This article explores precarity as a conceptual framework to understand the intersection of migration and low-waged work in the global south. Using a case study of cross-border migrant domestic workers in South Africa, I discuss current debates on framing and understanding precarity, especially in the global south, and test its use as a conceptual framework to understand the everyday lived experiences and strategies of a group that face multiple forms of exclusion and vulnerability. I argue that a form of negotiated (...) precarity, defined as transactions which provide opportunities for survival but also render people vulnerable, can be a useful way to make sense of questions around legality and formality in the context of poorly protected work, insecure citizenship and social exclusion. Precarity as a negotiated strategy shows the ways in which people interact with systems and institutions and foregrounds their agency. But it also illustrates that the negative outcomes inherent in more traditional notions of precarity, expressed in physical and economic vulnerability, and discrimination in employment relations, mostly hurt the poor. This suggests the importance of an intersectional approach to understanding precarity in labour migration studies. (shrink)

This paper explores political engagement by Guatemalans who seasonally migrate to Canada as contracted agricultural workers. Since 2003, an ever-increasing number of Guatemalans have pursued economic opportunities in Canadian fields and greenhouses as participants in a labour migration scheme brokered by the International Organization for Migration called the Temporary Agricultural Workers to Canada Project. While some describe this labour migration as a win-win situation for employers and migrant workers, for too many of these migrants, work in Canada has demanded sacrifices (...) and losses, not the least of which of their human rights and dignity at the hands of employers and administrators of the TAWC Project. While there is a great deal at stake for these migrants should they denounce mistreatment, given the climate of fear created by the employer-driven nature of the TAWC project, a growing number of them have been pushed to do so. With the support of allies that encourage political empowerment of migrant workers, black-listed Guatemalans have formed a political advocacy group - Asociación de Guatemaltecos Unidos por Nuestros Derechos - aimed at fighting for the realization of their rights and redressing cases of wrongdoing. Based on workers’ testimonies and other institutional interviews, this paper outlines the difficulties workers have experienced as labour migrants to Canada, the context of vulnerability that largely impedes them from denouncing mistreatment, and the development and activities of AGUND. Informed by literature on political organizing, it also identifies the factors that have both impeded and encouraged political activity on the part of these disenfranchised yet determined Guatemalan workers. (shrink)

This article explores how the intersections of gendered, racialized and neoliberal dynamics reproduce social inequality and shape the violence that nurses face. Grounded in the interviews and focus groups conducted with a purposeful sample of 17 registered nurses (RNs) and registered practical nurses (RPNs) currently working in Ontario's mental health sector, our analysis underscores the need to move beyond reductionist notions of violence as simply individual physical or psychological events. While acknowledging that violence is a very real and disturbing experience (...) for individual nurses, our article casts light on the importance of a broader, power structure analysis of violence experienced by nurses in this sector, arguing that effective redress lies beyond blame shifting between clients/patients and nurses. Our analysis illustrates how assumptions about gender, race and care operate in the context of global, neoliberal forces to reinforce, intensify and create, as well as obscure, structural violence through mechanisms of individualization and normalization. (shrink)

Despite the fact that there is unmet demand for nurses in health services around the world, some nurses migrate to destination countries to work as domestic workers. According to the literature, these nurses experience contradictions in class mobility and are at increased risk of exploitation and abuse. This article presents a critical discussion of the migration of nurses as domestic workers using the concept of ‘global care chain’. Although several scholars have used the concept of global care chains to illustrate (...) south to north migration of domestic workers and nurses, there is a paucity of literature on the migration of nurses to destination countries as domestic workers. The migration of nurses to destination countries as domestic workers involves the extraction of reproductive and skilled care labor without adequate compensatory mechanisms to such skilled nurses. Using the case of the Canadian Live‐in Caregiver Program, the study illustrates how the global movement of internationally educated nurses as migrant domestic workers reinforces inequities that are structured along the power gradient of gender, class, race, nationality, and ethnicity, especially within an era of global nursing shortage. (shrink)

There is limited research into the situations of people living with precarious status in Canada, which includes people whose legal status is in-process, undocumented, or unauthorized, many of whom entered the country with a temporary resident visa, through family sponsorship arrangements, or as refugee claimants. In 2005, a community-university alliance sought to carry out a research study of the lived experiences of people living with precarious status. In this paper, we describe our negotiation of the ethics review process at a (...) Canadian university and the ethical, legal, and methodological issues that emerged. Although being able to guarantee our participants complete confidentiality was essential to the viability of the project due to their vulnerability to detention or deportation, we discovered that the Canadian legal framework limited us to being able to offer them confidentiality “to the fullest extent possible by law.” One way to overcome this conflict would have been through the construction of a Wigmore defence, in which we would document that the research would not be possible without assurance of our participants’ confidentiality. Such a defence would be tested in court if our research records were subpoenaed by immigration enforcement authorities. Rather than take the risk that this defence would not be successful and would result in our participants being deported, we altered the research methods from using multiple interviews to establish trust (which would have required that we store participants’ contact information) to meeting participants only once to discuss their experiences of living with precarious legal status in Canada. Our encounter with the ‘myth of confidentiality’ raised questions about the policing of knowledge production. (shrink)

This article examines how migrant and immigrant sex workers have been rendered invisible before the courts and parliament in the reform of laws regarding sex work in Canada. A discourse analysis of the expansive legal record in the Bedford case and the transcripts of Parliamentary debates and testimony before Standing Committees confirm the lack of nuanced discussion on how criminal law reform could impact migrant and immigrant sex workers. As such, while the case of Bedford and the resulting change in (...) the law made by Parliament have been celebrated as a win for some sex workers as an acknowledgment, recognition and judicial validation of experiences by legal institutions of sex workers, a sub-group of women – migrant and immigrant sex workers – remain in the shadows. This article examines how law excludes migrant and immigrant sex workers; it is a starting point for research on how migrant and immigrant sex workers may participate in future legal reform. (shrink)

Research on migrant care and domestic workers has focused on their multiple dislocations and exclusions in the diaspora, analysing a highly gendered global economy of care and domestic work. This article investigates the role of ritual performance and spirituality in female care workers’ projects of migration and in the emergence of their feminized and racialized subjectivities. On the basis of anthropological research in Israel and the Philippines, it analyses Filipina care workers’ narratives of migration to Israel as a form of (...) spiritual transformation, investigating their spiritual practices and emphasis on Christian morals like ‘compassion’ and ‘patience’ for their work. Israel, a country that has recruited Filipinos as carers for the elderly since the 1990s, is a destination country highly valued among Filipino Christians as the ‘Holy Land’. Focusing on evangelical Christians, the article portrays four women for whom migration to Israel signifies an ethical career: turning into ‘Holy Land’ pilgrims, Christ-like activists and missionaries, they are engaged in a deeply self-transforming journey. Rooting themselves in Christian spiritualities and morals, these women negotiate and ‘inhabit’ rather than openly challenge existing gender norms. Engaged in corporeal disciplining of their selves during affectively demanding care work, and in migration more generally, their moves are analysed as a form of ethical formation. (shrink)

Scholars have identified crimmigration – or the criminalization of “irregular” migration in law – as a key issue affecting migrant access to justice in contemporary immigrant-receiving societies. Yet the gendered and racialized implications of crimmigration for diverse migrant populations remains underdeveloped in this literature. This study advances a feminist intersectional approach to crimmigration and migrant justice in Canada. I add to recent research showing how punitive immigration controls disproportionately affect racialized men from the global south, constituting what Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo (...) have called a “gendered racial removal program”. In my study, I shift analytical attention to consider the effects of the contemporary crimmigration system on migrant women survivors of gender-based violence. While such cases constitute a small sub-group within a larger population of migrants in detention, nevertheless scholarly attention to this group can expose the multiple axes along which state power is enacted – an analytical strategy that foundational scholars like Crenshaw used to theorize “structural intersectionality” in the US. In focusing on crimmigration in the Canadian context, I draw attention to the growing nexus between migration, security, and gender-based violence that has emerged alongside other processes of crimmigration. I then provide a case analysis of the 2013 death while in custody of Lucía Dominga Vega Jiménez, an “undocumented” migrant woman from Mexico. My analysis illustrates how migrant women’s strategies to survive gender-based violence are re-cast as grounds for their detention and removal, constituting what I argue is a criminalization of survivorship.The research overall demonstrates the centrality of gendered and racialized structural violence in crimmigration processes by challenging more universalist approaches to migrant justice. (shrink)