Undocumented migrants and supporters staged a theatrical procession and noise demonstration outside the Prime Minister’s office in Ottawa on July 31st. The action aimed to deliver an open letter to PM Carney demanding regularization for all undocumented migrants and an end to Bill C-2.

While the previous federal government had promised a mass regularization program after years of tireless mobilization by undocumented migrants, Prime Minister Mark Carney introduced Bill C-2. If adopted, Bill C-2 would block many migrants from filing refugee claims, expand the exclusionary Safe Third Country Act, and grant sweeping, arbitrary powers to the Immigration Minister to revoke permits and cancel refugee claims, thereby creating even more undocumented people. 

Dressed in the symbols of capitalist exploitation that the migrants are forced into, undocumented migrants and allies marched through downtown Ottawa to the Prime Minister's Office, where they shed their uniforms and demanded that migrants be recognized as part of our society, beyond their usefulness to the market that exploits them while denying them basic rights and dignity. They called for "Status for All, Dignity for All."

The full letter and visuals are included below.

OPEN LETTER FROM UNDOCUMENTED MIGRANTS TO PRIME MINISTER MARK CARNEY

Immigration is a “Crisis” with One Solution: Regularisation

Montreal, July 31, 2025 – We are people from Africa, the Middle East, South America, and South Asia who live in Canada and are undocumented. We are here and we are staying here because our countries of origin are ravaged by colonialism, capitalism, extractivism, and wars - often for the benefit of, and with the support of, Canada and its corporations. Following a long struggle, the previous Liberal government promised us a mass regularization program. In an about-face, your government introduced Bill C-2.

Your Bill C-2 is dangerous and violent. You were elected because voters rejected Trumpian policies. But you are walking in his footsteps. You blame us for crises we did not create. We refuse to be scapegoats for all of Canada’s social and economic problems. We are literally sick of being used as disposable tools for an economy which excludes us from the wealth it creates. We are celebrated as “guardian angels” and lured with false promises, only to be dehumanized and demonized once you no longer need us.

You know, you know very well, the reality of the hundreds of thousands of undocumented people here in Canada. Our long, exhausting fight for regularization has not been in vain. Everyone knows the suffering of undocumented migrants: the constant fear of being arrested, detained, and deported; the system of work permits which condemns us to live in precarity and exposes us to exploitation, stripping us of all protection; the reality of our super-exploitation as labour in restaurants, on construction sites, in cleaning, health-care, elder-care, farms, factories; the denial of healthcare, even when our lives are at risk.

We are not asking for charity. We are simply asking to be treated with dignity, as full human beings. We demand that our presence, our contributions, and our humanity be recognized.

We call for a fully inclusive regularization program for all people without status. We demand an end to deportations. We demand an end to detentions.

We demand that Bill C-2 and the Safe Third Country Agreement be scrapped.

– Angry and Exhausted Undocumented Migrants

Note: The author is a member of Solidarity Across Borders.