Migrant workers with precarious status | The regained hope of Bénédicte

Bénédicte Carole Ze has not seen her children for seven years.

“I was deprived of their childhood. I lost so many precious moments, ”says the 37-year-old mother whose migratory journey to Quebec has been nightmarish.

Her first Quebec employer had promised her that she would soon be reunited with her children. An immigration consultant made him dangle the same thing.

Seven years later, her children are still in Cameroon.

One has become an adult. The other is now a teenager.

Bénédicte Carole Ze is one of the “guardian angels” whose status has been regularized to allow her to settle permanently in Quebec, thanks to the special program of the Quebec government put in place during the pandemic.

For the first time, she sees the hope of being reunited with her family.

Except that before obtaining her permanent residence, she lived through hell.

The Press revealed her story in the fall of 2020. Arrived in Canada in 2016 as a temporary foreign worker, she then held a work permit – valid for two years – which allowed her to work for a single employer. This is called a “closed permit”.

A Quebec agricultural entrepreneur brought him from Cameroon through an African recruiter. This entrepreneur kept her in a situation of “modern slavery”, she describes. She refuses to name him, because she believes that it is necessary to attack “the system of closed permits” rather than a specific individual.

“The immigrants who come to make jobs that no one here wants to do now, they are kept in a situation of extreme vulnerability while they are the strength of this country, she underlines. So that supermarket shelves are stocked with beautiful tomatoes and strawberries, so that slaughterhouses work, so that office towers and hospitals are clean, they are the ones who work. »

For two years, she lived in constant fear of being sent back to Cameroon if she did not obey her employer.

She has had virtually no days off during this time, isolated and kept in the dark about her rights. This agricultural entrepreneur also threatened her: “The day you don’t work, I send you back to your country. »

With an “open permit”, the mother would have had the freedom to find another job, she pleads, without fear of losing everything. She wants the abolition of “closed permits” and easier access to permanent residence for workers with precarious status.

Hard work

We find the mother two and a half years later in her modest Montreal apartment where she still lives with two roommates.

The day of our interview, last Wednesday, she had slept barely a few hours after having chained an evening shift and a night shift. The first at the residence for the elderly where she was hired as a beneficiary attendant, the second for a private health placement agency.

It was not an exceptional day. She maintains this rhythm week after week.

With “only” two full-time jobs, she works “less than before”, she underlines before bursting out laughing.

When we had met her two and a half years earlier, she was working not two, but three jobs. She was totally sleeping in the subway between her three jobs.

She has no choice but to work so much, she says, regaining her seriousness, because in addition to paying the lawyer’s fees for her immigration procedures, her rent, etc., she has to provide for the needs of her two children who remained in Africa (pension, studies, etc.).

In her rare days off, she campaigns to improve the lot of the vulnerable immigrant workforce.

Because if her nightmare ended with the regularization of her status, she decided to fight for those who still work with a precarious status or who are downright without status.

Infiltration

The beneficiary attendant is one of the protagonists of the documentary Essentials*, a Quebec film coming out these days and which asks a shocking question: “People we see as arms, is that our vision of immigration in Quebec? »

When Bénédicte Carole Ze fled the farm, she found herself without status. To survive, she worked in informal employment agencies that exploit immigrants with precarious status. She was sent to slaughterhouses and fields – hard, low-paid work.

In a disturbing scene from the documentary, she returns – armed with hidden cameras – to a tomato field accompanied by the film’s creator, Sonia Djelidi. The latter pretends to be an immigrant with precarious status looking for work.

For a pittance, immigrants – and our two infiltrators – leave Montreal at 5 a.m. in vans. They know neither the destination nor the working conditions. That day, in the middle of a heat wave, they will toil away picking tomatoes for 10 hours.

At the end of the day in the field, “Mama” – nickname given to the recruiter of the informal enterprise – will tell Mrs.^me Djelidi not to show up at the agency the next day. It is considered too slow. M^me Ze, she can come back (she worked hard to cover her friend).

The two women will return to Montreal at 8 p.m., exhausted. Travel time will not be paid to them.

Precarious immigrant labor is not only cheap. It is disposable.

permanent residence

When she left Cameroon, the African recruiter promised M^me Ze that she would soon be reunited with her children in Canada. Same thing for the Quebec employer. False promises, of course. Then, when she found herself without status, an immigration consultant extorted $3,500 from her in exchange for an assurance that within six months she would get her asylum application approved and be reunited here with her two children. Another mirage.

It was finally in 2021 – thanks to the special program of the government of François Legault – that she obtained her permanent residence. But it was only last month that she received the precious card formalizing her status. Without this card, she could not fly to Cameroon to see her grown up children.

In an interview, the mother of the family shows us the precious object that she keeps in a chest. As soon as her employer gives her a vacation, she will go find them. She also completed a sponsorship application for them to come and live with her in Canada.

“They tell me it’s going to take time, but I can’t bear to be away from them anymore,” says the woman who talks to them every day, sometimes twice a day.

“Why don’t you come get me? her youngest often asks her, although she knows the answer. Each time, the mother is heartbroken.

As for the eldest, he studied physics and dreams of continuing his studies in science in Montreal.

In her living room, furnished with two old sofas that have seen better days, a huge box is leaning against a wall. Inside, a new sofa.

“I plan to open it when my children are with me in Quebec to mark their arrival. »

About him, we understand that the box contains more than a couch. There is also the hope of a new life in three.

* The documentary Essentials will be broadcast on Wednesday, January 25 at 8 p.m. on Télé-Québec (production: Ky Vy Le Duc; animation and research: Sonia Djelidi and Sarah Champagne).