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

• Published in: Journal of international migration and integration Vol. 23; no. 4; pp. 1765 - 1791
• Main Authors: Vosko, Leah F., Spring, Cynthia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.12.2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Accountability; Agriculture; COVID-19; Demography; Empowerment; Farmworkers; Federal government; Food; Food supply; Health risks; Healthy food; Immigration policy; Migrant workers; Migrants; Migration; Population Economics; Renewal; Reproduction; Social reproduction; Social Sciences; Sociology; Transnationalism; Viral diseases; Canada; COVID-19; Canada; Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program; Social reproduction; Migrant farmworkers
• ISSN: 1488-3473; 1874-6365
• DOI: 10.1007/s12134-021-00905-2

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.