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Article Excerpt
FOR THE LAST 40 YEARS, the Canadian state has facilitated the movement of up to 20,000 foreign workers annually for fixed periods of employment into the horticultural sector under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Originally designed to enable the temporary migration of Jamaican workers, since its inception in 1966 the SAWP has expanded to include participants from a number of other countries in the Commonwealth Caribbean, as well as Mexico. Although Jamaican men constituted the majority of SAWP workers for the first 20 years of the Program's history, Mexican workers now represent the majority of participants. Questions of racial or national replacement in this labour market have not been the subject of scholarly attention in the emerging literature on foreign workers in Canadian agriculture, which has tended to focus on theorizing unfree labour, documenting migratory experiences, and gauging impacts for sending and receiving communities (Basok, 1999; 2000; 2002; 2003; Binford, 2002; Colby, 1997; Preibisch, 2000; 2004; Smart, 1997, among others). Furthermore, most studies have tended to remain methodologically focussed on workers from one particular country of origin, with Mexico receiving the bulk of attention since the mid-1990s (Basok, 2002; Binford, 2002; Binford, Carrasco, Arana and Rojas, 2004; Cecil and Ebanks, 1991; Colby, 1997; Smart, 1997). Ironically, the literature has not explored racism and processes of racialization to any significant degree, despite the compelling evidence of a pioneer study that stressed the centrality of these issues to the organization of labour in Canadian horticulture (Satzewich, 1991).
In order to begin to uncover the racial dimensions of the agricultural labour market, this paper seeks to explore the racial/national transformation of the SAWP work force that has occurred over the past 20 years. We detail how Mexican foreign workers have gained an increasing share of the labour market at the expense of Caribbean workers and offer some explanations of this trend. In addressing this process whereby workers from one nationality come to replace those from another, we highlight the role of employers' racialized preferences in influencing the level of demand of workers from source countries and their incorporation in the production process. We also shed light on how social relations of inequality--in particular those based on race, ethnicity, citizenship and gender--intersect in the contemporary context of globalization, as multiple low-income countries compete for labour placements in migrant-receiving nations. In particular, our focus on the case of foreign farm workers in Canada emphasizes the role of race in organizing labour incorporation and shaping global production, lending further evidence of the racialization of the global labour supply within what some authors have termed a "global hierarchy of states" or "global apartheid."
Racialization and Citizenship
Contemporary patterns of accumulation under globalization increasingly rest on a labour market flexibility achieved through deepening labor segmentation on the basis of race/ethnicity, gender and citizenship. The employment of (im)migrant workers has played a central role in strategies aimed at achieving greater flexibility, particularly within high-income countries seeking to restructure labour-capital relations in an increasingly competitive global economy (Rai, 2001; Sassen, 2000; Sharma, 2006). Between the 1960s and 1990s, the rate of growth of the world's migrant population more than doubled (ILO, 2006), with developing countries accounting for the dominant, and growing, share (Stalker, 2006). Pressures to migrate from the South, rooted in legacies of colonialism and imperialism, have been exacerbated by processes integral to globalization that that have deepened income inequality among the world's rich and poor (ILO, 2006; Stasiulis and Bakan, 2005). (1) As opposed to the massive migration flows of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most of today's migrants originate not in Europe but developing countries and face much greater restrictions on their mobility in terms of border controls (Sharma, 2005). The growing gap in wealth between the North and the South, accompanied by tightening borders, have created what some authors have termed "global apartheid" (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Richmond, 1994) or a "global citizenship divide" (Stasiulis and Bakan, 2005). In this context, state citizenship becomes an ever more relevant basis for inequality among workers in the global economy (Stasiulis and Bakan, 2005). Immigration policy thus continues to serve as a powerful arena for migrant-receiving states in determining the incorporation of (im)migrants into labour markets, including legitimizing discriminations based on the social relations of race, class and gender (Sharma, 2006; Stasiulis and Bakan, 2005; Ball and Piper, 2002).
The intersection of gender and citizenship has been the subject of recent scholarly attention, particularly given the surprising growth of feminized migration flows. Although migration studies have tended to obscure gender as a relation of power that shapes the movement of people, feminist scholars have shed light on the ways in which sexism structures migration patterns (Nyberg-Scrensen, Van Hear and Engberg-Pederson, 2002; Oishi, 2005; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2003; Pessar, 2003). The importance of racial discrimination in determining (im)migrants' access to economic and social opportunities, on the other hand, has received considerably less attention. While it is generally recognized that people from developing countries constitute the majority of contemporary migrants, "analyses of migration have tended to either miss or under emphasize the racio-cultural factors governing and regulating labour regimes" (Persaud, 2001: 378).
Research in Canada suggests that racism shapes the movement of people and their incorporation into labor markets. Racial and ethnic considerations have played a central role in Canada's immigration policy, including blatant discrimination against non-Whites prior to 1965 (Galabuzi, 2006; Li, 1988; Persaud, 2001; Sharma, 2006). Current research on the position of racialized groups in Canada has suggested that racial discrimination is a fundamental factor in the class formation of Canadian society, to the extent that a "colour-coded vertical mosaic" (2) or social hierarchy of race has emerged (Galabuzi, 2006; Geschwender and Guppy, 1995; Li, 1988; Lian and Matthews, 1998). In addition to studies on Canada's settled population, several authors have documented the centrality of racism and processes of racialization in the recruitment and allocation of non-citizen foreign workers (Stasiulis and Bakan, 2005; Satzewich, 1991; Sharma, 2002; 2006). For example, in the 1950s, Caribbean domestic workers were subject to a number of restrictions, including compulsory live-in domestic labour and the threat of deportation, conditions that did not apply to domestics coming from Europe, who also received government assistance in the cost of passage (Stasiulis and Bakan, 2005). In regards to the agricultural sector, Satzewich's persuasive archival research on the incorporation of foreign workers into horticulture shows how, in the 1960s
... decisions about whether to allow [farm workers from the Caribbean] were made, in part, on assessments of the implications this movement would have on social stability in the country in general and in the workplace in particular, on the likelihood that the "Black" population would get progressively larger, and the belief that they would be the cause of social problems in the future (1991: 190).
Black Caribbean farm workers were allowed to enter Canada as temporary labourers, but effectively prevented from seeking permanent settlement. Satzewich writes: "'Black' migrants were defined as potential problems, or as individuals who might disrupt the social order.., because of the racist belief that as a 'race' they were unable to 'assimilate' to the other 'Canadian way of life'" (1991: 191).
The use of social relational analysis had not been applied in the study of Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program until recently, when the growing numbers of women and their increasing visibility in rural spaces instigated the use of a gender perspective (Preibisch and Hermoso Santamaria, 2006). (3) This is remarkable considering this approach has been the starting point of feminist researchers studying Canada's other longstanding program for foreign workers, the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) (Arat-Koc, 1989; Giles and Arat-Koc, 1994; Macklin, 1994; Pratt, 1997; Stasiulis and Bakan, 2005, among others). These Canadian studies, along with the broader body of research on the international migration of domestic workers, hold important findings regarding the role of racialized understandings and assumptions in implementing foreign worker programs, as well as the consequences for workers themselves. These studies have shown convincingly that governments, employers and migrant placement agencies hold racialized (and gendered) preferences for migrants (Stasiulis and Bakan, 2005; Oishi, 2005; Pratt, 1997; Winter, 2005). A number of researchers also document the malleability of these social constructions when they no longer suit employers (i.e., facilitate capitalist accumulation). For example, Stasiulis and Bakan's work (2005) on Canada and Oishi's work (2005) in Hong Kong show how preference towards one nationality of domestic workers has declined in response to rising militancy and organized resistance to abusive working conditions. Furthermore, these studies point to the material consequences of racially and sexually oppressive stereotypes, not only in terms of one group losing employment opportunities to another, but also in terms of social hierarchies and the construction of migrant workers as subjects less deserving of the rights afforded citizens (Pratt, 1997; Stasiulis and Bakan, 2005; Sharma, 2006; Winter, 2005). Indeed, their findings further underline processes of racialization as central to constructing the vulnerability of workers in society and making them more exploitable as cheap labour (Persaud, 2001).
The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program
The SAWP is a temporary labour program that brings foreign workers to Canada for periods of between six weeks and eight months annually in order to resolve the purported labour shortages in the horticultural sector. The Canadian government employed a variety of stop-gap measures during the period between 1945 and 1965 to ease these shortages, in order to uphold a decidedly racist immigration policy that denied temporary visas or permanent residence to people of colour. The 1965 White Paper and a reformed immigration act passed in 1966 that eliminated most overtly racist clauses paved the way for the recruitment of Jamaican workers (1966) and, during the course of the next ten years, the citizens of other Caribbean countries: Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados in 1968 and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) in 1976. Mexico entered the Program in 1974.
Participating growers, government officials and some academics (Verduzco, 1999; 2000; Verduzco and Lozano, 2003; Munoz, 1999; Greenhill and Aceytuno, 2000) view the SAWP as a resounding success, a model program based on labour market complementarity and bilateral co-operation that provides benefits to all participants. Canadian growers obtain access to a cheap and reliable work force, poor farm workers from developing countries get access to the more lucrative Canadian labour market, and labour supply countries benefit from hard currency remitted by migrants. Finally, Canadian businesses in rural areas benefit from increased sales (Preibisch, 2003). Other researchers have criticized the SAWP for perpetuating an unfree labour force tied to a single employer for the duration of the contract, legally prevented from unionizing, represented by ineffective home country officials, and whose further participation is largely dependent on favourable employer evaluations (Basok, 2002; Binford, 2002; 2006; Binford, Carrasco, Arana and Rojas, 2004; Preibisch, 2000; Satzewich, 1991). This weak or non-existent bargaining position, which is a structural--as opposed to a contingent--feature of the SAWP, works to ensure that foreign workers work hard (even through illnesses and injuries), accede to growers' requests to labour through the weekend during peak periods, and to suppress complaints and avoid conflicts if they want to stay out of "trouble" and be "named" by the employer to return the following season. They do this despite a lack of control over the duration of the contracts, an absence of overtime pay, a high level of social isolation,...
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