Tanya Basok

• University of Windsor

Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants attempt to travel through Mexico toward the U.S. hoping to claim asylum, but today the Mexican government, supported by international organizations, strongly urges them to seek refuge in Mexico. In this article, based on research on Mexico’s refugee infrastructure and its impact on migrants in Southern M...

Migrant farm workers recruited under Canada’s temporary employment programs work in difficult environments, under poor working conditions, and live in unsafe housing in remote rural communities. Fearful of repatriation or replacement, many accept their working and living conditions as part of a necessary sacrifice to improve their living conditions...

Drawing on insights from scholarship on contentious action frames, this article examines the framing of demands for social justice for migrant farmworkers in Spain, Italy and Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus particularly on how activists in each country aligned their action frames with prevalent public discourses on the essential contr...

Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has often been portrayed as a model for temporary migration programmes. It is largely governed by the Contracts negotiated between Canada and Mexico and Commonwealth Caribbean countries respectively. This article provides a critical analysis of the Contract by examining its structural context and consid...

In this chapter, we utilize the transnational employment strain model, outlined in Chapter 2, to examine working and living conditions of migrant farmworkers in two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, before the COVID-19 pandemic. We demonstrate that well-prior to the pandemic migrant farmworkers faced employment demands such as occupational he...

In this chapter, we draw on the transnational employment strain approach, advanced in Chapter 2, to illustrate that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated pre-existing, and contributed to new, employment strains among migrant farmworkers in Canada. Employment demands increased for migrant farmworkers during the health crisis as the working and living en...

Attending to the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic deepened structural vulnerabilities previously and routinely experienced by migrant farm workers, this chapter emphasizes how working and living conditions described in Chapter 4 flowed from those established prior to the pandemic. In revealing the excessive levels of employment strain among this...

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework adopted in this book and applied to the case of migrant farmworkers. It begins by elaborating the conception of transnational employment strain among precarious status workers—a holistic framework accounting for relations of social reproduction and production, citizenship status, and transnational r...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada imposed certain international travel bans and work-from-home orders, yet migrant farmworkers, declared essential to national food security, were exempt from such measures. In this context, farm worksites proved to be particularly prone to COVID-19 outbreaks. To apprehend this trend, we engaged an expanded and tr...

This study analyzes the conditions that migrant farmworkers in Canada endured prior to and during theCOVID-19 pandemic (January 2020-March 2022). It draws on policy analysis and open-ended interviews with workers in Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), as well as non-status migrants employed in agriculture. It evaluates policies and me...

Des recherches récentes ont montré que les migrant‐e‐s disposent du potentiel pour remettre en question les pratiques qui limitent leur mobilité et compromettent leur sécurité et leur bien‐être. Les chercheur‐e‐s travaillant sur le paradigme du droit à la ville et adoptant une approche critique sur la citoyenneté ont constaté que les migrant‐e‐s re...

This article draws on border studies that recognise rebordering practices as ongoing performances of conflict between various actors including state authorities, border security agents, migrants, migrant supporters, smugglers, international organisations, lawyers, advocates and others. We draw attention to variable levels of intensity with which th...

The Canadian temporary migration regime has been widely criticised for its failure to provide protections and address migrant needs. This article contributes to these critiques by analysing how temporariness impacts the sense of belonging and perceptions of social inclusion among farmworkers in Canada. The sense of inclusion and belonging is vital...

In the last quarter of a century, in Mexico, immigration control and verification measures have notably increased, framed in arguments related to sovereignty and national security. Restrictive migration policies derived from this type of concerns have focused on the management of migratory flows, which has had different consequences, not only in th...

Questioning the depiction of pro-migrant solidarity as unequivocal and transformative, the article draws attention to two types of ambivalences evident in the solidarity activism in Mexico. The vacillation between two different goals, that is, protecting migrants’ rights to mobile citizenship (i.e. the right to safe and secure mobility through Mexi...

This chapter describes the predicament of transit migrants. Focusing on conditions in Mexico, the chapter draws attention to an emerging trend in global migration, namely, the entrenchment of permanent temporality due to the measures implemented by receiving states aimed at controlling and deterring irregular migration. Based on interviews conducte...

Regularization programmes for undocumented migrants are generally viewed as a form of transition from “illegality” to a secure legal status. Yet, as we argue in this article, in many countries, such as Mexico, this transition is often incomplete and reversible. This article discusses regularization programmes for undocumented migrants in Mexico bef...

Social movement analysts have long recognized that it is not easy to assess outcomes of social activism since direct causality between activism and social, cultural, political, or legal changes is often difficult to trace. This article analyzes the complexities in evaluating the tangled relations between migrant rights activism and migration policy...

Agricultural migrant workers, recruited to work in Canada under the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP), are disciplined to be compliant and productive. Based on ethnographic data, we draw attention to several ways in which Spanish-speaking migrants, employed in agriculture in a rural community in Southwestern Ontario, respond to this discipli...

In the last two decades, temporary worker programs have experienced an unprecedented expansion as instruments of what is defined as the migration management approach. Various migrant rights activists have voiced concerns about the treatment of temporary migrants in these programs and taken initiative to advance their rights. For some migrant rights...

This chapter summarizes the book’s main arguments. It also discusses the unaccompanied minors’ ‘crisis’ that erupted at the United States-Mexico border in the summer of 2014 and the political responses it triggered in the United States and Mexico. In its approach to Central American migration, the United States remains committed to a closed-door po...

This chapter argues that the concept of ‘transit migration’, frequently employed to characterize the flow of Central American migrants through Mexico, obscures the instability, circularity, and unpredictability of this so-called transitory movement. The chapter advances a model that explains migrants’ mobility and immobility by the precarity they e...

This chapter outlines the political structures and processes that shape Central American migrants’ precarity in the transnational space that comprises migrants’ homes in the countries of the Northern Triangle, Mexico, and the United States. It suggests that both poverty and the violence perpetrated by criminal organizations and individuals in the m...

Drawing on Foucault’s notion of the ‘techniques of the self,’ this chapter illustrates various techniques migrants employ to overcome the paralysing effect of precarity, shaped in the context of the United States biopolitics of citizenship, on their mobility. On the basis of migrants’ narratives, the chapter discusses such techniques of the self as...

This chapter examines the lived experiences of precarity in the transnational space comprising the three Central American countries of the Northern Triangle, Mexico, and the United States. On the basis of migrants’ narratives, this chapter illustrates how migrants experience precarity in specific places, such as home communities, international bord...

Questioning the notion of transit migration, the book examines factors that shape Central American migrants' mobility and immobility in the transnational space, comprised on Central American countries, Mexico, and the US.

Deportability, or a threat of deportation, can be viewed as a technique of discipline employed to make migrant workers efficient and compliant. Under the threat of deportation, migrants accept dangerous, dirty, degrading and difficult jobs for low pay. Deportability also prevents them from challenging their working and living conditions either indi...

The article examines urban employment programmes for Salvadorean refugees in Costa Rica. It compares two types of projects, individual or household workshops on the one hand, and cooperative projects on the others. It is argued that both face tremendous difficulties trying to compete with capitalist enterprises. However, a number of characteristics...

Drawing on the studies of citizenship practices and health and safety literature, this paper explores the reporting of workplace injuries and hazards among Latin American immigrants in Southwestern Ontario. The paper examines how (under-)reporting is shaped by three conditions: the knowledge of workers’ rights, job (in)security, and ethnic identiti...

The first edited book to compare various temporary labour migration streams in Canada, Legislated Inequality offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of current trends in Canadian immigration policy from a multidisciplinary perspective. Two recent scandals have made the issues raised in this book particularly relevant. The first erupted in respon...

In recent years, international labour migration and its highly gendered nature have received an unprecedented level of attention by international organizations (IOs) and national policymakers in general (GCIM, 2005; IOM, 2009a; UN, 2004; UNFPA, 2006). This renewed attention to international migration at the global level has highlighted demographic...

ocusing on theory, current trends, and the future of social justice movements in Canada and around the world, Issues in Social Justice offers a valuable contribution to the growing debates on what social justice means in our increasingly globalized world. Examining such key topics as modern citizenship, human rights, transformations of the welfare...

The global governance of labor migration reflects two major trends: one supports neoliberal migration management priorities and another addresses human rights, with the latter subordinated to the former. This subordination of human rights to other, market-related, priorities parallels global governance priorities in general. While some internationa...

Among high-income countries such as Canada, there is growing dependency on "low skilled" temporary foreign workers in a variety of sectors. The purpose of this review is to critically synthesize and analyze the theoretical and empirical literature on gendered and temporary migration in the context of globalization and the health of temporary agricu...

Focusing on seasonal agricultural migrant workers in Canada, this article illustrates how local migrant rights activists have utilized different judicial fora to claim rights for non-citizen migrant workers under the international human rights framework. The article underscores the role of litigation by activists who, citing international norms and...

North for the Harvest traces the symbiotic relationship among Mexican migrant workers, beet growers, and the American Crystal Sugar Company in the Red River Valley from the decade after World War I until the 1990s. Norris recognizes that betabeleros (sugar beet workers) were exploited, abused, and subjected to racist treatment. But his book goes be...

Scholarship on the dissemination of human rights norms and principles has focused predominantly on the socialization of nation-states into the values which have been widely endorsed. I argue in this article that the socialization mechanisms, discussed by such scholars as Meyer et al. (1997) and Risse and Sikkink (1999), do not capture the complex p...

Despite continuous struggles on the part of disenfranchised and marginalized peoples throughout the world, and various initiatives undertaken by national states and international organizations, social justice remains an unattainable goal for many diverse groups and populations. By "social justice" we mean an equitable distribution of fundamental re...

As a contribution to the growing literature on citizenship and advanced liberal governance, this paper focuses on how citizens—especially the poor—are brought into new policy platforms and new social relationships of responsibility, accountability, and participation. In making specific empirical reference to a range of global organizations and thei...

Threatening Others: Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica. Carlos Sandoval-García. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. 263 pp.

This paper analyzes the ways in which the Canadian voluntary sector has been created as a 'community of service providers'. Drawing upon a governmentality perspective, we illustrate how governmental interventions have been largely successful in carrying out the voluntary agencies' responsibilization efforts within the sector. We trace this responsi...

In the past few decades, migrants residing in many European and North American countries have benefited from nation-states' extension of legal rights to non-citizens. This development has prompted many scholars to reflect on the shift from a state-based to a more individual-based universal conception of rights and to suggest that national citizensh...

The article explores development and migration. Based on a comparison of investment-related behaviour of participants of the Canadian Mexican Seasonal Workers Programme from eleven Mexican villages, the article explores the impact of the nature of the migrants' community of origin on development. Contrary to the findings reported by the “new econom...

This article relates multiplicity and flexibility of ethnic identities to the following three aspects of postmodernity: (a) perpetual redefinition of self by reflexive individuals who constantly receive and evaluate new knowledge; (b) increased global interaction, which expands the number of alternatives for reflexive individuals to chose from; and...

Based on interviews with Leamington greenhouse growers and migrant Mexican workers, Tanya Basok offers a timely analysis of why the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is needed. She argues that while Mexican workers do not necessarily constitute cheap labour for Canadian growers, they are vital for the survival of some agricultural sectors becau...

Critics of guest worker programmes have pointed out that many temporary workers do not return home when their contracts expire and thus end up swelling the ranks of undocumented workers in a host country. This article argues that this outcome is not inevitable. Whether or not guest workers return home or stay behind depends to a large extent on how...

This article explores the impact of international labor migration on development in communities of origin. It outlines three theoretical positions corresponding to specific theoretical trends in the field of development. The first position is represented by those who postulate that remittances and acquired skills and knowledge contribute to local d...

This article explores the impact of international labor migration on development in communities of origin. It outlines three theoretical positions corresponding to specific theoretical trends in the field of development. The first position is represented by those who postulate that remittances and acquired skills and knowledge contribute to local d...

The article is based on fieldwork research on Mexican seasonal farm workers brought to Canada through the Foreign Agricultural Workers Program and their employers. I will argue that these workers are both free and unfree. In Mexico they enter the guest worker program voluntarily; yet once in Canada they are forbidden to circulate in the labour mark...

This extensive survey of migration in the modern world begins in the sixteenth century with the establishment of European colonies overseas, and covers the history of migration to the late twentieth century, when global communications and transport systems stimulated immense and complex flows of labour migrants and skilled professionals. In ninety-...

In 1986 Canada was awarded the Fridtjof Nansen Medal in recognition of its prominent role in assisting and resettling world refugees. Since 1947 the country has admitted over 500000 refugees; they accounted for about 10 per cent of total immigration to the country over this period. In the 1980s, the refugee component of Canadian immigration increas...