‘Guardian Angels’: Essential work, conjunctural crises, and shifting sovereignty in COVID Quebec

This article critically examines the making of the ‘Guardian Angels’ program, a Canadian special immigration program for Asylum claimants working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. The program was the product of community organizing and mediatized ‘essential worker’ discourse which resulted in contest over the terms of migrant inclusion. These debates were waged by migrant justice organizers, who called for “Status for All”, and the Federal and Quebec provincial governments each with their own plans. At first proposed as wide-spanning amnesty for migrant healthcare workers, the Guardian Angels program’s final form was restrictive and exclusionary. Based on our ethnographic work with Montreal’s Immigrant Workers Center, we analyze the program’s logics through a conjectural framework, centering the debates around two overlapping crises: First, the Trump-era rise in asylum-claimant land-border crossings at Roxham Road, and second, the pandemic public health crisis. These moments were seized on by Quebec Premier François Legault’s nationalist CAQ party to increase provincial immigration sovereignty in Canada’s federated immigration framework. We contend these goals were pushed through by bordering through the mechanism of status, a power which we argue is continuous with a broader assertion of territorial control that operates through selection powers.