Understanding Temporary Labour Migration through a Settler Colonial Lens: A Critical Analysis of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and International Education Strategy

The relationship between differential inclusion of workers migrating for employment internationally and the dispossession and assimilation of Indigenous people and lands is a growing area of study within critical migration studies. Less attention has been paid, however, to how (im)migration policies that foster migrant worker precariousness also extend settler colonial practices. Scholars situated in the transdisciplinary fields of Black Studies and Indigenous Studies have long theorized nation-state building as exclusionary to Black and Indigenous life, and reliant on limited mobilities and dispossession of Black and Indigenous peoples. Bridging this scholarship with critical migration studies, in this article we explore how policies regulating international migration for employment to Canada on temporary bases reflect and sustain the settler-colonial context in which they operate. We outline three logics of settler colonialism that underpin policies governing temporary migration for employment to Canada: (1) the racialized hierarchization of life and knowledge; (2) the reliance on technologies of governing, which foster unequal administrative burdens; and (3) the disruption of people’s relationships to land and livelihoods. Analyzing Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and International Education Strategy, we illustrate how migration policies reinforce and replicate settler colonial practices.