Abstract
While migrant workers play an important role in maintaining the Canadian work force, unlike permanent residents and Canadian citizens, they are permitted to work in Canada only for short durations, with limitations placed on who they can work for, where they can live, and what services they have available to support them. The uneven allocation of rights to immigrants and migrants is enabled by a multifaceted immigration bureaucracy and the application of what I term immigration classifications. This analysis applies the lens of classification theory to examine the multilayered work that classifications do in the management of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP) and access to settlement services. It finds that, built into immigration classifications is a prioritization of economic considerations of what make immigrants desirable for long-term settlement in Canada. These considerations further shape understandings of the role the state should take in supporting immigrants and migrants. This economic-focused perspective is prioritized at the expense of considerations of the human rights and settlement needs of migrant workers, leaving them systematically marginalized and vulnerable to abuse.
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Notes
While I interrogate this category of “temporary foreign worker,” I follow the lead of scholars and activists in using the term temporary migrants, or “migrant worker,” throughout this piece (Buklaschuk 2015; Faraday 2012; Hennebry 2012; Lowe 2010; Migrant Workers Alliance for Change 2014; Preisbisch 2010; Sharma 2012).
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Acknowledgements
This paper is adapted from my Masters of Information Thesis, “The Classifying Work of Immigration Policies in Canada: A Critical Analysis of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program and Access to Settlement Services” (2014). I would like to acknowledge the contributions of my thesis committee: Leslie Shade, Nadia Caidi, and Ted Richmond, for their support in this project. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support I have received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Roberts, S.E. The Bureaucratic and Political Work of Immigration Classifications: an Analysis of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program and Access to Settlement Services in Canada. Int. Migration & Integration 21, 973–992 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-019-00693-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-019-00693-w