Enslaving temporary migrant women: Canada's shifting immigration policies

Canada’s adherence to the expansion of the neo-liberal ideology has been accompanied by the federal government’s implementation of an immigration policy shift from a focus on permanent residents to a focus on temporary migrants. Not only has the amount of temporary migrants increased, but so too has the amount of temporary migrant women, indicating the demand for their unfree reproductive labour. This thesis analyzes the changes made to the temporary foreign worker program (TFWP) over the past decade and argues that the Canadian federal government has purposefully implemented a series of changes to the TFWP to render temporary migrant women unfree in Canada and facilitate the extraction of their unfree reproductive labour, ultimately rendering temporary migrant women as modern day slaves. Through a feminist post-colonial lens, this thesis concludes that the expansion of the TFWP is a result of the country’s adherence to neo-liberal ideology and the desire to secure a cheap, flexible source of unfree labour, which is necessary to increase the country’s national comparative advantage.