Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Earth & Environmental Sciences

Advisor

Cindi Katz

Advisor

Monica Varsanyi

Committee Members

Miriam Ticktin

Reece Jones

Subject Categories

Human Geography | Social Justice

Keywords

immigration, border, migrant labour, Quebec, Montreal, migration geography, social movements, immigrant justice, regularization

Abstract

This dissertation examines how migrant justice struggles in Quebec during and immediately after the COVID‑19 pandemic challenged and reshaped the cultural politics of membership in a neoliberal welfare state under strain. The research is centered on an ethnography of the Status for All campaign, a coalition effort spearheaded in Montreal to secure permanent immigration status for all people with precarious status in Canada. I situate pandemic‑era regularization efforts within overlapping crises of border governance, social reproduction, and federal–provincial relations. I argue that Quebec’s growing reliance on migrants with precarious status to sustain essential public social reproductive functions in care work, education, and construction, while often legally excluding them from the benefits of these same systems, exposes a bordering logic that manages the contradictions of a fraying welfare state through status stratification.

Using a conjunctural analysis and drawing on five years of ethnographic work with the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal—supplemented by media, archival, and policy analysis—this study traces how ‘essential worker’ discourse advanced a novel social reproduction argument for immigrant inclusion and opened space for political mobilization. I show how, in multiscalar governance contexts, organizers leverage jurisdictional tensions to secure footholds for transformative projects. The regularization campaign provoked significant debate over the meaning of national membership in Quebec, pushing beyond a linguistically defined imaginary toward questions of pluralist values and what a society owes the people involved in the material making of its everyday life. Coordinated lobbying across civil society and both Quebec and Canada’s “national” governments ultimately produced the Guardian Angels Program, a regularization initiative for pending and refused asylum seekers working in healthcare. Efforts to extend the program to all migrant ‘essential workers’ were briefly entertained by the Canadian government but were blocked amid a post‑pandemic wave of migrant scapegoating for housing pressures and the erosion of public services. Linking theories of social reproduction, border governance, and differential inclusion, I reconceptualize immigration policy as a central technology in reproducing provincial welfare systems in an era of intensified contestation over the state’s role in public provisioning and the politics of immigration.

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