The story of Alberta is the story of generations coming to the prairie province in search of a better life. This has been the force that shaped Alberta's earliest days as a province, and it continues to drive the experiences of newcomers working here now. Before it even became Canada's 10th province in 1905, Alberta's broad prairie skies and rolling foothills were already lodged in the imaginations of people seeking for a better life. In the late 1800s, thousands of Ukrainian, Hungarian, Romanian and German families arrived in Alberta to farm wheat, barley and oat crops. At the same time, American cattle drivers found in the prairies the ideal landscape to set up permanent ranches, launching a cattle industry that would become an Alberta staple. Towards the end of the 20th century, Alberta's booming oil and gas sector attracted Canadians from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in search of a fresh start after the Atlantic fishing industry collapsed in the early 1990s and a surge of unemployment battered the Maritimes. More recently, in the 2020s, the promise of high-paying jobs, shorter commutes and reasonably-priced suburban homes lured more than 116,000 Ontarians, and roughly 111,000 British Columbians, to move to the prairie province. To support the influx of new arrivals, more than 19,000 employers in Alberta sought to leverage the federal temporary foreign worker program to recruit the labour needed to build new homes, stock shelves and pour double-doubles without jeopardizing the prairie province's affordability advantage. Since 2022, roughly 90,000 migrants have received a permit to work in Alberta via the temporary foreign worker program alone. Like the generations of newcomers before them, temporary foreign workers came to Alberta seeking to improve their livelihoods — and their families. Earning a wage in Canadian dollars can afford the children of temporary foreign workers an education in their home countries, access to adequate health care or simply a more stable life. Their hopes, however, often come with a hefty price tag. A new book uncovers the realities of foreign workers across Canada, and seeks to reimagine immigration policy from a perspective that centres the humanity and lived experiences of newcomers. In A Renewed Canadian Welcome: Eleven Visions from Migrants and Advocates, Salvadorean Canadian policy analyst and refugee rights advocate Emilio Rodríguez brings together the voices of activists, organizers and academics whose lived experience informs their sharp critiques of an immigration system that they say is exploitative and drenched in racism. "Migrants and refugees are integral to the fabric of our communities," Rodriguez writes. "But the recognition of our importance must go beyond rhetorical or merely symbolic gestures. What we demand, and believe are owed, is dignity, equality and justice." For workers in the Global South, migration offers a way out of poverty With few opportunities back home, lower-income workers from the Global South can seldom choose to stay at home. It's a reality for many to seek employment opportunities abroad, as their countries of origin rely on their migration as a source of revenue, writes Marco Luciano, a labour rights activist and director of Migrante Alberta, an Edmonton-based advocacy group for the Filipino diaspora. In the Philippines, Luciano explains, workers have become a profitable export. The remittances of more than 10 million workers living abroad account for roughly nine per cent of the country's economy, World Bank data shows. But there are few pathways for permanent immigration available to migrant workers. And non-permanent residents lack the basic rights that their fellow Canadians take for granted. Leaving an abusive employer, or facing a life-altering illness or injury, can cause foreign workers to lose their immigration status in Canada. "The number of undocumented migrants reflects on the failure of Canada's immigration programs," Luciano writes, poi...
