Troubling “Project Canada”: the Caribbean and the making of “unfree migrant labor”

Abstract

Despite persistent denials, Canada’s relationship to the Caribbean is fraught with concerns about imperialism and racism. While we have experienced a resurgence in “critical” theorizing on capitalist imperialism, including a focus on Canada’s place in global affairs, these interventions fail to meaningfully address labor migration. In taking seriously the racism–imperialism nexus in the context of Canadian–Caribbean relations, I argue that the Canadian state is an imperialist state which has sought to secure an empire abroad through its approach to agricultural labor migration from the Caribbean. Focused on the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, I show how migrant labor unfreedom is organized through the modern national state system and uneven development, understood in the racialized context of neoliberal capitalist globalization. The deployment of Caribbean seasonal agricultural labor in Canada functions through transnational regulation rooted in the socio-historico-legal development of the Caribbean and Canada as longstanding – yet unequal – sites of production of politico-legal authority and unfree labor.

En dépit d’un déni persistant, les liens que le Canada entretient avec les Caraïbes sont empreints de motifs impérialistes et racistes. Alors que nous avons vu émerger une résurgence de la théorie dite « critique » concernant l’impérialisme capitaliste, et notamment un intérêt particulier ayant trait à la place du Canada dans les affaires globales, ces interventions peinent à véritablement rendre compte des migrations de la main-d’œuvre. Dans cet article, je prends au sérieux le noyau racisme-impérialisme dans le contexte des relations entre Canada et Caraïbes, et avance que l’Etat canadien est de type impérialiste et a voulu établir un empire extérieur par le biais de la main d’œuvre agricole recrutée parmi les migrants venus des Caraïbes. A travers le Programme de Main-d’œuvre de Migrants Agricoles Saisonniers [Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program], je montre que le système de l’Etat national moderne et les développements asymétriques conditionnent l’absence de liberté des employés saisonniers migrants, dans le contexte racial de la mondialisation néolibérale capitaliste. Le déploiement d’une main-d’œuvre de migrants saisonniers d’origine caribéenne au Canada est rendu possible par une régulation transnationale qui s’enracine dans le développement sociohistorique et légal des Caraïbes et du Canada, pris ici comme des sites durables (mais inégaux) producteurs d’une autorité politique et légale et d’un travail non-libre.

Keywords:

• migrant labor
• racism
• Canada–Caribbean
• migration
• agriculture
• imperialism
• Left nationalism

Notes

1. Although not taken up in this article, I wish to acknowledge the crucial gendered class dimensions of neoliberal capitalist globalization (see e.g. Abigail and Stasiulis 2005). Crucially, Canada commenced its temporary labour migration regime with the utilization of female domestic workers from the Caribbean, in a predecessor to the Live-In Caregiver Program (see Bakan and Stasiulis 1997; Calliste 1991; Henry 1968). Work needs to be done to connect the utilization of Caribbean domestic workers within the argument of this article. Further, global food production is largely done by women (McMichael 2012, 100) and, as such, despite the focus on the SAWP, which largely – but not solely – recruits men, the omission of the gendered impacts of migrant labor production is glaringly absent from this analysis. My forthcoming work will seek to fill this void.

2. My thesis, therefore, turns on a rejection of the unsatisfactory resort to dependency theory’s (Frank 1969) “functionalist explanation” of the relationship between the core and peripheral states in which development and underdevelopment – and more recently, globalization – are regarded as “two sides of the same coin” or as “a zero-sum game” (Kiely 2007, 16–18; see also McMichael 2012, 6–7). My contention is that attentiveness to contemporary forms of imperialism requires descriptive and explanatory analyses, which go beyond an “imperial masters” and “colonial subjects” (Wood 2003, 129) binary framing, and which see beyond imperialism as merely an external imposition of forces, pressures, or constraints, to address the complex role of agency of states of the global South and accordant class analysis accounting for the role of local governing elites.

3. I use the term anti-imperialist to denote the resurgent Marxist-inflected debates and discussions on imperialism, including Wood (2003), Harvey (2003), Callinicos (2009), Mooers (2006), Kiely (2010), Panitch and Gindin (2003, 2004). In this I draw a distinction from liberal theories of imperialism, of which Ignatieff (2003) and Ferguson (2004) present two prominent examples. For a critique of this “imperialism lite” thesis see any or all of the aforementioned anti-imperialist interventions.

4. The structural dimensions of the SAWP are extensively documented in the existing literature (Satzewich 1991; André 1990) and thus not addressed in any detail here.

5. It should be evident that the account presented here, despite noted quibbles, remains heavily indebted to the insights presented by Satzewich. Quite importantly, Satzewich carefully documents the almost two-decade-long attempt by Caribbean states, and growers in southwestern Ontario, to secure entry of Jamaican labor (see Satzewich 1991, chapter 6). This includes reference to the Minister of Manpower and Immigration’s ultimate recommendation to Cabinet supporting entry, which states that “it is important that any importation of labour should be under strictly controlled conditions” (Satzewich 1991, 168). It also should be noted that Satzewich identifies the role of “[U]neven development associated with European colonialism and imperialism” in the creation of Caribbean surplus labor and that Caribbean states have “actively encouraged” migration abroad “to ease social and economic contradictions which have resulted from underdevelopment” (Satzewich 1991, 129–130). That said, the claim here is that the analysis does not extend beyond this descriptive content to situate the regulatory role of Caribbean sending states in the SAWP; or, put differently, a focus on the modes of incorporation of foreign labor in Canada is incomplete without an understanding of the mobilization work of labor-sending states.

6. Hilbourne Watson (1989) subsequently disavowed and rethought a core dimension of his thesis, a point which escaped André’s analysis perhaps because it occurred around the time of publication of his own account.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrian A. Smith

Adrian A. Smith teaches at Carleton University.