Following Donald Trump’s recent election victory in the US and his threat of 25% tariffs against Canada and Mexico, the liberal Justin Trudeau government in Canada – itself in the midst of a political crisis of representation – responded with promises to step up the policing of its borders against illegal migration. Canada’s supposedly lax enforcement against the flow of drugs and migrants into the US was one of the stated reasons for the Trump tariff policy, but in fact Canada’s immigration system under Justin Trudeau has been anything but lax. Now, with the exit of Trudeau from the political arena, the new Liberal government of Mark Carney seems set to continue his predecessor’s immigration policies, even as the party’s project has been granted a new lease of life by Trump’s threats to annex the country.

Last year, the Trudeau government introduced several measures to curtail immigration. In January 2024, it imposed a cap of 360,000 international students, requiring most applicants to obtain a Provincial Attestation Letter to qualify for a study permit. In October, the government announced a 20% reduction in permanent residency targets, aiming for 365,000 new permanent residents by 2027 instead of the 500,000 previously planned for. Measures also included tightening the Temporary Foreign Worker Program by lowering the proportion of low-wage foreign workers employers could hire, from 20% to 10%. In December, following Trump’s election victory, Trudeau unveiled a $1.3 billion Border Plan, including a larger role for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which will establish an Aerial Intelligence Task Force equipped with helicopters, drones, and mobile surveillance towers to provide 24/7 border surveillance, as well as proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act granting authorities the power to cancel, change, or suspend immigration documents and applications. 

Increased border militarisation has been framed as a response to growing concerns about housing, public services, and labour market pressures for Canadians – concerns for which there is very little evidence. Canada’s 100 richest CEOs made 210 times more than the average worker in 2023, and this trend continued in 2024 with the highest income inequality ever recorded. The alarming increases in poverty, food insecurity, education and healthcare costs, housing shortages, and climate crisis in the last few years are a result of a government that prioritises the interests of capital and, worried about the Conservatives under Pierre Polliviere in the federal election, and the Trump politics to the South, has moved itself further and further to the right on a range of issues. Following Polliviere’s humiliation at the polls, and the Liberals benefitting from a resurgence of Canadian nationalism in response to Trump’s anti-Canada posturing, it remains to be seen whether Carney will change course.

These migration measures are especially curious when read against the backdrop of the recent Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel program (CUAET), which was introduced a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In contrast to its typical refugee programs –  Canada’s response to the crisis in Afghanistan in 2021 saw only 33,100 refugees accepted; during civil strife in Sudan in 2023, only those already in Canada or with an application pending were supported – under the CUAET program the Trudeau government followed what amounted to an open-door policy. Canada received approximately 1,189,320 applications from Ukraine, of which 962,612 were approved, and 298,128 Ukrainians arrived in Canada. (This stands in even more stark contrast to the policy for Palestinian refugees from Israel’s genocidal war, of whom Canada has accepted less than 1000 within the last year.) 

CUAET became a specially designed fast-track, with three-year temporary residency attached to an open work permit and pathways to obtain permanent residence through family members and skilled-work programs. Whereas Sudanese refugees in Canada were required to rely on family sponsors to cover their basic needs for a year after obtaining permanent residency, Ukrainians under the CUAET program faced no such financial responsibility requirements, and received direct assistance from the government. Even worse, those individuals who managed to cross the border independently as asylum seekers, mostly from Nigeria, Uganda, and Kenya, found themselves sleeping on the streets of Canada’s major urban centres, many shelters closing their doors due to over-capacity. In contrast, Ukrainian nationals received not only a clear pathway to employment, financial support, and healthcare, but also an immediate sense of belonging. 

Like other Western liberal democracies, Canada opened its borders and extended social programs to Ukrainian nationals fleeing war, while simultaneously deterring other refugees. That Canada’s migration policies are plainly racist—privileging Ukrainians as white—is so obvious that even the Canadian authorities themselves do not meaningfully deny it. In Canada’s humanitarian response (as in Germany’s and Poland’s, to name a few), some humans are viewed as simply ‘more human’ than others. 

As I have argued elsewhere, Ukrainian refugees do not fit neatly into either side of the usual liberal framework of the Global North-South divide between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’; in fact, they are instrumentalised to support this dualism. They are neither threats, burdens, nor helpless victims dependent on Western charity – nor are they fully sovereign, white, middle-class, European citizens. Instead, their position is shaped by the precarious privilege of ‘cheap white’, a status that has proven useful to both Western labour markets and civilisational narratives. Within this framework, Ukrainian refugees are in a constant process of ‘becoming human’—a transitional state signifying a trajectory away from Homo Sovieticus, the Soviet subject. Shedding Sovietness, then, becomes not only a political shift but a proto-racial transformation —one that repositions the Ukrainian state within global capitalism and Ukrainians within a hierarchy of racialised citizenship. This essay applies a Marxist social-reproduction lens and draws on the literature of racial citizenship and post-communist transformation to examine how Canada’s exceptional CUAET program functioned as both a labour-market tool and a foreign-policy instrument. I argue that by incorporating Ukrainian refugees as a strategically racialised, ‘cheap white’ labour force, the program reinforced the settler-colonial ‘Canadian dream’, historically shaped in part by anxiety over communism.

Migration away from the post-Soviet condition 

Before situating the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) program within the history of Canada’s settler-colonial project, it is essential to critique the dominant perception of Ukrainians as simply humanitarian refugees—fleeing Russia’s war from an otherwise stable and prosperous homeland. The current image of the Ukrainian migrant worker must be understood in the broader context of Ukraine’s shifting economic position within global capitalism, particularly since its post-Soviet transition in 1991.

During the heyday of Shock Therapy in 1990s, Ukraine’s industrialised economy, public infrastructure, and social services were rapidly dismantled through neoliberal restructuring. The result was mass impoverishment, gender inequality, and social crisis. These ‘reforms’, backed by post-Soviet elites and Western financial institutions, relied on large-scale privatisation and expropriation as primary modes of capital accumulation, stripping away state-provided housing, education, and healthcare. In 1992, after one year of independence, Ukraine’s real per capita income had fallen by 24%, and poverty soared from 9% to 30%. In October 1994, President Leonid Kuchma launched a sweeping economic liberalisation program, eliminating subsidies, price controls, and tax protections, while privatising industry, agriculture, and banking. The privatisation of Soviet state enterprises, particularly in heavy industry, coal mining, and metallurgy, concentrated wealth among a rising oligarchic class, deepening inequality, hollowing out civil society, and concentrating political power among oligarchal factions.

In the 21^st century, after Euromaidan, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the Donbas conflict, Ukraine experienced another round of neoliberal restructuring under militarised austerity. From 2014, the IMF’s $17.5 billion bailout, which came with strict austerity requirements, further reduced social spending, in direct contradiction of Ukraine’s constitution which defines the country as a ‘social state’. As Dutchak has documented, by 2016 neoliberal, ‘de-communisation’ reforms had caused 39% of rural hospitals and 21% of village clinics to close, disproportionately affecting women’s access to healthcare and employment. Healthcare, education, and civil service budgets were cut by over 30%, and by 2021—just before Russia’s full-scale invasion—67% of Ukrainian households described themselves as poor. As we can see, the economic conditions behind Ukrainian immigration to Ukraine pre-dated Russia’s invasion.

Since gaining independence, Ukraine has been a key exporter of migrant care-labour, particularly to Germany and Poland, a trend that accelerated dramatically following the 2014-2021 neoliberal restructuring. By 2020, an estimated 2.2 to 2.7 million Ukrainians—13-16% of the country’s workforce—were employed abroad, with remittances accounting for 9.8% of GDP, making Ukraine the largest remittance recipient in Europe and Central Asia. By 2021, remittances surpassed $19 billion, covering 50-60% of household budgets and increasing migrant families’ spending on housing, education, and food. Women are overrepresented in this workforce, making up 56.6% of Ukrainian long-term migrant workers across the EU. As Ukraine’s social reproduction burden shifted to households preparing workers for export, host countries benefited from a ‘cost-free’ labour force, educated and raised in Ukraine through the leftovers of Soviet-era infrastructures. Meanwhile, Ukrainian migrant workers remained largely excluded from state benefits and EU social citizenship, even as their labour became increasingly desirable.

The expansion of labour channels for Ukrainians has developed in parallel to the militarisation of European borders against racialised ‘undesirable’ migrants, with both operating within the same hierarchy of inclusion and exclusion. This is particularly observable at Poland’s eastern border, which functions as the EU’s outermost frontier. Since 2014, Poland has eased entry for Ukrainians in order to meet labour shortages, while simultaneously hardening its borders, as exemplified by the €350-million high-tech fence installed on its border with Belarus in 2021, to block migrants from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. This dual role—as a gateway for Ukrainian labour and a fortress against the Global South—illustrates how border violence and labour precarity sustain European economies. In short, Ukrainian and Syrian grandmothers had to compete for the ‘privilege’ of cleaning German toilets. 

Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, Ukrainians have experienced preferential and accelerated labour market inclusion in the EU’s care sector, compared to other refugees. The Temporary Protection Directive (TPD), activated in March 2022, granted them immediate access to employment without additional permits, a privilege unavailable to refugees from the Global South. Framed as a humanitarian response, this policy conveniently aligned with the EU’s economic interests, facilitating the rapid absorption of cheap, white, feminised labour amid growing demand. Continuing pre-war trends, Ukrainian women were concentrated in low-wage service jobs, particularly in domestic work, accommodation and food services, contradicting reports of ‘skill mismatches’ that overlooked how they very much ‘matched’ the dirty, informal-sector jobs. Some journalists have called this ‘the business of poverty’, as temporary work agencies, employers, and landlords preyed on Ukrainian mothers, controlling their access to basic necessities. As an example of this kind of exploitation, a woman named Irina was forced to work 77-hour weeks in Lithuania, in violation of labour laws, while her employers boasted of their generosity towards Ukrainians, claiming that ‘nobody loves them more than we do’. But, even amid their precarity, Ukrainians were rapidly absorbed into the labour market, while refugees from other brutal wars such as those in Syria, Afghanistan, and Sudan faced major legal and economic barriers. The result is an intentionally two-tiered system, where racial citizenship dictates access to labour rights and economic survival in the EU.

Does the preferential approach for Ukrainians reflect their political, cultural, and geographic proximity to Europe? Is it because Ukrainian refugees are predominantly white women and children, framed as in need of protection? Or is it the shared perception of Russia as a common enemy? Over the past two years, scholars of migration have explored these questions to understand how the ‘deservingness’ of Ukrainian refugees has been constructed. However, these questions ignore economic factors and don’t bother to ask the basic questions of which economic interests benefit from these policies, and for what political purposes? To begin to answer these questions, we must look at the political economy of post-socialist transformation and its role in racial capitalism. I suggest that it is precisely the Ukrainian worker as post-Soviet subject – recruited into the ongoing geopolitical project of strengthening the EU’s borders – that is useful to the upkeep of global capital accumulation.  

Scratch a Ukrainian and find a … Soviet?

Like other post-socialist states, Ukraine has been framed within colonial imaginaries as a nation in transition—moving away from the Soviet past embodied by Homo Sovieticus (the Soviet ‘man’), toward an idealised European future of whiteness. And it is the perpetual political economy of ‘becoming’ that is especially useful for capital, marked by Shock Therapy restructuring of the 1990s and de-communising neoliberal reforms in the 2000s. The extent to which various post-socialist countries have embraced neoliberal reforms, ‘Euro-Atlantic integration’, and so-called ‘democratisation’, has become the benchmark for the classification of their proximity to the West. As Michał Buchowski writes, ‘in the Cold War period, from a Western perspective, the Iron Curtain set a clearcut division into “us” and “them” which was reduced, in fact, to geography. The two systems’ border was inscribed in the mental map in which continuous space was transformed into discontinuous places inhabited by two distinctive tribes: the civilized “us” and the exotic, often “uncivilized” Others.’ Homo Sovieticus, a condition simultaneously temporal and spatial – belonging to the past, as well as to ‘the East’ – has been pronounced a dead-end of human development, and one that requires much repenting and cleansing in the form of neoliberal reforms. 

The discourse surrounding Ukraine’s ‘return to Europe’—and the idea of Ukrainians fighting a European war on Europe’s periphery—is predicated on such a notion of atonement for the ‘sins’ of Sovietness. After three years of war, it’s an open question as to how many more Ukrainians need to die to achieve this atonement. Meanwhile, the most recent wave of austerity measures, implemented by the post-Maidan Ukrainian state under the banner of ‘de-communisation’ reform, dismantled many of the remaining Soviet-era social protections, imposed further cuts to the social wage and public sector (what little remained after 1990s Shock Therapy), and accelerated the subsumption of labour to capital in alignment with EU accession requirements. As a result, labour precarity deepened, and households—particularly women—were forced to absorb the burden of social welfare retrenchment. Since 2022, while officially ‘defending European and Western civilisation’, the Ukrainian state has suspended labour protections and expanded healthcare and pension rollbacks. Shedding Sovietness—both through neoliberal reforms and the discourse of aspirational European civilisation—becomes not only a political shift but a proto-racial transformation, one that repositions the Ukrainian capitalist state within global capitalism and Ukrainians within a hierarchy of racialised citizenship. 

The ‘Canadian Dream’

Since February 2022, the events on Europe’s eastern frontier have had political-economic implications beyond Europe, including in Canada. In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland—the primary destination for Ukrainian refugees—became an outpost for Canada’s recruitment agencies, which facilitated the relocation of Ukrainian migrants. In May 2022, Canada’s federal government opened a Canada Information Centre in Warsaw, managed by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, to advertise Canada as a destination for Ukrainians fleeing the war. To facilitate the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel program, the Canada Information Centre offered in-person information services to Ukrainian CUAET applicants, providing guidance in Ukrainian, English, and French on topics such as pre- and post-arrival services and support in Canada. Under the same roof in the Global EXPO Centrum in Warsaw, Canada also opened a Biometric Operations Centre to address the increased demand for biometric appointments from Ukrainians applying to travel to Canada. At the same time, through Operation REASSURANCE, its largest overseas military mission contributing to NATO deterrence and defence measures since 2014, Canada deployed its forces to Poland’s border to assist with managing the flow of refugees from Ukraine. The Canadian state’s dual objectives of labour recruitment and border militarisation in Poland – far from its own domestic borders – have exposed the deep entanglement between shifting dynamics of European integration, NATO security policy, and Canada’s ongoing settler-colonial project. 

The ‘Canadian Dream’ of vast work opportunities, land, and prosperity is a foundational myth of Canada’s settler-colonial political economy, built on the dispossession of Indigenous lands and the racialised stratification of migrants and citizen-settlers—a structure that persists today. Labour migration programs have long played a role in this nation-building, helping to meet economic demands and expand settler control over Indigenous territories. Since the late 19th century, Ukrainian peasants and industrial workers were recruited by the Canadian state to settle Indigenous lands in the West and fuel its agrarian and industrial economy. Immigration agents targeted Ukrainians from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires – some fleeing Tsarist oppression because of their revolutionary activities – encouraging their settlement in the prairies as part of a broader state-led colonisation effort. While Ukrainians were racialised as ‘non-preferred’ Europeans, they were still deemed valuable as disposable farm and industrial labourers, and their settlement actively contributed to Indigenous displacement. At the same time, their whiteness – though in ‘cheap’ or lower-caste form – positioned them within Canada’s broader project of racial engineering. Often allocated ‘uncleared land’, Ukrainian peasants laboured to transform forests and prairies into so-called ‘productive farmland’. While there were instances of cooperation, mutual support, and solidarity between Ukrainian settlers and Indigenous peoples, perhaps in shared land-based relationalities and in the context of their shared exclusion from Anglo-Canadian citizenship, the very premise of Ukrainian settlement was inseparable from settler-colonialism and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. 

Because Ukrainians were perceived as non-preferred Europeans and easily disposable, they could still be subjected to internment, surveillance, and forced labour under Canada’s racialised labour regime. During World War I, Canada interned approximately 8,579 people under the War Measures Act (1914) and registered another 80,000—primarily Ukrainians from the Austro-Hungarian empire — as ‘enemy aliens’. Some were detained; many faced police surveillance, employment restrictions, and movement limitations. Those interned were forced into hard labour on infrastructure projects, directly contributing to Canada’s settler-colonial nation-building efforts while enduring harsh conditions and economic marginalisation. 

The first wave of Ukrainian immigrants (1891–1914) included many radicalised labour activists and exploited landless workers, who laid the foundation for the Ukrainian Left in Canada. Disillusioned with their treatment as ‘disposable whites’, they formed the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA), which emerged from the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party of Canada (USDPC) in 1918 and grew rapidly after the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, reaching 10,000 members by 1939. The Canadian government viewed Ukrainian radicalism as a threat, fearing disruption to industrial production and settler-colonial expansion. In contrast, the second wave of Ukrainian immigration (1923–1939) brought nationalists, former soldiers, and political refugees who opposed Polish rule and Soviet Bolshevism. They formed anti-communist organisations like the Ukrainian National Federation (UNF) and the Ukrainian Catholic Brotherhood of Canada (UCBC), opening divisions within the Ukrainian-Canadian community. On June 4, 1940, under the War Measures Act, Canada banned the Communist Party, seized ULFTA properties, and suppressed leftist organisations. Though framed as a wartime security measure, this repression was rooted in anti-communist ideology. Confiscated properties were often transferred to nationalist Ukrainian groups, further cementing their dominance. To unify the Ukrainian-Canadian community under anti-communist leadership, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) was created in November 1940 in Winnipeg. Backed by the Canadian government and nationalist organisations, the UCC marginalised the Ukrainian Left while consolidating anti-communist influence within the community.

During the Cold War, Canada’s instrumentalisation of Ukrainians shifted—from ‘non-preferred’ Europeans, to desired anti-communist refugees-turned-citizens within an emerging multiculturalist policy framework. Ukrainians appeared to become fully white – but only Ukrainians of a particular kind. This transformation was largely driven by the post-World War II wave of Ukrainian migration, as thousands arrived in Canada under displaced persons programs designed to resettle refugees from Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. Framed as victims of communist persecution, these migrants were incorporated into Cold War-era human rights discourse, strategically aligning Ukrainian identity with Canada’s Euro-Atlantic vision—a move that not only reinforced Canada’s anti-communist stance but also served its settler-colonial nation-building project by legitimising its own narrative of freedom, democracy, and Western civilisation. 

By the 1960s, Ukrainian nationalism had become part of Canada’s ‘multicultural mosaic’, a vision formally enshrined in 1971 with the adoption of multiculturalism as official policy, and actively championed by the Ukrainian diaspora, whose contributions and influence received a new legitimacy. However, Cold War tensions within the Ukrainian community also mirrored geopolitical hostilities. The questions of who was a ‘real’ Ukrainian and a ‘good Canadian citizen’ became deeply contested, with leftist and labour-affiliated Ukrainians facing state repression under Canada’s anti-communist policies. Ukrainian nationalist organisations, such as the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, spearheaded anti-Soviet sentiments, lobbying the Canadian government to adopt hardline stances against the USSR while mobilising protests and propaganda campaigns. This period saw the reframing of Ukrainian nationalist figures and historical narratives, with Nazi collaborators recast as liberal-democratic anti-Soviet heroes, while the Holodomor narrative gained prominence, increasingly portrayed as a deliberate genocide against Ukrainians. The mythical-racialist idea of ‘Ukraine’, as having a special geo-cultural mission, was established in terms that foreshadowed our current moment with depressing accuracy, as ‘the fortress and defence of the European nations and culture against the Mongolian East’. By the late 20th century, Ukrainian nationalism and Canadian multiculturalism had become intertwined to the point where, some scholars argue, Ukrainian identity-formation in Canada could no longer be disentangled from its geopolitical context.

CUAET categorises Ukrainians fleeing the war as migrant workers rather than refugees by directly attaching residency rights to employment. In Canada, many Ukrainian women who have arrived through the CUAET program are also rapidly entering the care sector (Khan 2022; Pauls & Chughtai 2022). As in the EU, the care sector in Canada has seen some of the lowest wage increases and greatest worker discontent, and is dominated by immigrant, racialised, feminised workers. The provincial governments in Canada, including Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Manitoba, have collaborated with employers to attract skilled labour from Ukraine, with fast-track licensing for Ukrainian healthcare workers (Purdon & Palleja 2023; Ontario 2022; Thomas 2022). In doing so, the Canadian state’s special migration program taps into a new pool of low-cost, feminised migrant workers who happen to be white, reflecting the politics of differential inclusion that reproduces precarity and exclusion for refugees from countries in the Global South (Anderson 2010; Fudge 2012; Vosko 2019).

However, while visa-free pathways for refugees are funded by the state, the House of Commons immigration committee voted against lifting visa requirements for Ukrainians in March 2022. Instead, the Government of Canada encouraged Ukrainians to apply for an extendable three-year open work permit through the CUAET, which may lead to permanent residence via provincial and federal skilled-labour immigration streams. Clearly, the whiteness of Ukrainians in Canada is not fixed but precarious, bestowed only by virtue of running an apparently endless gauntlet of war and political repression – and of repentance for the ‘sins’ of suffering those very things. The Ukrainians’ shedding of their Sovietness is not so much about the Ukrainians themselves, but rather serves a broader legitimising function for settler-colonial states like Canada. In Canada as elsewhere, ‘humanitarianism’ toward Ukrainians in the context of Russia’s war is, in reality, an extension of labour-market policy. By ‘saving’ Ukrainian refugees through advantageous labour policy, Canada reinforces its own civilisational narrative, reaffirming whiteness as a category shaped through ideological purification, while obscuring its own ongoing project of Indigenous dispossession. Thus, the conditional whiteness of Ukrainian refugees is part of a system that continues to produce surplus humanity on all sides.