What you need to know about immigration and unemployment (w/ Karina Villada & Juan Vargas Alba)

In the wake of the successful inclusion of a Youth Climate Corps pilot in the 2025 federal budget, Juan Vargas Alba (co-lead of the Youth Climate Corps campaign) interviews community organizer Karina Villada about the myths and scapegoating around immigration, migrant workers and (youth) unemployment.

This episode functions as a resource for young organizers who want to understand issues of immigration and encourages the climate movement to stand in solidarity with the migrant rights movement.

This episode aired on Wednesday, December 17th, 2025.

Credits: Produced by Anjali Appadurai, Juan Vargas Alba and Doug Hamilton-Evans. Hosted by Juan Vargas Alba. Featuring Karina Villada. Music and audio editing by Anjali Appadurai. Artwork by Geoff Smith.

Transcript

Juan Vargas Alba (00:05)
You're listening to Break in Case of Emergency. My name is Juan Vargas Alba I'm the Alberta organizer and Youth Climate Corps co-lead at the Climate Emergency Unit. We're recording this on November 7th, three days after the release of the 2025 federal budget. In this budget, we want a commitment to a Youth Climate Corps, guaranteeing $40 million across two years. It's not as much as our demand, but it's more than nothing, and we're coming for even more. At the same time, this budget slashed immigration targets and invested big in border security, making it clear that the federal government is willing to echo Trump-style policies. That major contradiction in this budget really highlights something we started seeing more as we shifted our campaign frame to talk more about youth unemployment. When we bring up how hard it is for young people to find work at this moment, we would see a lot of replies talking about the effect of the temporary foreign workers program or labor market impact assessments on youth unemployment. Most people were coming from a place of curiosity, not malice, and without resources to make sense of this moment. 

Since 2018, Karina Villada has been active as a community organizer in British Columbia, organizing and teaching for the rights and protections of migrant workers.

Her focus has been with agricultural workers and undocumented families in the lower mainland. I sat down with Karina to talk a bit about this moment, but also to set the record straight on immigration policy in the country.

So Karina, tell me how do you unpack the blame game that's happening right now linking immigration and youth unemployment?

Karina Villada (01:51)

Well, ⁓ migrants are serving as convenient scapegoat for right-wing governments around the world. We've seen that, and we've seen that in the news. And wherever people are struggling with, like healthcare, unemployment, ⁓ housing, you name it, gets blamed on migrants. So there is no end to the analysis that could be done, debunking those narratives, ⁓ these hate narratives against migrants. But the stats aren't going to convince anyone, looks like that, that what we need to do at the end is organize and build power together to support ⁓ each other against destructive and exploitative classes. And it's like what we are doing right now with this protest.

Juan Vargas Alba (02:50)
Yeah, thank you. And you're totally right. I like the even this idea that there is a link, like makes too much room for the belief that that this is the main cause, right. And I think, for example, what housing prices and of course, that's the scapegoat, right? Migrants and an increase of new Canadians is such a huge scapegoat for housing prices. But housing prices have been rising since the late 90s, when we stopped building collective public housing. And so it's always so pinpointed on the scapegoat. As you know, there's also been a huge focus on international students as a scapegoat. Can you speak a bit more to the challenges that international students have in navigating the immigration system in Canada?

Karina Villada (03:39)
Yeah, well, we need to remember and we have memories and also there is internet and Canada has been promoting itself to potential international students with the slogan study, explore, work, stay. And we can look on the internet and we can look through the history that in 2021 at the height of the pandemic, the immigration minister Marco Mendocino tweeted, ⁓ we don't just want you to study here, we want you to stay. So this was a lie. And Canada extracted labor ⁓ and now are trying to toss them out and scapegoat them. So that's what we are saying now.

I did like, we just need to go back as well, but the government thinks that we don't have memories.

Juan Vargas Alba (04:39)
Yeah, totally. And it's very much like they want their cake and they want to eat it too, right? Like they want to say, let's bring as many people in, let's bring as many in. The system is not unfair. The system is exactly as it's meant to be. And then when we all realize that the system is unfair, ⁓ know, the finger pointing starts to happen a little bit, right? Thinking about part of the system, ⁓ you know, people really focus on the temporary foreign workers program, TFWs, and then labor market impact assessments, LMIAs, as something that they either really understand and they think they understand part of the way that it contributes to the moment, or that they just hear and think they understand. But I guess to just give it to us straight, like, can you describe how the TFW and LMIA programs work and how you kind of contextualize them within all of this moment?

Karina Villada (05:36)
Yeah, well I want to highlight again that I am a community organizer and I see with these lenses, but at the same time we see workers as human beings. As human beings and in this case the program centers all the power with the employer. That's the reality. And imagine not only being ⁓ legally allowed to work for only one employer, regardless of how they are treating you. And imagine meeting your boss, you needed to have the boss support to be able to stay in your home or your community. And if your boss isn't interested in you anymore, you will face detention and deportation. So they have that power to dispose people.

So it becomes easy to see how those programs ⁓ breed exploitation and abuse. That's reality. ⁓

Juan Vargas Alba (06:44)
Yeah, absolutely. then so for example, if you're someone that applies to be in a temporary foreign worker program, the employer has to apply for those positions, right? And then when you show up, a lot of the time, the employer will, they have the housing for you, but then they'll say, for the housing, give us your passport, right? And now you're in a room and in ⁓ building, not even a building, you're in a room with eight other people and you all have to stay in this room and you'll have to be agricultural workers and we get to choose when you leave ⁓ the site. We have your passport so you can actually literally cannot work anywhere else. Like there's this really big unfairness and a very real critique of the temporary foreign worker program as incredibly exploitative. And at the same time, none of the cutbacks that we currently are seeing from the government on the temporary foreign worker program really does anything to protect migrant workers.

Right? So again, this perception of the system as we set up was unfair and our response to the system is equally unfair. So what do you make of that contradiction?

Karina Villada (07:53)
⁓ When politicians like ⁓ David Evey, who was just here a couple of weeks ago, then call for scrapping the temporary farm workers ⁓ program because of ⁓ youth unemployment and exploitation, ⁓ but don't talk about any alternatives ⁓ for workers.

That really shows that are not thinking about workers as human beings and with dignity. And it's classic politics that uses workers as then cast them and them aside and wants them to disappear. workers must not, we don't need to ignore them when we talk about solutions.

And that means that replacing exploitative programs ⁓ with rights, like affirming programs, that means granting permanent ⁓ immigration status for all at the end. Because as soon as the workers keep coming with these tides with their employer, the abuse will continue.

And the government doesn't have the capacity to review and have a night in every employer. And also, if they really wanted to make those changes, they would have made those changes through the different remedies or through the laws. Like for instance, migrant workers in the agricultural sectors, they don't have the right to get over hours. ⁓

They work and they receive the same salary and also they are not covered with stats holidays. They don't have that.

Juan Vargas Alba (09:58)
Yeah, so there's a lot of rights that every other worker that isn't a resident gets to, residents get a specific sets of rights. And there's a second sets of rights for temporary workers or for migrant workers, which is why so often, you know, people describe the temporary foreign worker program as modern day human trafficking, right? Like you were giving the very same powers ⁓ to do that. And like you mentioned, when politicians say, we're, we're clamping down on this, we are, we're changing the way this happens. Rarely are they speaking with the belief that or with the conviction of we're doing this because we're protecting migrants, right? Migrants get brought in to fill in the jobs that people aren't doing. And then the second that it is not politically convenient to do that, they're scrapped and the jobs are still empty, right?

So of course, we kind of hear this discourse around temporary foreign workers are being used to fill in jobs and roles that young people could be accessing, but it's the exact same conversation as always, right? The problem isn't migrants. The problem is an easy to abuse system that employees are using to abuse not just temporary foreign workers, but yeah, also using to abuse like young workers and all of us together, right? At the end of the day, like you said, we are all, we're all humans and we need to take the perspective of we're all humans coming here for whatever reason, working here for whatever reason, we're also all workers, right? And if we're able to, you know, allow a system that focuses and that has so much room for worker abuses and thinking that the problem is the people working those jobs, then we're letting bosses abuse our rights as well, right? So there's a real value to protecting it, because people are human, but also because if we don't stand up for each other, those abuses are going to be used against us as well.

Karina Villada (12:02)
Yeah, that's right.

Juan Vargas Alba (12:05)
So thinking largely about the wider movement, of course, we have a really large role to play when it comes to debunking this blame game, this idea that migrant workers are pitted against unemployment or migrant workers are pitted against youth workers. What role can climate campaigns and youth campaigns ⁓ play in debunking this blame game?

Karina Villada (12:30)
Well, solidarity. That's the word. Solidarity and recognizing that our liberation is tied up with each other. As you mentioned just a bit, just in previous ⁓ words, that, all of us seems as workers because at the end we don't have those, ⁓ we are not owners of companies and we are not owners of capital.

We are part of this ⁓ of the same community that is fighting for rights and we have our dignity there. So yeah, we will keep going. it's recognizing that the Canada Border Service Agency is the muscle that enforces the extraction of wealth and labor from migrants. ⁓ So the laws empower Canadian employers, as you mentioned too, but also employers, schools, spouses, to extract from migrants. And they use the Canada Border Services Agency to enforce compliance. So right now, ⁓ we need to be mobilizing against Bill C-2, Bill C-12, ⁓ and the government's latest assault on migrants as well as their publicly announcement plans that make hundreds of thousands of temporary residents undocumented while increasing the budget for detention and deportation. And those are the numbers there. So ⁓ that's solidarity.

Juan Vargas Alba (14:15)
Yeah, I also I love that answer. And I also feel like within our movements, you know, we've been we've been leaning more and more into working across movements, working across sectors. Of course, the draw the line protests were a really big part of that. And I feel really compelled to expand on that work. And that's a lot of what we're seeing in the United States, like people who previously did not feel like they needed or how to write quote unquote, to take political action like bishops and priests and like leaders of the institutions that the people who are being detained are a part of are saying, you don't mess with my members, right? You don't mess with my parishioners, you don't mess with my neighbors. And people are really standing up for that. And so even hearing you talk about solidarity, about what that can look like here is really just an opportunity to expand the way we stand up for each other ⁓ within our movements, but also bringing tons of new people into these big struggles to support each other and to support workers and migrant workers. As we end it, I'm wondering if you have any other questions you wanted to address or any other kind of parts of the discussion you wanted to speak to.

Karina Villada (15:33)
⁓ Well, just like a final thought, it's like, well, we need to remember that we are on stolen lands. We are inhabiting this part and as citizens of this land, stolen land, we cannot cover our eyes and be complicit to see how these migrants are being attacked how all these situation is destroying our communities and families. So, yeah.

Juan Vargas Alba (16:14)
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And of course, there's also just a strong link there between a lot of people who are temporary foreign workers are also indigenous. ⁓ know, people who have been displaced from their lands in Central America or in Mexico or in the Philippines, who have been expelled from those homes by the impacts of colonialism, right? And so there's this double effect here when people come to these, as you correctly call it, stolen lands. And so there's a real opportunity again for that solidarity to grow, ⁓ not just against the abuse of migrants, but against the abuse of migrants and workers on these lands. So yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for adding that.

Karina Villada (17:01)
Thank you.

Juan Vargas Alba (17:07)
That was my snack-sized conversation with Karina Villada. Of course, there's a lot to add that we didn't discuss, including the Strong Borders Act and the uptick in raids and deportations in the country. I encourage you to check out the incredible work being done by the Migrants Worker Center and groups like the Migrant Rights Network. I wanted to end with one of my biggest takeaways from this conversation, and it's about the inconsistency in government messaging around immigration. A few years ago, when the regularization for all campaign was booming, we knew that the movement was close to winning status and protection for millions of people. Instead, the federal government completely pivoted and leaned hard into an anti-immigrant rhetoric, one of which we're facing the price now. For the climate movement, education and solidarity are so, so, so important. But what this moment has also taught me is that the climate movement has to be proactive. Across the world, we're seeing more scapegoating of migrants based around environmental issues. Migrants are some of the most vulnerable when it comes to climate, and in return, leaders are tightening borders and forcing people back to homes that our emissions are destroying. In the United States, churches, unions, and movements are finding new ways to stand up for their neighbors. It's time we hone in on what's working, and prepare ourselves for the same.