Temporary Foreign Worker Program Research Articles

Migrant Agricultural Workers’ Experiences of Support in Three Migrant‐Intensive Communities in Canada

Canada has intensified its reliance on temporary foreign workers, including migrant agricultural workers (MAWs) who have contributed to its agriculture sector, rural economies, and food security for decades. These workers live and work in rural communities across Canada for up to two years. Thousands of MAWs engage in recurring cyclical migration, often returning to the same rural communities in Canada for decades, while others are undocumented. Yet MAWs do not have access to the supports and services provided for immigrant newcomers and pathways for permanent residence. The exclusion of these workers from such entitlements, including labour mobility, reinforces their precarity, inhibits their sense of belonging, and reflects the stratification built into Canada’s migration regime. This article draws on interviews with 98 MAWs in three migrant‐intensive regions in southwestern Ontario to examine how workers construct and describe support in relation to co‐workers, employers, residents, and community organizations. Drawing on conceptualizations of support as an important vehicle for social connection and inclusion that comprises social and citizenship belonging, we document how the strategies MAWs employ to forge connections are enabled or undermined by Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program, community dynamics, and the broader forces of racialization, gender, and exclusion. This article contributes to the limited scholarship on the support landscape for MAWs, whose experiences foreground the contested nature of belonging and inclusion among migrant populations across smaller cities and rural areas.

Contending With Precarity: Health and Multi-Sectoral Supports for Migrant Agricultural Workers in Southern Ontario

Research has long-documented how Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs (TFWP) foster workers' precarity through their status as non-citizens and living and working conditions, ultimately, impacting their health. While studies point to limited supports and services for workers, their role in reinforcing or alleviating the precarious conditions that migrant agricultural workers experience remains largely unexplored. This paper draws on interviews with 35 service providers in three migrant-intensive regions in southwestern Ontario, to explore how service providers describe and construct support. We explore the barriers workers face in accessing services, challenges providers experience in supporting workers, and strategies employed to surmount these barriers. We argue that this multiregional analysis is important to illuminate how support shapes and is shaped by the larger structural context, namely common features of Canada’s TFWP. A more comprehensive understanding of support moreover, provides direction for sustainable interventions that can promote the health and wellbeing of this population.

The dangers of rationalizing temporary foreign worker programs as a solution to food waste

In this Forum piece, I argue that actors in Canada’s agri-food industry have begun to frame the employment of temporary migrant workers as a remedy to food loss and waste. This discursive shift threatens to further entrench Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs, which have been critiqued as enabling labour exploitation and facilitating the poor treatment of precarious racialized workers from the global South. I detail the limitations and violations associated with these temporary migration programs, and discuss how they have been criticized as neo-colonial tools of the Canadian state. I then discuss the increased policy attention paid to food loss and waste in Canada and other locales, suggesting that this is an emergent environmental issue that is still in discursive flux. As the framing of temporary migrant workers as a solution to food waste gains discursive coherence in Canada, it becomes important to attend to what is centred and what is discarded by this narrative. I argue that this emerging framing invokes a sustainability crisis in order to reinforce the status quo of exploitative migrant labour systems, and that such a discursive move is ethically problematic.

The Revolving Door of Im/Migration: Canadian Refugee Protection and the Production of Migrant Workers

This paper places the seemingly distinct projects of refugee protection and temporary foreign worker programs alongside one another to reveal their interlinked relationship. I argue that despite its seeming humanitarian exceptionality, refugee protection is deeply implicated in the production of both the category and supply of temporary foreign workers for the Canadian economy. I demonstrate that the defining limitations of refugee law in relation to questions of class and economic deprivation are integral to the conceptualization of the category of the migrant worker. I then engage with statistical data to show that patterns of refugee adjudications in Canada have contributed to maintaining the supply of temporary foreign workers. In particular, I show that Canada has consistently rejected refugee claims from key source countries of migrant workers, namely Jamaica and Mexico. By refusing these claims, Canadian refugee protection has constituted Jamaican and Mexican nationals as inappropriate subjects of permanent protection and, subsequently, primed them for incorporation as temporary foreign workers. In effect, Canadian im/migration has operated like a revolving door: pushing some nationalities out of the permanent protection of refugee status while pulling them into the precarious opening of temporary labour migration.

The Transformation of Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program

Malgré les efforts répétés pour réduire sa taille, nous montrons que le Programme canadien des travailleurs étrangers temporaires (TÉT) a évolué de telle sorte depuis 2000 que les TÉT forment maintenant plus de quatre pour cent de la main-d’œuvre au Canada – une multiplication par cinq de leur proportion. Cette main-d’œuvre est de plus en plus spécialisée, dispose de permis de travail à long terme et est susceptible de demander la résidence permanence (RP). Bien que les cas de TÉT disposant déjà d’une expérience du marché du travail semblent être concentrés dans des marchés relativement compétitifs, 85 pour cent sont exemptés des critères d’offre d’emploi, et l’augmentation des permis émis sans critères d’offre d’emploi dépasse l’augmentation du nombre de TÉT qui demandent la résidence permanente//acquièrent le statut de résident permanent. Nous soutenons que le système doit montrer davantage de transparence en ce qui concerne, d’une part, les lieux et les emplois où se retrouvent les TÉT disposant de permis avec exemption des critères d’emploi, et, d’autre part, le suivi de leur taux de transition vers la résidence permanente.

Re-centering labour in local food: local washing and the growing reliance on permanently temporary migrant farmworkers in Nova Scotia

This article explores the labour behind local food in the Canadian Atlantic province of Nova Scotia. Based on surveys and interviews with farmers, migrant farmworkers, and farmers’ market consumers in the province, we suggest that the celebration of local food by government and industry is a form of “local washing.” Local washing hides key aspects of the social relations of production: in this case, it hides insufficient financial and policy supports for Nova Scotian farms and the increased reliance on migrant farmworkers via the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Our research found that a growing reliance on migrant farmworkers was not just the case for larger, industrial farms, but also for smaller farms participating in local and alternative food initiatives, like farmers’ markets and fresh produce subscription boxes. Additionally, our surveys show that while farmers’ market shoppers expressed an interest in supporting local foods, they reported knowing little about farm workers or working conditions. Our paper contributes to the literature on local and alternative food initiatives by connecting the relations of production to consumption. Rather than focusing solely on the nature of the relationships between farmers and consumers and the values embodied in direct agricultural markets, this research explores the central role of permanently temporary migrant workers in local agriculture.

Everyday Cruelties: Political Economies of Migration and Indifference

AbstractThis article examines how attitudes and structures of indifference to oppression and global inequality—practices of cruelty—are cultivated at both macro (institutional) and micro (everyday life) levels. First, following (Inayatullah and Blaney 2010a, 2010b), I suggest that a core premise of classical political economy—the split between self and other—is depoliticized and rationalized by contemporary discourses of international political economy. This depoliticization is a condition of possibility for attitudes of indifference. Consequently, understanding attitudes and structures of indifference requires re-politicizing political economy as a cultural encounter structured through gendered and racialized hierarchies. Second, I argue that indifference to cruelty is cultivated through recourse to ethical rather than political imperatives, which foreground ethical action in ways that continue to depoliticize the cruelties of global inequality. Two sites animate this project and foreground a form of banal cruelty justified through the cultivation of political indifference: at the microlevel, a dystopian short story that takes an ethicized indifference as the basis for accounting for racialized and gendered labor migration (George Saunders’ “The Semplica Girl Diaries”), and, at the macro-level, Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker programs, which produce depoliticized justifications for systemic racialized exploitation. I argue that this ethicization of political relationships is a way of precluding engagement with the colonial politics of indifference and the everyday cruelties of political economy through which inequalities and exploitations are produced and reproduced.

Tracking Precarity: Employment Pathways of Precarious Status Migrant Workers in Canada

In recent years the issue of migrant workers with precarious status has increased in importance in Canada, in large part due to economic and policy changes that have led to greater numbers of migrant workers remaining in the country post permit expiry. This study tracks the employment experiences of low-skilled migrant workers who arrived through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and who remained following their permit expiry. Using a temporal analysis, the study identifies four timepoints that shape the workers’ employment outcomes both pre- and post-expiry. Events at these timepoints create differing employment pathways that, in turn, reveal different aspects of the workers’ precarity. In addition to pathways, workers’ ability to access informal support networks shape their employment outcomes as workers with precarious status.

Contingent Relations: Migrant Wellbeing and Economic Development in Rural Manitoba.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural Manitoba and the Philippines, this paper uses the example of the small town of Douglas, which since 2009 has been home to a small Filipino community, as a tenuous counter-point to the accounts of exclusion that dominate the scholarship on Temporary Foreign Labour in Canada. This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in Manitoba with the region’s newest immigrants—those recruited to ensure the viability of the new, diversified rural regional economy, and more specifically, the tourism and hospitality sector, established in the 1970s. In 2009, unable to meet its labour needs regionally, a local hotel began recruiting temporary foreign labour. By 2014, the Hotel had recruited 71 workers from the Philippines, most of whom arrived through Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program; others having arrived through the province’s immigration scheme, the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program (MPNP). A reflection of the ubiquity of globalized Filipino migration, the well-being of these workers had long been informed by economic development in the Philippines and the centrality of international labour mobility to that state project. What emerges from the data is a simultaneous acceptance and contestation of the conditions of transnational family life, and moreover—reflecting the focus of this special issue—the extent to which migrant well-being shifts in accordance to labour mobility regimes responsive to development. Migrant workers and their families are implicated in these connected, yet differently motivated, state projects. And while particular narratives concerning their contributions come to be valorized and even celebrated, their mental, physical, affective, and relational well-being is often over-looked by those who benefit from their labour and mobility. Of equal importance is the provincial state’s participation in this process through the provision of permanent residency to existing and in-coming migrants. While this benefits individual families, it does not inherently challenge the logics of neoliberalism; rather, drawing on its nuances, it create new possibilities for capital accumulation and exploitation, while offering some protection for select families who are willing and able to abide by the terms established by their employer and the Manitoba state.

Parsing the mobilities of capital and labour: The case of Tim Hortons and internationally mobile Filipino workers

AbstractIn 2007, Canada expanded the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) to include service and hospitality sectors. By 2010, more migrants entered Canada with temporary visas than as permanent residents. While some found employment in hospitality and tourism, most were concentrated in the fast food sector. Working transnationally, this paper uses Tim Hortons’ concurrent global expansion and its arrival in the Philippines as a case study of the global mobilities and intersecting pathways of capital and labour. Drawing on the theoretical contributions of feminist political economy, it illustrates how the aspirations and mobilities of the Filipino workers at the centre of this study are organized in the service of capital; capital, in this example, as represented by the globally ambitious Tim Hortons’ parent corporation, Restaurant Brands International (RBI) and, more specifically, the Brazilian American global investment firm that owns and manages RBI, 3G Capital, as well as by the efforts and objectives of franchise holders.

How to Improve Worker-Firm Matching: Evidence from a Temporary Foreign Worker Market

This paper investigates the role of worker-firm matching algorithms in accounting for early job separation rates. For this purpose, we examine Korea’s temporary foreign worker program in which the government classifies firms by priority levels and matches them with foreign workers based on their stated preferences. Using administrative data, we examine predictors for the job separation rates and propose alternative matching methods using the serial dictatorship. Our simulation results show that alternative matching methods can substantially reduce job separation rates, suggesting a possible improvement of the Korean program.

The systemized exploitation of temporary migrant agricultural workers in Canada: Exacerbation of health vulnerabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic and recommendations for the future

In 2018, 55,734 jobs in Canadian agriculture were filled by temporary migrant workers, accounting for nearly 20 percent of total employment in this sector. Though referred to as temporary, those migrant workers often fill long-term positions and provide crucial support to the Canadian agricultural industry, which has seen an increasing disengagement from the domestic workforce in the last fifteen years. Health vulnerabilities faced by temporary migrant workers are already well documented. In addition, there are multiple systemic factors inherent within the structure and implementation of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program that contribute to the perpetuation of health inequities within this population. The COVID-19 pandemic has both exacerbated many of these disparities and further increased the risk of labour rights violations and vulnerability to exploitation for these workers. As Canada's 2020 growing season comes to an end, thousands of temporary migrant agricultural workers are returning to their native countries. With planning for next year's growing season already commencing, this timely analysis aims to examine health vulnerabilities faced by TMAWs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Five key areas are examined: occupational injuries, substandard living conditions, psychological difficulties, lack of access to healthcare and barriers in exercising labour rights. Building on this analysis, recommendations for policy and practice aimed at improving migrant workers’ health are discussed.

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

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.

Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker and International Mobility Programs: Charting Change and Continuity Among Source Countries

AbstractThis article analyses contemporary developments in top source countries of Canada's temporary migrant worker programmes, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and International Mobility Program (IMP). An analysis of administrative data and policy suggests that most temporary migrant workers from key source countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are present in Canada under highly restrictive conditions of the TFWP, largely as agricultural workers. Simultaneously, most temporary migrant workers from key source countries in Europe and Asia migrate to Canada under the growing IMP, comprised of a diverse set of subprogrammes which, in some cases, have the potential to perpetuate conditions associated with exploitation identified historically with the TFWP. At the same time, unprecedented levels of temporary migrant workers from India and China are being granted open work permits in Canada, raising questions about how racialization and colonial pasts intertwine with this fast‐growing and under‐studied side of temporary labour migration.

Family Farmers to Foreign Fieldhands: Consolidation of Canadian Agriculture and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program

In the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, questions regarding the participation of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) in the Canadian workforce may seem reasonable. With borders closed to most international traffic due to public health concerns, and high levels of unemployment, the Canadian public, policy makers, and even employers may question the need to employ workers from abroad (Statistics Canada 2020;CBSA 2020). In addition to concerns over the health and employment of Canadians, the spread of COVID-19 among migrant workers has raised alarm over the security of both our food supply chain and the safety of workers (Rodriguez 2020;Yasmeen, Alexander, and Paskal 2020). These concerns have prompted policy makers at the federal level to study the issue in greater detail, and calls from advocates for expanded worker rights and protections (Migrant Rights 2020;HUMA 2020). In this briefing paper we provide answers to some of the above concerns. We begin by outlining the necessary role of foreign workers in Canadian agriculture. Despite the sometimes-common notion that TFWs displace domestic workers, we present data that provides a more plausible history of the program. We demonstrate that, following the Second World War, Canadian agriculture underwent significant consolidation and a steep drop in the number of smallholder farms and unpaid family members working on them. As average farm sizes increased and the unpaid labour force fell, producers responded with efforts to mechanize their outfits and offer higher wages for paid employees. Despite efforts to attract local workers, the number of domestic labourers in food production has fluctuated between stagnation and marginal decline. The participation of foreign workers in Canadian food production may have little to do with the displacement of domestic workers in comparison to the consolidation of agriculture, the exit of own-account workers and unpaid family members from the sector, and their substitution with capital investment and expansion of the labour pool beyond the border. This narrative of industrial transformation rather than displacement should inform the decisions of policy makers. Governments desiring to shutter the TFW program and replace the labour pool it provides with domestic workers may find little uptake among Canadians, replacing foreign workers with a shortage of workers. Producers may not be able to rapidly substitute towards further mechanization of food production, potentially resulting in higher prices at grocery stores, a reduction in exports, and greater reliance on imported food. We instead provide several suggestions that the federal and provincial governments may wish to consider to protect the lives and supply of foreign workers, and thereby secure the Canadian agricultural sector.

Looking at reforestation to consider Leigh Binford’s forum statement: ‘Assessing Temporary Foreign Worker Programs Through the Prism of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program: Can They Be Reformed or Should They Be Eliminated’

Looking at reforestation to consider Leigh Binford’s forum statement: ‘Assessing Temporary Foreign Worker Programs Through the Prism of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program: Can They Be Reformed or Should They Be Eliminated’

Intensified Exploitation and Mental Stress as Impacts of Changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in Alberta, Canada

Migrant precariousness is a growing global trend that calls for effective policies to attend to the rights and well-being of migrant workers in destination countries. The experience of migrant workers is highly structured by the policies and systems in destination countries. In Canada, policy changes have affected the experiences of migrants. We sought to examine the impact of changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in 2015 on migrants in Alberta, one of Canada’s western provinces. Using a transnational theoretical perspective embedded within a critical social paradigm and a focus group method, we gathered data from thirty-five temporary foreign workers. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and thematically analysed with the aid of NVivo 10 qualitative data analysis software. The findings of our study reveal that the changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in Canada in 2015 restricted the rights of these workers, intensified exploitation, and led to mental health strain for temporary foreign workers and their families. To attend to the marginal status of migrant workers, there is a need to broaden pathways to permanent resident status for low-wage temporary foreign workers in destination countries.

Response to Leigh Binford’s forum statement: ‘Assessing Temporary Foreign Worker Programs through the Prism of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program: Can They be Reformed or Should They be Eliminated?’

Response to Leigh Binford’s forum statement: ‘Assessing Temporary Foreign Worker Programs through the Prism of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program: Can They be Reformed or Should They be Eliminated?’

“The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all”?: a predicament for applied anthropology

This article takes up a central predicament of applied anthropology: The development of adequate scientific explanatory theory and choosing to do so on behalf of disempowered groups that are themselves incorporated into the design of, and, indeed, the primary purpose of, the research in the first place that goes against traditional research standards. The dilemma, then, is how applied practitioners can remain true to scientific objectives while at the same time make their research relevant to and in the service of marginalized sectors of society. The article begins by considering Karl Marx as an applied theorist, then refers to well-known models of a Marx-inspired applied approach through praxis. A call by anthropologist Leigh Binford (Dialect. Anthropol., 2019) to abolish Temporary Foreign Worker Programs based on his study of Canada’s Seasonal Agriculture Worker Program is evaluated vis-a-vis how this approach theorizes structural determinants such as class formation and social reproduction, how it participates in a reciprocal process of dialog and mutual education with interlocutors and those interested parties affected by the program through research and teaching, and how it activates cooperatively designed revolutionary advocacy.

Working to end farmworker oppression while listening to farmworkers and focusing on root causes in context

In this paper, we respond to Leigh Binford’s excellent article “Assessing Temporary Foreign Worker Programs through the Prism of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program: Can They be Reformed or Should They be Eliminated?” We offer three clarifying points to Binford’s article. First, in this time of widespread and increasingly aggressive racism and nationalism, we are concerned that calls for closing borders (including the discontinuation of TFWPs) may play further into these violent divisions. Second, TFWPs are not apparatuses that can be extricated from the larger context of transnational racialized capitalism, and ending them would not end the exploitation Binford rightly criticizes within them. Third, we—academics, activists, non-migrants, and non-farmworkers—should pay attention especially to what diverse migrants and farmworkers prioritize, think, say, and do in relation to these programs and in relation to their own well-being more generally. Finally, we highlight union work that has been listening to, and collaborating with, immigrant workers to help them make certain demands of the state normally outside the purview of TFWPs.