# Introduction

Although asylum seekers and other people with precarious immigration status (humanitarian applicants, undocumented migrants, etc.) generally immediately express their intention to integrate into Québec society through work, they face specific barriers within the labour market. Their integration often takes place by way of precarious employment, which places the disadvantaged in nonstandard jobs (non-unionized, part-time, no benefits, seasonal, short-term contracts, on call, through temp agencies, paid cash under the table, etc.) (Direction générale de la santé publique [DRSP], 2016; Fudge, 2011; Look, Block and Galabuzi, 2021; Teelucksingh and Galabuzi, 2009). These already difficult working conditions were rapidly worsened by the impacts of the pandemic. In Montréal, precarious immigrants were disproportionately employed in “essential” sectors where they were required to work in person, making them more vulnerable to infection (DRSP, 2020c; Hamel-Roy, Fauvel, Laurence-Ruel and Noiseux, 2021). Isolation and a lack of access to government and community support also generated many hardships.

This article addresses some of these people’s working conditions both before and during the pandemic as well the adverse effects those conditions had on their personal lives. The article focuses primarily on so-called “essential” workers (nurses’ aides and orderlies, some warehouse workers, food-sector workers, cleaners, etc.). We also discuss their individual and social resilience and resistance, recognizing their role and value in keeping Québec society functioning, including the efforts of some im/migrant community organizations to make public hardships. We ask the following questions: 1) How were the working and living conditions of asylum seekers (and certain other precarious immigrants) exacerbated by the pandemic? 2) How can their individual, social and political resilience be understood in terms of social contribution? and 3) In the light of this group’s social value and contributions, which of the emergency measures implemented by the government should be maintained and developed?
# Conceptualizing the situation of asylum seekers and precarious immigrants in
				Québec

Canada has often received international recognition for its generous immigration and asylum system that is considered to be worthy of emulation (Kissoon, 2010). In fact, however, the Canadian system has created conditions that institutionalize precarious immigration status, causing people to struggle with a temporary right to be in Canada and, often, their dependence on a third party such as an employer, family member or educational institution (Goldring, Berinstein and Bernhard, 2009; Goldring and Landolt, 2013). Restrictions resulting from immigration policies are determinants of social vulnerability (Salamanca Cardona, 2019).

Canada has a long-standing history of measures aimed at limiting the entry of potential asylum seekers (Hudson, Atak and Nakache, 2018; Martin, Lapalme and Ro, 2013). Since 2004, for example, the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) has prohibited migrants from seeking asylum in Canada if they have transited through the United States. As early as 2006, the Canadian Council for Refugees, Amnesty International and the Canadian Council of Churches filed a legal challenge to the Supreme Court on the unconstitutionality of this agreement. In July 2020, the Federal Court found that the STCA violated the fundamental human rights of refugee claimants and was therefore unconstitutional. On April 15, 2021, however, the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the Federal Court’s July 2020 decision (Amnesty International, 2021).

Migrants who succeed in entering Canada by crossing the border between official ports of entry may, however, seek asylum and obtain the same legal status as any other asylum seeker. “Irregular” entry has no bearing on the assessment of an asylum claim.

Between 2016 and 2019, the number of migrants attempting to enter Canada skyrocketed (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada [IRCC], 2021). Although there were various geopolitical reasons for this, the primary cause was the Trump administration’s increasingly harsh anti-immigration policies. With the US suddenly a less attractive destination, many precarious migrants crossed the border to seek asylum in Canada (Cleveland et al., 2021). Most of those incoming migrants are racialized in the Canadian context, however, which exposes them to racism in the labour market of Québec and other provinces (Block and Galabuzi, 2011). This intersection of precarious work and racializing has been widely documented over the last 20 years (Bakan, 2016; Choudry, Hanley, Jordan, Shragge and Stiegman, 2009; Look, Block and Galabuzi, 2021; Ng et al., 2016; Teelucksingh and Galabuzi, 2009; Salamanca Cardona, 2018).

Montréal was hit hard by the pandemic in March 2020, and recent literature has confirmed the effects of the pandemic on racialized populations during this period in North America. American studies found that these groups were more likely to become infected with the virus and suffer severe health effects and death in greater numbers (Kim and Bostwik, 2020); structural racism was at the core of their explanations (Tuyisenge and Goldenberg, 2021). Studies in Canada and Québec also found that racialized communities and visible minorities were more likely to contract COVID-19 and were dying in greater numbers (DRSP, 2020a and 2020b; Lourenco, 2020). The Montréal qualitative study carried out by Cleveland et al. (2020) concluded that some communities were made more vulnerable by intersecting multiple socio-economic factors, including precarious financial situations, jobs with high exposure risk to COVID-19, precarious migration status or lack of status, lack of medical insurance, inability to speak either French or English, low literacy and racialization. The spread of COVID-19 appeared strongly linked to outbreaks in workplaces: in October 2020, 30% of new coronavirus cases were linked to workplaces (Marotta, 2020). On October 22, 2020, Dr. Horacio Arruda, the Québec director of public health at the time, reported that “46% of all outbreaks involve a workplace” (Gordon, 2020). Monitoring by the Montréal Regional Public Health Direction (*Direction régionale de santé publique*[DRSP]) confirmed the trend of a high concentration of cases in poor neighbourhoods with large immigrant populations, such as Montréal Nord (Rocha, Shingler and Montpetit, 2020). Poverty, precarious work, migration status, racialization and geographic location were setting a systemic shape for the spread of the pandemic and its social and health impacts. Another report from the DRSP released in August 2020 showed a correlation between the proportion of visible minorities in neighbourhoods and the rate of COVID-19 per 100,000 inhabitants (DRSP, 2020c). These studies confirm a structure of intersectionality between immigration status, quality of employment, Canadian citizenship, racialization and socio-economic condition (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2020).

Starting on March 13, 2020, the Québec government adopted sanitary measures to prevent virus spread, including lockdowns, social distancing regulations and measures to be implemented in workplaces, daycares and schools. At the same time, the federal government focused on providing financial relief for anyone who was legally employed (CERB<fnref n="1" />) to compensate for the first lockdowns. As the months went by, other measures came into force: The Québec Health and Social Services Ministry (*Ministère de santé et des services sociaux* *[MSSS]*) offered universal access to COVID-19 testing and treatment regardless of migrant status at the end of March, and between April and June the Montréal DRSP provided documents on health guidelines and workers’ health and safety with translations in various languages, paying special attention to vulnerable workplaces. The DRSP also provided translations in order to reach out to non-Canadian precarious workers, and the City of Montréal provided support for certain community groups to help them communicate with precarious migrants. Through such provincial institutions as the SHERPA Institute of the CIUSSS West-Central Montréal, some emergency funding was directed to community organizations who were in a position to reach vulnerable racialized populations.

Although these palliative measures were necessary on the whole, they did not alleviate the inequalities and structural problems like poverty related to employment precarity or precarious migratory status that had existed before the pandemic (Noiseux, 2020; Noiseux and Hamel-Roy, 2020). Criticism and actions by community organizations had already been building a critical narrative exposing the structural gaps between government institutions (both federal and provincial) and the long-ignored realities of discrimination and systemic racism prior to the pandemic.

Further documenting of the pandemic has shown how it exacerbated and accelerated the inequalities—based mainly on gender, age, immigration status and race—that were already present in the Québec labour market (Alberio and Tremblay, 2021; Hamel-Roy et al., 2021). Many affected groups suffered loss of employment, work hours and income, as well as serious problems related to work-life balance, particularly in precarious jobs and non-unionized sectors that hire larger numbers of immigrants. Immigrants working in these environments were also more exposed to the virus and were forced to deal with a lack of equipment and protection (Hamel-Roy et al., 2021). The effects of precarious employment and increased risk of contagion varied depending on the sector. In the health sector, particularly in the case of orderlies [*préposés aux bénéficiaires*] and nurses’ aides working in long-term residential care centres [*Centres d’hébergement de soins de longue durée* or CHSLDs] where there was a high proportion of immigrants and migrants, one of the main problems was the precarious conditions caused by temp agency employment (Plourde, 2022). In the agricultural sector, where the vast majority of workers are temporary migrants, the main issue was the increasingly stringent working conditions imposed by employers seeking to make up for lost time during the lockdown. Other common problems included employers’ failure to provide safe, secure accommodation, unreported outbreaks and deaths, and a lack of protective equipment (Hamel-Roy et al., 2021). During the first year of the pandemic at least, precarity was reactualized and redeployed in several sectors based on the racialized and gendered lines of labour social division that already existed in Québec (Hamel-Roy et al., 2021).

Faced with this situation, many immigrants and migrants with precarious jobs demonstrated a form of social resilience. Social resilience refers to “the transformative capacities of individuals, groups, and social institutions in dealing with challenges and simultaneously recognizes how power relations and institutional structures shape these capacities” (Preston, Shields and Akbar, 2021, p. 4). These authors add that social resilience “suggests a movement away from a purely individual focus to the idea of the collective and a shift from independence to interdependence” (p. 4). This shift toward a collective interpretation undoubtedly stems from an understanding of resistance in this context as the organized and coherent interpretation by many immigrant groups of their structural situation, leading to their organization (Choudry et al., 2009).

<footnote n="1">The first financial aid package to be implemented was the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), which ran from March 15 until September 26, 2020. This benefit, provided by Employment Insurance Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency, replaced traditional employment insurance, making it accessible to more people. The prerequisites for receiving CERB were a valid work permit and Social Insurance Number and an income of $5,000 during the previous 12 months. In October 2020, this benefit switched back to Employment Insurance Canada, with supposedly easier and more flexible conditions. At the same time, the Canada Recovery Benefit Plan was Implemented for independent workers and people infected with COVID-19 who had to be quarantined. The Canada Recovery Caregiving Benefit was also offered to people who had to stay home to look after children when schools or daycares were temporarily closed because of COVID-19 outbreaks.</footnote>
# Research methods and data sources

Most of the data for this article comes from the project “Settling in: Understanding the challenges of the journey and integration of asylum seekers in Québec'' founded by the *Fonds de recherche du Québec - Culture et Société*[*FRQSC*]. This project was carried out by the SHERPA University Institute of Montréal between 2019 and 2021, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Although the original research goals did not include COVID-19, the emergence of the coronavirus in the middle of the process made it an unavoidable research subject. It is important to mention here that the project’s research process unfailingly respected the requirements of the Research Ethics Board of the SHERPA University Institute, including obtaining participants’ informed consent, protection of personal data, and anonymity.

The quantitative data was collected by means of a survey of a sample of 324 asylum seekers who arrived in Québec between 2017 and 2019. The survey was conducted from July to October 2019 (i.e., prior to the pandemic). It addressed such variables as family situation, education and employment (type of work, salary, occupation and job sectors, health and safety conditions) that are considered to be important in describing working conditions. The sub-sample used for this report consisted of asylum seekers who were currently employed (155). Since the original sample (324) was not random, this sub-sample cannot be described as statistically representative. The composition of the sub-sample (like the sample), however, accurately reflects the diversity of gender, age, family situation, country of citizenship, mode of arrival, year of arrival, stay in accommodation and migration status among the group of asylum seekers who arrived in Québec in 2017-2018. Representativeness (in the broadest sense) was also assessed by comparing the key demographic characteristics of the total sample (324) with those of the reference population based on general data from Statistics Canada for 2017 and 2018. Apart from the near absence of asylum seekers from India in our sample, its composition in terms of country of origin, age group and year of arrival very closely mirrors that of the reference population. Generally speaking, the sub-sample of 155 employed asylum seekers closely resembles the population of asylum seekers who arrived in Québec in 2017-2018.

The qualitative data was drawn from: (a) interviews with a sub-sample of 31 of the 324 original survey respondents between February and November 2020, and (b) focus groups with service providers. Twenty-four of these interviews were conducted from April to December 2020 (during the pandemic) with asylum seekers whose responses to the survey indicated they were working. The interviews included questions about their working conditions during the pandemic as well as how it was affecting their personal lives (isolation, financial concerns, immigration uncertainty, fear of infection, mental health). Some of the focus groups with service providers were conducted prior to the pandemic (four groups in June 2019 and January-February 2020), while others were conducted during the pandemic (five in November 2020). All the above information sources have been taken from the project “Settling in: Understanding the challenges of the journey and integration of asylum seekers in Québec.”

The third source of data comes from the written records of meetings that the three authors of this article had with the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC) (a community grassroots organization that provides support for immigrant and migrant workers), the SHERPA University Institute's precarious workers’ working group, and the CoVivre Program (https://sherpa-recherche.com/en/sherpa/partner-projects/covivre-program/) between June 2020 and April 2021, for a total of 18 meetings. Records are based on personal notes taken by one of the authors at every meeting, email exchanges, and summaries of meetings provided by the staff of the CoVivre Program.

During this period, the three groups joined forces to improve the institutional and community response to the needs of racialized migrant and immigrant communities in Greater Montréal. The information coming from the meetings of these groups was treated as complementary to the survey data, interviews and focus groups. It expanded the analysis of the pandemic’s impacts on migrants other than asylum seekers (from temporary migration programs, international students, undocumented), providing contextual descriptions and local analysis supplied by members, organizers, field practitioners and researchers from the IWC and the SHERPA Institute. This information was gathered, synthesized and triangulated/discussed among the other authors from October to December 2021. Finally, a press review was carried out to confirm the chronological sequence of events and data that emerged from this source.
# Discussion and conclusions

The complex situations (in workplaces, homes, transportation) of asylum seekers and other precarious migrants contrasted with the experiences of most white, middle-class people working in unionized and pink- and white-collar sectors. The latter had many more opportunities to limit the impacts of the virus on their lives. In contrast, it was almost impossible for asylum seekers and other precarious im/migrant workers to avoid the negative impacts and effects of COVID—their safety depended overwhelmingly on employers’ willingness and actions.

These workers assumed a disproportionate share of the risk in sectors considered to be essential, especially in healthcare. Beyond a sort of symbolic recognition, their heroic role as “guardian angels” deserves concrete, material recognition in the form of clear provincial and national policies that would allow asylum seekers and other precarious migrants to regularize their status, or at least to facilitate the process. The impact of the pandemic was felt by these workers not only in the workplace, but also in other dimensions of their personal and community life; their resilience is part of their contribution to Québec society. During the interview process, we noticed an increase in interviewees’ collective awareness of how significant their contribution had been to buttressing the economy in Québec and keeping the health system afloat during the pandemic. Their individual resilience, of which they themselves recognized the social value, was transformed into social resilience and, subsequently, political resistance.

This process is related to the role of community organizations that had to generate public discussion on the social value of immigrants who labelled as “essential” or “guardian angels.” This organization and mobilization has called attention to their precarious labour conditions and their relationship with the more significant impacts of the pandemic on their health, their community and personal lives. It is essential that the health system collaborate closely with these organizations in the future in order to better understand these impacts and the needs of immigrants with precarious status.

In this article, we provided examples of the systemic impacts of the pandemic on the lives of precarious migrants—not just in the workplace, but also in their personal lives, affecting their financial situation, health, homes and family relationships. We also saw how migratory uncertainty is producing frames of anxiety that, in the medium and long term, will have tangible effects on the mental and physical health of asylum seekers. Attention must be paid to these projections in order to assess how specific health and social programs will be able to to attenuate these effects.

Many asylum seekers and other precarious migrants understand their own social value based on their engagement with their work and their awareness of their social importance. This awareness requires a great deal of resilience—both in the workplace, dealing with precarious labour conditions and the risk of contracting the virus, and in their personal lives at home with their families. In addition to their disadvantaged situations, they have to cope with social distancing, solitude, isolation, fear of the virus and a lack of social networks—that are crucial for social integration—internal tensions and conflicts among family members, and a gradual decline in the conditions that are required to maintain good mental health.

Although some asylum seekers and precarious migrants working in the health and warehouse sectors saw improvements in terms of salary increases and bonuses, their general working conditions remain exceedingly precarious—maybe even more so than before the pandemic (having to work at several places, non-unionized work, no benefits, through agencies, night shifts, temporary, part-time, etc.). Although the pandemic created upheaval in the labour market, it did not result in any general improvement in the working conditions of migrants surviving in precarious jobs.

In this article we showed how individual resilience became social resilience, which led in turn to resistance and political dissent, as immigrant and migrant defense organization became part of a legitimate social movement. It is important that these voices are heeded by the governments of Québec and Canada.

Some of the measures that were introduced during the pandemic were actually beneficial for precarious migrants; we need to think about how to maintain and improve these measures. There is no doubt that CERB provided significant support, but many precarious migrant groups either could not access the benefit or had to deal with specific obstacles to obtain it. The federal government needs to commit to working with community and immigrant organizations in order to understand and put an end to this exclusion. Although provincial efforts to improve access to health guidelines, COVID testing and universal treatment were commendable, these measures need greater stability and structure to ensure they serve migrant communities all the time, not just during a pandemic.

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