Social policy frameworks of exclusion: the challenge of protecting the social rights of ‘undocumented migrants’ in Quebec and Shanghai

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the implications of administrative ‘undocumentedness’, arguing that a lack of legal recognition across jurisdictional boundaries has parallels whether international or inter-municipal. In Canada and China, migrant workers only began receiving significant public attention in the past 20 years. Canada has had a boom in the use of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, yet tightening immigration procedures overall has led to a rise in the number of undocumented workers. While in China, most rural-to-urban migrants move without transferring their hukou residency registration. The authors argue that there are surprising parallels in the policy frameworks governing access to social rights for undocumented migrants in Quebec and in Shanghai, parallels that create social exclusion. Mutual lessons for addressing the social rights of irregular migrants are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Undocumented migrants
• migrant workers
• social rights
• social exclusion
• Shanghai
• China
• Quebec
• Canada

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to recognize the helpful contributions of the participants of the Social Policy and Social Protection in Asia 2015 Workshop conference in Hong Kong, July 2015, as well as those of Drs. Meihua Zhu and Wendy Thomson who were members of the advisory committee for the Shanghai case study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the case of Canada’s international migration, this would be stateless persons; in China, this could be children whose birth was never officially registered and who, correspondingly, have no hukou registration.

2. Because Canadian citizens are free to move within the country without any need for state approval and without any significant barriers to registering in a new province or city, we do not include here a discussion of the internal migration of Canadians seeking work, although it also represents a significant number.

3. These numbers do not include any dependents that may have accompanied TFW permit holders, while the Chinese numbers cited below do include other household members than the principal breadwinner.

Additional information

Funding

The Canadian portion of this research was supported by the Quebec Fund for Social and Cultural Research (FQRSC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Notes on contributors

Jill Hanley

Dr. Jill Hanley is Associate Professor at the McGill School of Social Work where she teaches social policy and community organizing. Her research focuses on access to social rights (labour, housing, health) for precarious status migrants, as well as their individual, family and collective strategies to defend these rights. She is co-founder of the Immigrant Workers Centre where she is still actively involved.

Ya Wen

Dr. Ya Wen is a research associate at the McGill School of Social Work, studying migration policies in Canada and China. Dr. Wen is also collaborating with Social Work and Social Policy Research Center at East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai on several policy research projects. Her research is on migrants' well-being, child welfare, and policy research.