Temporary labour migration by any other name: differential inclusion under Canada’s ‘new' international mobility regime

Abstract

ABSTRACT To appease public anxieties and limit exploitation, in recent years Canada has sought to more strictly regulate and reduce temporary migrant work, while expanding opportunities for international mobility. This article explores the division between mobility and migration in this settler colonial context by charting developments in two overarching Canadian immigration program streams dedicated to facilitating international migration for employment on a temporary basis – the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and the International Mobility Program (IMP) – focusing on the latter. Through an analysis of underexplored IMP subprograms directed at ‘national competitiveness,’ it probes the extent to which several fast-growing IMP subprograms entail a departure from temporary migrant work under exploitative conditions. Questioning the validity of the migration/mobility distinction assumed in policy discourse, it argues that far from providing for ideal conditions for ‘mobile’ workers, Inter-Company Transfer, Postgraduation, and Spousal subprograms are characterised by conditions poised to heighten exploitation. Meanwhile, many participants in these subprograms migrate from source countries with a history of subordination through differential inclusion, illustrating how the application of migration control devices is bound-up with residues of formal barriers to entry forged on the basis of nationality and the institutionalised racism that they engendered and threaten to perpetuate.