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Diverging Ideologies and Converging Outcomes: Consistency and Exploitation across Australia's and Canada's Temporary Foreign Labour Programs
Thu, November 20, 1:15 to 2:45pm, TBAAbstract
Focused on several cohorts of migrant workers, this paper elaborates two features of migrant labour recruitment. 1) We begin with the ubiquity of migrant labour exploitation, highlighting the consistency of migrant labour extraction to consider how immigration management, conditioned by market-state regimes, benefits capital to the detriment of workers. From there, 2) we consider the web of policy implications that, originating in receiving-states, condition the opportunities available to and navigated by migrant workers and their kin. At opposite ends of the world, the migrant receiving states of Australia and Canada are united in their settler colonial histories, as well as their associated longstanding reliance on migrants and their labour. Whereas labour migration to both countries was once predominantly permanent, increasingly Australia and Canada have come to favour short-term migration policies which offer few pathways to permanence, firmly—in the case of our research—relegating the more intimate and costly processes of social reproduction to sending states, while ensuring on-going access to relatively cheap, highly productive labour for Canadian and Australian employers. Drawing on case studies from our respective research into Australia’s Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme and Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), we consider the interactions between Australia’s and Canada’s migration management regimes, as well as their unique ideological framings, to elaborate how these differently rationalized (PALM as an international development program; the TFWP as safeguard for depreciated labour markets), continue to deliver similar outcomes that reverberate across the Pacific Islands, the Philippines, and Latin America.