A timely analysis of Canadian temporary labour migration policies.

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 because they are always available for work, even on holidays and weekends, or when exhausted, sick, or injured. Basok exposes the mechanisms that make Mexican seasonal workers unfree and shows that the workers' virtual inability to refuse the employer's demand for their labour is related not only to economic need but to the rigid control exercised by the Mexican Ministry of Labour and Social Planning and Canadian growers over workers' participation in the Canadian guest worker program, as well as the paternalistic relationship between the Mexican harvesters and their Canadian employers.

North of El Norte provides an important counterpoint to the attention given to Mexican migration to the United States by examining a lesser-known migration route: that taken by contemporary Mexican migrants to Canada. Paloma Villegas considers changing Canadian immigration policy and practice, and the implications of these changes for Mexican migrants without permanent resident status. Her analysis addresses the context in Mexico, the experience of border crossing, policies to restrict migration, and migrants' options to achieve secure status. Villegas also provides an assessment of the barriers migrants encounter once in Canada, specifically in the labour market, in their creative pursuits, and in accessing health care. Drawing on interviews, policy documents, media accounts, and literature from local social service organizations, North of El Norte concludes that migration – and by extension migrant illegalization – is assembled, produced, and negotiated. The comprehensive research in this book sheds light on how individuals and institutions work to illegalize migrants and on migrants' active resistance to these efforts.

Collecting the diverse perspectives of scholars, labor organizers, and human-rights advocates, Accountability across Borders is the first edited collection that connects studies of immigrant integration in host countries to accounts of transnational migrant advocacy efforts, including case studies from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Covering the role of federal, state, and local governments in both countries of origin and destinations, as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), these essays range from reflections on labor solidarity among members of the United Food and Commercial Workers in Toronto to explorations of indigenous students from the Maya diaspora living in San Francisco. Case studies in Mexico also discuss the enforcement of the citizenship rights of Mexican American children and the struggle to affirm the human rights of Central American migrants in transit. As policies regarding immigration, citizenship, and enforcement are reaching a flashpoint in North America, this volume provides key insights into the new dynamics of migrant civil society as well as the scope and limitations of directives from governmental agencies.

Most examinations of non-citizens in Canada focus on immigrants, people who are citizens-in-waiting, or specific categories of temporary, vulnerable workers. In contrast,Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship considers a range of people whose pathway to citizenship is uncertain or non-existent. This includes migrant workers, students, refugee claimants, and people with expired permits, all of whom have limited formal rights to employment, housing, education, and health services. The contributors to this volume present theoretically informed empirical studies of the regulatory, institutional, discursive, and practical terms under which precarious-status non-citizens – those without permanent residence – enter and remain in Canada. They consider the historical and contemporary production of non-citizen precarious status and migrant illegality in Canada, as well as everyday experiences of precarious status among various social groups including youth, denied refugee claimants, and agricultural workers. This timely volume contributes to conceptualizing multiple forms of precarious status non-citizenship as connected through policy and the practices of migrants and the institutional actors they encounter.

If the right policies are in place, labour migration can help countries respond to shifts in labour supply and demand, stimulate innovation and sustainable development, and transfer and update skills. However, a lack of international standards regarding concepts, definitions and methodologies for measuring labour migration data still needs to be addressed. This report gives global and regional estimates, broken down by income group, gender and age. It also describes the data, sources and methodology used, as well as the corresponding limitations. The report seeks to contribute to the 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and to achieving SDG targets 8.8 and 10.7

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and resistance of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. Seth Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes was invited to trek with his companions clandestinely through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with Indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology” deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequities come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care. In a substantive new epilogue, Holmes and Indigenous Oaxacan scholar Jorge Ramirez-Lopez provide a current examination of the challenges facing farmworkers and the lives and resistance of the protagonists featured in the book.

Home Economics is an urgent and much-needed reminder that society must pay careful attention to how nationalist ideologies construct 'homelands' that essentially leave the vast majority of the world's migrant peoples homeless.