Abstract
“Migrant workers” have become an important resource in the global economy, and not solely for employers and governments. Multilateral agreements, trade liberalization, and advancements in communication and transportation have enabled flows of the world’s poor into international labour migration systems, often mediated by a migration industry that profits from providing services to employers and migrants. Based on ethnographic case studies in Mexico, participant observation in Ontario, and interviews with migrant workers and their families, farmers, government representatives and other intermediaries, this paper examines the extent to which a migration industry has formed around the Mexican-Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program.
Highlights
Multilateral government agreements, trade liberalization, and advancements in communication and transportation networks have enabled flows of the world’s poor into managed labour migration programs (Martin and Martin, 2001; Massey et al, 1998; Stalker, 2000; Parreñas, 2001)
Following a migration systems theory approach to the political economy of temporary migration (Boyd and Greico, 1998; Fawcett, 1989; Massey et al, 1993; Zlotnik, 1998), this research adopts an understanding of SAWP migrant workers as transnational actors and emblematic subjects of the spatiotemporal realities of contemporary economic globalization
Globalization and the constituent emergence of a migration industry powered by developments in communication have played a direct role in facilitating the growth of contemporary temporary migration systems
Summary
Multilateral government agreements, trade liberalization, and advancements in communication and transportation networks have enabled flows of the world’s poor into managed labour migration programs (Martin and Martin, 2001; Massey et al, 1998; Stalker, 2000; Parreñas, 2001). The Mexican-Canadian SAWP is a government-to-government program of managed migration (Aceytuno and Greenhill, 1999), involving both public and private sectors in Canada and the labour supply countries Workers enter their employment under the Agreement of the Employment in Canada of Seasonal Agricultural Workers from Mexico, which is a four-party agreement between the worker, the employer, the Government of Mexico, and the Government of Canada (FARMS, 2005; 2007). These developments facilitate the growth of circulatory mobility (and, I contend, play an important role in the contemporary expansion of temporary migration systems), in which people migrate regularly between a number of places where they have economic, social, or cultural linkages (Castles and Miller, 2003:29).
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