Parishioners at St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church on Cree Road in Thompson have started a petition to the federal government to block the possible deportations of three Filipino men who attended church here from February until their arrests last June.
Ermie Zotomayor, 45, Antonio Laroya, 45, and Arnel (Arnisito) Gaviola, 42 -- known in the Manitoba Filipino community as the "three amigos" - were arrested here June 24 by officers from the Canadian Border Services Agency and held in custody at the RCMP detachment for eight hours for not having valid work permits.
The three men, devout Roman Catholics working in Canada to send money back home to their families living lives of grinding poverty in the Philippines, face an Immigration and Refugee Board hearing in Winnipeg two days before Christmas. If the adjudicator decides Dec. 23 Zotomayor, Laroya and Gaviola have to leave Canada, they have no right to appeal. All three have jobs lined up in Thompson with another employer, but can't take them at this point.
They say they were recruited in February to work at a local gas station here in Thompson by an employer who promised to get their paperwork in order, but never did.
The three men left their families in the Philippines to escape poverty and come to Canada in 2007 under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) to work in a gas station in High Prairie, Alberta. Although it is illegal in Alberta for recruiters to charge workers a fee for finding employment, the three say they were charged $3,000 each by a recruiter to land the jobs.
After almost two years of working at the High Prairie gas station, they were laid off. They received work permits for employment at a restaurant in Peace River, Alberta where they lived together in a mobile home. But as their third year in Canada approached, they knew their time under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program was drawing to a close because the program only allows workers to stay for a maximum of four years, after which they must leave the country and not return to the program until after another four years.
They asked their restaurant employer if they could be sponsored under Alberta's Provincial Nominee Program but the employer couldn't help them with that, so they looked for other jobs.
After a friend found a position at a gas station in Thompson, and because of the reputation for success of the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program (MPNP) in helping skilled workers become future permanent residents after six months of work, they headed east to Thompson.
Steve Ashton, Thompson's NDP MLA and Manitoba's minister of infrastructure and transportation, said here in April 2008 the annual number of provincial nominees in Manitoba had gone from about 2,000 to 10,000 and the province could use as many as 20,000 such new immigrants a year.
Ashton, himself an immigrant who came to Canada from the United Kingdom in 1967 with his family, noted that his dad was unemployed when the family arrived in Toronto 43 years ago and would never be admitted into the country under the current point system or proposed immigration changes.
"Immigration is not just about labour markets," Ashton said in 2008. "It is also about families."
Zotomayor, Laroya and Gaviola say their new employer here insisted they start working at once and promised that the work permits would soon follow. Zotomayor, Laroya and Gaviola went to work in February for $10 an hour, sharing an apartment in Thompson, and sending most of their pay home to their families in the Philippines. Zotomayor, who has a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering, says he's been advised not to identify the employer.
After waiting for three months, the employer still failed to obtain the new work permits as promised, they say. Even after asking their employer repeatedly about the status of their papers, the work permits never came. This caused the workers to be "out of status."
After their June 24 arrests, they were released, but not allowed to work and all their identification cards were confiscated, including their Philippine passports.
Zotomayor, Laroya and Gaviola say they tried to seek legal advice after their release but Legal Aid Manitoba said they were not eligible.
After seeking the advice of a Philippine consular official, they paid another $4,500 in total to an immigration consultant in Calgary to help them, not knowing they cannot work while awaiting their Dec. 23 admissibility hearing.
As of 2009, more than 280,000 foreign workers were in Canada, according to Citizen and Immigration Canada statistics. From 2007 to 2009 alone, almost 50,000 foreign workers from the Philippines entered Canada via the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, says Diwa Marcelino, of Migrante-Canada in Winnipeg.
Migrante-Canada is an alliance of Filipino migrant and immigrant organizations in Canada. It has member organizations in Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Alberta and British Columbia. Migrante-Canada is a chapter of Migrante International, a global alliance of Filipinos abroad with a presence in North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
The chronic unemployment and lack of opportunities in the Philippines has resulted in the daily exodus of approximately 3,900 Filipinos workers who find jobs outside the country, according to the Quezon City, Philippines-based IBON Foundation, a non-profit research-education-information and advocacy organization set up in 1978 to serve marginalized sectors. Many of these university-educated workers find employment in remote communities doing jobs which locals are unwilling to do, Marcelino says.
Just last year, 3,649 foreign workers entered Manitoba to work in service sector and agricultural jobs to fill the labour shortages in these industries.
After the Winnipeg Free Press ran a story Nov. 26 on Zotomayor, Laroya and Gaviola, they were kicked out of an apartment the same day, where they had been given shelter by a friend in Winnipeg, by the building superintendent, who saw their photos in the paper, said Marcelino. They spent a couple of nights at the home of Manitoba Culture, Heritage and Tourism Minister Flor Marcelino, who is Diwa Marcelino's mother.
A forum regarding the plight of Zotomayor, Laroya and Gaviola and two additional Filipino temporary workers employed by a Mennonite farmer in Southern Manitoba was held Dec. 10 at the Philippine-Canadian Centre of Manitoba in Winnipeg. The forum was organized by Damayan Manitoba and Migrante Canada.
