Limits of solidarity: immigration enforcement, labour control and im/mobility in Washington State

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the entanglement of mobility, immobility, labour control, and immigration control in Washington State in the US. I analyse two cases: first, one where aggressive immigration enforcement has destabilized a local labour regime, impacting workers’ im/mobilities in ways that employers felt made their businesses vulnerable. In this case, employers responded with a politics of protection that involved cooperation with immigrant rights groups, but not in ways that challenge immigrant marginalization. Next, I analyse the H2A visa programme, a temporary foreign worker programme that concentrates power over labour’s mobility with the employer in ways that have made workers vulnerable to unfree work conditions. Together, these cases demonstrate how state control of im/mobilities can do different kinds of work in the context of the struggle between employers and workers. I apply this lens to reimagining labour solidarity that centres the freedom to move rather than the protection of workers’ marginality.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour
• unfreedom
• solidarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The H2B program is an analogous but smaller program that exists for temporary employment of non-agricultural workers in industries such as shellfish and meat processing, and landscaping.

2 For context, in Washington, the agricultural labour force included 95,888 stable or ‘covered’ workers and 34,451 seasonal workers in 2019 (Washington State Employment Security Department, 2021).

3 Farmworkers in Washington State, and in the US as a whole, do not have a right to form of a union. At the time this was written, FUJ holds the only union contract for farmworkers in Washington State. The union is based in Whatcom County and was instrumental in supporting the H2A workers who were fired following their self-organized workplace action.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leah Montange

Leah Montange received her PhD in Human Geography from the University of Toronto in 2021. Her PhD research was supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a Society of Women Geographers Pruitt National Fellowship for Dissertation Research. Her research concerns immigration enforcement, migrant detention, migrant labour, and politics in the US interior. Her work is recently published or forthcoming in Citizenship Studies; ACME: An International Journal of Critical Geographies; Population, Space and Place; and Environment & Planning D: Society and Space.