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So by April 1, 2015, all temporary foreign workers who arrived on or before April 1, 2011 (no one knows the exact number) are expected to pack up and go home. But some will not go back. They will remain living and working in Canada without legal status. How can we know this for sure? Because that is what has happened, from the mid-1940s to the present, in every country in the world that has run a mass guest-worker regime.

This is what any competent Citizenship and Immigration bureaucrat knew and probably told the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration in 2006, when the government decided to dramatically expand and under-regulate the temporary foreign worker program, and again in 2011 when the government instituted the “4-in, 4-out” rule.

Temporary foreign workers overstay their visas and go underground for various reasons. Their families abroad may depend on their remittances to subsist. They may have been exploited by rapacious “recruiters” and/or unscrupulous employers. Returning home empty-handed and possibly indebted is not only stigmatizing, it can be dangerous.

Some workers may even have dared to feel at home in Canada — to imagine themselves as potential members of the society where they live, work, pay taxes, form bonds and contribute. This last possibility is, of course, inimical to the very purpose of the 4-in, 4-out rule, which is to enforce the message that temporary foreign workers are good enough to work but not good enough to stay. After all, the rule doesn’t prevent employers from replacing temporary workers with other temporary workers in perpetuity. The work need not be temporary, only the people who do it.