Immigration & Refugee Law

Collecting the diverse perspectives of scholars, labor organizers, and human-rights advocates, Accountability Across Borders is the first edited collection that connects studies of immigrant integration in host countries to accounts of transnational migrant advocacy efforts, including case studies from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. This volume provides key insights into the new dynamics of migrant civil society as well as the scope and limitations of directives from governmental agencies.

This collection of original essays untangles the two stories that are intertwined in the Fraser decision--the story of the farm workers and their union's attempt to obtain rights at work available to other working people in Ontario, and the tale of judicial discord over the meaning of freedom of association in the context of work. The contributors include trade unionists, lawyers, and academics (several of whom were involved in Fraser as witnesses, parties, lawyers, and interveners). The collection provides the social context out of which the decision emerged, including a photo essay on migrant workers, while at the same time illuminating Fraser's broader jurisprudential and institutional implications.

Disrupting Deportability highlights obstacles confronting temporary migrant workers in Canada seeking to exercise their labor rights. Leah F. Vosko explores the effects of deportability on Mexican nationals participating in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Vosko follows the decade-long legal and political struggle of a group of Mexican SAWP migrants in British Columbia to establish and maintain meaningful collective representation. Her case study reveals how modalities of deportability--such as termination without cause, blacklisting, and attrition--destabilize legally authorized temporary migrant agricultural workers.

Also available online.
Follows Teodoro Bello Martinez, a poverty-stricken father of four living in Central Mexico, and several of his countrymen as they make an annual migration to southern Ontario to pick tomatoes for conditions and wages no local will accept.

Migrant workers, though long welcomed in Canada for their labour, are often excluded from both workplace protections and basic social benefits such as health care, income assistance, and education. Through interviews with migrants and their advocates, Marsden shows that people with precarious migration status face barriers in law, policy, and practice, affecting their ability to address adverse working conditions and their access to institutions such as hospitals, schools, and employment standards boards.

In this book, two longtime volunteers with a Canadian worker center draw on their own experience, in-depth interviews, and academic work from the fields of law, communication studies, and social movement theory, to produce a tactically focused, theoretically informed introduction to immigrant worker organizing in a neoliberal era. Frozzini and Law describe the phenomenon of employment precarity in the context of U.S. and Canadian labor history, explaining how union certification and collective bargaining function under the law.

This report provides a critical analysis of the federal and provincial laws that regulate and constrain the rights of low-wage migrant workers, proposes a rights-based framework to assess their treatment, identifies the ways in which the law constructs migrant workers’ insecurity through each stage of the labour migration cycle, and examines options for systemic change to increase workers’ security.

This collection of essays illuminates the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States over the past two centuries. The authors describe the ways that people have fashioned cross-border lives, as well as the effects of shifting labor markets in facilitating or hindering cross-border movement, the place of formal and informal politics in migration processes and migrants' lives, and the creation and transformation of borderlands economies, societies, and cultures.