Abstracts
Linamar Campos (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Geography, Université de Montréal)
"Living better, but separated: the emotional costs of being an agricultural temporary foreign worker"
Since its inception, the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (CSAWP) attracted the attention of scholars and unions’ leaders. These concerns orientated dozens of studies which have found that the employer-tied contracts signed by agricultural temporary foreign workers (ATFW), the risks and the treatment that eventually they could receive expose the ATFW to abuse, exploitation, non-recognized occupational illnesses and overall, the violation of rights and liberties enshrined by the Canadian Laws (Basok, 1999, 2007; McLaughlin 2008; Hennebry & Preibisch, 2012; Hanley et al., 2012; Depatie-Pelletier, 2013, 2016; Gravel et al. 2014). Furthermore, as the research done by feminist geographers suggests, we need to push forward the analysis of the link between emotions and labour migration (Bondi, 2005; Pratt, 2007; McKay, 2007; Pain, 2009). To this end, our research project addresses the emotional geographies of cyclical labour migration with the aim to deepen our understanding of the emotional costs generated by cyclical and controlled labour mobility, both in the transmigrant workers and in their families to elucidate their relation with the restriction to the exercise of rights and the effects they can have on the identity of individuals, the family unit and the social tissue in their communities. We argue that the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) represents a good site of examination of the emotional costs of the back and forth between the “here” (the place they call home) and “there” (the work site). We will present some of the findings from our fieldwork which highlight the fissures and tearing in the social and family tissues that emerge within this context.
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Danièle Bélanger (Professor, Department of Geography, Université Laval)
"Migrant workers' vulnerability in Southeast and East Asian context as multi-sited and transnational"
Research on temporary migrant workers in Asia indicates that migrants experience a particularly high degree of precarity as well as various forms of vulnerability in the region. With its highly privatised system that recruits, trains, moves, manages and returns migrants, the Asian labour migration system entails high risks for migrants. In this presentation, I will speak to the importance of considering migrants’ vulnerability in countries of origin prior to departure and upon return. Indeed, the understanding of some of the most extreme forms of vulnerability such as forced labour and human trafficking requires a multi-sited and transnational approach to unravel the processes that lead up to migrants’ exploitation. I will illustrate my argument with evidence from fieldwork research conducted in Vietnam with returnees who worked as temporary migrant workers in East Asian countries.
Danièle Bélanger is Professor of Geography at the Université Laval in Québec City. Until December 2012, she was Professor of Sociology at Western University and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Population, Gender and Development. Her research examines migrants with precarious status, including temporary migrant workers, individuals victims of forced labour, undocumented migrants and marriage migrants. She conducts fieldwork in Asia, Latin America and Canada to document the structural conditions of migrants’ precariousness as well as their agency. She conducts research in French, English, Spanish and Vietnamese with various partners and colleagues. She is the co-author of Rethinking Transit Migration. Precarity, Mobility and Self-Making in Mexico (2015, Palgrave Pivot). Some of her recent migration research is published in The Annals of Social and Political Science, Current Sociology, Asian Population Studies, Asia Pacific Migration Journal and Pacific Affairs. She is the co-editor of three edited books on Vietnam (The Reinvention of Distinction: Modernity and the Middle Class in Urban Vietnam. Springer; Reconfiguring Families in Contemporary Vietnam. Stanford; Gender, Household and State: Doi Moi in Viet Nam. Southeast Asian Series. Cornell).
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Zachariah Su (Master's student, Department of Political Science, McGill University)
Zachariah Su is working on a thesis which aims to compare and contrast the migration policies of Singapore and Canada, as well as the nature of state-society relations over issues of migrant workers’ rights in both countries. As part of this conference, Zachariah will present a paper on migrant labour in Singapore, his country of origin, focusing especially on how migrant vulnerability comes to be produced in the city-state. Besides the topics of labour migration and migrant workers’ rights, his research interests also include international human rights and the ratification of international human rights treaties, democratization, development studies and Southeast Asian politics. After graduating from McGill, Zachariah hopes to contribute to the advocacy of migrant workers’ rights and the equitable treatment of migrant workers either as a volunteer or a full-time member of an NGO. He hopes that his paper presented at the conference will works towards the broader aim of raising awareness about the precarious position of migrant workers across a variety of contexts worldwide.
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Kazue Takamura (Faculty Lecturer, Institute for the Study of International Development, McGill University)
In 2015, Japan’s Immigration Bureau proudly declared that it had successfully reduced the number of “illegal foreign residents” from 250,000 in 2004 to 60,000 in 2015. This tangible “success” is closely tied to the state’s nation-wide campaign to remove “illegal foreign residents” from the territory. Under the campaign, special detection office units were created to identify diverse categories of “deportable foreigners”. The campaign has played a crucial political role in terms of reinforcing nationalistic moral norms through which to justify the state’s inhumane and discriminatory treatment of temporary migrants. The campaign has effectively normalized deportability of temporary migrants who are perceived as a threat to Japan’s social coherence and stability. The intensification of migrant deportability is also aggravated by the Immigration Bureau’s recent shift toward the centralization of foreign residents’ registration and management.
This presentation seeks to locate Japan’s recent immigration reforms within a broader neoliberal labor migration context. I pay particular attention to the explicit, yet underdiscussed, interactions between the discursive construction of “deportable foreigners” by the state and labor exploitation of migrant workers in diverse low-wage private sectors in Japan. I will demonstrate the ways in which vulnerability of temporary migrants is produced through two seemingly conflicting variables, namely Japan’s neoliberal labor market shift toward a significant dependence on cheap and disposable foreign laborers, and the inward-looking immigration policies that magnify deportability of temporary migrants. As Nicholas De Genova (2002) argues, deportability of migrants has an inseparable linkage with labor exploitability of migrants. I argue that discursive construction of “deportable foreigners” effectively ensures both the state’s moral authority over its illiberal immigration practice as well as the market’s neoliberal profitability based on labor flexibility and exploitability.