Amir Hodhod lived the life of an illegal in the US for 4 years. He’s been living in Montreal as a refugee for 2 ½. He is a writer and works towards social justice. As a member of Solidarity Across Borders he walked the 7 days to Ottawa to call for the regularization of all non-status people, an end to their deportation and detention and the abolition of security certificates. Amir is awaiting the outcome of a Pre-Risk Removal Assessment. He fears the prospect of a forced return to Egypt where Amnesty International reports the routine use of imprisonment and torture under the Mubarak regime.

“...but certainly for the present age ,which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence,...illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”

Ludwig Feuerbach, preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity 1841

The struggle of refugees, non-status and illegal people is a struggle which ranges between image and resistance. In the social dimension people may often be confused as to which creates what? Does the man spawn the image or does the image spawn the man? But perhaps it goes without saying that image in society is not the simple reflection from a reflecting surface. It is not the medium through which we identify our features. It is more than that. Image is a political construction used to organize and sustain the status quo. While resistance becomes the means by which image is deconstructed and revealed for what it is.

"Faces" by Pinny Dubrofsky

I still recall a discussion I had with a social worker in the school where as a refugee I was to learn the French language. She’d come to help the refugee students integrate into their new society. We were discussing whether there were real opportunities for refugees to express their abilities and develop their expertise and interests inside Canadian society or not. I remember the social worker saying, “You have to know something. Refugees need to eat first, before asking whether they have equal rights with other citizens or not.”

...Yes...hungry people, who need to eat first, are not able to ask for equal rights...realistically speaking...this was her point of view. But her statement, like every other social discourse, hides more than it declares. It hides the fact that refugees, non status and illegal people are here in Canada mainly because there is a need for them. There is a need for them in the job market, as food or kitchen workers, farm and construction workers, servants for rich families (see the Live-in Care Giver program), as workers in the manufacturing and service industries, and as adult entertainers.

The significant social factor here is that there are an increasing number of non-citizen workers, primarily people of color, from the global south, participating in the Canadian work force, below or outside the standards that the labor movement fought hard to gain over the years. The exact number of non-citizen workers is unknown but varying reports range it anywhere from 20,000 to 800,000. The statistics are inconclusive to say the least but might be rather more precise if it were in the interests of government to be more transparent. However the very fact that the number of undocumented migrant workers here in Canada is rising points to the economic importance and need for having them here.

That same point of view given by that same social worker touches upon the social image of a refugee, a social image that has been industrialized to serve an economy based on exploitation and hierarchy. The people who need to eat first are confined to certain positions for as long as they have to work, for as long as they have to survive in this society. This is an economy that has planned the prevention of any further development of those productive forces that are mainly dependant upon human ability. The existing economic and class forces understand that the further growth of science and technology within the population at large, to the latter’s social and environmental advantage, would ultimately mean the collapse of the current elite. The denial of rights to specific groups of people such as refugees, illegal or non-status people, ie. rights to study and self-develop, or even to realize their existing abilities, helps sustain the current system of power relations.

For within the social image of refugees, illegal or non-status people there are few human features. For these people are perfectly reduced to one dimension, that of cheap labor power. And they are asked to identify themselves in this image, in the features of a slave. The good refugee is the slave who accepts being a slave hoping that one day he will be able to move on. Otherwise, losing such hope, he falls into the despair of his day to day life.

The process of identifying groups of people out of their humanity until this identity is accepted by the oppressed group of people themselves is the most important factor in articulating the social hierarchy. It is the process by which exploitation moves from its economic level into its spiritual one.

Negating this identity of oppression is resistance. The matter of resistance becomes the matter of re-identification. Resistance can only be carried out in those sectors of society where capitalism restores its history of exploitation and appears in its most naked form. Resistance will succeed on a spiritual level as it is carried out on a day to day economic one.