Business or Bureaucratic Dominance in Immigration Policymaking in Canada: Why was Mexico Included in the Caribbean Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program in 1974?

Abstract

This article considers why Mexico was added to the Caribbean Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program in Canada in 1974. It also asks how the conflicting interests of the host country’s bureaucracies, its business community, and the sending countries’ representatives influence the formation of policies on seasonal migration programs? The article suggests that recent versions of political economy, which emphasize a neoliberal turn in Canadian immigration policy, help only partly to explain why Mexico was added to the Caribbean Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program in 1974. The author argues that political economists need also to pay attention to the independent interests of immigration bureaucrats and bureaucracies in the policy-making process. Canadian immigration officials were responsive to employer interests, but also gave the green light to Mexican migrant workers as a way to solve a particular legitimacy crisis that they were facing in the early 1970s. From immigration bureaucrats’ point of view, this policy also had the effect of helping to resolve embarrassing and politically explosive challenges to its claimed ability to supply Ontario farmers with suitable supplies of farm labour.