Afraid to ask for help
Often forced to take low-paying jobs in warehouses, food factories or the agricultural industry, many migrants with precarious status work under the table and are indebted to employment agencies, according to two studies conducted by the University of Montreal and the Montreal Immigrant Workers Center.
While undocumented migrants endure particularly harsh working conditions, they hesitate to ask for help, for fear that this will backfire.
Fear, especially fear of deportation, is a theme that recurs frequently in the discourse of defenders of migrant rights.
We should “remove this fear that these people live today” argues Mr. Kodoye. “Especially with the pandemic, there are those who would rather hide than ask for help.”
The former undocumented migrant from Mauritania says he is in solidarity with all the other migrants with precarious status.
In fact, the powers of the municipality in matters of immigration are very limited. Within the framework of the powers delegated to it by the Canadian federal system, the municipality has no control over the granting of a migratory status to foreigners. Municipal police also cannot intervene to prevent the detention or removal of migrants by the Canada Border Services Agency, although some activists advocate a policy of non-cooperation with federal border officers.
That said, Montreal does have some leeway. In 2019, the City launched a “fearless access policy to municipal services”. At the heart of the project, says Mr. Rivest, is the granting of identity cards allowing migrants to establish their residence and thus overcome the fear of identifying themselves. Doctors of the World, one of the city’s key partners, provides them with these cards.
However, the program is limited to municipal services such as libraries and public swimming pools and does not provide access to health care.
The health issue
Health is a domain of the provincial government which administers the public health insurance plan or the RAMQ. In Quebec, most temporary residents, including international students and agricultural workers, with the exception of French citizens and other Europeans, do not have access. Without a RAMQ card, medical costs, even in emergency cases, amount to more than 200% of the costs incurred by citizens and permanent residents. Hospitals may require a deposit to facilitate medical operations such as childbirth.
The very idea of a sanctuary city in the health sector makes no sense in the Quebec context, notes Nadja Pollaert, CEO of Médecins du monde. Throughout the pandemic, his organization, which operates a mobile clinic, has seen an increase in requests from migrants with precarious status. Some of them had to be fired for lack of resources.
Ms. Pollaert paints a portrait of those who come to the clinic: low-income people, pregnant women and those who have experienced domestic violence. Many have lost their jobs during confinement.
“People had to choose between paying for their apartment, paying for their food and paying for their medicine,” she says. Already in normal times, the average income of a migrant with precarious status in Montreal is around $ 800 per month.
“It is unacceptable that in a democratic country, where we are aiming for a social safety net, that we leave these people like that adrift,” says Ms. Pollaert, whose organization has worked with migrants without access to care in the streets of Montreal for twenty years.
The pandemic, admits Guillaume Rivest, has indeed exacerbated the challenges faced by migrants in an irregular situation “having very limited access to government programs, including health care”. Since the beginning of the year, the City has undertaken, he says, to better fund and coordinate its actions with migrant assistance associations, through the Office for the Integration of Newcomers in Montreal.
Médecins du monde was thus able to conduct an awareness campaign among social workers to make them aware of the particular difficulties experienced by people without status. The organization also aims to reach migrants directly to assert their rights and explore legal options to regularize their status.
For Nadja Pollaert, the right to health and permanent status are inseparable.
“People do not have access to health care services because they have no status,” concludes Pollaert.
A question for the federal government. Even though the City wants to protect migrants with precarious status, it still has its hands tied.