They call it “regaining control"; we know it is incitement against migrants

Imagine a migrant child entering their school in Quebec City one morning. They carry their school bags, speak the French they learned in class, and try to find their place among their classmates. But now they hear the leader of a political party standing outside their school and presenting their very presence as evidence that the province has lost control.

 

As Global News and The Canadian Pressreported on August 29, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon chose a school using modular classrooms to announce his plan to cut the number of temporary migrants from more than 500,000 to between 200,000 and 250,000, claiming that Quebec no longer has the capacity to provide them with housing and public services.

 

The choice of location was not neutral. He placed migrant children before the public and pointed to overcrowded classrooms. The implied message was cruel and unmistakable: these children have taken the place of yours.

 

St-Pierre Plamondon may say he blames the Coalition Avenir Québec and the federal government, not migrants themselves. But incitement does not always begin with an explicit insult. Sometimes it begins with an image: a migrant child beside a modular classroom, an asylum seeker beside an overcrowded emergency room, or a foreign worker beside an apartment listing with an unaffordable rent.

 

That is how a human being is transformed into a threat, a neighbour into a suspect, and a child into a burden.

 

Migrants are human beings, not a number to be reduced

 

When politicians talk about reducing the number of “temporary immigrants,” they hide human beings behind statistics.

 

Behind every number is a worker who wakes before dawn to go to a factory or a farm. A woman who cleans an office after everyone else has left. Someone who cares for an older person, prepares food, drives a truck, or changes a patient’s bandages. An international student who left their family and paid tens of thousands of dollars in the hope of building a future. An asylum seeker who escaped war, imprisonment, or persecution and fears being returned to the place they survived.

 

When St-Pierre Plamondon promises to reduce their number by hundreds of thousands, what does that mean in real life?

 

It means a permit that is not renewed, a job that is lost, a child pulled out of school, a family separated, and a person waiting for a letter that could destroy in one moment everything they have built over many years.

 

Calling it an “immigration target” does not make it less violent. These numbers have faces, names, homes, and frightened children.

 

Who destroyed the schools and hospitals?

 

Migrants did not impose austerity on education. They did not allow schools to deteriorate until modular classrooms became a permanent solution. They did not freeze workers’ wages, exhaust teachers, or leave hospitals without enough nurses and doctors.

 

Migrants did not stop governments from building social housing. They did not hand neighbourhoods over to property speculators, nor did they allow large landlords to raise rents and displace working-class families.

 

Governments did that.

 

They cut spending, expanded privatization, and protected the profits of corporations and landlords. Then they searched for someone weaker to blame. Instead of directing people’s anger upward toward those who possess wealth and power, they redirect it toward the worker sitting beside them on the bus.

 

This is not an accident. It is a politics of divide and rule. When a Quebec-born worker blames their migrant co-worker, the employer wins. When tenants compete over who is more deserving of housing, the landlord wins. When migrant children are blamed for deteriorating schools, the politicians who dismantled public education escape accountability.

 

They want their labour, not their lives

 

The Parti Québécois platform exposes an even crueller contradiction: St-Pierre Plamondon wants to cut temporary immigration by more than half, yet simultaneously promises to protect agriculture, manufacturing, and health care sectors that depend heavily on migrant workers.

 

They want the worker in the field, but not their family in the neighbourhood. They want the caregiver in the nursing home, but not her child in the school. They want the labour, taxes, and tuition fees but refuse to give the people providing them stability, rights, or permanent status.

 

They want the working hand, not the human being attached to it.

 

That is the essence of the temporary immigration system: bring in workers when employers need them, tie them to precarious permits and keep them afraid of losing their jobs and being deported. Then, when the crises created by governments deepen, those same people are treated as a surplus population to be discarded.

 

This is not a failed immigration system. It is a system performing the function it was designed to serve: supplying cheap and compliant labour, dividing the working class, and providing politicians with a scapegoat whenever a crisis erupts.

 

None of us become safer by deporting our neighbour.

 

Deporting a worker will not build a home. Refusing a student’s permit will not open a classroom. Separating a family will not create a hospital bed.

 

Real security means every child having a place in a well-funded public school. It means every family having a home they can afford. It means every worker being able to reject exploitation without fearing deportation.

 

That requires massive investment in social housing, schools, health care and public transit. It requires genuine rent controls, action against property speculation, an end to closed work permits, a halt to deportations, and permanent status for all.

 

Québec solidaire spokesperson Ruba Ghazal was right to say that migrant children must not be blamed for the deterioration of schools. But we must go beyond defending the innocence of children. We must reject the entire system that divides people into those who are wanted, those who are temporary and those who can be deported, according to the needs of the market and electoral calculations.

 

They will try to convince us that the crisis speaks with a different accent, wears work clothes, or sits beside our children in the classroom.

 

But our enemy is not the migrant worker returning exhausted from a night shift. It is not the asylum seeker awaiting a decision that could determine the course of their life. It is not the child opening a book inside a modular classroom.

 

Our enemy is the system that profits from the labour of us all, allows our public services to collapse, and then pushes us to fight one another.

 

Migrants are not Quebec’s crisis. Political incitement against them is.