Kerry Preibisch’s research while affiliated with University of Guelph and other places

The ‘migration–development nexus’ has become an established development mantra with debate surrounding the ability of migration to promote economic growth and reduce poverty. The optimism of this debate is paired with a push to control migration through the promotion of temporary migration programmes and initiatives considered to support the regular movement of migrants. This dominant paradigm has come under criticism, however, for overlooking the multidimensional costs of migration for migrants and their families. As evidence on the costs of migration gathers, debates within policy and scholarly arenas have turned to how to integrate human rights into migration and development initiatives. The discourse surrounding this debate largely draws on the capabilities approach, which sees expanding human capabilities as the central role of development. In this paper, we analyse the resulting discourse and implementation of this approach to demonstrate how this theoretical framework is utilised to conceptualise diverse outcomes for migrant worker rights within global governance priorities for managing migration. We argue that greater attention is needed in the application of the capabilities approach in order to resonate with policy-makers without compromising the integrity of the approach or separating migrants from their intrinsic human rights.

The precipitous growth of monetary remittances from international migrants to less developed countries has made international labor migration of central importance to the contemporary global policy agenda. In particular, the potential for migration to contribute to development has captured the interest of policymakers and scholars. The quest to harness, maximize, and leverage the benefits of migration in order to promote economic growth and reduce poverty—the ‘migration-development nexus’—is now an established development ‘mantra’. In particular, attention has focused on how remittances offer migrant workers, their families, and their communities economic benefits that significantly outperform traditional top-down bilateral and multilateral aid. The general optimism of this debate is paired with a push to ‘manage’ migration through the global promotion of temporary migration programs and initiatives considered to support the regular movement of migrants. The purpose of the management of migration is to ensure circularity of human mobility and thus the return of remittances to their countries of origin, and to allow destination countries to balance their labor market needs while restricting permanent immigration. However, there is growing criticism of the passive acceptance of the predominant migration-development model and the managed migration agenda. More precisely, the dominant paradigm has been criticized for overlooking the economic, social, and psychological costs of migration for migrant workers and their families. Moreover, the exploitation and human rights abuses that accompany international labor migration for increasing numbers of migrants further challenge the optimism surrounding the connection between migration and development. As the costs of migration become more evident, discussion and debate are taking place in both policy and scholarly arenas concerning how and to what extent human rights and a rights-based approach should be integrated into migration and development initiatives. The discourse surrounding this debate largely draws on the capabilities approach as conceptualized by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, which sees expanding human capabilities as the central role of development. The capabilities approach has contributed to policy debate surrounding human development and directly informed the human development framework and a series of Human Development Reports authored by the United Nations Development 3 Programme (UNDP). Indeed, the human development framework is seen as an attractive and useful theoretical approach to meaningfully bring migration, development and human rights together. Yet despite growing concerns to emphasize the link between rights and development and prioritize migrants’ rights using the human development framework, the resulting discourse and implementation are highly problematic. While the capabilities approach is a fundamental component of the human development framework, the approach is commonly misconstrued in both policy and scholarship leading to an incomplete reading and understanding of the approach and its application. In this paper, we argue that the recognition and protection of the rights of migrant workers, their families, and their communities must be the focal point of any application of the capabilities approach. Moreover, this focus can contribute to reconciling a rights-focused human development approach within global governance priorities for managing migration.

Temporary migration programmes (TMPs) contain features such as reduced costs and the social legitimation of regularized entry that allow women, including the very poor, to access transnational livelihoods. For mothers, taking up opportunities for employment abroad inevitably involves ‘transnational homemaking’, the set practices involved in caring for family relationships and maintaining household economies across borders. In this article, we examine the transnational homemaking practices undertaken by rural Mexican migrant women employed in highly masculinized TMPs in Canada, tracing how they construct and maintain household economies across borders through a delicate (re)negotiation of reproductive roles and responsibilities with non-migrating kin in Mexico. We find that migration yields material and subjective benefits that enable the expansion of their citizenship across multiple dimensions ranging from the economic to the sexual. At the same time, as racialized, gendered, migrants from the global South, their labour and status in Canada are highly precarious. The advantages derived from transnational migration are thus tenuous, limited, and contradictory.

Global restructuring is dramatically reshaping how women and men around the world relate to agriculture. While gender analysis has been central to research on labor‐intensive, corporate agriculture in the global South, it is rarely invoked in the literature exploring these trends in the North. Moreover, research on gender in agriculture in high‐income countries has tended to focus on women in family farms, despite extensive restructuring of the sector that has increased demands for waged laborers. This article speaks to these limitations by tracing the incorporation of Mexican women into the Canadian agricultural sector as temporary migrant workers. In exploring the lived realities of these women, it reveals workplaces characterized by highly gendered, racialized employment relations and illustrates how temporary migrant worker programs further entrench existing structures of labor segmentation in agriculture. While temporary migrant worker programs have brought greater flexibility into the Canadian agricultural labor market by enabling a particular set of employment practices that rest on gendered, racialized subjectivities, these processes are by no means uncontested by the actors they seek to command.

Contemporary processes of globalization have had significant implica-tions for food systems around the world. The adoption of neo-liberal policies on a global scale, changing systems of governance in supply chains, and the develop-ment of new technologies have transformed how food is produced and consumed. Although the implications of these changes for the labour sustaining agri-food systems have received scant attention in the literature, research suggests they are profound. In this article, I seek to further our knowledge of how these processes are unfolding in a high income country context through a focus on Canada, ex-amining in particular how changes to immigration policy have rendered work in Northern agri-food industries more precarious. In so doing, I seek to contribute to theoretical debates on the role of the state in regulating work-place regimes and managing capitalist accumulation in agriculture.