Testing the Boundaries of Employer-Driven Agricultural Migration: Privatization and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, 2002-2011
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent growth of Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) parallels the international trend toward the revival of guestworker programs. This growth, however, is simply the most visible sign of a fundamental restructuring of the institutional framework that governs the program. This shift is rooted in a broader transformation of the political economy of the Canadian state that has resulted in a new form of migration control, one which embodies the logic and practices of neoliberalism - a paradigm revolving around the privatization and retrenchment of certain state functions, the globalization of markets, and the construction of economically-competitive individuals. In the context of the TFWP, this has resulted in an "offloading" of administrative functions from the federal government to third party actors, as well as the creation of a more employer-driven TFWP that is sensitive to businesses' demands for a flexible and reliable labour pool. This thesis employs a case study of the TFWP's agricultural components during the period of 2002 until 2011, drawing in large part on federal ministerial documentation obtained through the Access to Information Act. It questions why this era of increasing privatization reversed course and culminated in the creation of a new government program, the Agricultural Stream. The analysis pursued in this study indicates that while there are certain roles and functions concerning the recruitment of migrant labour that the Canadian state has undoubtedly vacated, it has nevertheless adopted a new, active role that involves mitigating the unintended consequences of privatized migration control as a means of supporting the continued viability of the TFWP. This effort drove the creation of Agricultural Stream, which replaced a legally-embattled "privatized" guestworker program developed by the International Organization for Migration on behalf of the Quebec growers' association FERME and the government of Guatemala. This countertrend should caution against conflating neoliberalism and privatization or accepting the two as necessarily harmonious, suggesting that movements towards privatization become vulnerable and subject to reversal should they pose complications for employers. This in turn stresses a reading of both the "ideal" and "practice" of neoliberalism as it concerns privatized migration control.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".