Grown Close to Home™: Migrant Farmworker (Im)mobilities and Unfreedom on Canadian Family Farms

Abstract

Migrant farmworkers in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) are bound by unfree labor relations. Migrants are employed by and live adjacent to Canadian family farms. Extending current research on Canada's SAWP, I specifically conceptualize the family farm as a locus of unfree labor relations. The article identifies how employers impose mobility controls around migrants' freedom to leave their workplaces, circumscribing where, how, and when migrants can circulate in Canadian communities. Growers use discourses and practices of paternal care and protection to justify these controls, revealing the familial features of employer–employee relationships. Harnessing a relational understanding of the family farm, I argue that worker (im)mobilities reveal key features of extant family farm relationships. Direct involvement by state officials and legal frameworks undergirding the SAWP effectively enable and sanction employer practices. Contributing to mobilities research, I identify how family farms exercise and directly benefit from state-sanctioned forms of power that allow them to restrict and regulate migrants' mobilities at localized levels. With relevance to both Canadian and U.S. contexts, the power to “fix” farm labor in place is highly desirable for family farms as a labor control mechanism. Material geographies of everyday (im)mobility help employers and states secure high levels of labor control from this low-wage migrant labor force. Arguments are based on qualitative research with fifteen migrant farmworkers employed on ten farms in Norfolk County, Ontario, Canada, as well as additional interviews with sending government officials, local civil society, and growers.