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RESEARCH INTERESTS

Transmigration, Geographies of Development, Political Economy of Latin America, Geographies of Inequality

As a second year doctoral student in the Geography department at Queen’s University, I intend to examine an area of the Geography of Development that has drawn limited attention not only at my university but also in my field of interest. While there has been considerable geographic research on immigrant communities in Canada, geographers take little interest in temporary migrant labour from Latin America and the recent strategic approach taken by the Canadian government to enhance the temporary foreign labour market. The proposed doctoral research project is an expansive case study on the recently introduced Foreign Worker Program and the cluster of Guatemalan seasonal farm workers contracted onto farms in Québec. My study will entail a critical examination of the migration management tactics and techniques taken by both the sending and receiving state for the economic advancement of their respective countries and how this in turn has shaped the transnational experience of Guatemalan seasonal migrants.

I propose to advance discussion on temporary migrant worker programs by examining how the Guatemalan government and the seasonal farmworkers have responded to the FWP and the Canadian’s government approach to migration management. With the Guatemalan government incorporating outward migration as a development strategy it becomes important to examine how (1) the people and government of Guatemala are responding to Canadian labour demands and (2) the transnational identity of Guatemalan seasonal farmworkers is (re)shaped by their participation in the FWP and how they in turn interpret their role as a seasonal migrant both in their host and home country. It is both beneficial and necessary to develop a research project that scrutinizes the Canadian government’s strategic management of migrant labour and assesses responses from the labour-sending state and transnational migrant communities, given the limited attention so far given to this issue by Canadian scholars.