Confronting myths: agricultural citizenship and temporary foreign worker programs

Abstract

This paper provides a conceptual intervention through an analysis of the myths surrounding agricultural citizenship and migrant work that underlie the temporary foreign worker program in two settler countries: Canada and Israel. The paper offers a brief insight into the ideologies around farm work that informed the colonisation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the expropriation of non-citizen labour. It begins with a historical overview of how agriculture was used as a tool of colonisation even as settlers struggled to cultivate Canadian lands because of the seasonal nature and the persistent lack of labour. From the time of Confederation, agriculture began to be intimately tied with immigration policies culminating in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) that persists to this day. The paper then expands the analysis to Israel to show how other settler nations have also followed similar ideological and policy trajectories. The paper illustrates how racial capitalism intertwines with settler colonial practices discursively and institutionally through immigration policies.

Discipline and resistance in southwestern Ontario: Securitization of migrant workers and their acts of defiance

“…As a settler‐colonial country, Canada's immigration system is built on historical colonial and imperial practices based on systemic racism and sexism, which constructs a binary between ‘desirable’ immigrants who will become Canadian citizens and the racialized, gendered, class‐marginalized ‘undesirable’ people from global south countries who will either be barred from entering or forced to remain in a precarious temporary status (Mooten, 2021; Venkatesh, 2019). Grassroots organizations such as J4MW have raised concerns about the role that biometrics play in reinforcing systemic racism and sexism and retrenching disparities of who is allowed and not allowed to enter Canada.…”

“…They were deemed ‘essential’, that is, exempted from border closures and other pandemic related measures that were instituted to protect Canadians. Farmers and the media used the narratives of food security and food sovereignty—embedded mythical narratives of Canada's settler‐colonial project (Venkatesh, 2019)—and conflated this with the need to open borders to migrant labour while simultaneously engaging in technologies of securitization to exploit workers (Baum & Grant, 2020; Grant, 2020; Graveland, 2020; Mcgregor, 2020; Sheldon, 2020). Policies enacted were implemented, not in the interests of racialized migrants, but to ensure that the broader (White) community is protected by the potential pandemic threat from the racialized (foreign) others.…”

Migrant farmworkers: Resisting and organising before, during and after COVID‐19

“…Workers from poorer and racialised countries are mobilised by neoliberal agricultural policies, which have dispossessed their livelihoods in their home countries, to work in a foreign country, where their labour and physical mobility are controlled and restricted by their status of being deportable (Rogaly, 2021; Smith, 2015; Zuntz et al, 2022). Their immobility is further ensured by unscrupulous recruiters, whose hold on workers is ironically increased by restrictive, securitised border controls (Thiemann, 2016), rural isolation of farms, control by farm employers and xenophobic and racialised segregation from national and local communities (López‐Sala, 2022; Melossi, 2021; Peano, 2021; Venkatesh, 2019). All the case studies in the symposium show how the dire working and living conditions function under a systemic framework of unfree labour that replicates historical colonialism and systemic racism by ensuring precarity of labour and immigration status, surveillance and policing, and systemic discrimination against historically othered populations.…”

“…Foreign workers are employed via bilateral or multilateral agreements, through employer‐driven programmes or by informal means like being undocumented or having other forms of precarious status (like asylum‐claimant) (Augère‐Granier, 2021; Corrado & Palumbo, 2020; Richardson & Pettigrew, 2022; Venkatesh, 2019). Agricultural guest worker programmes now exist across continents in countries with vastly different political economies (Martin, 2016).…”

“…They are replaced by racialised, immigrant and foreign workers (Basok et al, 2014; Bernstein, 2016; Clapp & Moseley, 2020; International Labour Organization, 2022). Migrant/foreign farm labour has become a quintessential feature of many high‐income countries such as the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands (Basok & George, 2021; Della Rosa, 2021; Fratsea & Papadopoulos, 2020; Perrotta, 2015; Schneider & Götte, 2022; Siegmann et al, 2022) but also of non‐high‐income ones like Costa Rica (using workers from neighbouring Nicaragua), the Dominican Republic (workers from Haiti) and South Africa (workers from Zimbabwe and other southern African nations) (Christiaensen et al, 2021; Corrado & Palumbo, 2020; Martin, 2016; Venkatesh, 2019). Some countries like Thailand, the Dominican Republic, South Africa and Mexico function as both receiving and sending countries (Ferraro & Weiderman, 2020; Ramón et al, 2022; Richardson & Pettigrew, 2022; Simmons, 2010).…”