Foreign Domestic Workers In Canada

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Pages: 4

In Canada, ratification of migration policies regarding foreign domestic workers began after the country entered the fourth phase of migration. In 1981, the Foreign Domestic Movement (FDM) was established to provide domestic workers with temporary employment visas which allowed them to reside in Canada while implementing their roles. Foreign domestic workers who entered through this program were required to live with their employers which covered their residency expenses. This program was replaced with the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) in 1992 which increased the educational requirement to grade twelve. Recently, the Canadian government has introduced amendments to the LCP, by removing the mandatory clause of “living-in” the employer’s …show more content…
Due to the fact that most of their applications for permanent residency are rejected, it is argued that Filipina domestic workers do not fall in any of the two classes of noncitizens characterized by the Canadian Immigration Act of 1976: immigrants and visitors. An immigrant is identified as a permanent resident as soon as they enter Canada. On the other hand, the category of visitors must acquire an employment authorization, which is not provided to those who migrate under the live-in caregiver program. Therefore, many in the world of academia affirm Canada places these workers in the non-existing category of “visiting immigrants” in which they enter as easily as visitors and remain in the state as long as immigrants, but “receive the benefits of neither.” Inevitably, these programs facilitate Filipina migration by placing the domestic workers in a perpetual temporal status in Canada as foreigners instead of an explicit permanent status as citizens, ultimately prolonging the notion of transnational …show more content…
These theories are classified through economic, social, and political models and depict the importance of foreign domestic workers in the broader context of global migration. First, the neoclassical theory of migration justifies this episode through the assertion that labour and capital move to locations where they are both abundant. In other words, this economic models emphasizes that Filipina domestic workers leave their country of origin due to insufficient wage labour and migrate to Canada to meet the demands of domestic workers which consist of better pay. However, this theory does not take into account the level of accessibility that domestic workers have in their movement. Another economic model consists of the dual labour market theory which assumes immigrants will benefit from the demand of precarious work. Therefore, in the case of domestic workers, the theory assumes that conducting labour intensive secondary jobs will provide domestic workers with greater prestige and economic benefits than they would have back in the Philippines. A challenge to this theory includes its conformity that migration is demand driven, excluding any other push factors that may have motivated the workers to migrate such as political