The Revolving Door of Im/Migration: Canadian Refugee Protection and the Production of Migrant Workers

Abstract

This paper places the seemingly distinct projects of refugee protection and temporary foreign worker programs alongside one another to reveal their interlinked relationship. I argue that despite its seeming humanitarian exceptionality, refugee protection is deeply implicated in the production of both the category and supply of temporary foreign workers for the Canadian economy. I demonstrate that the defining limitations of refugee law in relation to questions of class and economic deprivation are integral to the conceptualization of the category of the migrant worker. I then engage with statistical data to show that patterns of refugee adjudications in Canada have contributed to maintaining the supply of temporary foreign workers. In particular, I show that Canada has consistently rejected refugee claims from key source countries of migrant workers, namely Jamaica and Mexico. By refusing these claims, Canadian refugee protection has constituted Jamaican and Mexican nationals as inappropriate subjects of permanent protection and, subsequently, primed them for incorporation as temporary foreign workers. In effect, Canadian im/migration has operated like a revolving door: pushing some nationalities out of the permanent protection of refugee status while pulling them into the precarious opening of temporary labour migration.