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. 2022;23(4):1765-1791.
doi: 10.1007/s12134-021-00905-2. Epub 2021 Oct 31.

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

Leah F Vosko  1 , Cynthia Spring  2
Affiliations

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

Leah F Vosko et al. J Int Migr Integr. 2022.

Abstract

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.

Keywords: COVID-19; Canada; Migrant farmworkers; Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program; Social reproduction.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Work Permit Holders in Canada by Year in which the Permits Became Effective, 2002–2020. Source: IRCC,
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
New Temporary Work Permits under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in Canada by Permit Holders’ Country of Citizenship, January to August 2020. Source: IRCC,
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Rate of Infection per 100,000 in Ontario, July 2020
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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