scholarly journals Sentenced for the season: Jamaican migrant farmworkers on Okanagan orchards

Race & Class ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 030639682110548
Author(s):  
Elise Hjalmarson
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Foreign Workers ◽  
Agricultural Worker ◽  
Prison Life ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Government Oversight ◽  
Latino Workers ◽  
Black Immigration

Despite perfunctory characterisation of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) as a ‘triple win’, scholars and activists have long admonished its lack of government oversight, disrespect for migrant rights and indentureship of foreign workers. This article contends that the SAWP is predicated upon naturalised, deeply engrained and degrading beliefs that devalue Black lives and labour. Based on twenty months’ ethnographic fieldwork in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada, it reveals the extent to which anti-Black racism permeates, organises and frustrates workers’ lives on farms and in local communities. It situates such experiences, which workers characterise as ‘prison life’, in the context of anti-Black immigration policy and the workings of racial capitalism. This ethnography of Caribbean migrants not only adds perspective to scholarship hitherto focused on the experiences of Latino workers, but it also reinforces critical work on anti-Black racism in contemporary Canada.

Yearly quotas and country-reserved shares in Italian immigration policy

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Cuttitta
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Foreign Workers ◽  
Irregular Migration ◽  
Quota System ◽  
Italian Immigration ◽  
Migration Flows

Regular immigration to Italy is based on a quota system setting annual ceilings to legal entries. Reserved shares are granted to single countries or categories of countries. Reserved shares have been increased; they are used as an incentive to obtain the cooperation of countries of origin in stemming irregular migration flows. The total quota of regular immigration has gradually increased too. Still, it does not fully respond to the growing demand of foreign workers on the labour market, and quotas seem to be used as crypto-regularisations rather than as an instrument for regulating legal entries.

Immigration and the tech industry: As a labour shortage remedy, for innovation, or for cost savings?

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Matloff
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Brain Drain ◽  
Cost Savings ◽  
Foreign Workers ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
It Service ◽  
Labour Shortage ◽  
Labour Costs ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The U.S

The two main reasons cited by the U.S. tech industry for hiring foreign workers--remedying labour shortages and hiring "the best and the brightest"--are investigated, using data on wages, patents, and R&D work, as well as previous research and industry statements. The analysis shows that the claims of shortage and outstanding talent are not supported by the data, even after excluding the Indian IT service firms. Instead, it is shown that the primary goals of employers in hiring  foreign workers are to reduce labour costs and to obtain "indentured" employees. Current immigration policy is causing an ‘Internal Brain Drain’ in STEM.

Quiet struggles: Migrant farmworkers, informal labor, and everyday resistance in Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 141-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Cohen ◽  
Elise Hjalmarson
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Agricultural Sector ◽  
Migrant Labor ◽  
Migrant Farmworkers ◽  
Agricultural Worker ◽  
Informal Labor ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Community Organizers ◽  
Strict Regulation ◽  
Everyday Resistance

Utilizing James C. Scott’s germinal concept of everyday resistance, we examine the subtle, daily acts of resistance carried out by Mexican and Jamaican migrant farmworkers in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. We argue that despite finding themselves in situations of formidable constraint, migrant farmworkers utilize a variety of “weapons of the weak” that undermine the strict regulation of their employment by employers and state authorities. We also argue that everyday forms of resistance are important political acts and as such, they warrant inclusion in scholarly examinations. Indeed, by reading these methods neither as “real” resistance nor as political, we risk reproducing the same systems of power that de-legitimize the actions, agency, and political consciousness of subaltern and oppressed peoples. After a brief discussion on the concept of everyday resistance, we provide an overview of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), establishing the conditions that drive migrant workers to resist and drawing connections between the regulatory framework of the SAWP, the informality of the agricultural sector, and migrant labor. Finally, we examine specific instances of resistance that we documented over 3 recent years through ethnographic fieldwork and as community organizers with a grassroots migrant justice organization. We assert the importance of situating migrants’ everyday acts of resistance at the center of conceptualizations of the broader movement for migrant justice in Canada and worldwide.

scholarly journals ‘Yassaba’ or the Fear of Being Abandoned

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-14
Author(s):  
Maria Cristina Manca
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Health Services ◽  
Health Care Services ◽  
Ebola Virus ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Culturally Appropriate ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Local Populations ◽  
Care Services

AbstractHealth promotion is dependent upon sharing information with local populations and adapting health-care services to make them more acceptable, and is an essential part of any Ebola intervention. Listening to the concerns of local communities and engaging them as active participants ensures that health promotion messages are relevant, acceptable and understandable as well as culturally appropriate. Ebola is associated with fear and death, thus understanding the significance and meanings of life, death, disease and sickness for the Kissi of Guinea Forestière (Guinea) is essential for ensuring acceptable health services. Community engagement was essential for this research to gain the trust of the Kissi and to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and information to reduce the transmission of the Ebola virus. This technical account is based on three periods of ethnographic fieldwork and health promotion activities conducted in Guinea between May 2014 and February 2015.

Diasporic Sexual Citizenship: Queer Language, (Im)Possible Subjects, and Transfiliation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis M. Provencher ◽  
David Peterson
Keyword(s):  
North Atlantic ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Global Cities ◽  
Sexual Citizenship ◽  
French Society ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Families Of Origin ◽  
Flexible Accumulation ◽  
French Citizen

This chapter reviews scholarship on queer language in the diaspora through the lens of flexible accumulation and neoliberal citizenship. The relevance of these ideas to queer linguistic data is illustrated through an analysis of ethnographic fieldwork with 2Fik (pronounced “Toufik”), a French citizen of Moroccan descent and multidisciplinary artist living in Québec, Canada. Queer diasporic speakers like 2Fik stake claims of belonging to multiple spatiotemporalities, drawing on new intersectional possibilities involving families of origin, various local communities, and still wider diasporic terrains—for example, the Maghrebi homeland(s), French society and Francophone global cities, and the broader global and often queer North Atlantic. Yet the use of flexible language(s) associated with “queer diasporic citizenship” differs from previous examples in the extant scholarship. 2Fik’s use of performance and virtual-mediated spaces questions the response to his invitations to participate in a diasporic citizenry, highlighting elements of hypersubjectivity, dis-identification, transgressive filiation (transfiliation), and dissidence.

US immigration politics will hinder reform

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Foreign Workers ◽  
Aggressive Approach ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Immigration Laws ◽  
Democratic Candidate ◽  
The Us ◽  
Immigration Politics ◽  
Opposite View ◽  
Research Centres

Significance Immigration policy has become a key issue in the US presidential primaries, upending the Republican nomination contest and fuelling the rise of 'outsider' candidate Donald Trump in the polls. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has taken the opposite view, claiming that she would take a "less harsh and aggressive" approach to enforcing immigration laws than President Barack Obama. Impacts The nativist rhetoric of the Republican primary will likely boost Democratic candidates in the 2016 federal elections. Countries may increasingly seek to streamline the visa/residency process in order to compete for high-skilled foreign workers. Gridlock in Washington on immigration policy may benefit foreign tech firms and research centres at the expense of US institutions.

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