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

Abstract

This 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 fastgrowing and under-studied side of temporary labour migration.

COVID-19 Outbreaks in Canada and the Crisis of Migrant Farmworkers’ Social Reproduction: Transnational Labour and the Need for Greater Accountability Among Receiving States

“…Canadian agriculture relies on racialized workers migrating under highly restrictive conditions rooted in settler colonial and imperial dynamics shaping Canada's financial and political ties to, and extraction of resources and labour from, relatively low-income source countries, especially Caribbean and Latin American countries, which represent the principal sources for TFWPs (André, 1990;Satzewich, 1993;Smith, 2015;Chartrand & Vosko, 2020). Migrant workers engaged in Canadian agriculture thereby emigrate from contexts in which capacities to engage in sustainable forms of social reproduction, including the production and purchase of food, is circumvented by ongoing processes of land, resource, and labour expropriation (Sassen, 1981, 68)-processes that place significant pressure on workers to join the global labour force.…”

“…Alongside these financial interventions, selective border enforcement during the pandemic meant that by summer's end 2020 work permit holders in agriculture received nearly 70% of all permits issued under the TFWP, compared with 58% in 2019 (IRCC, 2020a). This dramatic shift towards migrant work in agriculture had a notable impact on the TFWP's top source countries; while migrants from Latin American and Caribbean countries comprised over 50% of those enrolled in the TFWP in 2018 (Chartrand & Vosko, 2020), workers from Mexico, Jamaica, and Guatemala held over 66% of new TFWP work permits by August 2020 (see Fig. 2), underscoring Canada's deep dependence upon temporary labour migration forged on colonial and imperial histories that produce high returns to capital and are deeply racialized.…”

Who are Canada’s temporary foreign workers? Policy evolution and a pandemic reality

“…However, about one‐third of the IMP workers had a closed or highly restrictive work permit in 2018, indicating that the IMP sub‐programs are also tied to differential work permits and labour mobility (Vosko, 2020). The 2014 reforms replaced the terms high‐skilled and low‐skilled occupations with high‐wage and low‐wage occupations, respectively (Chartrand & Vosko, 2021; Kachulis & Perez‐Leclerc, 2020). However, the same criteria of the NOC categories are applied to differentiate the high‐wage and low‐wage groups under the TFWP.…”

Understanding Migrant Farmworkers’ Health and Well-Being during the Global COVID-19 Pandemic in Canada: Toward a Transnational Conceptualization of Employment Strain

“…As they labour transnationally, migrant workers’ lack of security of presence, often on account of the circularity of the labour migration programs in which they participate, can discourage them from voicing concerns or filing complaints about safety. Moreover, as we argue in this study, because these transnational workers originate predominantly in relatively low-income contexts, typically from Caribbean and Latin American countries affected by colonialism, they tend to tolerate working conditions that potentially compromise their health and well-being in order to maintain access to better paying Canadian jobs [ 5 , 6 , 7 ]. Furthermore, congregate employer-provided living accommodations, typical in agriculture, are often overcrowded and ill-equipped to provide for rest outside of work hours [ 8 ].…”