Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada ed. by Luin Goldring, Patricia Landolt, and: Legislated Inequality: Temporary Labour Migration in Canada ed. by Patti Tamara Lenard, Christine Straehle (review)

Two recent collections focus on the production of precarious conditions for migrants in Canada. Legislated Inequality: Temporary Labour Migration in Canada, edited by Patti Tamara Lenard and Christine Straehle, explicitly adopts an ethical perspective that takes the standpoint of migrant workers. Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, edited by Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt, shares this perspective, although its main approach is sociological. Both collections nicely explain and illustrate how immigration rules interact with conceptions of citizenship in a globally interconnected and deeply unequal world in ways that create social subordination at the level of the individual migrant. Each illuminates the processes by which migrants who cross national boundaries in order to work in Canada are inserted into the Canadian labour market, and how the legal status of migrants in Canada shapes their social location and capacity to access social entitlements and employment-related rights. Both collections are interdisciplinary, and both deploy a range of different research methods. Both books conclude that the different migration streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Workers’ Program construct different legal statuses for migrant workers that place them in precarious social locations and make them vulnerable to work-related exploitation. Each collection contributes to the emerging literature that critically assesses Canada’s increasing reliance on temporary migrant workers.

The scope and focus of the two collections differ slightly. Legislated Inequality concentrates exclusively on the streams of the temporary migration program that recruits workers who are regarded as “low-skilled,” whereas Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship considers a broader range of migrant statuses, including low-skilled migrant workers, irregular migrants, and refugees.

Lenard and Straehle’s collection considers “whether the expansion of low-skilled temporary migration poses urgent moral challenges that must be addressed” (p. 7). Given that Lenard and Straehle describe themselves as moral philosophers this approach is not surprising. In a helpful introduction, they explain why, from what they describe as a liberal democratic perspective, the three main low-skilled migrant worker streams are not morally acceptable. They identify three features that distinguish the earlier approach to immigration, which fostered permanent settlement, from the contemporary approach, which relies on low-skilled temporary worker programs. These features are shift from the state to employers in the selection of migrants for work in Canada, few and very restrictive pathways for moving to a more permanent resident status, and the reintroduction, albeit in an “indirect” way, of race as a barrier to membership in Canadian society. Drawing on the findings and arguments of their contributors, Lenard and Straehle identify two moral failings of the low-skilled programs: “[F]irst, that low-skilled migrants are treated as commodities rather than as individuals or even proto-citizens; and, second, that the injustice perpetrated on temporary migrants stems from their inability to access citizenship status” (p. 12). They focus on the juridical construction of inequality and its intersection with other dimensions of unfreedom to criticize contemporary Canadian immigration policy. These themes run throughout each of the book’s subsequent twelve chapters.

In the first chapter, Nandita Sharma goes beyond a liberal democratic frame. She provides a trenchant critique of nationalism and citizenship as normative discourses and institutional arrangements for organizing social recognition and economic participation, as well as an alternative political imaginary. The following chapters critically evaluate the three low-skilled migrant worker programs and examine the pathways for obtaining a more secure legal status. Five of these chapters focus on agricultural workers, and several contrast the two programs used to recruit migrants to work in the agricultural sector. Jenna Hennebry and Janet McLaughlin consider the long-standing Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), while Christine Hughes examines the more recent use...