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

Leah F Vosko; Cynthia Spring

doi:10.1007/s12134-021-00905-2

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

J Int Migr Integr. 2022;23(4):1765-1791. doi: 10.1007/s12134-021-00905-2. Epub 2021 Oct 31.

Authors

Leah F Vosko¹, Cynthia Spring²

Affiliations

¹ Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in The Political Economy of Gender & Work, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University, 6th Floor, Kaneff Tower York University 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada.
² Department of Politics, York University, Toronto, Canada.

Abstract

In 2020, migrant farmworkers in Canada, cast as essential to sustaining the national food supply, experienced relatively high COVID-19 infection rates. Taking Southern Ontario as its focus, this article reveals how the federal government response to COVID-19 in agriculture perpetuated the effects of longstanding laws and policies requiring migrant farmworkers, circumscribed in their ability to politically mobilize on account of their institutionalized deportability, to shoulder disproportionate amounts of economic, social, and health risks. Centering the transnational character of migrant farmworkers' renewal, it identifies meaningful interventions to limit the structural disempowerment of migrant farmworkers and the externalization of their social reproduction.

Keywords: COVID-19; Canada; Migrant farmworkers; Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program; Social reproduction.