Labour Migration Regime Research Articles

Food Security at Whose Expense? A Critique of the Canadian Temporary Farm Labour Migration Regime and Proposals for Change

AbstractTemporary farm labour migration schemes in Canada have been justified on the premise that they bolster food security for Canadians by addressing agricultural labour shortages, while tempering food insecurity in the Global South via remittances. Such appeals hinge on an ideology defining migrants as racialized outsiders to Canada. Drawing on qualitative interviews and participant observation in Mexico, Jamaica and Canada, we critically analyse how Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program is tied to ideological claims about national food security and agrarianism, and how it purports to address migrant workers’ own food insecurity. We argue remittances only partially, temporarily mitigate food insecurity and fail to strengthen migrant food sovereignty. Data from our clinical encounters with farm workers illustrate structural barriers to healthy food access and negative health consequences. We propose an agenda for further research, along with policies to advance food security and food sovereignty for both migrants and residents of Canada.

Silence and Invisibility: Exploring Labour Strategies of Zimbabwean Farmworkers in Musina, South Africa

ABSTRACTCommercial farms in South Africa have relied on cross-border migrant workers for decades. In this article the author explores how social relations on farms in Musina, Limpopo, South Africa, shape the employment conditions of Zimbabwean farmworkers. Drawing on empirical fieldwork with 134 workers, the author argues that within a context of unequal social power on farms and conditioned by a labour migration regime that has strong informal patterns, workers use silence and invisibility as tactics of self-preservation, and everyday survival. The author locates these actions within the political economy of Musina; and the strong desire amongst farmworkers to ensure access to livelihoods in the face of compounded precarity.

Oligarchic rule and best practice migration management: the political economy origins of labour migration regime of the Philippines

ABSTRACTThe Philippine labour migration regime has been praised as one of the best examples of government-led migration management in the developing world, with some of the most extensive policies and bureaucratic organisations to manage and protect its citizens working abroad. However, not much knowledge has been accumulated that explains its origins or why it emerged in the Philippines and not in other large-scale migrant-sending countries. Contrary to current explanations that emphasise the economic benefits of labour migration and civil society mobilisation, this paper highlights the migration regime's compatibility with the political economy interests of the country's ruling elites. Bringing together the country's two important political and economic features, oligarchic rule and labour export, this paper suggests that the unique genesis of the Philippines’ migration regime casts doubts on the replicability of the Philippine model in other labour-sending countries as currently pursued by the international development community.

Pacifying the ‘Armies of Offshore Labour’ in Canada

An exploration of the link between pacification and global apartheid in the context of the racialized effects of neoliberal labour migration is undertaken. Drawing on the general layout of Canada’s temporary labour migration regime, the legal regulation of migrant labour is taken as a project of pacification that enforces apartheid conditions. Juxtaposed against the construction of migrant labour as menace or threat to ‘host’ communities in Canada, the growing need for “armies of offshore labour” presents an especially acute challenge for capital and national states. Despite certain perceptions that it is freed from national state constraints owing to the hyper-competitiveness of contemporary migration, capital remains deeply beholden to the politico-legal interventions of states, both sending and receiving. Situated within the hierarchical and uneven logic of the nation-state system and global capitalist development, pacification becomes a way in which capital and states attempt to mediate contradictions and govern not “insecurities” surrounding human mobility but rather the need to fabricate productive labour, a need contingent upon the complex transnational legal regulatory dynamic of unfree migrant labour which itself relies upon and perpetuates apartheid.

Stranded migrants: a call to rethink the current labour migration paradigm

Examining recent cases in which migrant workers have been deemed ‘stranded’ and the emerging international discourse on the concept of stranded migrants, we explore the need for clarity with regard to who stranded migrants are, and for a paradigm shift in the governance of labour migration in response to such circumstances. The crisis in Libya, flooding in Thailand and the tsunami/nuclear disaster in Japan – all of which have legitimately rendered migrants stranded – and the ensuing talk about stranding at the international level reveal significant gaps in the current thinking on labour migration. Migrants stranded in emergencies call attention to serious flaws in the prevailing labour migration regime, and their struggle for the recognition of their rights illuminates the need for a thorough overhaul of accepted practices in migration governance. Furthermore, the emerging international discourse on stranded migrants points to a worryingly myopic understanding of the concept of stranding that risks relegating stranded migrants to the realm of humanitarian assistance, smartly giving states leeway to circumvent more complex conversations about the human rights failings of the labour migration regime that continually lead migrants to become ‘stuck’ in countries of transit and/or destination.

Migrant precarity and future challenges to labour standards in Sweden

Fears of a ‘race to the bottom’ in labour standards may have been overstated. Nevertheless, using Sweden as a case study, it is argued that the diminished capacity of trade unions to defend labour standards following the Laval judgement of the European Court of Justice, together with a decline in trade union density, a limited remit of enforcement authorities and recent changes to the Swedish labour migration regime, may have detrimental impacts on labour standards, particularly in low-skill low-wage occupations. In combination, these developments are creating new spaces for migrant precariousness within the context of a formerly well-regulated Swedish labour market model.

Factoring Turbulence Out: Diaspora Regulatory Mechanism and Migration Development Bank

AbstractThe ongoing economic crisis has shifted much of the policy debate to problems of financial sector regulation, productive capacity collapse, among others. However, this leaves unattended the real situation with labour migration, which directly impacts social and economic inner components of being of millions of individual families across the world. The somewhat ad hoc nature of the process poses several policy issues for the home and host economies alike. Immediate concerns relate to streamlining migrants and remittances flows. This involves sensitive aspects of inequality in migrant workers’ labour efforts vis‐à‐vis domestic workers; migrants’ social and legal status; and less obvious, but still profound, unproductive misallocation of labour resources. Derived from this premise and recognizing the need for an institutional approach, this paper offers alternative policy solutions to temporary labour migration regulation. This research’s original propositions include a Diaspora Regulatory Mechanism and a Migration Development Bank, both operating within a state‐managed temporary labour migration regime. Fiscal action, including multilateral agreements, is crucial. The functionality of these mechanisms will directly impact infrastructure, human capital and entrepreneurial projects development in both home and host economies. Discussion is inspired by the analysis of actual circumstances in the economies of the Commonwealth of Independent States, where migration is a social, economic, and increasingly political issue. In the interlinked world, diasporas become dominant actors across all society strata. The development plateau of the post‐socialist states offers a rich economic and social soil to conduct responsible policy with future outlook. Moreover, conditions of ongoing economic crisis offer a unique opportunity for daring research to propose and for a motivated decisionmaker to implement original, proactive, and beneficial policy solutions aimed at streamlining the (temporary) labour migration process. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on topics of diaspora, labour migration, and remittance flows.

From Class to Culture: Immigration, Recession, and Daily Ethnic Boundaries in Belgium, 1940s–1990s

Each society has myths about the successful adaptation of former migrants. Historians need to deconstruct these myths by dealing with the imagined boundaries between “indigenous” and “foreign” people that give way to them. This essay does so by comparing how children of Polish interwar immigrants and children of Italian postwar immigrants came to be seen as insiders in the Belgian Limburg mining region. Oral testimonies, associational records, and population data reveal that Poles achieved the status of industrious, adapted people around 1960, due to the equal promotion of Polish and indigenous miners' sons in the mines and to the labour migration regime which constructed Italians as unskilled outsiders. Around 1980, the industrial recession caused unemployment among young Italians. However, migration politics has, since the recession, primarily focused on culture. Moreover, European legislation constructed foreignness as non-European. Consequently, it is not class, but European culture which has turned Italians into “integrated” people.

The WTO/GATS Mode 4, International Labour Migration Regimes and Global Justice

Introduction: labour migration and global justice The WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) “Mode 4” is currently the only internationally-agreed legal instrument with the potential to become a functioning multilateral regime regulating temporary labor migration. It is an international mechanism aimed at liberalizing service-related labor mobility on the basis of qualified negotiated commitments by states to accept non-permanent foreign labor migrants, subject to substantive rules that regulate and constrain states' unilateral temporary labor migration policies. International trade and migration specialists query whether Mode 4 is effective as a global economic regime, and what may be done to make it work better. In this chapter I ask, rather, if GATS Mode 4 is just : does the model of international labor migration regulation that it represents conform to principles of global justice? This question is closely related to evaluations of the morality of autonomous national migration policies, but is independent of them, going one step beyond and considering an international legal and institutional migration arrangement from a global justice perspective. The exercise clearly holds lessons for the design of any future labor migration regime, but it is also important in the more general WTO context. To the extent that the WTO purportedly represents a global economic “constitution” for globalization, as is sometimes suggested, it must be sensitive to conflicting political and philosophical visions of global justice and the way that they relate to international economic disparity.

NEPAD and neighbours: an international exploration of principles to inform African labour migration regimes

NEPAD and neighbours: an international exploration of principles to inform African labour migration regimes

International Migration Systems: A Global Approach.

Global interactions, migration systems, processes, and policies, Mary M. Kritz and Hania Zlotnik. Part 1 Global and regional migration systems: empirical identification of international migration systems, Hania Zlotnik international migration in the South Pacific region, Richard Bedford the West African migration system, Paulina Makinwa-Adebusoye migration and interdependence - the migration system between France and Africa, Jean-Pierre Garson Caribbean exodus and the world system, Alan B. Simmons and Jean Pierre Guengant the role of migration policies and social networks in the development of a migration system in the Southern Cone, Jorge Balan. Part 2 Processes linking origin and destination countries: international labour movements - a perspective on economic exchanges and flows, Lin Lean Lim migration networks and the shaping of migration systems, Douglas T.Gurak and Fe Caces the use of social networks in Turkish migration to Germany, Czarina Wilpert the mobilization of labour migrants in Thailand: personal links and facilitating networks, Anchalee Singhanetra-Renard the contribution of remittances to economic and social development, Fred Arnold science and technology transfers and migration flows, Mary M. Kritz and Fe Caces. Part 3 Policy issues underlying international migration: laws and policies regulating population movements: a European perspective, Tomas Hammar contemporary labour migration from Asia: policies and perspectives of sending countries, Manolo I. Abella institutional and policy interactions among countries and refugee flows, Jacqueline Desbarats evolution of policy modes for regulating international labour migration, Mark J. Miller labour migration and international economic regimes - Bretton Woods and after Aristide R. Zolberg.