Living with Compromised Legal Status: Irregular Temporary Foreign Workers in Alberta and the Importance of Imagining, Strategizing, and Inter‐Provincial Legal Consciousness
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12506 |
Living with Compromised Legal Status:
Irregular Temporary Foreign Workers in
Alberta and the Importance of Imagining,
Strategizing, and Inter-Provincial Legal
Consciousness
Ethel Tungohan*
ABSTRACT
This article highlights the manifold ways that migrants strategically use their social networks
in order to survive in Alberta with compromised legal status. The conditionality of their status
is affected by individual encounters and by new policy developments, showing that their abil-
ity to control their life trajectories is constrained by factors beyond their control. Nevertheless,
although they experienced high amounts of stress because of their situations, the role played
by cognitive processes, which include imagining, strategizing, and what I call “inter-provincial
legal consciousness”, allowed them to exercise agency. These processes allowed them to build
communities and networks of support and to imagine potential life paths in other provinces
through other provinces’provincial nominee programmes.
INTRODUCTION
The goal of this article is to assess irregular migrants’experiences in Alberta . As part of my
project examining the experiences of t emporary foreign wo rkers under the low- skill Temporary
Foreign Workers Pr ogramme (TFWP), I bec ame acquainted with three irregular mig rants –
Mateo, Julia, and Eva –who suddenly found themselves either without status or with compro-
mised legal status. I define the former as being in a situation where a person has no legal
papers supporting their continued stay in Canada, and I define the latter as being in a situation
where existing policies offer no guidance about the legality of their continued presence in the
country. This article argues that the presence of restrictive policies that placed irregular
migrants in precarious situations did not create a uniformly chilling effect on their actions and
their life choices. B y describing instan ces of migrant agency , even when living with c ompro-
mised legal status , this paper rejects bin ary conceptions th at frequently accom pany popular
understandings of precariousness. It prefers instead to use Goldring and Landolt’s (2013) con-
ception of “conditionality”to underscore how migrants “can climb up ladd ers towards more
secure presence an d rights”one day and “be pushed down a chute toward more vulnerability,
fewer rights or less access, a nd a more uncertain pre sence”the next (2013: 16). This article
shows that for Mateo, Julia, and Eva, “cognitive proces ses”(Mahler and Pessar, 2001) are
* York University Toronto
doi: 10.1111/imig.12506
©2018 The Author
International Migration ©2018 IOM
International Migration Vol. 56 (6) 2018
ISSN 0020-7985Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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