Canada. Quebec Premier attacks immigrant proletarians, drawing inspiration from French policy

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Quebec Premier attacks immigrant proletarians, drawing inspiration from French policy

Premier François Legault's recent visit to France in early October was an opportunity for Quebec's provincial government to get in tune with the French state when it comes to immigration policies. Indeed, the various French governments of the past have a long history of enacting repressive policies against foreign workers. The latest “Darmanin law” adds a particularly racist and anti-worker layer, as it is the culmination of particularly aggressive attacks by the bourgeoisie targeting the most exploited, precarious and dominated sections of the proletariat (1).

This is the context in which Legault draws his reactionary political inspiration in France. In Quebec, as in France, the problem would be, as certain sectors of the Quebec and French bourgeoisies sing the same song, immigration on a too massive scale. And Legault intones: "I heard Emmanuel Macron say last week that the French were feeling pushed around by immigration. I feel exactly the same way about Quebecers (2)."

The Quebec government is using immigration to titillate Quebecers' already sensitive nationalist and chauvinist fiber. Playing on the fact that within Canada, francophones have historically had a position of relative inferiority to anglophones, immigration is becoming, in the eyes of the Conservatives of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) - the party currently in power - an existential danger for the Quebec nation. Legault's statement during his visit to France is aimed directly at the Canadian federal government, accusing it of deliberately flooding Quebec with immigrants. The Legault government is positioning itself as the victim within Canada, playing the xenophobic card of Quebecers' “identity insecurity”. In other words, the federal government would deliberately send too many immigrants who are foreign to Western culture (and therefore a danger to civilization in general) and who don't speak French (and therefore a danger to the Quebec nation in particular), in order to further reduce the weight of francophones within Quebec and Canada. Once again, immigrants become the scapegoats for the quarrels between Canadian and Quebecois chauvinism.

What is Legault proposing? Quite simply, to deport half of the 160,000 or so asylum seekers currently on Quebec soil to other Canadian provinces. Similarly, Legault intends to draw inspiration from French anti-immigration laws by asking “Ottawa to set up waiting zones for asylum seekers as it is done in France (...) (3) ”. In other words, Legault is asking the federal government to set up the kind of detention centers that the bourgeoisie euphemistically and cynically calls “waiting zones” - which, by the way, are nothing more than prisons - in which irregular migrant proletarians are locked up until they can be deported, a practice now commonplace in France and elsewhere in Europe.

In short, the Legault government wants to put forward a frankly reactionary and racist policy, aimed directly at undermining the potential unity of the working class and its struggles, by using immigrant populations as a convenient political scarecrow. Indeed, “[b]y attacking the immigrant part of the proletariat in particular, the bourgeoisie is attacking the proletariat as a whole (4).” In other words, when the Quebec government carries out specific attacks on migrant and undocumented workers, it does so to kill two birds with one stone: firstly, to attack the living and working conditions of immigrant proletarians in order to further increase the exploitation of those who are able to stay, and to drastically weaken the existence of those who are expelled; secondly, to hitch Quebec workers to the wagon of national concord and class collaboration, by making them believe that immigrants are the source of their socio-economic difficulties.

Proletarians must reject this chauvinist blackmailing imposed by the Quebec bourgeoisie, which aims to divide them in order to attack them more effectively; they form a single international class –whatever their ethnic, religious or national origin– whose defense of living and working conditions imperatively requires the solidarity of all proletarians against their direct bosses in the workplace first of all, but even more so against the national bourgeoisie as a whole from a more general point of view. The struggle against all immigration controls is therefore a struggle that must mobilize all proletarians, not because it would be a moral duty to “claim timeless, democratic and humanitarian ideals such as ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘right’, but because it is an internationalist requirement intrinsic to the class struggle “to unite the proletarian ranks, notably by making native workers understand the necessity, for the very needs of the struggle of the entire working class, of rejecting any situation of privilege, any discrimination and any maneuver of division on the part of the bourgeoisie (5)”

For the unification of all proletarians, for the exclusive defense of proletarian interests!

(1) See our text “Class struggle against the immigration law and all attacks against workers!”, 18 Jan 2024.

(2) https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/821007/recu-premier-ministre-francais-matignon-legault-discute-i Our translation.

(3) https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2109456/francois-legault-france-matignon-immigration-barnier. Our translation.

(4) “Proletarian solidarity against immigration control”, Le Prolétaire brochure no. 12, January 1980, https://pcint.org/ 40_pdf/18_ publication- pdf/FR/12_contre-controle-immigration.pdf, p. 15. (in French)

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