Foreign Workers

foreign workers: The formula has served us well by minimizing the us vs. them undercurrent that charges relations between new arrivals and the rest of society. In our native and adopted land, the old and the new are in it together, according to The Star. We were never like the oil-rich Persian Gulf nations that allow employers to import temporary foreign workers, but not their families, pay dirt-poor wages and hold them hostage as indentured labour tethered to their master and It hit me on Canada Day that even the name, temporary foreign worker program, is un-Canadian. Temporary and foreign are the antithesis of long-standing Canadian immigration policy, the bedrock principle of which is that immigrants are selected to be permanent residents and future fellow-citizens. Canada studiously avoided Europes guest worker program, under which hundreds of thousands were imported in the expectation that they d leave at the end of their work. Few did, creating a permanent underclass in Germany, France and elsewhere and all the resentments that go with it. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.