Essentials | A powerful documentary about immigrant workers

Tens of thousands of women and men from elsewhere pick the fruits and vegetables that grow here, do cleaning in public institutions and wash our parents or grandparents. Indispensable work for which they are kept in a precarious status, if not downright exploited. The documentary Essentials sheds light on these workers whom Quebec society treats more or less like disposable humans.

Immigration and the fate of immigrants are subjects that inhabit Sonia Djelidi (Break the code) since a long time. She is the daughter of immigrants and has long noticed a disconnect between public discourse on immigration and the reality of immigrants, which she sees and has experienced.

“Immigration, for many people, means: problems, threats and the disappearance of French. It’s never positive, except when you pull out of the bag what I call a trophy immigrant: three or four people you name to say that everything is fine, she says. For me, my friends and my family, immigration means sacrifice, racism, struggle for dignity and hard work. »

Sonia Djelidi does not turn her tongue seven times in her mouth before speaking, but she weighs her words. His tone is calm and direct. Like that ofEssentialsthe documentary directed by Ky Vy Le Duc, which she carries with journalist Sarah Champagne and which takes a disturbing look at the situation of immigrant workers in Quebec.

The sometimes appalling working conditions of farm workers occasionally make headlines. The pandemic has forced the realization that elder care relies heavily on immigrant workers. Gold, Essentials goes further: it dissects a system that promotes precariousness, if not outright abuse, of temporary foreign workers.

“We do not question the role that these people play in society or their state of servitude, denounces Sonia Djelidi. Who is the perfect immigrant now in Quebec? Is it a temporary foreign worker who is brought in, used and sent home when no longer needed? How come we ended up in a utilitarian and disposable immigration? »

Human dramas

Essentials goes to meet Carole, Rodrigo, Patricia and Edyn. Each of them is one of these shadow workers. Edyn, for example, has been a temporary agricultural worker for… 10 years. He is seeking through various means to obtain permanent resident status. His employer, Savoura, can’t seem to do much to help him, even though immigrants are essential to the operation of the business.

Carole, she has multiplied the jobs since she had to leave the abusive employer who had brought her here. She is sometimes reduced to getting hired by informal agencies that recruit cheap, docile labor from parking lots in Greater Montreal for unscrupulous employers.

Thus, it is a whole structure – framed by the State and from which the State also benefits – which is dissected in Essentials. Eloquently. And sensitive. Each of these immigrant workers has a family and a story. Sometimes immensely sad. Edyn only sees her children for two weeks every two years. Carole hasn’t seen hers for six years.

Behind all this, there is also the hypocrisy of the system and the instrumentalization of the debate on immigration.

“We must refuse to talk about immigration only in a problematic way, something that only serves certain columnists and politicians, believes Sonia Djelidi. The toxicity of speech must stop. »

The documentary filmmaker also believes that we must promote access to permanent residence (“other countries have done this,” she points out) and put an end to so-called “closed” work permits, which prevent a worker to knock on the door of another employer if the one who brought him here imposes inhuman conditions on him. “That’s what makes exploitation possible,” she says.

“Do you have to lose your children’s childhood? Do you have to lose a leg? We saw people who had accidents at work, says Sonia Djelidi. Should you lose your dignity? What do you have to lose to deserve the right to stay in Quebec? »

Wednesday, 8 p.m., on Télé-Québec