The Rural-Migration Nexus: Global Problems, Rural Issues 3031180410, 9783031180415

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RETHINKING RURAL

The Rural-Migration Nexus Global Problems, Rural Issues

Edited by  Nathan Kerrigan · Philomena de Lima

Rethinking Rural Series Editors

Philomena de Lima Centre for Remote and Rural Studies University of the Highlands and Islands Inverness, UK Belinda Leach Guelph, ON, Canada

This series will foreground rural places and communities as diverse, mutually constitutive and intrinsic to contemporary Sociology scholarship, deeply imbricated in globalisation and colonisation processes stretched across national spaces. This is in contrast to an urban focus which is the implicit norm where (urban) place often can appear as the sole backdrop to social life. Rather than rural places being marginal to Sociology, this series emphasises these places as embodying plural visions, voices and experiences which are fundamental to making sense of places as sites of solidarity, contestation and disruption in different national contexts.

Nathan Kerrigan  •  Philomena de Lima Editors

The Rural-Migration Nexus Global Problems, Rural Issues

Editors Nathan Kerrigan School of Social Sciences Birmingham City University Birmingham, UK

Philomena de Lima Centre for Living Sustainability University of the Highlands and Islands Inverness, UK

ISSN 2730-7123     ISSN 2730-7131 (electronic) Rethinking Rural ISBN 978-3-031-18041-5    ISBN 978-3-031-18042-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18042-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Credit: Ariel Skelley This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This edited collection began, like all good ideas, as a conversation between us as co-editors. We wanted to address the lacunae in rural migration literature on the global-rural simultaneity of international migration. We were interested in exploring the ways in which this process shapes particular rural places and communities, as well as the exclusion, exploitation and shifting boundaries of belonging for migrants residing and working in rural regions of the ‘Global North’. This book has taken an immense amount of work, taking—because of the global Covid-19 pandemic— almost five years to complete. The edited collection would not have become a reality without the encouragement and support of several people. Firstly, thanks must go to Palgrave Macmillan for contracting the book. In particularly, a massive thank you to Sharla Plant who arranged to meet Nathan during the 2017 British Sociological Association conference to discuss the initial idea(s) of the project. Also, to Liam Inscoe-Jones and Corrine Li who took over from Sharla while she was on maternity leave. We are truly grateful for your patience in waiting for the submission of the final manuscript. We would like to acknowledge the support of The Rural Policy Learning Commons (RPLC, Canada) and to Philomena’s colleagues in this journey, in particular Linamar Campos-Flores and Belinda Leach. The RPLC Migration in Remote and Rural Areas (MIRRA) network provided an opportunity to identify and address gaps in discourses on rural international migration and to identify a range of contributions that help to address these gaps. The conclusion, and in particular, the section on translocality draws on a literature review undertaken by Alexandra Mirowski v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Rabelo de Souza at the University of Guelph under the supervision of Belinda Leach and Philomena. Finally, thank you to all the contributors of this edited collection. Tiina Sotkasiira, Dina Bolokan, Ewa Dabrowska-Miciula, Linamar Campos-­ Flores, Adriana Leona Rosales-Mendoza, Geraldine Anne Lee-Treweek, Branislav Radeljić, Marko Stojanović, Branka Krivokapic-skoko, Katherine Watson and Jock Collins. Without your chapters, there would not be a book. You have all helped to contribute to the development of what we have called the ‘rural-migration nexus’. We hope you have enjoyed being part of this project as much as we have. –Nathan Kerrigan and Philomena de Lima

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Nathan Kerrigan and Philomena de Lima Globalising the Rural, Ruralising the Global   4 Rural Migration as Global-Local Interdependencies in the Context of the Global North   8 The Rural-Migration Nexus  12 Structure of the Book  14 References  18 2 Should  I Stay or Should I Go? Developing Migrant-led Understandings of Welcoming Rural Communities 23 Tiina Sotkasiira Introduction  23 Background to the Research  25 Discursive, Political and Lived Dimensions of a ‘Welcoming Community’  30 Data Analysis  31 The Analysis of Welcome as Having, Loving and Being  34 Welcome by Being Part of Loving Relationships  36 Being and Personal Fulfilment  39 Three Dimensions of Welcoming and Well-being  41 Conclusion: The Ambiguous Experiences of Welcoming in Rural Finland  44 References  45 vii

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Contents

3 On  the Hypermobility of Agricultural Workers in Europe: Life Courses Between Rural Moldova and Switzerland/ the EU 51 Dina Bolokan Introduction  51 The Agricultural Labour Market in Switzerland and Europe  53 Translocal Life Course Perspectives Within a Post-/Decolonial Global Ethnography Approach  56 Translocal Life Trajectories of Workers from Moldova to Switzerland and the EU  59 On Hypermobility: Personal Challenges and Structural Configurations  67 Conclusion  71 References  73 4 ‘Caging  All Tigers’: Pathways to Occupational Health and Safety for Transnational Agricultural Workers in Canada 79 Ewa Dabrowska-Miciula Introduction  79 Methods  82 Hierarchy of Prevention in Agriculture and Interventions in Canada  83 Temporary Migrant Labour in Canadian Agriculture  86 Results  89 Discussion  99 Conclusion 103 References 104 5 Living  Better but Separated: The Emotional Impacts of the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme on Transmigrant Workers111 Linamar Campos-Flores and Adriana Leona Rosales-Mendoza Introduction 111 Context: The Canadian Seasonal and Temporary Agricultural Workers Programme and the Recruitment of Mexican Workers 113 Methodology 125 Distress among Chiapanecan and Yucatecan Workers 128 Emotional Images 129 Conclusion 133 References 136

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6 Migrants,  Refugees and Settlement Camps in the Rural and Urban Fringes of Serbia: Cultural Repertoires, Changing Understandings and Imaginings of the Other141 Geraldine Lee-Treweek, Branislav Radeljić, and Marko ­Stojanović Introduction 141 On the Road to Change: The Rural and Urban Fringe as Collateral Space? 143 Methods and Cultural Repertoires Theory 151 Changing Attitudes: Borders, Politics and Expediency 152 Concerns Around Culture, Extremism and Narratives of Risk 155 Discussion 163 Conclusion 166 References 167 7 Being  Global and Being Regional: Refugee Entrepreneurship in Regional Australia171 Branka Krivokapic-skoko, Katherine Watson, and Jock Collins Introduction 171 Settlement of Refugees and Humanitarian Migrants in Regional and Rural Australia: An Overview 174 Refugee Entrepreneurs: Theoretical and Empirical Overviews 177 From Around the World to Regional and Rural Australia: Researching Refugee Entrepreneurship 182 Global Connections with Rural Australia 184 Rural-Global Connections 191 Conclusion 193 References 194 8 Conclusion201 Nathan Kerrigan and Philomena de Lima Rural Translocality and Migration 204 Emotional Well-Being and Geographies 207 Welcoming Migrants and (Hostile) Hospitality 211 Future Directions 216 References 218 Index223

Notes on Contributors

Dina Bolokan  is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Dina Bolokan’s work deals with the political economy of labour migration within the agricultural sector in Europe. Her main research areas and interests are located within the fields of decolonial thought, postcolonial and post-Soviet studies, critical border studies, and feminist epistemologies. Linamar  Campos-Flores is a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec-Société et Culture. Her research interests include the role of emotions in human spatial interactions, migration, gender, human rights, and the use of participatory audio-visual techniques in research. Jock  Collins is Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. His research interests are around the interdisciplinary study of immigration and cultural diversity in the economy and society. He is the author or co-author of ten books and of over 100 articles in international and national academic journals and book chapters. Ewa Dabrowska-Miciula  is a Professor at Conestoga College, Ontario. She is a medical geographer, certified in agricultural safety by the International Society of Agricultural Safety and Health. Her published works focus on rural health, rural labour migration, occupational safety, and equity in multidisciplinary projects within Canadian provinces.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Branka Krivokapic-skoko  is a Professor of Management at Charles Sturt University, Australia. She has published extensively on revitalisation of regional and rural Australia and regional migration. She recently co-­ authored Cosmopolitan place making in Australia: Immigrant minorities and the built environment in cities, regional and rural areas, and it was published by Palgrave Macmillan. Geraldine Lee-Treweek  is Professor of Knowledge Exchange (KE) and Social Justice at Birmingham City University, UK. A sociologist and policy analyst who has moved into interdisciplinary working, the focus of Lee-­ Treweek’s extensive funded portfolio is applied transnational research and KE, using intersectional and participatory approaches to challenge social injustice and exclusions. Recent projects have focused on migration, refugees, and racism; addressing extremism and hate on higher education (HE) campuses; student mental health and wellbeing; youth and digital inclusion, and capacity building in higher education on the borders of Europe. Adriana  Leona  Rosales-Mendoza  is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers. She is a professor at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional-Ajusco, and is in charge of the Master’s Program in Sexuality Studies. She conducts research on migration, gender, emotions, sexuality, and human rights. Branislav Radeljić  is Professor of International Relations at Necmettin Erbakan University, Konya, and Visiting Professor of European Politics at Antonio de Nebrija University, Madrid. He is the author and editor of numerous publications dealing with European Union, East European and Western Balkan political and socioeconomic developments. Tiina Sotkasiira  is an Associate Professor of Social and Public Policy at the University of Eastern Finland. Her main areas of research are international migration and ethnic relations. She has written several books, peer reviewed articles and book chapters and has a keen interest in methodological development. Marko Stojanović  is one of the Directors of the Western Balkans Institute (WEBIN), Belgrade, Serbia, and he leads the organisation’s training academy and project management development. He has eleven years of professional development and implementation experience in collaborative and cooperation projects in Serbia and the Western Balkans, funded under the

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auspices of EuropAid, Erasmus+ and HORIZON p ­ rogrammes, and UN agencies. His work has primarily focused on social inclusion of youth, Roma communities, and other vulnerable groups and educational capacity building in schools and higher education (HE) and public policy analysis. Katherine  Watson  received her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2011 and has been working with University of Technology Sydney. She co-authored Compulsory schooling in Australia (2016), and currently coordinates an Australian Research Council-funded longitudinal study of the settlement experiences of refugees across urban and regional communities.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Six steps to safety framework based on hierarchy of control in agriculture85 Fig. 5.1 CSAWP: Mexicans entering Canada 1974–2020. Source: Authors, with data from the Ministry of Labour, Mexico 114 Fig. 5.2 Arriaga: Participation in the CSAWP by Canadian province of destination 2010–2020. Source: Authors with data from Ministry of Labour, Mexico 116 Fig. 5.3 Yucatán. Participation in the CSAWP by Canadian province of destination 2010–2020. Source: Authors with data from Ministry of Labour, Mexico 116 Fig. 6.1 Diagram showing the typical ‘Balkan Corridor’ migration route. Source: Abikova and Piotrowicz (2021). 145 Fig. 7.1 Percentage of refugees settling outside Australian capital cities, 1996–2011. Source: adapted from Hugo et al. (2015: 74) 175

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Examples of welcoming activities 32 Table 2.2 Policy, discursive and lived dimensions of welcome 42 Table 4.1 Number of positions approved in agriculture under the Temporary Foreign Worker Programme (TFWP) for international migrants by programme type from 2010 to 2018 88 Table 4.2 TAWs’ occupational health and safety trajectories located within intersecting spheres of concern in literature from 2010 to 2020 90 Table 4.3 Actions and priorities for enhancing injury prevention among TAWs in Canada (modified from Agrivita Canada, 2017: 21) 101 Table 5.1 Characteristics of the CSAWP workers interviewed 119 Table 5.2 Categories of analyses used in our research 127 Table 7.1 Location of settlement and country of origin/ethnicity of informants184

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Nathan Kerrigan and Philomena de Lima

We are living in a dynamic and globalising world, intensified by cheap transport and new technologies resulting in opportunities for some and multiple risks, dangers, and insecurities for others across most regions of the world. One of the most recent highlighted globalised changes to have had an impact on people’s daily lives is migration. Globalisation underpinned by the drive for increasing profit margins has resulted in deepening the ties between places—rural and urban—by distanciating time-space through developments in technological communications, the internet and digital revolution, cheap air travel, and multiculture (Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1989; Massey, 1994). This has also resulted in globalised markets becoming increasingly reliant on migrant labour. Whilst it is important to

N. Kerrigan (*) School of Social Sciences, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] P. de Lima Centre for Living Sustainability, University of the Highlands and Islands, Inverness, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Kerrigan, P. de Lima (eds.), The Rural-Migration Nexus, Rethinking Rural, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18042-2_1

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recognise that the geographical scope of countries implicated in labour migration has increased across most regions of the world, this edited collection includes contributions from rural areas in Europe, Canada, and Australia. Although wealthy nation states such as Britain, most EU member states, Australia, and Canada benefit from the employment of low-­ wage, mostly temporary migrant labour, there are multiple economic, political, and social consequences for the migrants and the local communities they migrate to. For instance, migrants are restricted to the types of employment opportunities afforded to them; often working in low-paid, low-skilled jobs in a wide range of sectors such as tourism, care, agriculture, manufacturing, and construction (de Lima & Carvajal, 2020). They also face issues of integration, exclusion, and racism within the local communities where they reside. They are often used as ‘scapegoats’ in political discourses around the precariousness of the labour market and the erosion of national social and welfare infrastructures. It is widely acknowledged that one of the major global trends arising out of globalisation is the widening gap of inequalities within and across nation states (United Nations, 2020a, 2020b). In the context of these widening national and global inequalities aided by the media and political actors, some sections of the population have attributed their declining standards of living to an increase in migration. Although there are deeper structural issues at the national and global levels that have impacted on people’s lives, it is migration that is made a visible scapegoat for these other structural concerns: for example, economic austerity and cutbacks, the gig economy, and the precarity of work that many sections of the worldwide population are experiencing and are of legitimate concern (Seidler, 2018). Migration and its perceived impact on standards of living is one of the factors that led the British public (in England and Wales in particular) to vote 52–48% in favour of leaving the European Union on 23 June 2016 (Outhwaite, 2017). The vote for Brexit was worked up and constructed as an act of resistance: a push-back against not only continuous migrations but also elitist politicians. Given that politicians rely on processes of migration for the socio-economic development of the country, they were perceived by some sections of the public to advocate for the expansion of a global multiculture through state-driven social policies of integration that ignored the lived everyday realities and experiences of the ‘British public’. The Brexit referendum resulting from the protection of a predominately English national identity by claiming back sovereignty and control over its own borders was not a national story in isolation from the

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rest of the world. There are other, similar national narratives happening globally—with the increase in anti-migration parties in Canada such as Coalition Avenir Québec (Blanchet & Medeiros, 2019), Finland topping the European Social Attitudes Survey (2018) as being the most racist and xenophobic country in Europe with 63% of migrants reporting racist incidents, and the growth of the Populist Right more generally in countries such as the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and Poland. These movements clearly highlight how processes of globalisation that have come to be seen as resulting in an increase in international migration can also impact on the lived realities of migrants living and working in ‘host’ nations. It is important to note that some of the challenges and experiences that have emerged in relation to increased global connectivity shape and are shaped by various factors operating across different scalar levels, from local to global and across diverse geographical contexts. One example of ‘the local’ where these issues are played out is within rural spaces. Michael Woods (2007) in his paper, ‘Engaging the global countryside: globalisation, hybridity and the reconstitution of rural place’, exemplifies processes of international migration have a strong rural visibility in the form of seasonal migrant labour, which has always been and continues to be a typical feature of rurality, globally. In other words, there exists a global-rural relationship of migration where rural regions is a mirror which should be viewed as being shaped by and influencing the same problems and issues which processes of globalisation have thrown up that is seen to manifest in the context of migration (e.g., precarious employment, exclusion, and racism). This is evidenced by even the briefest glances of statistics, with 55% of the Brexit vote coming from the English countryside (Country Land and Business Association, 2016). The aim of this edited collection is to explore and examine the ways in which global-rural relationships shape rural places and communities of place through the lens of migration by focusing on agribusiness and rural development, as well as othering and the shifting boundaries of belonging in rural spaces. The chapters throughout this book take stock of these issues through an examination of how processes of globalisation influence different rural contexts in the ‘global north’ and the impact this has on migrant populations. The editors acknowledge there is no ideal term to describe the relationship between countries given the dynamic nature of geopolitics and the impact on the hierarchical ordering of national states. Organisations such as the United Nations and the International

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Organisation for Migration frequently use income as the key term—for example, high- and low-income countries. Similarly, migration and development theories are dominated by binary terms such as sending-receiving, origin-destination, here-there; modern-traditional, first-world-third-­ world, global north-south, core-peripheral. Such binaries are now ‘widely used in tracking and analysing migration within its own analytic lens, terminology, direction of developmental efforts and location of development’ (Raghuram, 2020: 44). Given this context, the editors have chosen to tentatively employ distinctions such as global-north-south but also others—to demonstrate the connections between international migration and rural areas of Europe, Canada, and Australia (see Raghuram, 2020 for a more detailed discussion on the use of binaries in migration and development thinking). Chapters in this edited collection examine the impact of experiences of exclusion and racism faced by migrants and refugees living in rural regions—from the social and emotional and occupational health costs associated with working in the agribusiness sectors to individualised experiences of exclusion and racism that emerge from living and working within ‘host’ rural areas. These chapters taken together identify the dialectical relationship between, and the problematics of, international migration and their influence of and impact on localised rural spaces.

Globalising the Rural, Ruralising the Global Globalisation is a dominant social, political, economic, and spatial force that has reshaped rural societies since the turn of the twenty-first century (McDonagh et  al., 2015). At the micro-level, its pervasiveness has had impact on the dynamics of rural life, while the unyielding pace of globalisation has seen rural regions undergo processes of major economic restructuring at the macro-level. As far back as 2007, the European Commission recognised that ‘globalisation is seen to touch every walk of life—opening doors, creating opportunities, raising apprehensions’ (European Commission, 2007). However, discussing globalisation as a monolithic social, political, economic, and spatial force ignores the fact that it is not a singular process. Globalisation encompasses a plethora of different processes and developments that act in tandem with one another but are also independent and contradictory. It has a transformative impact on all local places including rural areas. This trend is facilitated by the intensification of transnational integration of economic systems including the mobility of goods, capital, and services, as well as the concentration of economic

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influence in transnational corporations with a blasé approach to capital accumulation. In addition, the intensification of mobile populations is aided by the diffusion of communication networks (the time-space compression associated with the growth of the internet and digital revolution), the stretching out of social relations, and the circulation and hybridisation of culture and knowledge systems (Woods & McDonagh, 2011). Faulconbridge and Beaverstock (2009: 332) assert that the concept of globalisation ‘has long been contested’. Sociologists, geographers, and political scientists have all proposed an array of definitions, each differing in its focus and emphasis. For this edited collection, we have chosen to take a relational perspective—as advocated by social scientists such as Ash Amin (2002) and the late Doreen Massey (2005)—towards examining processes of globalisation in the context of the rural. The relational approach has become popular among sociologists of space and geographers, offering a way of moving beyond spatial essentialism which presents places as fixed and bounded while eliding the significance of locality, as well as postmodernist approaches (see Ray Pahl, 1966 for discussions around ‘villages of the mind’) that favour the discursive dimensions of place to the neglect of its materiality. This relational perspective positions space as ‘a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations’ (Massey, 2005: 5) that are dynamic and contingent. Space, in this context, is not segmented into territorialised places, but rather relational and which are brought into being as meeting points or entanglements of diverse social, economic, cultural, and political relations. Massey (2005: 140) refers to this as the ‘thrown togetherness of place’: that is to say, places are always hybrid, always fluid, always changing, and always threaded together with other places. This relational approach aligns with Steger’s (2003: 11) characterisation of globalisation as ‘a multidimensional set of social processes that create, multiply, stretch and intensify worldwide social interdependencies and exchanges while at the same time fostering in people a growing awareness of deepening connections between the local and the distant’. This definition resonates with the works of Amin (2002) and Massey (2005) which illustrate the complexities and contingencies of globalisation. Such a characterisation reveals processes of globalisation as ambivalent, as neither advantageous nor threatening (see also, Sikod, 2006). Woods (2007)—borrowing heavily from Massey (2005)—explores imaginings of rural places as entanglements of diverse social, economic, political, and cultural relations. His concept of the ‘global countryside’ articulates rural

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regions as spaces that are integrated and interconnected through globalising processes and developments, but which are also contested and marked by redistributions of power at the local level. In other words, global-rural areas are emergent, fragile, and fragmented spaces, which are more diffuse and dispersed. As Woods (2007: 499) states: The reconstitution of rural spaces under globalization results from the permeability of rural localities as hybrid assemblages of human and non-human entities, knitted together intersections of networks and flows that are never wholly fixed or contained at the local scale, and whose constant shapeshifting eludes a singular representation of place […] In this way, places in the emergent global countryside retain their local distinctiveness.

Globalisation, therefore, proceeds by capturing, substituting, cutting, and replacing these relations, changing the ways in which rural places are connected to other places, while simultaneously changing rural areas themselves. There is a small but growing body of European and North American rural literature on globalisation (see, e.g., Bolokan, 2021; Edmondson, 2003; Epp & Whitson, 2001; Hedberg & Haandrikman, 2014; Nienaber & Roos, 2016; Shortall & Bock, 2017; Woods, 2007, 2013, 2018) which has explored specific rural place-based experiences of globalisation relating to issues such as gender, migration, and transnational commodity and care chains (e.g., agribusiness practices). Through this relational perspective, rurality can be understood as neither a bounded and definable territory nor a purely imaginary space without materiality. Rather rurality is relational and dynamic—with change being integral to how globalisation has worked throughout history—discursively constructed through entanglements of different social, economic, political, and cultural processes that produce and draw articulations from the material foundations of rural regions and spaces (Murdoch, 2003). This is illustrated in, for example, the notion of the ‘rural idyll’, much discussed in mainly the English but also other national contexts— for example, Serbia, and some areas of North America and Australia (see, for instance, Thrift, 1989; Short, 1991; Bunce, 1994; Rose, 1995). The idyllicisation of rural space is a dominant discourse in these nations’ understandings of rural areas. The ‘rural idyll’ is a product of the dynamic relationship between a diverse set of social processes and politicised labour relations. This is reflected in the romanticised images of agricultural work by those on the left and ‘traditional’ crafts and home-made food

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production within the domestic sphere as idealised by those on the right (all of which ignore the racialised and gendered nature of such labour), cultural conventions, and landscape metaphors (Fowler, 2021; Francis & Henderson, 1992; Readman, 2018). It is the combination of these different relations that produces the distinctive imagining that is perceived to be so iconic and quintessential to this specific configuration of rurality. Yet, it is also these relations that tie these idyllicised imaginings into broader networks and structures, and which reinforce the image of rural areas as vulnerable to ‘distant events’ such as the incursion of neoliberalism, migration, and urbanisation (Halfacree, 2012; Stenbacka, 2012; Tonts & Horsley, 2019). Seeing rurality as relational facilitates a critical approach to the populist narratives concerning international rural migration that prevail in favour of answering more meaningful questions. These include questions such as, how are rural places remade through migration? How has migration become enmeshed into new or reproduced rural relations? And how migration is ambivalently experienced, being welcomed and supported, on the one hand, through state-driven social policies, while exploited and subject to racism and exclusion, on the other, by the same social policies and their reception from ‘host’ communities? It is these questions which form the thematic content presented by chapters in this book. The purpose of this edited collection is not in contributing to the ongoing (abstract) discussions regarding globalisation’s relationship to the rural. Nor is it about commenting on the merits of international rural migration, or whether the ‘global countryside’ (Woods, 2007) is actually a new concept or that rural has always been global given that agriculture has relied on seasonal labour (especially within Western states) as well as the colonial legacies that form the rural landscape (Fowler, 2021). Instead, the focus of this book is on presenting an analysis of how globalisation through the facilitation of international labour and more recently refugee migration into many rural areas on a scale not experienced before is experienced, negotiated, and contested within the ‘global north’. The task of this edited collection is to acknowledge that to fully understand the impact of the international migration-global nexus, it is essential to explore how it is experienced at a local level—in this case rural contexts. This involves unpacking the multiple contradictory and ambivalent ways in which migration is promoted, managed, and experienced—for instance, state governments encouraging migration through policies that both welcome and exploit individual migrants (Chap. 2), resulting in harsh lived

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experiences/realities characterised by mental health issues and the exertion of much emotional labour (Chaps. 3 and 4), occupational health and safety issues in the workplace (Chap. 4), and exclusion and racism from ‘host’ communities (Chaps. 6 and 7). Together these chapters present attempts to understand the plurality of experiences with regard to how migration processes are manifested across different rural areas of the ‘global north’.

Rural Migration as Global-Local Interdependencies in the Context of the Global North Migration needs to be understood as being embedded within dynamic and globalising processes, having influence on, and being impacted by, a range of social, cultural, economic, and political structures. Migration is constantly shaped and reshaped across scaler levels—from local to global— and within diverse geographical contexts, most notably between urban and rural regions but also between rural localities themselves. Rye and O’Reilly (2021) argue that the specificities of migration flows need to be understood to examine how wider social structures influence the contextuality of globalised migration through a range of opportunities and risks. This contextuality presents distinctive experiences and practices for different nation states in relation to migration. Over the past two decades, these interconnections have become increasingly evident in the rising levels of migration globally, which has led to Castles and Miller (2009) to term this temporal moment the ‘Age of Migration’. The number of people living outside of their country of origin was 281 million in 2020, with international migrants representing less than 4% of the world’s total population. Much of the increase for the last few decades have come from labour and family migration and more recently from asylum seekers, refugees, and forcibly displaced populations (United Nations, 2020a, 2020b: 6–7). These migratory flows are closely related to ruralised systems of food production and the wider agribusiness industry. As shown in Chaps. 3, 4, and 5 of this edited collection, rural migration is still largely rooted in, and a direct response to, the dynamics of globalised food production and wider agribusiness systems, which often rely on having access to cheap and flexible migrant labour. It is also important to acknowledge however that processes of economic restructuring have resulted in rural economies becoming not that different from urban areas—at least in the

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UK—in terms of economic activities. The proportion of individuals employed in the land-based sector has declined in comparison to those now working in manufacturing, service industries and quality food products (Shucksmith, 2012). Both of these trends have been facilitated by migrant worker recruiters (Martin, 2017), forced migration, and the creation of bilateral agreements between countries in the ‘global north’ and the ‘global south’ that have intensified the concentration of migrant supply chains from countries in the ‘global south’ (Preibisch, 2012). These trends have facilitated ‘frictionless’ migratory flows—for employers—and often exclusionary and exploitative social and occupational conditions for migrants and refugees that lock them out of settlement and rights (Allen & Axelsson, 2019). There have been various major geopolitical changes over the past 30 years that have driven cross-border migration to rural areas. In the context of Europe, the fall of communism (1989–1990) and enlargements of the European Union (both in 2004 and 2007) were significant in facilitating new migratory patterns (Rye & O’Reilly, 2021). European migration has tended to move towards more western regions of the European continent, reflecting strong regional economic disparities between ‘old’ and ‘new’ EU members states. An examination of population change between 1990 and 2010 within and across European nations (e.g., Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, some regions of the UK, and the Nordic countries) highlights ‘old’ (western) EU member states seeing population growth, with much of this growth occurring in rural regions (Johansson, 2015: 104). The pattern of population change in the ‘new’ (eastern) EU member states during the same period was, however, quite different, with many ‘new’ member states experiencing negative population trends. This was largely due to Eastern Europe undergoing political transformation processes—because of the collapse of communism—that affected both the economy and the labour market in these nations. This led to population decreases as individuals within the remotely localised periphery areas of Europe (mostly in Eastern European countries) looked to other areas and regions, particularly within Western European countries, for employment opportunities—affecting both rural and urban areas across Europe (Johansson, 2015). Similarly, in North America, migrants have been increasingly arriving in small cities and their peripheral towns, as well as in rural areas (Jentsch & Simard, 2016). Specifically, within the context of Canada, migration has moved increasingly from small urban areas to rural areas, mainly prompted

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by policies and programmes such as the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme that draws upon (mostly) Mexican migrant labour to support food production and the wider agribusiness sector (Hennebry & Preibisch, 2012). Such patterns of migration differ by province. Some provinces have benefited more than others—with rural areas in British Columbia, Yukon Territory, Ontario, and Alberta all seeing greater concentration of seasonal migrants in recent years than other regions of Canada—but all have an emotional and mental health impact on the migrants involved with many having to live away from their families for prolonged periods of time (see Chap. 5). The use of temporary labour migration programmes by governments is not isolated to rural Canada but operates in many countries across the world (McLaughlin & Weiler, 2017), especially given the changing demographics of aging populations and outmigration of the young and the economically active. In addition, more recently rural areas are also increasingly being seen as suitable destinations for the hosting and settling of refugees as discussed in Chaps. 2, 3, 6, and 7 (see also Glorious et al., 2020). Against the background of changing demographics, governments in the ‘global north’ are adopting welcoming policies as a way of (presenting themselves as) being open to migration to rural regions. Welcoming policies aim to achieve the ‘integration’ of migrant communities through different strategies of mobilisation and intercultural familiarisation as well as participation to ensure migrants are integrated into employment and the labour market, local schools, community organisations, and other social institutions. Public and voluntary sector organisations are crucial to helping migrants cope and adjust in ‘host’ communities. These organisations provide informal support and advice to migrants in helping them to settle. Countries such as Canada, Finland (see Chap. 2), and Scotland have all adopted policies of welcome to increase migratory flows to their rural areas to address labour shortages and the demographic and economic challenges they face. Some commentators (see, for instance, Gimpel & Lay, 2008; Jackson & Jones, 2014) maintain that such political strategies of integration can contribute to furthering feelings of exclusion for migrant communities. Processes of welcoming migrants into ‘host’ communities or indeed nations is conditional on migrants ‘fitting in’. It involves migrants having to adhere to particular sets of rules, laws, and customs. Thus, integration is only ever partially achievable and subject to the decision-­making of ‘host’ communities/nations to welcome and support the settling of migrant communities, suspending migrants between the

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poles of inclusion/exclusion, as individuals who are present but not fully enrolled residents/citizens (de Lima & Wright, 2009). Given that processes and conditions of welcoming are determined by the ‘host’ community/nation and can be withdrawn at any time, migrants experience many challenges and uncertainties regarding the processes of integration and inclusion. This is especially true of the political moment at the present time. Over the past decade, there has been a growth in right-­ wing populism. Such political commentators and parties (e.g., UKIP in the UK, the Golden Dawn Party in Greece, Le Pen’s Front Nationale in France, Coalition Avenir Québec in Canada, Trumpism in the USA) have all constructed narratives around migrant populations, with migrants being worked up as external threats and internal dangers against whom nation states and ‘host’ communities must defend themselves (Virdee & McGeever, 2017). In the context of the rural, these narratives have been highly concentrated, with Mamonova and Franquesa (2019: 710) asserting that right-wing populism found its ‘greatest support among rural communities’. These anti-migrant discourses—despite being global in reach—are highly contextual with different countries focusing on different migratory flows. For example, right-wing populism in Italy established anti-migration discourses with reference to Italian agricultural and food traditions (‘nativism’) (see Iocco et al., 2020). While, in the UK, one of the central arguments presented for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU (‘Brexit’) was the wish to restrict labour migration from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the large numbers of refugees fleeing conflict in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries, who made their way to EU member states via border crossings as part of the 2015 refugee crisis. Many of these 2015 migrants arrived in rural destinations to find work (Brovia & Piro, 2020). These trends have further presented the need for thinking through rural patterns of migration as part of a wider system of relationality within the context of dynamic globalised spaces. The chapters in this edited collection demonstrate the uniqueness of migratory experiences across rural areas. They also highlight the ways rural migration is shaped and reshaped by global changes and far-reaching structural shifts and how these are understood, experienced, and performed in different rural contexts in diverse ways, resulting in various modes of inclusion, integration, assimilation, exclusion, racism, and exploitation. As such, rural migration needs to be researched as a multiscalar spatialised phenomenon—encapsulated in

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the term ‘rural-migration nexus’ adopted in this edited collection—where the ongoing outcomes of migration emerge from the dynamism of local and global social relations and structures.

The Rural-Migration Nexus The term chosen to conceptualise the global interdependences described above between migration and the rural is the ‘rural-migration nexus’. Transnational perspectives within the field of migration studies have long drawn attention to the importance of giving due considerations to migrant interactions across national spaces (see, for instance, King, 2012). Despite an existing body of work (Basch et  al., 1994; Levitt & Schiller, 2004) highlighting the dialectical relationship of transnational migration processes between sending and receiving areas, this research has tended to focus predominately on the macro-level and largely in urban contexts (O'Reilly, 2012). For the purposes of this edited collection, it is important to conceptualise and make sense of transnational migrant experiences of living and working in rural areas. In this context, migrants are paradoxically fixed within a liminal space, navigating between the ‘here’ (e.g., establishing belonging in ‘host’ rural communities or putting up with poor conditions of work, limited rights, and dealing with emotional loss) and the ‘there’ (e.g., financially supporting their families and maintaining regular contact with family and friends, as well as maintaining emotional and often physical connection to their homeland; see Chap. 4); consequently, changing the nature of rural places themselves. At the time of writing, there has been no formal references to the term ‘rural-migration nexus’ in the rural sociological or geographical literature. Nor within the field of migration studies. There has, however, been references to an ‘agriculture-migration nexus’ (see Akeju, 2013) and a ‘migration-­development’ nexus (Faist & Fauser, 2011), which is not the focus of this edited collection. What sets the ‘rural-migration nexus’ apart from this previous research (e.g., Akeju, 2013; Faist & Fauser, 2011) is that it seeks to address questions concerning the interconnections between migration and rural in the context of a dynamic global-rural simultaneity that underpins experiences of migration. That is to say, the actions that happen in rural contexts are simultaneously affecting and are affected by other ruralised social fields and multi-layered global processes, leading to what Carmo and Hedberg (2019) have termed a translocal mobility system of rural migration.

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Rural migration as shaped through interconnected rural-global processes is of course not a new idea. Historically, transnational mobilities (forced and voluntary) of populations including from one rural area to another has always happened. In this sense, the rural has always been global and movement of people has been a feature of this. However, processes of globalisation have intensified—as discussed earlier—and have produced and reconstituted new patterns of spatial rural mobilities (Sheller & Urry, 2006), albeit in a different form and shape. This is reflected by an intensification and diversification of migration circulation between not only rural and urban areas, but also between rural spaces situated in different regional, national, and international geographies (Hedberg & Carmo, 2012). This acceleration of movement is a characteristic of late-modern globalisation and has introduced new complexities within rural areas—for example, the emergence of new patterns of daily life, the diversification of businesses, and the arrival of new social groups (Woods, 2007)—resulting in the transformation rather than the diminution of rurality. What marks contemporary patterns of international rural migration from previous forms is its scale and intensity, as well as it being a deliberate aspect of state management and policy to address labour shortages. Contemporary patterns of international rural migration are deeply enmeshed within processes of globalisation through migrants’ participation in networks and mobilities between different localities (Hedberg & Carmo, 2012; Woods, 2007); thus simultaneously becoming important actants on the global scale too. This means rural areas are not ‘fixed’ places immune to migratory flows and networks that circulate all over the world. Conversely, rural areas are relational and interconnected spaces, which are constructed through their interrelations with other spaces (Massey, 2005) resulting in a dynamic of spatial mobility of rural migration that is simultaneously global whilst also locally embedded, affecting change nationally and internationally. In other words, migrants and refugees navigate life between different spaces, but, once they have moved, they do not cease to engage with the social and cultural sensibilities and materiality of the spaces they have left. Rather, they add the place of arrival to the place of departure (along with previous places where they have lived), connecting and transforming rural places—as well as national and international contexts—through their mobility (Brickell & Datta, 2011). The concept of translocalism best captures these contemporary forms of international rural migration and the production of relational ruralities (Brickell & Datta, 2011), seeing the transformation of rural (and national and

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international) places not only through the activities that occur as migrants move but also through the activities of migrants and the consequences that are produced in rural space through such activities (Smith, 2001).

Structure of the Book Working across six central chapters, this edited collection aims to unpack the various complexities and contingencies embedded within these processes of the rural-migration nexus. Beginning with Chap. 2, Tiina Sotkasiira examines Finland’s ‘Welcoming Countryside’ policy, which draws together different actors at regional and local levels to develop initiatives that engage various organisations as well as newcomers and established community members to create warmer and more welcoming rural communities and programmes that facilitate the settlement and integration of newcomers. Drawing on qualitative data collected from participant observations and interviews with diverse groups of migrants living and working in rural areas of Finland, this chapter explores what enables and facilitates migrants to stay long-term in rural regions. From a Nordic perspective, the chapter produces new empirical and migrant-led insight into the notion of ‘welcoming’ rural communities and the diverse lived experiences of rural migrants in Finland. The chapter also acknowledges the contradictory processes, through which migrants are, on the level of regional politics, constituted as very important members of rural communities, while simultaneously in their everyday lives experience discrimination and face difficulties as they attempt to navigate life locally. Chapter 3 explores changes in European and global food chains over past decades that have prompted an enormous demand for temporary workers. In particular, Dina Bolokan draws on decolonial perspectives and life course ethnographies to highlight two dynamics which have been increasingly strengthened in the agricultural sector in the last decade in Europe: prison-like working conditions on the one hand and the hypermobility of workers on the other. She argues that mobility agreements foster the concept of so-called circular migration and are essential for just-­ in-­time recruitment practices, which correspond with the needs of wealthier European countries. The chapter demonstrates how these forms of confinement for workers and the transnationalisation of Fordist recruitment logic are not the product of a hidden strategy but of the interaction of colonialism, a repressive migration regime and the neoliberalisation of agriculture in Post-Soviet societies. The case study presented in this

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chapter focuses on Post-Soviet Moldova, a country on the so-called periphery of Europe. It deals with one of the countries from which labour to Europe can be recruited, although Moldova is not part of the European Union and hence does not fit into the two-circles model. By focusing on the recruitment structures and bilateral agreements between Switzerland/ Europe and Moldova in relation to circular migration policies and post-­ soviet citizenship practices, this chapter facilitates an understanding of how the agricultural sector in Europe is organised, the impact of outmigration on post-Soviet rural Moldova, and the enduring health impacts on Moldovan migrants. Chapter 4 demonstrates how changes in regional economic conditions in Canada have contributed to the changing proportion of migrants arriving in rural areas. The changing nature of population mobility into rural areas, both for highly skilled and low-skilled occupations, results from the expansion of Temporary Foreign Worker Programmes. While there are positive effects of growing food closer to home and a preference for local produce, which contribute to lowering greenhouse gas emissions and increasing the quantity of fresher products delivered directly to customers, there are also negative health implications for migrant workers, including long-term agriculture-related ill health and occupational injuries. Agricultural migrant work is considered to be one of the most hazardous occupations. Within this chapter, Ewa Dabrowska-Miciula focuses on exploring the gaps in agricultural safety and immigration policies that have been unevenly addressed across Canada. Specifically, this chapter seeks to answer the following question: how can future studies overcome research gaps and inform programmes and policies intended to increase the well-­ being of communities and the safety of transnational migrants in rural Canada? This research adopts a multi-method approach, incorporating primary research, current government reports and policy briefs, as well as secondary data and resources from Immigration, Refuge and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). Critical analysis of the experience of transnational Latina migrant workers in Canada presented within this chapter leads to the conclusion that a Canadian food policy that seeks to achieve sustainable food systems should include a focus on protecting the health and safety of the people who do the work—the human capital of those transnational agricultural workers from the rural ‘global south’. Building upon the narratives of Chap. 4, Linamar Campos-Flores and Adriana Leona Rosales-Mendoza in Chap. 5 investigate the exploitative conditions of the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme.

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Previous research undertaken has found that the employer-tied contracts signed by transnational agricultural workers increase the risks and exposure of these workers to abuse, exploitation, and occupational illnesses that go unrecognised as well as a violation of their rights and liberties enshrined in Canadian Law (Basok, 1999; Basok et al., 2014; Preibisch, 2007). Most of these studies have centred on labour, legal, social, or health issues, neglecting the emotional component which plays a fundamental role in transnational agricultural workers’ mental health and well-­ being because of the prevalence of stress and chronic illnesses (which remain unrecognised) associated with their working conditions. Drawing on the results of a larger research project, Chap. 5 examines data collected using interviews and visual ethnographic methods with Mexican transmigrant agricultural workers. The chapter demonstrates that the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Worker Programme represents a site of emotional labour for migrants who are stuck between the ‘here’ (the place they call home) and the ‘there’ (the work site) by building on the studies that emphasise the importance of addressing the intersections of gendered identity, work, and emotions (Bryant & Jaworski, 2011; Ey et al., 2017; Hochschild, 1983). Shifting the focus from migrants themselves to the attitudes towards migrants by ‘host’ communities, Chap. 6 denotes how rural regions in Europe remain a place of slow change that is considered to be immune to some of the worst excesses of city or suburban living, such as crime, social unrest, and even social and ethnic difference. In Serbia, whilst the concept of rurality may not be as romanticised as in other European countries, such as the UK, the narratives of the rural are no less compelling and are set against the presumption of the rapid change of city lives. In Serbia, most people live in either cities or towns and there has been a de-­ ruralification process ongoing for many years. But at the same time, Serbia has undergone massive change related to the arrival of migrants and refugees, due to Serbia being central to the Balkan corridor route for those refugees who have travelled across the Mediterranean and who seek passage into Europe. Once that route was shut in 2016, and fortress Europe drew up the drawbridge (primarily blocking the train routes across the Western Balkans borders and building fences as boundaries), refugees found themselves ‘stuck’ in Serbia and refugee camps sprang up in rural areas to cater for them. The changes in Serbia due to migration have not been lost on right-wing narratives and narrators in politics but also in ‘host’ communities. Geraldine Lee-Treweek, Branislav Radeljić, and

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Marko Stojanović in this chapter demonstrate the ways in which migrants are constructed to be ‘out of place’ in the rural fringes of Serbian towns and cities. The chapter reports on the mythologies that have grown up around rural change, migration, and migrants themselves. Drawing on the accounts of NGO workers to report on narratives around these rural interlopers, findings illustrate how migrants are perceived through a lens of being out of place and represented as an insertion of an urban problem into rural locales. The final central chapter of this edited collection (Chap. 7) observes the strategies adopted by refugees over many decades in Australia and other countries of the ‘global north’ to overcome restricted access to labour market mobility (Collins, 2003). Branka Krivokapic-skoko, Katherine Wilson, and Jock Collins illustrate in this chapter that one strategy refugees employ to overcome such restrictive labour market mobility practices is to create their own jobs through refugee entrepreneurship. Refugee entrepreneurship in Australia is shaped by the intersection of several factors: ethnic resources and networks, class resources, regimes of regulation, inclusion/exclusion, opportunity, family relations, gender, and racialisation. This chapter presents data gathered from interviews with 15 African female refugee entrepreneurs currently living in regional and rural Australia. It investigates the reasons why female refugees started up their own business, their strategies for overcoming the massive obstacles they faced setting up the business, and the extent to which their businesses are embedded in their family and community. African female entrepreneurs located in non-metropolitan Australia are also involved in diasporic entrepreneurship, with the critical role that international social networks of migrant communities play in the dynamics and success of these enterprises. The chapter identifies strong relations between resources obtained from personal network ties of the African female refugees and start-up success of their enterprises, as well as through the process of internationalisation. African female refugees benefited from social networks and commitment among the family but even more from the trust and relationships established and maintained through personal contacts with overseas based buyers and suppliers. The chapter further denotes the experience of formal and informal discrimination; the extent to which the racialisation of female refugees in Australia has shaped their lives, blocked their access to the labour market, and influenced moving into specific ethnic niche industries; as well as the contradictions embedded in the refugee entrepreneurship paradox in Australia.

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In the concluding chapter, the ‘rural-migration-nexus’ is further extrapolated. Detailing how processes of globalisation—of which migration is a part—change and have impact on rural places, facilitating consequences for both migrants and ‘host’ communities with a range of varied processual, conflicting, and sometimes contradictory differences and similarities across rural spaces, selected emergent themes covered across each of the chapters are drawn together highlighting wider social and policy implications and future research trajectories in relation to illuminating further the rural-migration nexus nested within the global-local relationship.

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CHAPTER 2

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Developing Migrant-led Understandings of Welcoming Rural Communities Tiina Sotkasiira

Introduction The urban-rural dynamic is changing worldwide. Many countries, especially in the ‘Global North’, are dealing with population decline and ageing. This is experienced more so in rural areas, while employment and educational opportunities tend to concentrate in and around the urban growth centres. In a rapidly industrialised country like Finland, more than 70% of the population now reside in urban areas (Helminen et al., 2020). Young people and the economically active in particular seek education and employment opportunities and lifestyle changes in larger cities (Armila et al., 2018). In Finland, many rural municipalities also struggle to fund and deliver educational, social, health and leisure services for diminishing populations. For example, the number of village shops has dropped by

T. Sotkasiira (*) University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Kerrigan, P. de Lima (eds.), The Rural-Migration Nexus, Rethinking Rural, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18042-2_2

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20% between 2012 and 2015, around 60 village schools close each year and the number of post offices in rural areas has decreased steadily since the 1990s (Sireni et al., 2017). Amidst such change, international migration has gained prominence (Hedberg & Haandrikman, 2014; Hugo & Morén-Alégret, 2008). It has become portrayed as a strategy to address problems of development in peripheral and sparsely populated rural areas, although researchers have been doubtful of its long-term effects (Hedlund et al., 2017). A key question in these debates is: how to attract immigrants and convince them to stay in sparsely populated areas, which lack attractiveness for the ‘host’ population, especially among the young and educated. A solution has been proposed in the form of programmes and initiatives that facilitate the settlement and integration of international immigrants by creating rural communities that are more welcoming towards the needs of newcomers (Esses et al., 2010). Previous research has defined welcoming communities as those that embrace diversity, encourage civic participation among residents, provide a range of appropriate service provisions and offer meaningful employment (Gibson et  al., 2017). In the Finnish context, there are local and regional projects and programmes that aim to create receptive or welcoming rural communities. The meanings given to these terms have been the same as elsewhere, such as in Australia, Canada and New Zealand (Wulff et al., 2008). While the attraction of immigrants to rural areas has been recognised as having many encouraging immediate impacts, such as increased business investment and positive community interaction, research has also pointed towards economic, social and service-based risks and limitations for new immigrants who move to live in small and peripheral communities (Wulff et  al., 2008). Welcoming initiatives seem to be based on a new kind of creative thinking, which challenges the backward-looking anti-­immigration discourse that prevails in some rural communities (Sotkasiira & Haverinen, 2016). However, it could also be argued that such rural immigration initiatives are developed to mainly serve the needs of long-term residents and local businesses (Søholt et al., 2018). The projects and programmes do not necessarily recognise the interests of rural immigrants, who may become perceived as the targets of welcoming and less as autonomous individuals with their own needs and aspirations (Mcintosh & Cockburn-­ Wootten, 2019). To challenge such instrumental views of immigration and immigrants, this chapter turns to the concept (and experiences) of

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well-being, which is analysed through the narratives of migrants who have settled in the rural parts of North Karelia, Finland. Paying attention to the narratives of well-being is suggested here as a step towards recognising the lived experiences of immigrants in rural settings in Finland, who to date are an under-researched group (Lund & Hira-Friesen, 2013). It is assumed that the focus on well-being in everyday experiences allows research to move beyond the most simplistic and instrumentalised conceptions of the relationship between immigrants and rural development. The focus on well-being is further justified by de Lima’s (2016) perception that migrants’ well-being has been largely neglected and marginalised in scholarly and political discussions, where the focus has been placed mainly on instrumental views of migrants and their contributions in host societies. Mindful of de Lima’s (2016) advice to study well-being as an ongoing process that emerges out of and is embedded in the social, economic, cultural and political processes and relations of everyday living, this chapter examines rural immigrants’ experiences of/lack of welcome in the Finnish countryside.

Background to the Research North Karelian Regional Context This chapter focuses on North Karelia, which is a sparsely populated region located in eastern Finland along the border with the Russian Federation. According to Statistics Finland (2020), almost 403,000 people with a foreign background lived in Finland in 2018, which accounted for 7% of the total population. In the Uusimaa region, near Helsinki, their proportion was 13% of the total population, while in North Karelia it is only 3.2%. The total population of North Karelia is around 162,000, of which 71,551 reside in the city of Joensuu, the regional centre. The other municipalities in North Karelia have fewer than 15,000 inhabitants and they consist of the rural heartland, rural areas close to urban areas, sparsely populated rural areas as well as local rural centres (Helminen et al., 2020). In the case of North Karelia, a large part of immigration is from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. Particularly in the rural municipalities of Tohmajärvi and Kitee, Russian speakers form a significant linguistic minority. Traditionally, North Karelia has not been a significant destination for immigrants, except for the resettlement of Karelian evacuees after the Second World War. Instead, it comprises municipalities with

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little prior experience of migration—they are what is termed New Immigration Destinations (see McAreavey, 2017). During the Cold War period, the border between Finland and the Soviet Union was closed and heavily guarded, crossing the border was highly restricted, with transborder mobility being limited (Raudaskoski & Laine, 2018). The first immigrants to settle after the collapse of the Soviet Union were mainly Ingrian Finns and other citizens of the former Soviet Union who were of Finnish descent. The profile of immigration to North Karelia has since diversified. The languages most spoken in North Karelia besides the official languages of Finnish and Swedish are Russian, Arabic, English, Estonian, Somali, Thai, Bengali, German, Kurdish and Turkish. In rural parts of the country, reception centres for asylum seekers have been established in empty schools, hospitals and military buildings to host such individuals due to depopulation and the centralisation of public services in recent decades. Also, in North Karelia immigrant communities have been formed nearby rural municipalities that hosted asylum centres. In 2013, 4.2% of the residents of Lieksa were of foreign origin (mostly humanitarian migrants of Somali descent), which was a significant proportion, comparable to the figures of the large university cities. However, due to negative attitudes and high unemployment, Somali residents found it difficult to settle and find employment in Lieksa, with many of them moving to Southern Finland. A few Somali families, who still remain, have recently (post-2015) been joined by new humanitarian migrants, who were first settled in North Karelia as asylum seekers and continued to live there after receiving residence permits. Other common motives for moving to Eastern Finland are connected to family reasons (Pöllänen, 2013) and education. The representatives of North Karelia Municipal Education and Training Consortium have visited Russia to inform young people and adults of the opportunities in Finland and to attract new students to prevent the closure of study programmes because of decreasing student numbers. Labour migration is also gaining importance, but it is still highly regulated. Third-country nationals, for example, those who do not enjoy the European Union right to free movement, are not permitted to enter the country in search of employment. They are required to obtain a residence permit in advance before arriving in Finland. In 2018, the share of people working in the primary sector (forestry, fishery and agriculture) in North Karelia was 5.6%, which is higher than that in the rest of the country (at 2.9%). The service sector is the largest

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employer in the region, employing over 70% of the population (almost 75% are employed in the whole country). The service sectors employing the largest number of people are commerce, transport, hotel and catering services, education, health and social services. In manufacturing, there are jobs in plastic production, technology, wood processing and food industries, for example. Immigrants are employed in the same sectors as Finns, although more often in employment that is not commensurate with their qualifications (Myrskylä & Pyykkönen, 2014). In North Karelia, the unemployment rate in January 2020 was 13.8% and of unemployed job seekers, 5% (498 persons) were foreign nationals. The factors frequently cited to explain the difficulties among immigrants in finding employment include insufficient Finnish language proficiency, lack of Finnish education and work experience, lack of Finland-specific cultural competence and informal capital, lack of ethnically diverse social networks, the lack of recognition of qualifications earned abroad and discrimination (Ahmad, 2019). The Finnish Policy Context The Rural Policy Programme is the key policy document that sets out the objectives and measures for rural development in Finland. The 2014–2020 Policy Programme (Rural Policy Committee, 2014) identified that development in rural areas was difficult to achieve without attracting new populations. It considered work-based immigration into rural areas as a particular challenge as there was an acute need for labour in many industrial and service sectors in rural regions, but immigrants tend to concentrate in cities. For these reasons, rural policy has highlighted the importance of measures to support the integration of immigrants into rural locations, paying attention to the reception and engagement in their village and residential communities as well as to the availability of employment opportunities. In rural policy terms, successful rural communities are those that provide immigrants with employment, a sense of community and sufficient services for supporting their integration. The hegemonic regional policy discourse also highlights the economic necessity of immigration and discusses population decline as a threat to the future viability of rural communities (Sotkasiira, 2016; for comparison, see Berg-Nordlie, 2018). At the same time, there is also a critical discourse of immigration underscoring the fears that increased immigration may result in xenophobia and heightened resistance towards the newcomers in new immigration destinations.

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In Finnish immigration policy, the integration of immigrants is perceived as being of utmost importance as it, among other things, paves the way to good population relations. The Act on the Promotion of Immigrant Integration defines integration as an ‘interactive development involving immigrants and society at large’, which aims at providing immigrants with ‘the knowledge and skills required in society and working life’ and with support ‘to maintain their culture and language’. It also refers to integration as involving multi-sectoral promotion and support based on measures and services provided by local authorities and civil society. The measures of support include both basic governmental and municipal services available to all as well as services that only immigrants are entitled to, such as language courses, integration training and guidance and counselling services. The immigrants who seek employment are served by public employment services, while municipalities and civil society organise integration activities for those who do not participate in employment services, including elderly people, stay-at-home parents and those suffering from long-­ term illnesses. Those taking part in integration measures are entitled to financial assistance in the form of a labour market subsidy or social assistance. In principle, then, the universal welfare state designates undifferentiated basic social security for all who have a municipality of residence in the country. In practice, the non-citizens’ social entitlements differ depending on nationality, legal status and the form of employment they are in. Könönen (2018) discusses this issue in detail and uses the concept of differential inclusion to describe the reception of immigrants into the Finnish employment and welfare systems. Furthermore, the current immigration policy has a clear emphasis on strengthening labour migration, which is understood as key to boosting ‘employment and public finances’ and improving ‘the dependency ratio and enhances internationalisation of the economy’ (Ministry of the Interior, 2018: 9). The policy is in line with the 2015 European Agenda on Migration, which identifies a specific demand for skilled migrants and stresses the need to control other types of immigration. While there are similarities between practical integration activities across the country, the services are not consistent in terms of their content or availability (Karinen et  al., 2020). They also change over time. For example, when the number of immigrants was on the rise in Lieksa, the municipality designated substantial resources to integrating immigrants. In 2009, the municipality established an integration office with three to five full-time employees, whose job was to facilitate the introduction of

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newly arrived immigrants into the local community to support their settlement. This office was closed in 2015. The reason stated was that the municipality aimed at providing all residents with similar services by making a transfer from a targeted service to the mainstream. In 2019, the residents of Lieksa were served by one immigration coordinator, whose task was limited to coordinating immigrants’ interaction with municipal services and authorities. Another recent policy development proposes to organise integration services in municipalities with the largest number of immigrants (Karinen et al., 2020). In North Karelia, there have been plans to centralise integration services in Joensuu. Many services have already been centralised and digitalised. Southeast Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment (TE) Office, which is based in the city of Lappeenranta, handles issues related to residence permits for employed people centrally for the regions of the Economic Development, Transport and the Environment (ELY) Centres of Southeast Finland, South Savo, Northern Savo, Central Finland and North Karelia. This means that the nearest office that serves North Karelian applicants is situated 240 kilometres from Joensuu and almost 400 kilometres from Nurmes, the northernmost municipality of North Karelia. The welcoming of immigrants in rural parts of the country is thus largely dependent on non-governmental organisations and short-term (EU-funded) projects. The At Home in Finland project (2015–2020) has focused on developing guidance, services and processes supporting immigrant integration. While being coordinated by the Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment for Uusimaa, it has branches and employers across the country. In North Karelia, the Association on Rural Culture and Education ran a Leader project between 2017 and 2018, which aimed at welcoming immigrants in rural areas by organising joint activities for long-term residents and newcomers and supporting volunteers who were interested in working with immigrants. Additionally, immigrants have set up organisations to provide newcomers with peer support. Such initiatives are typical of Finnish and other Nordic societies, where the third sector traditionally has a prominent advocacy role as a vehicle for expressing citizens’ political, social and recreational interests (Pirkkalainen et al., 2018: 24–25). At the same time, it has raised concerns about the hollowing out of the welfare state in sparsely populated rural areas due to wider neoliberal restructuring (Jokinen et  al., 2011; Pöllänen & Davydova-Minguet, 2017).

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Discursive, Political and Lived Dimensions of a ‘Welcoming Community’ The term ‘welcoming community’ came into use during the 1990s and was originally applied in the context of diversity management (Esses et al., 2010). Over the years, it became a popular term in rural development, where it appealed to and was often used by governments, consultants and other stakeholders with an interest in immigration. At the present time, ‘welcoming communities’ is viewed as a policy approach, a local development practice (Gibson & Annis, 2019) and as a discursive device with which rural developers identify problems and propose solutions to transform and ‘cultivate’ the notion of rural communities as being welcoming. According to Lynch (2017), the idea of ‘welcoming’ frequently features in the definitions and discussions of hospitality, which refers to the quality of being hospitable, for example, to being friendly and welcoming to guests and visitors and to providing good conditions for something or someone to live and grow. Lynch (2017: 175) notes that in dictionaries keywords associated with welcome include, for example, kindness, an act of consideration to another; welcoming strangers, a reaching out to another; and acceptance, and tolerating and embracing difference. These terms are often defined in relation to their opposites (inhospitality and unwelcome) which are understood as opposites to the concept of welcoming (see Sheringham & Daruwalla, 2007). As a policy concept, a welcoming community has no universally agreed meaning (Esses et al., 2010). Still, previous research has identified many similarities in the ways in which the idea of welcoming is enacted in the Global North by different actors and stakeholders, who commit to building communities or localities that are not just open to immigration, but actively seek to attract immigrants (Gibson & Annis, 2019). Reviewing international examples of welcoming communities (Bonifacio & Drolet, 2017; Guo & Guo, 2016; Immigration Services of New Zealand, 2017; Sampedro & Camarero, 2018), it appears that such programmes focus on three aspects of community development. They claim to manage social relations and build networks at the local level, provide a steer towards migrant-focused service provision and remove structural barriers to immigrants’ long-term settlement. The practices, which focus on social relations and networks, are based on understanding that the notion of welcoming includes specific interactions between ‘host’ communities and immigrants. McIntosh and

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Cockburn-Wootten (2019) argue that relationships of the welcoming-­ kind are essentially non-interventionist. By this they mean that welcoming builds on relationships that are empathetic, warm and connecting experiences. Under this pretext, welcoming refers to developing respectful relationships, trust and involvement, leading to social inclusion. Moreover, the work towards ‘welcoming’ social relationships also involves tackling discrimination and negative public perceptions of migrants in  local and wider society through media discourses. The actions in the second category are described as those which sensitise the available services to the needs of newcomers. Such activities include attempts to make the voices of migrants heard, arranging and having migrants participate in forums and activities that are organised and run by their peers and on topics of their choosing (Kisiara, 2015). According to Murray and Johnsen (2011: 328), in service production, the notion of welcome entails an aspect of hospitality combined with an open-door policy. Ideally, the transformation of services entails some form of advocacy and the construction of a range of contexts that not only enable migrants to participate in local activities and services but to engage in the critical framing of such initiatives and relate them to their experience, knowledge and futures (Cambridge & Williams, 2004; Kisiara, 2015). Intertwined with the two previous categories is the third set of actions, which focuses on overcoming structural barriers that make it harder for migrants to settle in rural areas. These actions include tackling work discrimination, providing newcomers with affordable and suitable housing and, particularly in the Nordic context, providing newcomers with educational opportunities that enhance their chances of finding employment in their field of knowledge and experience. Many more actions that are perceived as contributing towards welcoming communities are listed in Table 2.1. It is important to note that this list is not exhaustive, but rather provides examples of actions that are perceived as important in the literature and by the actors who claim to be part of the movement for welcoming communities in the ‘Global North’.

Data Analysis The data presented in this chapter was collected through ethnographic fieldwork, which was conducted in North Karelia between 2013–2018. I was involved in a research project that studied the settlement of Somali immigrants in the town of Lieksa (Sotkasiira, 2018). Since 2016, however,

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Table 2.1  Examples of welcoming activities Creating a sense of welcome

Migrant-focused service production

Improving structural conditions

The acceptance of diverse religious organisations Favourable media coverage and representation Positive attitudes towards newcomers and cultural diversity Positive relationships with the police and the justice system

The adoption of appropriate safety measures The involvement of newcomers in shaping services and their active use of such services Language courses

Effective working links between main actors working towards welcoming communities Appropriate and good quality employment Appropriate and good quality housing Culturally sensitive health care provision

my research has broadened its focus and shifted to the well-being of international migrants of various backgrounds in the remote and rural parts of rural Finland more widely. During these years, I collected a range of qualitative data on these topics, including interviews with international new arrivals and long-term residents, analysis of media materials, ethnographic field notes and so on. Here, the discussion is based mostly on the interviews that were conducted with immigrants, who lived either in one of the local rural centres of North Karelia or in the region’s sparsely populated rural areas. These interviews focused on well-being and everyday security, and they were mostly conducted in Finnish or English, except for two interviews that were conducted with an interpreter. The interviews were recorded and later transcribed by a professional person hired for this purpose. Among the interviewees there were nine men and nine women. Some of the interviewees had arrived in Finland as asylum seekers or refugees, while others stated their reasons for moving to Finland were connected to family relations, work or study. There were also participants who had entered Finland with the intention to set up businesses. All but one interviewee, who participated in the interview with his father, were over the age of 18. On average the participants had lived in the country for seven years, and all but one of them had either a temporary or permanent right to reside in Finland. The interviewees included people who had moved to Finland from the EU and European Free Trade Association (EFTA)

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countries, Russia, South America, Africa and Asia. The group of participants consisted of a small number of immigrants who live in small rural communities, which is why pseudonyms are used and their exact places of residence and nationality are not stated as this would violate their right to anonymity. The interviewee’s gender, age or other identity markers are revealed in the quotes when they are relevant to the analysis. I employed a set of narrative analysis techniques (Cortazzi, 2001) to understand how immigrants’ perceptions about their well-being served to make meaning out of their experiences of welcome and non-welcome in rural North Karelia. I also studied patterns in the narratives in connection with the future trajectories regarding participants’ plans to stay in the region. When categorising the stories of well-being, I used the framework developed by the Finnish sociologist Erik Allard (1975, 1993), who argued that an individual’s well-being consists of three interlinked dimensions: material (having), social (loving) and personal cultural (being). For Allard (1993: 89–91), ‘having’ is about material conditions that are necessary for survival and for the avoidance of misery, such as economic resources, housing, health and education. ‘Loving’ stands for the need to relate to other people and to form meaningful attachments and contacts in the local community, while ‘being’ refers to personal fulfilment and development through participation in leisure activities, meaningful employment, politics and opportunities to enjoy nature. Allard’s framework has been applied in the previous ethnographic study of well-being among villagers in the rural fringe areas of North Karelia (Uusitalo & Assmuth, 2013). According to Nordbakke and Schwanen (2013), Allard’s understanding of wellbeing is moderately universal by which they mean that he both recognises that well-being needs are socially defined and open to change as well as argues that, in some societies and groups, there exists a modicum of agreement regarding what the most important needs are. This commentary is particularly relevant in multicultural contexts, where we can expect a wide range of different understandings of well-being and good life to exist (de Lima, 2016). This chapter uses Allard’s framework as an analytical device to distinguish between different aspects of well-being, while remaining attentive to the narratives that do not fall under any of these predefined categories. In the sections below, immigrants’ experiences of having, loving and being and as well as possible new openings are discussed.

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The Analysis of Welcome as Having, Loving and Being Despite the pronounced need for labour migration, the road to employment and economic security in North Karelia is longer for immigrants than for ‘host’ residents. Immigrants with a refugee background in particular tend to have lower employment rates, earn less and receive more social benefits than other immigrant groups or natives (Sarvimäki, 2017). Immigrants are also disproportionately employed on short-term and part-­ time employment contracts (see Sutela, 2014), meaning that even for those immigrants who work, the employment periods are often intertwined with the periods of unemployment and participation in education or training intended for the unemployed to improve their employability (Pöllänen & Davydova-Minguet, 2017). For these reasons, immigrants tend to enter rural communities as clients of the welfare system, where they try to make their way to the labour market through participation in state integration programmes and initiatives. Many of the participants interviewed for the study had either an employment relationship or a subsistence income made possible by social benefits. In material terms, they felt relatively safe and confident in their ability to survive in the rural parts of Finland. They argued that in the periphery of North Karelia, life is relatively comfortable, even with less money because the cost of living is so much lower in comparison to Southern Finland. Also, the opportunities for consumption are rare, so money is not needed in the same way as it is in the urban areas. An exception to this narrative was expressed by the business owners interviewed who find their work situation to be very burdensome at times and their financial situation stressful. For example, those who work in tourism highlighted how demanding it is to generate sufficient income over the short holiday periods to survive financially during the quieter months. The entrepreneurs also worried about the potential negative impact of developing health problems on their financial situation. Their uncertainties may be increased by a tendency among foreign tourism entrepreneurs to operate alone and separately from the municipality, villagers and other entrepreneurs (Vatanen & Halonen, 2013). However, entrepreneurship gave meaning to the participants’ lives as it allowed them to fulfil their dream of working with animals or escaping city life. At the same time, the nature of the work was very time consuming which excluded them from integration services, such as language courses, which

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are mostly intended for unemployed jobseekers and are organised at times that are not suitable for those who run small businesses. The participants’ attitudes towards social welfare vary depending on their own history of use of welfare services. As a permanent resident and an EU citizen, Sophie is entitled to residence-based social security, but feels reluctant to turn to the authorities or other locals for support: It’s probably our mistake that we don’t look for support. Well, the family support, like Kela, I think Kela is really great. Everything is in English (…). And when we talked with her [an English-speaking neighbour, also of foreign origin] about business, she advised me to go to the TE [employment] office. Well, first, I’m a shy person. And second, I had a really bad experience in [names a small municipality] where I went to the office and the woman didn’t speak English at all. (…) On the phone it happened too. So, in this case I just. I don’t know. I’m completely disappointed and I have no hope anymore. And I [have not] been to the TE office because I’m just so afraid that I’m there and nobody speaks English. So, I don’t do it. And we can more or less survive now. We don’t plan to ask for any support.

As a mother of a small baby, the speaker is entitled to the maternity allowance provided by the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (Kela). This benefit combined with the money obtained from running a small business, she and her husband are able to establish a modest income on which they can ‘more or less survive’, which is how she describes their financial circumstances. This said, Sophie and other participants regard those with employment to be in a more secure position as they can move forward in life and plan their futures. As one interviewee said: ‘The money from the Kela goes directly from hand to mouth’. The participants are aware of the discourse of immigrants arriving in Finland to take advantage of the welfare system (Keskinen, 2016), which means that while being able to access the benefits of the Nordic welfare state, not everyone feels welcome to do so. In fact, there is a strong desire among participants to dissociate themselves from such disparaging comments by avoiding claiming benefits. Svetlana, who moved to North Karelia from Russia in the 1990s, reflects on this topic and her early years in the village: I know that when I came to the village, they surely talked a lot [about me] before they got to know me. (…) When I came to Finland, I absolutely did not want to be a burden to anyone. I was unemployed for a half a year, but

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after that I have always made my own money, as well as money for the family, not be supported by anyone. It was important because some thought ‘she just came here looking for a good life’. People don’t know all that [settling in a new country] demands. It has not been easy.

Svetlana speaks of material self-sufficiency as a central feature of her emotional and social well-being, while recognising that achieving such a status requires hard work, particularly from immigrants. She returns to this topic during her interview to argue that immigrants cannot expect to succeed or become part of the labour market in Finland without making sacrifices. As an example, immigrants, especially if they do not speak fluent Finnish, must be willing to accept any kind of employment regardless of their past work experience and level of education. Also, another interviewee, with years of work experience and a high school degree from her previous home country, claimed that moving to North Karelia required her to be ‘born again’ as a baby with no skills or valuable knowledge of working life. All participants claim that the situation is particularly dire in the rural regions with high unemployment. On the other hand, the ethos of hard work is the binding narrative thread within the stories told by the participants who now see themselves as being welcomed as part of the community. They talk about the sacrifices they have made and hard work it has required to integrate and make a living in the countryside. At the same time, they speak of the plight of vulnerability and being made to feel unwelcome, which results in reluctance to turn to others for guidance and support. In their view, a way to move forward is to accept one’s position as a foreigner, seize any opportunity that is given to them and push through any barriers no matter what life throws at them.

Welcome by Being Part of Loving Relationships The findings of my study support the notion by Flynn and Kay (2017) that in rural migrants’ narratives, a sense of emotional security, which is understood here as being part of close and mutually supportive social ties and networks (loving), is strongly linked to living in smaller places. Rural locales are perceived as friendlier, safer and quieter compared to big cities. The participants argue that, while the world is rapidly changing around them, life in North Karelian towns and villages is more manageable and slower paced: there is more time for fostering friendships and loving relationships than in cities, where people are busy and more focused on their

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careers and making money. A young couple, who live in an isolated village, compares their lifestyle to that of their friends: SOPHIE: My friends who live [in my home country] see their children for an hour in the evening. In the morning a nanny looks after them and takes them to nursery and also looks after them after school because the parents are working and they work later in the evening than in Finland. Crazy life. Perhaps they have more money but it is crazy they don’t see their children. MIHAIL: On the farm, children spend more time with their parents. They take part in family activities either on the farm or at the house. In the city, you need to work and then you have no… SOPHIE: …family. You have no life.

Flynn and Kay (2017) maintain that such perceptions may be constructed through preconceived and romanticised ideas about rural places rather than actual lived realities of immigrants within these places. Still, most of the participants in this study regard rural places as being more humane and personal compared to ‘faceless’ and crowded cities. At the same time, however, they narrate difficulties in establishing socially meaningful relationships, especially with long-term residents of Finnish origin. In the sparsely populated areas, such problems can be practical: there simply are not many people to socialise with and those who live nearby are mostly elderly people with limited ability to communicate with foreigners who do not speak much Finnish. On the other hand, there is an understanding among the participants that existing cultural differences make it hard for them to establish relationships with Finns. Indeed, many participants mention the lack of people, meeting places and leisure facilities as factors that make social connections in rural areas difficult, and at times even unachievable. In the Finnish countryside, a gas station or a small local bar can be the centre of village life, but not everyone feels welcome there. Such places may have their close-knit circles of regular customers or a masculine drinking culture. The participants, women especially, steer clear of places where alcohol is consumed because they connect excessive drinking with aggression towards foreigners. Male participants cite more experiences of clashes with drunks, but they also believe they are more capable of defending themselves against unwanted attention. On the other hand, during the interviews, the drunks were half-­ humorously referred to as the only Finns who willingly interact with foreigners.

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The participants state that in their interactions with Finns they encounter rudeness and stereotypes of immigrants. They explain that life in rural parts of the country is also hard for long-term residents, which is why many encounter immigrants with suspicion. A few interviewees discussed their experiences of unwelcome as racism, citing incidents of people swearing at them in public. However, the bigger problem in their view is the silent non-welcome of Finns, who prefer to keep their distance and are busy with their own lives. Finns are described as shy and quiet, which is why immigrants socialise mainly with other migrants who share the experience of settling in a new place. Marina explains her view on the topic: Our friends are always Russian. Very rarely can Finnish people get into our (-). Things are different, like our relationships are closer, while your relationships are… Like I can speak about family and personal issues, while in Finland it is not usual, in my opinion. Here it is better to talk about the weather. It is difficult to understand you, and it is difficult for you to understand us. (…) It is difficult to find friends.

Such descriptions of Finns are a cultural stereotype (Nyman, 2015). At the same time, they cannot be dismissed as merely personal opinions. There are several studies pointing out that loneliness is common experience amongst recent migrants in Finland. For example, a recent survey by the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (Kuusio et al., 2020) found that roughly one in five people from the Middle East and North Africa reported feelings of loneliness and others also had experienced feelings of isolation. The participants are inclined to explain the difficulties of making friends with local Finnish residents with their lack of experience of interacting with foreigners (see also, de Lima, 2011). They are of the opinion that immigration is new to this part of the country, which is why residents are now just learning the skills of multicultural living. In other words, the current uneasiness in participants’ day-to-day interactions with ‘host’ residents is interpreted as a ‘social fact’, typical of rural contexts, and a condition that one must adopt for the time being. Nevertheless, the participants were hopeful that attitudes may change over time, as people become more familiar with the idea of immigrants living in their vicinity.

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Being and Personal Fulfilment Previous research has highlighted the lack of access to wider networks of co-nationals living nearby as a particular concern for immigrants in rural places (de Lima, 2011; Flynn & Kay, 2017). This has also been highlighted as a reason why immigrants move away from rural locations. In contrast, this study establishes the presence of associations and a range of civic activities through which immigrants in rural North Karelia are involved in networks and interactions with other immigrants. Those immigrants who attended the activities and projects organised locally found them useful and relevant. They stated that such organisations gave opportunities for wider social interactions, information about local cultural practices, as well as knowledge required to deal with the authorities. Amidst the experiences of loneliness, these opportunities of civic engagement fill the needs of both loving and being. As Isabelle from South America explains: This work for me was very important because it has completed a little bit what I was missing, which is being with people. (…) It makes me feel good if I can lend a hand to somebody. Working with immigrants has also been very important for me because it makes you feel that you are not alone. All these things you feel when you come to another country, for all of us, it’s almost the same. Even if we come from very different places, different cultures, different situations, we all have our own story. But at some point, we connect. We have the same feeling. We are missing somebody, we have family somewhere else, sometimes we feel lonely. We don’t understand how the system works. So, for me, it was really very nice that I could help these people, that they can get some sort of help from me.

Other participants also expressed similar sentiments, claiming that they have gained new meaning in life as well as self-esteem, which comes out of being able to help other immigrants in similar situations. They further explained that such opportunities are valued because they are otherwise rare in rural North Karelia. A young man, originally from the Middle East, argued that rural places are great for families with smaller children, but do not offer many opportunities for young people or young adults: If you go to the south, you find more bars for those who want to go to bars and such. Games, hobbies, everything. Here the swimming pool is closed at weekends, for example. People cannot go anywhere. There is nothing to do.

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The cultural centre is closed, there is nothing there. The gym closes early. What do people do then? There are two bars to go to, but what if you don’t want to go there? You have to be at home.

On the other hand, it is clear the organisations cannot compensate for the lack of public services and commercial outlets, like restaurants or clothes shops in rural spaces. Also, while organisations provide some immigrants with opportunities for work trials, training and even temporary employment, the demand for work and other openings is far greater than what is on offer (see also, McAreavey & Argent, 2018). The participants recognised segregation in activities aimed at new migrants and long-term residents. While migrant-led organisations were appreciated by local authorities for their work and their attempts to cater for the various well-being needs of immigrants, these organisations were criticised for not organising joint programmes for newcomers and long-­ term residents. The participants claimed that participation in multicultural activities, for example, clubs and events that are attended by other immigrants, was not always a positive experience. Socialising mainly with other immigrants made it difficult to improve Finnish skills and meet Finnish-­ speaking ‘host’ residents given that knowledge of Finnish is perceived as a key ingredient to achieving meaningful everyday life. At the same time, the organisations that were perceived as Finnish were struggling because they found it hard to reach and engage with new members in their activities. This criticism was taken seriously by the immigrants who were interviewed and who held active roles in the organisations. While I was assured that the organisations had taken steps to open up their activities to immigrants and ‘host’ residents alike, they acknowledge that the change is slow: the reputation of being an organisation for immigrants is hard to shed. The activists of the organisations who were interviewed were proud of their achievements: being able to provide fellow immigrants with support, a sense of community and meaningful leisure opportunities were considered an important accomplishment. At the same time, they express helplessness in the face of more structural issues, such as the lack of employment opportunities in rural regions or discrimination in recruitment, which the participants also reported. The most critical issue for them was the lack of long-term funding. They were concerned that as soon as they have managed to establish good practices, the project funding runs out and the hard work goes to waste. Furthermore, attempts to change the municipal structures are falling short. For instance, in one of the North Karelian

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municipalities an informal council of immigrants was established by the local authority to coordinate the cooperation between the municipality and immigrant residents. The people involved appreciated the role given to them but felt like they did not have any real influence over matters of importance, such as when the local school was selecting a new teacher to teach Islam. A member of the council who was interviewed believed that this was a decision of highest importance to them, which is why the council should have been involved in the process, while the authorities (that were also interviewed for the research on another occasion) regarded it as unacceptable for the parents of immigrant pupils to interfere with school matters in this way. There was disappointment among the research participants that while the authorities often stated that they value cooperation with immigrant associations, the associations are not given any real power, and that the authorities reserve the final say for themselves in all important matters (Davydova-Minguet & Sotkasiira, 2014).

Three Dimensions of Welcoming and Well-being Previous research has proposed that the list of characteristics of welcoming communities could be used as a framework to evaluate the success of local initiatives (Gibson & Annis, 2019). This chapter, however, argues that instead of such ready-made checklists, welcoming communities’ initiatives should be evaluated against the lived experiences of well-being among the recipients. Furthermore, the understanding of a welcoming community can differ significantly, depending on whether it is regarded as a policy approach, local practice or a discourse of development (see Table 2.2). Economic well-being is clearly crucial in the choice between moving and staying in rural areas. The interviewees spoke highly of the universal residence-based social security of Nordic welfare states, which they considered generous when compared to what they have experienced in their previous countries of residence. At the same time, however, they held ambivalent views of the welfare state. For example, the Russian women who participated in Davydova-Minguet and Pöllänen’s (2018: 177) study regarded the livelihood guaranteed by the welfare state as both a valuable gift and a humiliation. While interviewees valued the material security it provided, they were resentful about their dependency on the state and dreaded being perceived as a dependant, or at worst a burden. Further, they suggested that without an income from work, a person lacks security in the deepest sense and is not fully accepted as part of the community.

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Table 2.2  Policy, discursive and lived dimensions of welcome Welcoming & well-being

Policy

Discourse

Lived experience

Having

Rural policy: attracting and retaining immigrants set as a key objective Immigration policy: work-based migration preferred over other types of immigration Social policy: Differential inclusion of non-citizens Support for building receptive and welcoming communities Strict family reunification policy cuts people off from their families Public services replaced by short-term initiatives and projects.

Struggle over deserving and non-deserving migrants and self-sufficiency vs dependency

Material security combined with ontological insecurity The ethos of hard work

Rural communities experienced as warmer, friendlier and safer

The actual lived experience depends on whether you are considered part of the in-group or not

Support for immigrant participation. The relationship with the host society is considered very important but it is perceived as difficult to achieve

Opportunities for meaningful leisure are limited Fulfilment mainly through interacting with other immigrants The host community supports activities but is reluctant to give up any real power

Loving

Being

When it came to emotional well-being in the form of fostering networks of friendship and other meaningful attachments, it appeared that close and friendly relationships are mainly nourished between those who are considered to belong to the ‘in-group’. The access of immigrants to the ‘circle of locals’ is conditioned by their skin colour, gender and the

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length of stay in the locality. While rural communities were described as warmer and friendlier, many participants shared their experiences of loneliness and isolation. Based on the interviews, it appears that those who move to the rural parts of the country can expect a long wait to experience an emotional welcome that is meaningful. Some people get tired of waiting and choose to leave in the hope of being welcomed elsewhere. Another important aspect concerning the need for emotional well-­ being is to acknowledge that for many immigrants, their family and intimate relations are transnational (Turtiainen et al., 2020). This requires a recognition and acceptance in welcoming initiatives that migrants have had emotional ties and relationships prior to arriving in the host society which they may wish to maintain as part of their new lives either through family reunification or through maintaining ongoing long-distance communication. As previous research has outlined, the family unification policy in Finland is very strict (Hiitola et al., 2020). Being able to get a permit for one’s immediate family to move to Finland requires meeting income requirements, which is particularly demanding in rural areas because of the employment insecurities described above. On the other hand, a warm welcome to one’s family may be a reason for immigrants to move to rural areas and stay there. A participant identified that a key reason why he settled in North Karelia was that at the local integration office he received friendly and solid advice on filling in the application form for family reunion, which left him with a deep sense of welcome and gratitude. This story highlights how important it is for an individual to be greeted as a person with a need for emotional security of their loved ones. It also illustrates the importance of structural factors at the national level that condition people’s residence choices. National immigration policies can work against local efforts at welcoming migrants by making access to settlement rights difficult (Derwing & Krahn, 2008). The creation of welcoming communities must occur simultaneously on local, regional and national levels. The analysis further suggests that the world of non-governmental organisations is the one that provides most opportunities for autonomous agency for rural immigrants, but this may take place in isolation from non-­ immigrant residents. The discussion thus suggests that whether rural immigrants interpret the welcome in their place of residence as positive or negative depends largely on their frame of reference. When the

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participants in the study compare their experiences to what is perceived as the opposite of welcome, such as unkindness and discrimination, the idea of being recognised as someone who has a right to be there was seen as a major step towards respectful and convivial co-existence. Sometimes being accepted as part of the community and not directly refused entry is the most that immigrants in the Finnish rural areas can expect. However, such processes of welcome mean being put in a position of the conditional newcomer to whom the courtesy is extended only if they conform to the ways of those who do the welcoming (for further discussions on conditioned receptiveness, see Søholt et  al., 2018). The driving force behind immigrant organisations is the understanding that it is not enough to be welcomed, to participate in the existent community. Instead, there is a wish to be part of producing that community, and it is only when this need is recognised and respected that the residents can feel their participation is both meaningful and effective.

Conclusion: The Ambiguous Experiences of Welcoming in Rural Finland This chapter has explored the ideal of welcoming rural communities and compared it to the lived realities of immigrants in North Karelia. It has argued that policies and local measures that are based on the idea of welcoming, or that have the creation of welcoming communities on their agenda, run the risk of (implicitly) stating that their targets, the recently arrived immigrants, are not part of the community in their own right. Rather, to really belong and contribute they need to be welcomed— unconditionally—by long-term residents. The reality for most of the immigrants interviewed as discussed in this chapter demonstrates that their material, emotional and social well-being depends on the approval of the long-term residents. Furthermore, the policy approach of welcoming, which highlights the actions of the ‘host’ community, may overlook the hard work that immigrants themselves put into belonging and into being accepted as part of their village or residential communities. Being aware of the criticism towards and the ambiguity around the concept of well-being is important (de Lima, 2016). It is evident that economic and social well-being may also be used as pre-determined measuring sticks to categorise who is welcome and who is not. This tendency is particularly visible in the discussions concerning labour migration versus

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other types of migration and in the discourse of immigrants’ expected material self-sufficiency. This may be—explicitly and implicitly—perceived as privileging the promotion of work-based immigration and fails to account for the structural barriers that exist for other categories of migrants in rural parts of Finland. As this chapter has demonstrated there is potential in discussing the lived experiences of well-being among rural immigrants through the lens of welcome rather than treating it as a distant object of rural policy. Research using welcome as a framework has the potential to make room for new migrant-led conceptualisations of welcoming alongside the improved understanding of what is relevant for decisions to stay in, or move away from, any rural setting (Flynn & Kay, 2017). This perspective outlines the importance of the needs and aspirations of rural immigrants rather than positing them as the objects of welcome from the majority. Thus, the focus on welcome in the sense of lived experiences has the potential to strengthen the position of rural immigrants as autonomous individuals, whose hopes and aspirations matter, and may be different from those of policy makers, ‘host’ communities and from each other. Immigrants’ transnational and transborder relationships, which can be overlooked in local initiatives, need to be taken into consideration when planning for welcoming communities. This chapter has also highlighted the importance of strengthening communication and democratic processes at a local level. It argues for a need to develop formal and informal channels of participation through which newcomers might meaningfully contribute to rural development. For welcoming initiatives to serve a purpose, individuals with short settlement histories and limited voting rights and those lacking knowledge of the local languages must also have a say in the ways in which welcoming is defined.

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CHAPTER 3

On the Hypermobility of Agricultural Workers in Europe: Life Courses Between Rural Moldova and Switzerland/the EU Dina Bolokan

Introduction The annual report on agriculture published by the Bundesamt für Landwirtschaft (Federal Office for Agriculture) in Switzerland contains information about livestock and food production. It also includes information on the farming population, such as the divorce rates in agriculture and migrating agricultural workers, which are subsumed under the category familienfremde Arbeitskräfte (family-foreign labour force) (Bundesamt für Landwirtschaft [BLW], 2019: 47). This juridical category serves as a basis for the precarious labour arrangements of Swiss nuclear family members on farms (Bäschlin et al., 2013; Contzen & Forney, 2017: 31) because they are not automatically included in all social security benefits, while maintaining the myth of nuclear and intergenerational family

D. Bolokan (*) Centre for Gender Studies, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Kerrigan, P. de Lima (eds.), The Rural-Migration Nexus, Rethinking Rural, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18042-2_3

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farming as the foundation of food production in Switzerland. Moreover, this category positions all other farmworkers as ‘foreign’ and thus as not belonging to the food-producing communities—a situation that mirrors broader othering and socioeconomic marginalisation processes. Furthermore, people who travel to Switzerland to work in agriculture are not completely represented in any official count. As the report on agriculture occurs at the beginning of the year, these statistics do not reflect how many people from abroad work in the agricultural sector during labour-­ intensive months. Family farming is also the main point of interest in qualitative studies on farming populations in Switzerland, thereby revealing ‘methodological nationalism’ (Amelina, 2012) and the dominant family ideology in Swiss society. Both epistemological settings exclude insights into the lives and challenges of agricultural workers from abroad. Their overall invisibilisation is furthermore reflected in the public sphere as agricultural workers’ biographies, struggles, and needs rarely appear and remain untold. This chapter focuses on hypermobile life trajectories of agricultural workers from Moldova who have been working in Switzerland and the EU.  Their biographies reveal how labour mobility within agriculture is closely connected to diverse working arrangements across different borders along the life course. First, I describe briefly the agricultural labour market in Switzerland and the EU. Methodological and theoretical trajectories are elaborated to weave together a global ethnography (Burawoy, 2000), a life course perspective (Mills, 2000), and post- and decolonial approaches (Mohanty, 2003; Smith, 2005). The chapter then moves to a discussion on agricultural workers’ movements and presents biographical testimonies, focusing on people’s personal struggles. Finally, the chapter expounds on agricultural workers’ hypermobility to elaborate on the political economy of labour regimes in Europe and the consequences of such mobile living and working conditions for people’s health and well-being. Previous research on perspectives of rural living and working relations in agriculture has excluded the most marginalised from perspectives on social justice. By approaching agricultural labour relations from a translocal lens and within a decolonial life course perspective, I aim to (1) contribute to the gap in knowledge on farmworkers in Switzerland and the EU and (2) develop a theoretical and methodological orientation for future investigations of labour mobility within the agricultural sector that counter the above-mentioned epistemological limitations. Consequently, this research adds to existing studies on the challenges faced by farming

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populations in Switzerland and the EU. I will demonstrate that financial bottlenecks in agriculture are compensated not merely by local communities but also by agricultural workers from abroad. I argue that while migrant workers represent an inevitable labour force for food production in Switzerland, their statistical, scientific, and public invisibilisation feeds into colonial discourses and continuities where people working in agriculture are constructed as ‘others’ and reduced to mere numbers without histories while facing socioeconomic exclusion. While focusing on agricultural labour regimes, I aim to follow Smith (2005) and Islam (2013) who argue for the need to ‘uncover hegemonic effects of colonising discourses [as these] colonising discourses continue to create grand narratives that push non-Western narratives to the periphery’ (Islam, 2013: 318, parentheses added).

The Agricultural Labour Market in Switzerland and Europe The Swiss agricultural industry is the most subsidised worldwide after Norway (OECD, 2021). However, despite the high direct payments to this sector, neoliberal policies have intensified international competition faced by Swiss farmers, which has led to precarious economic conditions. The main beneficiaries of subsidies have been agribusinesses. Financial bottlenecks are compensated by nuclear family labour and unpaid labour, with small farms barely surviving (Contzen & Crettaz, 2019; Vonarb & Roth, 1994). Reports show, that nearly one-third of Swiss farmers live in an economically precarious situation (SBV, 2007). When farms shut down (around 1000 per year), the land is passed onto neighbouring farms, leading to structural changes towards medium- and large-scale companies that employ workers from abroad on a short-term basis (Chau et al., 2015: 2). The most recent available statistics reveal that in 2017 the agricultural sector in Switzerland had 154,000 workers; 120,000 are subsumed under the category of family members and 17,000 other workers are counted as Swiss based on citizenship. Another 17,000 are counted under the category ‘employees from abroad’, which has grown by 31% since 2007. The number of agricultural workers with Swiss citizenship is constant, but the number of family member workers has been declining (Agristat, 2019; Bundesamt für Statistik [BFS], 2019). As the statistical data collection that these figures are based on occurs at the beginning of the year, there are no

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statistics of how many people from abroad are in the country during labour-intensive months. A sample from Agristat (2014) on agricultural wage surveys demonstrates that most employees are between 20 and 29 years old; 40% are from new EU countries (post-2004 enlargement) and 26% are from old EU countries; 27% have Swiss citizenship; and 4% are from non-EU countries. Men comprise 71% of all workers and the division of labour on farms is highly gendered (100% women in farming households, 14% women in animal husbandry, and 6% women in arable farming). Workers not holding Swiss citizenship are found in the lowest-­ income brackets. According to a study on short-stay permits (L EU/ EFTA permit), it may be assumed that both recurrent and non-recurrent labour arrangements occur with agricultural workers from abroad (Eidgenössische Kommission für Migrationsfragen [EKM], 2013). It is estimated that around 35,000–40,000 people from abroad are employed annually around the harvest season (Bopp & Affolter, 2013: 99). Most work permits in agriculture are issued to workers from Poland, Portugal, and Romania. While stock farming involves longer-term working relations, most people are employed for short-term work in vegetable cultivation. Contracts last for 3–9 months, but labour arrangements for as little as a few weeks at a time also exist. Such short employment relations are often found in fruit cultivation and include informal or even illegalised labour arrangements (for more detail on the use of the term ‘illegalised’, see Bauder, 2014). Research on labour conditions of migrating farmworkers in Europe has been mainly conducted in the context of Mediterranean agriculture (Corrado et al., 2017; Gertel & Sippel, 2014). In this context, agricultural workers must be very mobile and flexible (Molinero & Avallone, 2016: 137). While studies have largely focused on recruitment practices, researchers have also pointed to the overall symbolic and structural violence within the emergence of a highly segregated, racialised, and gendered sector (Lo Cascio & Perrotta, 2019; Peano, 2017). The ‘Californisation’ of Mediterranean agriculture designates some larger transformational processes that are common to several rural territories: the spread of wage labour in activities traditionally carried out at small-scale family farming; the flexibilisation of seasonal activities due to the fluctuating demands of the agrifood market; and the spatial and temporal concentration of large numbers of migrating workers, often moving in search of work in different production areas. As in California, these changes go hand in hand with the spread of crop monocultures, which demand labour concentration during

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sowing and harvesting seasons; the attendant work is mainly accomplished by documented and undocumented workers, and, above all, precarious migrating workers (Garrapa, 2018). The situation outside the Mediterranean—in northern, western, central, and eastern EU countries—lacks research. The research remains limited to single cases and is short-term orientated, focusing, for example, on Romani berry pickers from Bulgaria in Sweden (Mešić & Woolfson, 2015); agricultural workers from Poland in Germany for the asparagus and strawberry harvest (Becker, 2010); or farmworkers from eastern EU countries in Norway (Rye & Andrzejewska, 2010). Longer-term research perspectives, such as in Finland, where mainly non-EU workers from Ukraine and Russia are employed on farms, provide insights into workers’ labour conditions (Mattila et al., 2021). However, semi-structured interviews do not allow for deeper insights into labour mobility regimes. Thus, for wealthier EU countries, due to an absence of comparative long-term studies using ethnographic and life course methods, there is a lack of depth in understanding the impact of structural changes on issues such as labour regimes and migration patterns and experiences across countries and over time. Most describe the ongoing transformations in labour arrangements and mobility regimes using the concepts of Pendelmigration (shuttle migration) (e.g., Becker, 2010) and circular migration (e.g., Hedberg et al., 2019) when referring to mobility patterns of migrating agricultural workers. These concepts imply that these workers regularly commute between different places, thereby regularly crossing borders and living in transnational household arrangements. While this is clearly the case for many agricultural workers all over Europe, the question arises on whether circular and shuttle migration concepts— largely referred to within studies on the global care economy—are applicable to the analysis of agricultural workers’ mobility patterns and if these reference systems are helpful in accessing an understanding of the agribusiness sector and the employment of migrants in the context of globalisation over time. Meanwhile, studies describe the agricultural and agrifood sector as one of the most dangerous to workers’ health (Fiałkowska & Matuszczyk, 2021; Holmes, 2013; Palumbo & Corrado, 2020). Given the impact of working in agriculture on migrant workers’ health, researchers have also highlighted the need for more research using a life course perspective on farmworkers (Unterberger, 2018) which this chapter addresses.

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Translocal Life Course Perspectives Within a Post-/ Decolonial Global Ethnography Approach My knowledge production on agriculture commenced in 2011. I worked for several months on farms in Switzerland as part of my master’s thesis. It began by listening to life stories of farmworkers from different parts of the world. I continued my research on labour migration within agriculture and spent several months in rural areas in Moldova. This helped me gain a better understanding of the challenges farmworkers face from a translocal perspective. This perspective was enriched by personal experiences. I was born in Moldova, migrated to Germany in 1991, and currently live in Switzerland. Half of my relatives in Moldova live on subsistence agriculture and work abroad whenever they need money or when they wish to escape from the difficulties of everyday life. Growing up among these realities, I became sensitised to the need to understand the role of migration out of/back into Moldova after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While following agricultural workers’ biographies, my research developed into a translocal life course approach—not a disconnected and alienated ‘research strategy’ but a supportive part of my own back-and-forth movements. Hence, it became a personal coping strategy to meet my own translocal care obligations. Additionally, my relationship with the rural communities goes far beyond my wage labour in academia. From the beginning, seeking social justice and searching for emancipatory translocal visions within the transformation of food production became and remain a constitutive part of my work. These experiences facilitated the possibility of tapping into the sensory aspects of working: the beauty and challenges from the perspective of those who deal with soil, plants, and animals on a daily basis. This again allowed me to see agriculture as a place of exploitation but also one of emancipation. Although there are big differences between a medium-size farmer in Switzerland and a subsistence farmer from Moldova working on a Swiss farm, I do not focus on these differences (see Galindo, 2013 for a critique on fragmentation). Instead, I focus on understanding the structural configurations and power relations people experience while trying to make a living by producing food. My research aims to decolonise our mindsets and relations (Walia, 2013: 250); consequently, following Mohanty (2003: 231), I argue that a perspective on well-being within the transformation of agriculture in Europe must be rooted in the lives, experiences, and interests of migrating agricultural workers, who are critical to food production

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and are also the most marginalised group. Such a perspective on food production allows an inclusive and ecological social justice analysis. The insights in this chapter are based on biographical interviews (recorded) with 30 farmworkers from Moldova, with mostly unrecorded follow-up conversations and observations archived on tape and in a diary over nine years (2011–2020). The first biographical interviews (8) were with farmworkers from Moldova I met while working on two farms in Switzerland in 2011 and 2015. All the other workers were recommended to me through a snowball process by those I had already talked to or met during my stay in rural Moldova. The only criterion that mattered was their past or present work experience in agriculture in Switzerland, regardless of mobility patterns or duration of employment. I met some of these people in person several times over the research process and in different working and living conditions, mainly in Moldova and Switzerland. I stayed in contact via telephone with others or followed their life trajectories by talking to their friends and relatives. These processes were multilingual, conducted mainly in Russian but also in Romanian/Moldovan. While following the trajectories after the initial biographical interview, I was guided by Precarias al la Deriva’s (2004) ‘drifts through the circuits of feminised precarious work’, asking about their last job experience in agriculture while aiming to understand mobility patterns and labour conditions. Most of the workers (28/30) were from rural Moldova and had grown in subsistence farming communities. They were between 21 and 47 years old (28 years average) when I first met them, and most had been socialised male (24/30). Their educational background, while changing over the life course, ranged from high school (18) to being a university student (9) to holding a university degree (3). While one person had regularly commuted only between Moldova and a farm in Switzerland, all the others had labour experiences in two (5), three (11), four (9), or even more countries (4) over their life course. Besides the agriculture/agrifood industry, the workers had been employed in construction, gastronomy, and the care sector before or after their jobs in food production. More recently, they had increasingly switched to package delivery driver jobs while trying to move away from temporary employment (6). While some were regularly commuting between Moldova and different places abroad where they performed wage labour (21), others were permanently on the move across countries and regularly changing wage labour experiences for years before returning to Moldova (8). While most were on the move by

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themselves, four were moving as couples/families. The labour arrangements in the agriculture/agrifood sector varied from a few weeks to several months but only in rare cases lasted for more than six months or longer. While I was able to stay in contact with some people throughout the nine years (4), other relationships only lasted for around five years (16) or even less (10). My guiding question for this chapter is: What leads members of farming communities from Moldova to remain for years in hypermobile living arrangements, and how do mobility and labour regimes impact workers’ health and well-being while performing wage labour in the agricultural/agrifood sector in Switzerland and the EU? My research perspective weaves together global ethnography and life course approaches drawing on postcolonial theories motivated by a ‘decolonial option’ (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2009). While a global ethnography (Burawoy, 2000) is conducted across multiple places and is interested in how globalisation is grounded in the local, life course studies aim for longitudinal perspectives and biographically informed knowledge production that focuses on ‘the study of biography, of history, and of the problems of their intersection within social structures’ (Mills, 2000: 134). From feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial thinking, I apply a reformulation of objectivity that unfolds positionality as ‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway, 1988) and as a critical aspect of ‘geo-politics’ and the ‘body-politics of knowledge’ (Anzaldúa, 1987; Tlostanova, 2012). This positionality acknowledges that we are always situated in time, history, and place and thus that knowledge production is heavily enriched by the researchers themselves—their personal biographies, experiences, and political interests, such as underlying ideologies. I further draw on Tsuda et al. (2014: 130), who argue that ‘transnationalism is more grounded in specific localities and places. (…), the so-­ called “transnational” connections between people in different countries are actually translocal, since their transborder activities do not engage the nation-state; instead, their commitments and identifications are with very localised communities (…).’ Thus, where state politics enter explicitly, I refer to the transnational, but when discussing life trajectories, I refer to the translocal. I do so from an understanding that the current worldwide political situation is characterised by a ‘“reterritorialisation” more than a “deterritorialisation” of the world’ (Wastl-Walter, 2011: 2) and that the separation of local and national is limiting, as both are affected by global power relations, border regimes, and historical entanglements based on colonialism. A further reason for translocality as a point of departure is to

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avoid the reproduction of the nation as the unquestioned point of reference and orientation. In keeping with these reflections, I argue that a decolonial and translocal life course perspective, understood as the study of biographies as shared, community experiences of global power relations, can illuminate the health aspects and structural challenges of hypermobility well. Furthermore, such a study, conducted across time and space, can grasp structures of domination at the intersection of colonial (which, in my case, includes the Soviet Union) histories within current power relations. In the sections below, I briefly outline the historical context that has shaped rural communities such as the farming populations in Switzerland and Moldova. This is contextualised by presenting two vignettes of farmworkers. These vignettes allow for deeper insights into workers’ lives and cross-border movements due to wage labour. By drawing on longer interview passages, I aim to create a space for peoples’ own narratives on their realities, although these may appear fragmented due to the space limits of this chapter. While looking into personal challenges, the life trajectories presented are chosen because—in structural terms—they mirror the lives of the workers I talked to. Thus, the vignettes are specific and indicative of mobility patterns and challenges shared by the individual’s wider communities. Finally, the health-related effects of these mobility patterns on agricultural workers, with consideration to overall socioeconomic power relations, are discussed.

Translocal Life Trajectories of Workers from Moldova to Switzerland and the EU Although every life trajectory is unique and movements vary among them, the biographies of the agricultural workers I met are embedded in sets of power relations and have historical continuities. On the one hand, they are embedded in the history of a precarious farming population all over Europe which, in the case of Switzerland, is entangled with indentured child labour, eugenic policies, and racist guest worker programmes: thus, a history based on violence against the most vulnerable and most marginalised in rural Switzerland (see below). On the other hand, Moldovan farm workers’ trajectories are closely connected to the country’s post-­ Soviet history—especially the changes in agriculture—as almost all farmworkers grew up in rural, subsistence farming communities.

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Historically, social security has been a crucial challenge for the farming population and agricultural workers in Switzerland. The lives of children are a telling mirror of society. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Swiss children from poor rural families were sent to work as seasonal summer labourers in the nearby region of Upper Swabia in Germany (Schwabenkinder/Hütekinder; see Haumann, 2020). In the first half of the twentieth century, poor domestic farming families emigrated to neighbouring countries or as settlers to European colonies (Schelbert, 1967: 420). In other words, poverty was ‘exported’. At the same time, the phenomena of ‘contract children’ (Verdingkinder) arose; thousands of children in Switzerland were taken away from their parents and forced to work on farms (Kinder der Landstrasse; see Leimgruber et al., 1998). This practice—that intertwined with the eugenic ideologies—continued until the 1970s and predominately affected Yenish communities (an itinerant group in Western Europe) as the children were separated from the families to assimilate the next generation into settled life and force them to become sedentary, ‘hard-working’ citizens (Leuenberger & Seglias, 2008). From the 1950s–1970s, in the guest worker era, approximately 10,000–15,000 children of recruited workers had to live undocumented in Switzerland, becoming referred to as ‘forbidden children’ (verbotene Kinder; see Frigerio, 2014) due to their illegalised status by Swiss authorities. As hiding children on farms and in rural spaces was more difficult, it can be assumed that agricultural workers from abroad were forced to live away from their children. Agricultural production and subsistence farming was and remains the area in which most people work in Moldova. The end of the Soviet Union had devastating economic consequences. Farms (kolkhozes and sovkhozes, ‘collectives’ and state-owned farms during the Soviet Union) were disbanded, markets disintegrated, and agricultural land was distributed, privatised, and fragmented. The farming population was left with historical traumas and without infrastructure or perspective on how to reorganise food production and distribution (Bolokan, 2021). Between 1990 and 2000, the GDP of Moldova fell by around 65%. Moldova at present is challenged by mass emigration, especially from rural areas where wage labour is required but does not exist. The average income is around 170 euros per month, while the prices for gas and electricity are as high as in Germany. Approximately one-third of Moldova’s working population are employed abroad. Remittances currently represent the main source of income (Pinger, 2010) and make up 25%–30% of GDP—one of the

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highest rates in the world (Mosneaga, 2007). Along with permanent emigration and transnational family relationships worldwide, various forms of temporary working relations structure mobility patterns. In most households, at least one person emigrates or regularly works outside the country, supporting those who live in Moldova. Further, migration is feminised, with more women migrating than men (International Organization for Migration [IOM], 2012: 57). Consequently, villages in Moldova are characterised by a regular absence of people in their 20s–40s as villagers participate in the global economy. These rural communities can therefore be considered as embedded in a ‘global countryside’ (Woods, 2007) and represent global villages. Insight into the lives of the most vulnerable among the rural, farming communities, for example childcare in rural Switzerland and the phenomena of Verdingkinder/Kinder der Landstrasse/verbotene Kinder versus the recent rural migration/mobility in Moldova, highlights how dispossession, displacement, and mobility (control) intertwine and represent different regimes of immobilisation that are based on entangled histories of impoverishment, exploitation, and a global, rural capitalist precarity (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015). I will now turn my attention to two examples of how workers organise their hypermobile labour arrangements and what impacts on their mobility patterns. Valeriu Valeriu: I was born in 1990—there were 30 of us in my year at school. And now, there’s nobody here. (…) I recently wanted to chop down a tree. I dug a big hole, threw a sling around it, and wanted to pull it down. There were three of us, but we needed two more. I went into the village and looked for 30 minutes but couldn’t find anyone. I was willing to pay, but there was no one. It was empty, not even dogs or cats walking around. Nothing. What a load of rubbish, I thought. (…) Everyone who could work has gone abroad. Only old people remained— well, not really old, but forty and above. They have their own fields and no time to work for you. Today you need to sow just as much as you can handle yourself; otherwise, you’ll lose your harvest. (…) Me: And what do you feel when you see this? Valeriu: I came back to the village, and I’ve got nobody to spend time with. It’s like going into the mountains. Nobody.

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Me: Lonely? Valeriu: Very lonely! Me: Ina told me that the problem is that there aren’t any tractors for working the land. There is fertile land but nothing to work it with. Valeriu: No, the problem is that we can’t sell what we grow—not here, not abroad. (…) For example, we have enough tomatoes for the whole country. Cabbage and other things. But no, they import everything. All the tomatoes in the country are from Turkey. Even potatoes are imported from Poland. What the hell should we do with these potatoes? They’re killing us with this policy. But you can’t do anything about it. (…) The peaches are dropping from the trees, but nobody goes to collect them. (…) Then, the government comes and forces people to sell their land. Because they’re increasingly buying land for themselves. They have 30–40-hectare estates. They ruin people’s attempts to grow things and then buy the land themselves. Me: And how do they do that? Valeriu: For example, I can’t sell my tomatoes anywhere. At some point, I’ll say to hell with this land, and I’ll sell it. Nobody talks about it. But it is frequently happening. This one deputy has 100 hectares of land growing grapevines, with a tall fence, dogs, towers, and a house. There are increasingly more people like him in Moldova. (…) But he also has connections. He sells his grapes and they make them into champagne. You’ve got to celebrate the new year somehow. But nobody buys our grapes. They have their own factories. What do we have? We only have grapes, nothing else. But they have contacts and all the rest. (…) Then, someone comes to your house, presses money into your hand, and that’s it. Whether you want to sell the land or not isn’t important. You can’t do anything about it. They’re friends with the mayor. It’s all made legal. If you want to complain, who can you go to? But that’s Moldova. That’s why I say I don’t want to live here.     (Interview conducted in 2013 in Moldova) I first met Valeriu in 2011. He comes from a village in Moldova close to the Romanian border. We got to know each other while working on a medium-sized organic farm in the Central Plateau of Switzerland. Valeriu was 21  years old then and came to Switzerland via Agrimpuls, a Swiss farmers’ union branch responsible for worker recruitment from abroad via agricultural traineeship programme. It was his first job in Switzerland. He had worked in construction in Russia before, where he had been paid

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poorly for precarious, hard work and lived under illegalised conditions. Now, as a student in Chișinău, he can work via arriving in Switzerland as an agricultural trainee—although Moldova is not part of the European Union or in the Schengen zone. Valeriu learnt about the possibility of working in Switzerland via this channel from his older brother, who also worked in Switzerland through Agrimpuls. After working for a few months on a farm in Switzerland, Valeriu was happy to return home, but when I met him in 2013, in Moldova, he was frustrated and saw no future in the country, where he was trying to make a living in agriculture (see excerpts of this talk above). Valeriu planned to invest in his parent’s farm. He was inspired by the Swiss farm he was working on and intended to replace his vineyards with corn. Initially, he was confident he had discovered a niche market for sweetcorn in Moldova. Later, he learnt that buying the hybrid corn seeds each year from Switzerland was a financial investment he could not afford. Additionally, it was unclear where and how he could sell the corn and who could help him with organising and growing the corn. He was already running out of money and planning to leave to work abroad again. Valeriu considered going to the US as an option to join his brother’s friend. However, the lower wages deterred him, and he decided to follow his brother and apply for Romanian citizenship to enter the EU’s labour market. As it is not possible to enter the European Union labour market more than once through the traineeship programme, his first employment was based in Switzerland. Receiving Romanian citizenship based on co-­ ethnicity was introduced in Moldova after the collapse of the Soviet Union and is possible if you can prove that your ancestors were living on the territory of Greater Romania before the Soviet Union. Valeriu’s first application was rejected. He borrowed money and tried again. When he finally received his Romanian citizenship, he started working on a farm in Sweden and later found a position on a farm in Germany. He later returned to work on the farm where he had been initially employed in Switzerland. When I met with Valeriu in 2017, he was commuting between Moldova, Switzerland, and Ukraine, where his newborn child and partner reside. Over seven years of moving back and forth, he could not find a place to reside permanently: neither in Germany nor in Sweden nor in Switzerland. He could return and work on the farm in Switzerland annually for a couple of months. He planned to build a house in his village for his new family but was unsure if he could support them by staying in Moldova. Over the last few years, he had often said that he wanted to work abroad only while

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he was single as he had seen too many relationships fall apart when people worked away regularly. Although life in Switzerland was expensive, working in the agriculture sector in Europe was better paid than any job he could get in Moldova. On the other hand, he and his family lived the whole year on the small salary he received for working several months per year in Switzerland. After years of changing labour relations and different back-and-forth movements, he was emotionally and physically drained and concerned about being in various places at the same time. While he had to work on farms abroad to make a living for himself and his family during the summer months, he could not work on his own farm to build a stable future in Moldova—which seemed impossible to him due to the economical and socio-political situation of its farming populations. Additionally, he was very stressed by the continuous search for work and the fear of not being able to return to work in Switzerland for the next season—stress that had accumulated over years of instability and led to severe sleep problems that began to affect him physically. In 2020, he was trying to find a job in a different sector in Switzerland where he could earn more money as a different sector might allow for working regularly—including less intensive working days and hours—or even allow him to move to Switzerland permanently. This plan was not an easy one. Again, he tried to follow his brother, who was able to find a job in a different sector after several years. He now works as a package delivery driver in Switzerland, taking advantage of the boom in the online shopping industry. Larisa and Petru Me: I’ve heard that more and more people are going to Poland to work. Larisa: Yes, it’s the new trend. With a Moldovan passport you can work in Poland. But you can only earn 300 euros a month there. People are treated badly. I wouldn’t go back there again and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. All the Poles work in Switzerland or other countries and employ people from Ukraine and so on back home in their own country. Last summer, I went to Ukraine. (…) There were many Ukrainians waiting at the border there, a lot of them. Huge rows of people waiting there to cross the border on foot. It’s like a market. People sit there, and farmers come and take them. They look around and say, OK, I’ll take this woman and this man. Do you want to work for me? Well, come on,

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then. (…) It’s the poor people who are waiting there and want the chance to earn at least something. I wouldn’t say that it’s good to work in Poland. Me: So, you think they’re looking for people since they don’t have enough local workers? Petru: No, the Poles just don’t work for those salaries. But you can give a Moldovan 300 dollars, and you pay for his food and accommodation— they say 500 at first, then they deduct the food and accommodation, and you’re left with 300. (…) we came home after some weeks. I said I will not go back to work there again; I prefer just staying at home. At the end of the day, we did not gain anything.     (Interview conducted in 2015 in Moldova) I got to know Larisa and Petru in 2015, in Chișinău, shortly before they left Moldova with their two small children. They had planned for this departure for many years. Before, they had been working in Poland. They did not want to work in meat processing factories, but this was the only job they could get—first in Poland, later in Germany. They started their journey through Europe to work in Poland, as they did not have Romanian passports. The possibility of working in Poland without European citizenship is based on bilateral agreements between Moldova and the European Union and is part of circular migration policies. Such bilateral agreements have developed rapidly and intensively in the last few years, including the one between Moldova and Poland, which primarily allowed temporary employment for people from Moldova only for work in the agricultural sector. After Larisa and Petru returned to Moldova and applied for Romanian citizenship, they decided to start a new life in Germany. They stopped farming, sold their house, paid for their application procedure, and quit their jobs at a gas station. After working for three months in Lower Saxony in northwest Germany, where the biggest meat processing factories are located, the working conditions there made Petru so sick that he had to stop working. Larisa told me that they never knew in advance when they would have a day off, which forced them to stay in the area to keep their jobs. As they could not leave town, Larisa felt like they were working in a prison—only a bigger one. Many of the people working in the meat processing factories in Germany were from Romania and Moldova. The working conditions in Germany were like those in Poland. Larisa said that the workers protested these working and living conditions and the associated Werkverträge (special work contracts in Germany that

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allow minimum wages to be bypassed). Local newspapers had covered this a few times. However, nothing changed, and they did not want to continue working in these factories as it was damaging their minds and bodies. Larisa and Petru found new jobs in a food processing factory in Germany. This second employment was no better, and Petru wanted to go back to Moldova. They asked themselves: What now? There was no home and no job in Moldova; Petru had gotten sicker, and because of sending money back to Moldova, both were in debt. Larisa opposed the idea of going home and staying with her mother. She wanted to work abroad, not only to have a better future for the whole family, especially the children, but also to financially support her mother, who received only the ordinary Moldovan pension of 70 euros per month, an amount barely enough to cover the electricity and gas costs in winter. Hence, Larisa and Petru were happy when they found a job on a farm in England, where they hoped to escape from the working conditions experienced in Germany. When I talked to Larisa and Petru in the summer of 2018, they had already returned to Moldova after several months in Switzerland. This time, only Petru had been offered a job on a farm in the Canton of Bern and a work permit. They stayed in a flat that belonged to the farm. When the season ended, so did Petru’s working permit and the accommodation arrangements. It was not easy to obtain a new permit for the whole family as local authority requirements included a family-sized accommodation (meaning a flat that according to their understandings was big enough for a family) if they wanted to stay in Switzerland—a requirement that they could barely afford. Even if they could, it would be difficult to find a flat without a work contract and a precarious legal status that was soon to expire—not to mention the discrimination due to their foreign-sounding name and lack of local language skills. When they finally found a flat they could afford, it was too small and did not meet the official requirements. Larisa was asked by the local authority to return home with the children. Coming to Switzerland as a family was challenging; it contradicted the logic of labour arrangements in agriculture and regulations on migration policies, and families from abroad were treated poorly and stringently controlled on a local level. Agricultural workers were meant to leave and only return next season or be forced to live illegalised in the country. Larisa and Petru refused to be separated and were confronted with a constantly mobile future. They also refused to remain in Switzerland on an illegalised basis, as this would perpetuate their precarious living conditions. Due to his seasonal employment on a short-term work permit, Petru would not

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receive a B-permit (granted to those who have, e.g., been guaranteed employment for at least one year) anytime soon, which would have allowed family reunification at a later date. Hence, they went back to Moldova after one and a half years abroad, physically damaged, emotionally drained, and in debt.

On Hypermobility: Personal Challenges and Structural Configurations The Political Economy of Mobility Patterns The agricultural workers’ labour arrangements from Moldova are varied, and the mobility patterns that I mostly encountered represent zigzag movements all over Europe. In most cases (29/30), working on a Swiss farm has been only one of many working arrangements across multiple countries. Wage labour experiences of agricultural workers from Moldova shared the widespread starting point of entering the labour market in the EU by beginning with an arrangement based on internships (18/30). Accessing labour mobility patterns from workers’ experiences based on getting to know workers in Moldova has additionally demonstrated a further prevalent entry point: workers who later work in agriculture in Europe begin with a job in the food processing industry, the first one often being in Poland (8/30). While both entry points serve as first steps into the EU labour market, they allow workers to earn money to later apply for Romanian citizenship if they can prove their ‘co-ethnic’ status (see Dumbrava, 2016 for discussions on co-ethnic citizenship). Romanian/ Bulgarian citizenship allows permanent access to the EU labour market, whilst simultaneously invisibilising the fact that workers come from a non­EU country. Talking to Valeriu and other agricultural workers from Moldova (and farmworkers from Ukraine), I observed that young people started studying a particular subject because of the possibilities it offered for working abroad. Such work is considered an educational exchange programme. Students can participate in these programmes only once in their life, for a maximum period of 18  months. This arrangement allows labour flows between Switzerland and poorer regions, including those from outside the Schengen Zone, while also bypassing minimum wages as work is considered to be for educational reasons. Trainee workers are paid less money

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than regular workers. These workers are young as the traineeship is limited to those under 30 years. They are experienced in agriculture as they most often come from subsistence agricultural communities. They are also well educated, having been students of agronomy or tourism; making them also linguistically prepared as universities offer language courses. The other entry point is that those who cannot study or afford Romanian citizenship—that is, those who are not considered ethnically Romanian—can legally work in Poland. Whereas after 1991, people used to go to Italy and often worked in agriculture under illegalised conditions, they now increasingly end up working in meat processing factories through bilateral agreements based on circular migration policies (Bolokan, 2020: 60). These regulations have been implemented as development policies and are referred to as ‘win-win-win’ solutions. These policies have been described as follow-up guest worker programmes (Nita, 2016) and the implementation of ‘modernised regimes of recruitment and labour control that reveal colonial patterns’ (Bolokan, 2020: 71). They hinder permanent immigration and push forward precarious, temporary labour arrangements across borders while controlling workers’ movements and excluding workers from abroad from rights local workers enjoy. While such policies make workers from abroad responsible for the most important but least valued, least paid, and most exploitative jobs in society, these labour conditions further institutionalise an ‘ethclass’/’underclass’ (Ha, 2003: 74) that allows those holding citizenship to climb up the social ladder to better paid and less damaging jobs. When workers are able to receive Romanian citizenship—which is widespread in Moldova (see Bolokan, 2020: 58)—they can enter the European labour market regularly. This makes those individuals seldom lucky enough to find a permanent place to stay or engage in annually recurring labour relations in Switzerland. The first few years are characterised by extreme mobility. This hypermobility does not follow the ‘natural’ seasonality of agriculture—as the narrative of circularity misleadingly suggests. In Switzerland, such hypermobility is implemented with short stay permits that are only granted repeatedly ‘after an appropriate interruption of stay in Switzerland’ (art. 32 para. 4 Federal Act on Foreign Nationals and Integration). The temporariness of workers’ in Switzerland is also realised via welfare policies that expel workers from the country if, for example, their housing arrangements are considered deficient (see Larisa and Petru’s life narrative accounts), thereby revealing a historical continuity of outsourcing care duties and responsibilities such as costs to

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reproduce the agricultural workforce. This hypermobile phase is often longer than expected as people search for stable labour rearrangements jobs across the EU and are confronted with the same and new difficulties, insecurities, and harsh labour relations. Sometimes this phase lasts a few years, but at other times, these temporary working relations require mobility for a decade or even longer. The question of how long someone can go through a life stage that is dominated by hypermobility depends on personal capacity, economic necessity, the working conditions abroad, and, above all, existing alternatives. Effects of Hypermobility on Workers’ Health and Well-being Through Valeriu’s testimony, we gained some insights into how difficult it is for small farmers to sustain agriculture in Moldova and the struggles people face making a living in rural areas. This economic precarity and instability are the legacy of kolkhoz/sovkhoz farming and post-Soviet transformations to liberalised markets. This is both continuity of the old and an establishment of new power relations. While rural upper classes (often former kolkhoz/sovkhoz directors or other people who managed to benefit from the privatisation of agriculture post-1991) own machinery and can engage in social, economic, and political networks to organise food production and distribution, small farmers (mostly from former kolkhoz families who received land after perestroika) do not have access to the infrastructure to work the land and sell their products. At the same time, villages lack community members that are permanently taking care of community life, including food production. Due to intensive out-­ migration and hypermobility, accompanied by agricultural care chains, this leads to serious challenges for self-organisation and reorganisation of agricultural production from the bottom. Additionally, Stalinism and so-called collective farming have caused historical traumas, which are not addressed in Moldova and hinder liberating visions on how to reorganise food production and distribution beyond being integrated into the capitalist economy. Thereby putting farmers in global competition with each other (for a deeper elaboration, see Bolokan, 2021). As people leave their homes to search for an alternative future, they are confronted with new structural power relations in the so-called receiving countries. When looking into the personal challenges of hypermobile workers and the effects of their labour arrangements, it is crucial to take the division of labour within the agricultural and agrifood sector into

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consideration. Being a worker from abroad mostly means labouring under predefined, monotonous procedures where workers have no say in determining their workflows and rhythms. This is because the workers are deliberately allocated to fill these jobs. A deeper analysis of the highly exploitive meat and fish processing industries cannot be considered at this point as it requires further investigation. An analysis of these working relations would help to clarify the concurrent exploitation of human and non-­ human animals within these destructive food production spaces as they are constitutive of each other. However, the similarity between factories and farms are the monotonous and repetitive working conditions, which are harmful to the workers. Moreover, the gendered division of labour is reflected in gender-related pain—for example, female socialised workers tend to be given tasks that unevenly strain their wrists (e.g., monotonous hand grips in setting up fruits and vegetables or packaging tasks), while male socialised workers tend to be involved in more varied operations (e.g., work with machines, carrying things, or driving large vehicles such as tractors). Long-term suffering due to monotonous and repetitive tasks and accidents at work is widespread. However, workers have diverse techniques to hide pain to remain and appear functional. Studies have already pointed out how hiding injuries from the supervisors is widespread amongst agricultural workers due to fear of losing work (Fiałkowska & Matuszczyk, 2021: 7). While holding a short stay permit in Switzerland, changing place of employment is legal only when it is considered to be for a ‘good cause’ (art. 32 Federal Act on Foreign Nationals and Integration: para. 3). This additionally engenders workers’ fear of losing their job, leading them to appear as well as possible by hiding difficulties and illness as much as they can. While agricultural working conditions are already difficult for those from abroad, people are additionally stressed by hypermobility. The structural power relations in receiving countries impose physical and mental costs on these hypermobile workers, encompassing various problems. The following challenges have been reported by the workers I talked to: feeling pressure to find the next job while still being employed in the current one; expressing permanent feelings of guilt or inner disruption from being away from home—including, the inner conflict of working abroad and not being physically or fully emotionally present to care for loved ones and their own agricultural subsistence; the uncertainty of being able to send money home or save for future personal plans; exhaustion from permanent linguistic challenges and experiences of discrimination, including

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sexist attacks and harassment; and permanent insecurity, not least due to ongoing struggles to be paid as promised. Workers that witness constant physical and mental injury of co-workers report feeling incapable and helpless; this comes on top of their personal hardships and reminds them of the precariousness of their status. Workers’ reported hardship is endless and often leads to depression, or panic attacks—all of which remains mostly untreated and is seldom talked about. People in temporary labour relations are also confronted with the risk of disability due to injury, general joint depletion, or permanent mental fatigue, followed by unemployability and permanent fear of having to leave the country (see De Genova, 2002 for deportability). Finally, workers have no prospect of early retirement or social security from the state. This is a privilege reserved for domestic workers, although temporary workers are also made to pay into the different state funds.

Conclusion Life trajectories of agricultural workers from Moldova who work on farms in Switzerland demonstrate that mobility patterns cannot be simply summarised under the concept of shuttle migration (Pendelmigration). Workers I talked to over the past nine years do not start working on a Swiss farm and regularly return to the same farm as is associated with shuttle migration. Only in rare cases were labour relations characterised by commuting between two places over a long period. Border regimes, labour policies, welfare systems, and how the agricultural labour market is structured hinder such labour arrangements. While studies in the EU on migrating farmworkers are mostly short-term oriented and often frame their ‘cases’ by looking into individual farm settings, they have often missed capturing what I refer to as hypermobile working and living arrangements that impact negatively on workers’ health and well-being. This knowledge gap has led researchers to summarise agricultural workers’ movements under the concept of shuttle migration. Others have uncritically adopted the terminology of state policy: ‘circular migration’. Through a translocal life course approach, I was able to follow the precarious life trajectories of agricultural workers within the Swiss and wider EU agricultural labour market and the labour relations and mobility patterns of migrating agricultural workers who cannot rely on regular labour arrangements and who—along with illegalised employment relations such as

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those based on refugee status—are the most marginalised and vulnerable workers in agriculture. While the hypermobility mirrors workers’ agency to refuse exploitative labour relations and move on and away from harmful labour conditions, above all, it represents a specific labour regime that leads to a fast decline of workers’ health and well-being and hinders permanent immigration through the embedding of ‘just-in-time recruitment’ in the agricultural and agrifood sector in the EU.  Looking into the political economy of hypermobility by taking into consideration the historical contexts in Moldova and Switzerland, it is clear how intense mobility and integration into the agricultural labour market are structurally connected to and based on a deeply rooted instability: for people to be willing to work under such ‘flexible’ and sometimes even disastrous conditions, there must be immense precarity in Moldova and other such countries. This structural precarity and instability stabilises the agricultural sector in the wealthier receiving countries where many farms—although subsidised—can otherwise hardly sustain themselves in the global capitalist marketplace. The hypermobility of workers is, therefore, a central feature of a finely tuned system in which the range of mobility and temporary and partial integration into the labour market are conditional. The transformation of agricultural labour markets and food production, in general, takes place within a post-Fordist and neoliberal reorganisation of production and consumption; the political economy of these labour regimes can only be grasped if we consider colonial continuities because rotation regimes of the workforce in the EU have been developed, proved, and tested in Imperial Germany (Ha, 2003; Bolokan, 2023). While this stability-instability nexus builds the basis of labour migration within food production in Europe, circular migration policies and narratives can be seen as colonising discourses that create narratives of naturally given migration flows, thereby hiding the structural exploitation that such regimes implement and that workers discuss. Further studies should be conducted to include the life span of workers who return home after many years or decades of hypermobility. Such studies should be interdisciplinary to better access the health-related status of hypermobile life trajectories. How far hypermobility extends beyond agriculture could also be a further research focus. Such approaches would have to consider the post-Soviet, neocolonial, globalised conditions and the lived realities of migrant workers’ communities, thereby expanding the dominant workers’-rights-centred perspective on social justice. This would

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allow for a deeper understanding of the role of coloniality within Europe, opening an inclusive perspective on social justice that would inevitably include the ‘decolonial option’ (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2009). This would further allow for an abolitionist perspective on the international division of labour while aiming to understand historical traumas caused by colonialism, such as Stalinism and its aftermath, reflected in everyday social relations and working conditions. Ultimately, this would include asking if solidarity and decolonisation are possible without restructuring agricultural (re)production by abolishing the international division of (re) productive labour, otherwise the self-contained focus on ‘workers’ rights’ could be seen as a perpetuation of colonialist mindsets.

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CHAPTER 4

‘Caging All Tigers’: Pathways to Occupational Health and Safety for Transnational Agricultural Workers in Canada Ewa Dabrowska-Miciula



Introduction

In this chapter I analyse the pathways to safety for temporary migrant labourers in the Canadian agricultural context and discuss the occupational health experiences of transnational agricultural workers (TAWs) serving the globalised agricultural sector. The occupational health and well-being of migrant workers facing precarious work arrangements and conditions has emerged as a significant topic related to global mobility and the expansion of agricultural industries across the world (Abubakar et al., 2018; Bretones & Santos, 2020; de Lima, 2017). Agriculture is one of the most hazardous industries globally. Half of the fatal workplace accidents worldwide occur in the agricultural sector, about 160,000 deaths annually

E. Dabrowska-Miciula (*) Conestoga College, Kitchener, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Kerrigan, P. de Lima (eds.), The Rural-Migration Nexus, Rethinking Rural, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18042-2_4

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(Hämäläinen et al., 2017; ILO, 2013). Research in Canada and elsewhere shows that agricultural operators and workers are often exposed to high risks and exploitative jobs with precarious working conditions, sometimes referred to as ‘3D jobs’, denoting these jobs as dirty, dangerous, and demeaning (McLaughlin et al., 2014; Preibisch & Grez, 2010). According to Canadian Agricultural Injury Reporting (CAIR), from 1990 to 2012, there were 2324 agricultural fatalities in Canada—an average of 101 deaths each year (CAIR, 2012). In rural agricultural communities in Canada, where farmworkers have been slowly implementing effective safety protocols, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the occupational health and safety (OHS) concerns to levels never seen before (Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers, 2021). Agricultural OHS also plays a key role in the health of people working in the food production sector globally (FAO, 2015). For TAWs, labour migration is a dynamic process and often necessitates crossing transnational spaces from the ‘global south’ to the ‘global north’ and involves exposure to a range of adverse occupational health conditions that impact workers’ well-being (Dabrowska-Miciula & de Lima, 2020; King & Skeldon, 2010). Factors such as an absence of mandatory protocols for the prevention of agricultural injury, lack of access to drinking water and sanitary facilities, difficult terrain, lack of training, poorly designed tools and procedures, and exposure to extreme weather conditions are aggravated in the case of transnational agricultural workers (ILO, 2013). In the agricultural sector, in both small and micro-enterprises and large industrialised operations, occupational safety is fundamental for preventing injury among all workers, including domestic agricultural operators/farmers, and agricultural migrants employed through the Temporary Foreign Worker Programmes (TFWPs), as well as for non-status, undocumented workers (Butler et al., 2019; DeGroot et al., 2011; Horrigan et al., 2002; Salami et al., 2015). Primary prevention of occupational diseases requires policies, strategies, and tools designed to generate data that can support monitoring and reporting systems capable of ensuring detection of hazardous exposures and diagnosing health issues. Yet, occupational or work-related injuries and illnesses among TAWs remain largely invisible. OHS procedures, including relevant legislation, have been unevenly addressed across Canada. To examine migrants’ access to health protection, Hennebry (2014) adopted the World Health Organisation’s (WHO, 2003, 2013) international human rights framework and determined that migrants’

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rights to healthcare have been violated, particularly those seasonal and temporary migrant workers who are concentrated in low-skilled agricultural occupations. Canadian researchers have argued that temporary citizenship status negatively influences migrants’ rights to health and safety in the workplace, including rights to workers’ compensation for occupational injuries (see Hanley et  al., 2014; Preibisch & Otero, 2014). Numerous studies have examined major health issues affecting TAWs that result from barriers to accessing health care, language barriers, fear of deportation, and chronic physical and mental illness (Salami et al., 2015). Factors that contribute to disparities in temporary migrants’ working conditions from layers of vulnerability include precarious immigration status, conditions of recruitment, sector of employment and occupation, employment in the informal sector, lack of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights, and xenophobia and discrimination (Basok & Belanger, 2016; Goldring et al., 2009; Sargeant & Tucker, 2009). Furthermore, researchers noted that rapid increases in the use of migrant labour require OHS preventative activities and policy actions associated with these layers of vulnerabilities ‘before those vulnerabilities materialize in unacceptably high levels of work-related death, injury, disease and disablement’ (Sargeant & Tucker, 2009: 71). The neoliberal context of food production, precarious work conditions, and migration status serves to increase the vulnerabilities of TAWs. Of importance here is the lack of well-structured programmes in most countries for the prevention of agricultural injuries and protection of workers’ occupational health and safety arising from the dangerous nature of work. Researchers highlight that occupational safety in the agricultural profession within the global labour-migration nexus should facilitate and connect the applied research from the ‘global north’ and ‘global south’ to offset the trade-off between the TAWs’ health and rural economic impacts (Cole, 2006; Dabrowska-Miciula & de Lima, 2020; Nuwayhid, 2004). Given the alarming level of injuries throughout the agricultural sphere, participants in the 7th International Symposium on Safety and Health in Agricultural and Rural Populations analysed the global relationship between farm health and proposed prevention interventions for special at-risk populations in agricultural communities (Koehncke et al., 2015). In the 2008 Saskatoon Declaration for the Health, Safety, and Living Conditions of Migrant Workers in Agriculture, stakeholders recognised

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the occupational health and safety challenges faced by all agricultural migrants and their families (Lundqvist & Day, 2010). The aim of this chapter is to analyse how creating safe and healthy working environments for TAWs in remote locations in Canada is thus of central concern in relation to seasonal labour migration to rural areas. I pose the following research questions: (i) which barriers impact on effective prevention of injury and death for agricultural seasonal migrants in Canada? and (ii) what changes will help to safeguard a healthy workplace both for domestic workers and for TAWs? The nexus between governments, labour mobility, and injury prevention programmes is limited. Establishing a preventive culture of a safe and healthy working environment for TAWs requires new practical improvements that provide direct benefits to migrant workers and owners of agricultural operations in a way that addresses the existing lack of integration between governments, labour mobility, and injury prevention programmes.



Methods

The research presented draws on a multidisciplinary approach. The scoping review of peer-reviewed and grey literature provided data focussed on the health and safety of temporary foreign workers in agriculture in Canada from 2000 to 2020. The inclusion criteria were research studies addressing either quantitative or qualitative measures of occupational safety of TAWs. To better understand occupational health inequalities, this study incorporates a sample of data drawn from a larger collaborative project with TAWs in Ontario and Mexico presented at the 1st World Congress on Migration, Ethnicity, Race and Health (Campos-Flores & Dabrowska-­ Miciula, 2018). Statistical information was also collected from Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) and Statistics Canada to understand the changes in the rural agricultural workplace. As a researcher who was a part of the Canadian AgriSafety Applied Research Programme, I have also included data from participatory research and knowledge translation and a technology transfer project with Canadian farmers from 2015 to 2016. Data on occupational injury and illness prevention was gathered through my participation in applied research projects and from focus group discussions at the Summit, drawing on the expertise of scientists, experts in occupational medicine, doctors, nurses, agricultural workers, policy makers, engineers, public health professionals, farm organisations, and other stakeholders. Transcripts of interviews with

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farmers and an ‘expert round-table’ focus group allowed for discussions around key themes resulting from initial findings. Thematic analysis was used. To analyse the data, I adopted the modified HOC model (Dosman et  al., 2015), with the aim of finding solutions to critical occupational health problems among TAWs in Canada. Identifying and mitigating exposures to occupational hazards using the HOC model, an applied injury and illness prevention framework for TAWs could help in breaking down barriers between two kinds of workers—domestic and migrant— and creating better workplaces for all. The next section introduces the modified HOC model in agricultural safety research. For the first time, this framework was adopted at the national level of consultation as a comprehensive planned approach to reducing injury in Canadian agriculture using proven methods (Agrivita Canada, 2017). The result section summarises findings and offers a step-­ by-­step process with examples of barriers to safety embedded in workers’ precarious immigration status. Finally, an agenda of identified priorities for action is provided to guide efforts to enhance injury and illness prevention among TAWs in Canada.

Hierarchy of Prevention in Agriculture and Interventions in Canada Farming environments are associated with multiple levels of risk because the farm is not just a workplace, but also a home environment for the family. Farm safety studies in Canada have mapped and described the occupational hazards in the agricultural industry (Hagel et  al., 2013; Pickett et al., 2011; Voaklander et al., 1999). Their work indicates that in 2006 there was a total of 13,801 farm injuries, and between 2003 and 2012 farm machinery continued to be involved in most agriculture-related fatalities—run overs and rollovers (18%) and being pinned or struck by a machine component (9%) (see also, CAIR, 2016). Immigrant status is widely recognised to have a significant impact on TAWs’ work and health experiences, and the pathways to receive services may intersect to influence agricultural workers’ occupational health (Hanley et al., 2014; Hennebry et al., 2015). Official statistics for occupational injuries and illnesses of TAWs are not available in Canada.

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In 2007, the Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture (CCHSA) at the University of Saskatchewan initiated a national effort to promote health and safety on Canadian farms. The forum entitled ‘A National Stakeholder Consultation on Health and Safety Research and its Effective Translation to the Agricultural Sector’ constructed a business plan—‘Agrivita Research to Practice Program’—promoting OHS applied research and development (Asselin et al., 2009). The participants in the AgriSafety National Summit created knowledge translation programmes on agricultural health and safety and identified national research priorities to address key areas in agriculture. Work safety campaigns—through applied research and marketing—are promising components in the development of injury and fatality reduction programmes in farm communities in the USA (Sorensen, 2009). At the same time, the trend towards larger agribusiness operations that employ larger numbers of TAWs poses unique concerns around creating safe agricultural environments. To determine the current safety practices of farming operations and to evaluate their effectiveness in preventing on-­ farm injuries, the Saskatchewan Farm Injury Cohort Study’s provincial team developed a modified injury and death reduction approach. In their research, Dosman et al. (2015: 362) worked with a large cohort of 1196 Saskatchewan farming operations to test this modified HOC hazard reduction model for the first time in agriculture. The modified HOC provides a framework to examine which prevention factors may be effective for reducing the risk of farm injury and illness. The HOC model has been widely used in industry but has not been utilised in Canadian agriculture. Since other industries have been successful in reducing rates of injury and death, the agricultural applied research programmes proposed this model as an organising scheme for the broad concept of injury and illness prevention. The research results demonstrated that when farmers used the modified HOC model, injury rates were reduced by three-fold (Dosman et al., 2015: 368). Essentially, the researchers established that the six steps to safety process of hazards reduction may be adopted to achieve healthier workplaces and to prevent agricultural injuries and death in Canada (Agrivita Canada, 2017). Most health and safety specialists support the use of multimodal interventions over single-approach interventions as having a higher likelihood of improving health and safety in agricultural populations. Integrating the HOC approach (Dosman et al., 2015) with other models from health and safety professionals (Donham & Thelin, 2016), I have

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drawn Fig. 4.1 to illustrate the six steps to a safety framework based on the HOC model adopted in this study. Hazard control methods at the top of the graphic are more effective and protective than those at the bottom. As the number of steps in modalities of injury prevention varies and complete elimination or substitution of hazards may not be possible, elimination of hazards is the ultimate goal. Overall, a rational approach to injury prevention combined with the six steps to safety framework based on HOC proved to be an effective tool for identifying areas of priority for applied research and health and safety interventions for TAWs in Canada (Agrivita Canada, 2017). Labour migration in Canada differs from European migration, where there is free movement of European Union citizens. Most agricultural migrant workers enter Canada with temporary employment authorisation. In the following section, I focus on the participation of TAWs in the Canadian agricultural industry.

(1) Hazard Identification

e.g. undertaking hazardous activities without thinking about consequences

(2) Risk Assessment

e.g. worrying about being hurt, risk mitigation

Elimination Substitution

More Effective Transpersonal

Engineering Controls Procedural and Administrative Controls

Least Effective Personal

Personal Protective Equipment

(3) Elimination of Hazards

e.g. hazards substitution, investing time and money to improve safety on the farm

(4) Engineering Controls

e.g. keeping all safety shields and gaurds in place, improved methods for transporting farm workers

(5) Procedural and Administrative Controls

e.g. timing of work, policies and regulation, training, work practices

(6) Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) I Education e.g. using or wearing protective equipment

Fig. 4.1  Six steps to safety framework based on hierarchy of control in agriculture

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Temporary Migrant Labour in Canadian Agriculture It is estimated that by 2025 Canada’s agricultural domestic labour pool will be lacking approximately 114,000 workers (Burt & Meyer-Robinson, 2016). Within a trend of agricultural labour market restructuring, there is a growing demand for migrant workers to cover agricultural labour shortages. Employment and Social Development Canada confirms that under the TFWP, 69,705 agricultural migrant positions were filled by migrant workers in 2018 (Statistics Canada, 2020). The largest labour shortages in the agricultural sector are in Ontario, followed by Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta, and Nova Scotia. Canada administers two main temporary migration programmes for agricultural workers: (1) the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Programme (SAWP), which begun in 1966, and (2) the Temporary Foreign Worker Programme (TFWP), with a dedicated agricultural stream, which began in 2011 (and which started as a stream for lower-skill occupations in 2002). The Canadian government is responsible for creating and overseeing both TFWPs, the long-standing SAWP, and the newer streams of the TFWP. The SAWP is a government-to-government programme, under bilateral agreements with Commonwealth Caribbean countries and Mexico, Guatemala, the Philippines, and Thailand. Under this scheme workers are employed as circular migrants, who return year after year but without the right to immigrate. Mexico’s agricultural workers joined the programme in 1974, with a specific bilateral agreement between the Canadian and Mexican governments. Although SAWP is authorised at the federal level, it is managed by privately run user-fee agencies. In Ontario and Nova Scotia the Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Service (F.A.R.M.S) administers the programme and the Fondation des entreprises en recrutement de main-­ d’œuvre étrangère (F.E.R.M.E.) functions in the same capacity for Quebec, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. The SAWP approves temporary work visas that have a maximum length of eight months, requiring all migrants to leave Canada by 15 December (Perry, 2018). SAWP work permits are employer specific, which means that migrants can only work legally for the person they are assigned to. The programme does not include a path to permanent citizenship and does not allow for family reunification. Under the SAWP agreement the employer is obligated to provide housing to workers at no cost on or close to their property, which extends employers’ control over migrants; places

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restrictions on worker mobility; and includes curfews, prohibitions of visitors of the opposite sex, and allows an employer to sanction migrant workers (Preibisch, 2010). The SAWP standard employment contract entitles employers to terminate employment and repatriate workers for reasons such as refusal to work, non-compliance, or any other reason the employer deems sufficient (Mysyk et al., 2008). Under the second programme, agricultural streams of the TFWP (or lower-skilled occupations) temporary migrant workers are now hired from almost 80 countries. Unlike the SAWP, the TFWP has no written agreements between countries to clarify rights or conditions of exchange of these workers. The TFWP allows migrant workers of any country to come to Canada for a 24-month period (with a maximum of 4 years) after which they must return to their home country for 4 years. This so-called 4 & 4 rule reinforces the temporal nature of the migrant worker programme. The federal government continues to approve employers who seek new workers through a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA). While neither programme receives much government oversight, the TFWP operates for the most part by private authorities (Hennebry et  al., 2015). Agricultural operators or farmers contract with private labour suppliers in Canada—known as a ‘liaison agency’—who pair them with private recruiters located abroad, who then carry out the selection and assignation of workers to designated employers. Migrants of the TFWP are vulnerable to victimisation by recruiters charging large fees to help the migrant worker find employers with an approved LMIA. In case of contract disputes, they do not have government agents from the sending country to mediate on behalf of migrants (Gesualdi-Fecteau et al., 2017). Table 4.1 shows the rapidly growing number of agricultural positions approved under the TFWP streams from 2010 to 2018. In 2018, temporary foreign workers accounted for 50,542 positions under the SAWP, 18,072 under the TFWP agricultural stream, and 73 positions in the high-wage and 625 positions in low-wage positions. It is estimated that TAWs represent 45% of hours worked in agricultural labour and 18% of the agricultural workforce in Canada. In 2015, 20,824 workers (51.5% of positions) were from Mexico, followed by Jamaica (19.5% of positions) and Guatemala (15.2% of positions). The next most represented countries are the Philippines and Thailand (Statistics Canada, 2019). The trend of hiring high numbers of Mexican agricultural workers in Canada has been previously analysed in scholarly publications (Basok, 2003; Binford, 2002).

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Table 4.1  Number of positions approved in agriculture under the Temporary Foreign Worker Programme (TFWP) for international migrants by programme type from 2010 to 2018 2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

SAWP 27,687 Agricultural 0 Stream

28,835 2156

29,021 7680

34,042 8480

36,718 8106

41,702 9977

40,238 13,003

44,742 14,608

50,542 18,072

High-wage Low-wage Canada— Total

96 6858 37,945

111 3459 40,271

45 2794 45,361

71 2579 47,474

154 1465 53,298

141 878 54,260

156 1072 60,578

73 625 69,312

118 8046 35,851

Source: By author based on data from Statistics Canada. The source for all information is Employment and Social Development Canada’s (ESDC) Foreign Worker System (FWS). Each Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) application is restricted to a single occupation, as defined by the National Occupation Classification (NOC) codes

According to Statistics Canada (2019), most TAWs were hired on crop operations (greenhouse, nursery, vegetable, and melon farming; fruit and tree nut farming, floriculture, and grain farming). This represents 92.6% of migrant agricultural jobs. In the livestock subsector (cattle ranching and farming, hog and pig farming, poultry and egg production), the 3346 positions filled represented 7.4% of TFWP agricultural employees. The data on labour distribution and available positions among the diverse types of agricultural industries provides additional context and information about their workplaces. This reflects both labour shortages and the lack of other options for TAWs. The Conference Board of Canada (Burt & Meyer-Robinson, 2016) estimates that the persistent shortage of domestic workers is costing Canadian farmers $1.5 billion per year. Despite widely publicised promises by the federal government to review and reform the TFWP to fill gaps in management of agribusinesses, such policies are still marked by bureaucratic barriers, limited provincial healthcare entitlements, precarious employment, low income, and racial and gender discrimination (Fudge, 2012; Gabriel & MacDonald, 2011; Read et al., 2013). Federal and provincial changes to migrant worker agreements for both TFWPs include granting access to a wide range of agricultural organisations, agricultural agencies, and provincial jurisdictions in all Canadian regions. In the case of the SAWP, changes will require modifying bilateral

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government-to-government agreements and multimodal complex negotiations (Preibisch & Hennebry, 2011; Sargeant & Tucker, 2009; Vosko, 2016). The federal government’s TFWP allows eligible foreign workers to work in Canada for an authorised period of time and all TAWs have the right to a safe workplace. TFWPs are governed at the federal level, while the provincial ministries define health standards for workers and legislate OHS laws. Agricultural operations in Canada are regulated under the provincial Occupational Health and Safety Act and Regulations, which are enforced by officers from the Occupational Health and Safety Division of provincial governments. OHS issues and barriers faced by TAWs are intensified because of their temporary status, without rights to citizenship in Canada.

Results 

TAWs’ Occupational Safety and Health Experiences

The literature review identified 40 related studies that focused on or had an outcome related to migrant agricultural workers, farm safety, or occupational injuries and illnesses in Canada. Most of the studies were published in peer-reviewed journals across a wide range of academic fields including migration studies, rural sociology, agrimedicine and medical journals, safety journals, environmental health, policy studies, and political economy. A comprehensive review is beyond the scope of this chapter. Table  4.2 summarises the intersecting concerns that emerged from the literature review and provides samples of context describing the multi-­ layered trajectories that TAWs experience in relation to health and safety. Domestic workers and TAWs may experience similar working environments, but in terms of occupational health and safety, TAWs are an even more vulnerable population (Cole et al., 2019; Smith & Mustard, 2010). TAWs often face the difficult choice of either continuing to work in a risky job or losing their income, and/or being fired or repatriated at the discretion of their employers. Among other socio-political factors contributing to workplace injustice, TAWs experience constant stress around the need to conform to their employers’ expectations (Basok & Belanger, 2016). Canadian researchers have maintained that occupational analyses need to be expanded and that the understanding of the function of OHS should be combined with other contextual factors that situate occupational health

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Table 4.2  TAWs’ occupational health and safety trajectories located within intersecting spheres of concern in literature from 2010 to 2020 Spheres

TAWs’ occupational health and safety trajectories

Labour migration global mobility

Rotation on the SAWP programme creates need to resort to the countries with lower OHS protection compared to Canada Seasonal and temporary work migration and its cyclical access to health care as they move between the Global North and South Lack of immigration pathways for low-skilled TAWs Outdated bilateral agreements and programmes Public health Work performed often in extreme weather conditions, without Health safety breaks or access to water; lack of emergency procedures agricultural medicine Workplace injuries and deaths, pesticide-related illness, musculoskeletal injuries, heat stress Infectious disease, gastrointestinal problems, exhaustion due to extensive working hours, and skin, eye, throat, and respiratory irritation Depression, stress, anxiety, sleepless, and addictions Special solutions to be tailored to migrants’ injury prevention needs Social determinants of Precarious employment and impact on quality of life and living health conditions ‘Double precarity’ in rural electorates that find permanent immigration ‘threatening’ in areas lacking minorities Access to health care and health insurance varies in Canadian provinces for temporary migrant workers Linguistic barriers and cultural differences pose risks to occupational health and safety and well-being High rates of illiteracy, lack of training and education Neglect comprehensive healthcare services due to fear of losing employment Poor housing conditions, violations of privacy, lack of sanitation in workplaces Food insecurity and lack of transportation Human rights & equity Marginalisation, discrimination, and isolation Lack of recognition of immigrants’ rights No rights to unionise and OHS equal representation Women’s rights, sexual harassment, and family rights leading to violations Global social protection UN not ratified for labour temporary migrants (continued)

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Table 4.2  (continued) Spheres

TAWs’ occupational health and safety trajectories

Global health & Migrant labour portrayed as a valuable economic resource, economic development earning lowest wages Changes to community economic capital, human capital, and cultural diversity create equity barriers Lack of capacity development, weak regulation, and poor OHS regulation enforcement Generating remittances and human capital costs/benefits to families to help reduce poverty in the Global South Cost of long-term care for ill and returning workers who have incurred injuries absorbed by their families and communities Diverse work realities and lack of consistent OHS policies between sending and receiving governments and within countries Transnational barriers to health care, medical treatments, and worker’s compensation benefits Note: Data source resulting from the analyses of literature included in this chapter

and safety studies (e.g., Cedillo et al., 2019; Dabrowska-Miciula, 2017; Gravel et al., 2010). Sargeant and Tucker (2009), for example, analysed political and economic influences on the OHS risks faced by migrant workers and constructed the layers of vulnerability framework. Structural and intercultural challenges include environmental and occupational hazards related to the size of an agricultural operation, geographical location, psychological hazards, and other contextual and physical health issues related to specific conditions of their employment, living conditions, and legal status in the country. Notably, transnational challenges around the continuity of care for TAWs, along with medical repatriation data on occupational injuries and poisonings, merit further research as a global health equity concern (Cole et al., 2019; Orkin et al., 2014). Medical researchers note that the most common health problems for TAWs are exhaustion, back pain and muscle fatigue, musculoskeletal problems, headache, leg cramps, joint pain, stomach pain, and sore throat. Occupational health issues of migrant farm workers in Canada include a range of musculoskeletal injuries, ocular injuries, acute skin conditions, psychological problems (e.g., depression, anxiety, and inconsistent sleep patterns), and sexually transmitted infections including HIV (Pysklywec et al., 2011). The pace of work is intense, and the workers are frequently

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forced to work long days, sometimes seven days a week during harvest time. While health professionals have determined that pesticide poisoning is now relatively rare, due to regulatory changes, TAWs are still vulnerable to other kinds of harms, including chemical poisoning, due to insufficient access to protective measures, lack of sanitation facilities, inadequate equipment, and poor communication with employers (Preibisch & Otero, 2014; Read et al., 2013; Viveros-Guzmán & Gertler, 2015). The review also indicates a range of health problems that include dehydration and heart issues linked to high temperatures and environmental exposures among workers in greenhouses and in isolated farming operations (Otero & Preibisch, 2010). Workers are regularly subjected to extreme variability in conditions, from hot greenhouses to open fields with burning sun and to snow and freezing rain. Moreover, workers are significantly affected by unexpected weather patterns and changes in climate (Dabrowska-Miciula & Neis, 2016). TAWs in Canada are exposed to physical environmental hazards (e.g., sun, heat, frost, snow, wind, rain, dust), wild plants (e.g., poison ivy, allergens) and animals (e.g., insects), sharp tools, machinery and equipment, electrical hazards, chemical exposures to pesticides and fertilisers, and mechanical hazards resulting from unsafe transportation (Agrivita Canada, 2017; Pysklywec et  al., 2011; Salami et al., 2015). Studies indicate that the work-related health and safety risks faced by all TAWs may actually be greater than reported because migrants likely experience work traumas in conjunction with a range of factors, which include their family situation, discrimination, social exclusion and isolation, bullying, mental health issues, alcohol abuse, depression, gendered labour divisions, male biases in agricultural professions, labour trafficking, lack of personal and professional support, and bureaucracy (Basok & López-Sala, 2016; Campos-Flores & Dabrowska-Miciula, 2018; Cedillo et al., 2019; de Lima, 2017; McLaughlin et  al., 2017). Taken together, the review provides an excellent platform for researchers and policy makers focused on efforts aimed at protecting rights of TAWs’ health and well-being.  Six Steps to Safety Preventive Strategies in Agriculture for TAWs To frame the findings of this study, I have adopted a modified six steps to safety framework of HOC, drawing on ideas of industrial hygiene developed by the Saskatchewan research team (Dosman et al., 2015); see Fig.  4.1. To prevent occupational injuries, the starting point for an

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agricultural producer/employee is to identify the hazards present in the working environment—including atmospheric, biological, and mechanical, among others—and determine what impact these hazards are likely to have on the individuals performing the work. Hazard Identification The first step—hazard identification—requires ongoing consideration. The common occupational hazards present in agricultural operations are bending, lifting, twisting, repetitive motions, slips, trips and falls, mechanical equipment, chainsaws, tractors, and other equipment and noise. Along with the overall exposure, where pesticides are part of the production system, workers can be exposed to pesticides stored near the housing provided to TAWs (Preibisch & Otero, 2014). Generally, temporary migrant workers lack information on hazards and the health consequences of the work they are undertaking and could learn more about possible hazards when OHS inspectors visit the farms. In a study undertaken in British Columbia researchers reported that working conditions may change drastically in the period leading up to a visit from an inspector: There was a day of preparation for the visit, more stoves than what actually had been provided to workers were brought in, and pesticides, chemicals, and debris were removed from the living quarters in order to appear to meet housing requirements. At another farm, a worker shares: … Actually, they told us, ‘So you know this day, you’re going to have to use gloves’. (Caxaj & Cohen, 2019: 2643)

Lack of knowledge about hazards and not being made aware of the dangers are common in agricultural working environments. Based on field research in Ontario, Quebec, and Mexico (Campos-Flores & Dabrowska-­ Miciula, 2018), a lack of awareness of hazards resulted in a number of workers in Quebec becoming sick from drinking or washing their faces with water that contained chemicals used to water greenhouses. Migrant workers are not aware of physical and environmental hazards generally known to domestic workers, as demonstrated in Pablo’s (a seasonal agricultural worker from Ontario) case: ‘I had to suffer (rash from poison ivy) because nobody was willing to tell me that this plant (zucchini) must be picked up wearing a long-sleeved shirt. This is unjust, nobody cares. Just work, that’s all.’

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When TAWs identify the occupational hazards, they do not refuse to do the work that could affect their health and safety. Reliance on employers and their precarious employment status restricts TAW’s fundamental right to resist hazardous working environments (Caxaj & Cohen, 2019). Risk Assessment The second step—risk assessment—is out of the hands of TAWs. Migrants generally will not refuse to perform any task, fearing termination of employment and the loss of future job opportunities. Concerns about good relations with an employer can lead to an acceptance of long working hours, consistently fast paced work, and the heavy workload that characterises the workplace. In a study in Atlantic Canada, employees supported long working hours due to Canada’s shorter growing seasons: In this country, farmers got to get in their crops in ‘cause some crops only got 2, 3, 4 months, so you have to get them in. They [the farmers] have to get crops in, and that’s one thing about coming to this country, you have four seasons, right? … in the Caribbean we only do one season. (Horgan & Liinamaa, 2012: 21)

The subjective experiences combined with long work hours and the lack of time-off have negative impacts on the safety and health of TAWs and lead to violations of their rights. Research with migrants in Ontario and British Columbia conducted via survey methods with 600 employees revealed that the fear of deportation led to migrants not claiming their rights, which resulted in physical and emotional suffering, impacting on their occupational safety, and overall health and well-being (Hennebry et al., 2015). Elimination of Hazards Step three, elimination of hazards, is the top priority. It is not easy to remove a hazard completely from the agricultural operation. In most cases a substitution is required. Elimination of hazards requires an investment of money and time to improve safety at various points. When the agricultural operations become larger and have more than 10 or 20 workers, depending on provincial legislation, specific OHS safety regulations pertain to these operations and by law employers must comply with them. Hazard elimination is aimed at reducing the risk of injury, as much as possible, through a combination of methods in order of effectiveness.

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Guidelines regarding hazards elimination on the property as well as how to manage these are open to the interpretation of individual employers/ agricultural producers. The process of elimination of hazards varies across small and large farming operations in relation to the nature of farming, economics, and culture, among other factors (Butler et al., 2019). The imbalance of power between the agricultural employers and the contract workers means that TAWs work in an environment they perceive to be unsafe (McLaughlin et al., 2014; Preibisch & Otero, 2014). Researchers in several studies noted that TAW’s concerns to eliminate hazards for the benefit of workers were not resolved. Poor worksite maintenance was of particular concern to greenhouse workers whose jobs involve standing on electric carts with adjustable platforms some six to eight feet off the ground. Greenhouse workers complained that the heating pipes used as rails were not well maintained. An immigrant worker who formerly worked in a vegetable greenhouse claimed: ‘If a pipe was broken, there would be a risk of the cart going off the track. Then a person could fall off the cart. Once I fell off the cart and was injured for a couple of months.’ Engineering Controls Mechanical- and tractor-related injuries have the highest fatality rate of all kinds of agricultural accidents in the Canadian agricultural industry. The fact that TAWs are dealing with unfamiliar agricultural machinery—such as machinery with conveyor belts and forklifts, tractors, and other heavy tools—means that hazards are elevated in the case of workers from Mexico when safety procedures are not addressed (Viveros-Guzmán & Gertler, 2015). Language barriers result in a lack of instructions and training for non-English speakers and a heavy reliance on informal sign language. Another example of engineering control is the safety regulation that requires using a seat belt on tractors and on vehicles used to transport workers. Several accidents and deaths of TAWs have been reported in British Columbia and Ontario which have occurred during transportation of workers to the fields (Mackrael et al., 2012). Rural and remote locations limit transportation options for TAWs between their residences and workplaces. As one civil servant explained: They would never refuse work. They’d never refuse getting into a van that they know doesn’t seat them properly or doesn’t have seatbelts or may be in

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mechanical despair. The fact of the matter is, if they make any kind of noise at all, then the whole family could be punished. […] There’s 16 people [and] there’s 14 seats in your vehicle. You woke up [at] probably four thirty or five, you work from six [A.M.] until it’s nine [P.M.] now, almost dark, and are you going to tell your employer or the contractor that there’s only 14 seats? (Otero & Preibisch, 2010: 43–44)

 rocedural and Administrative Controls P Many TAWs on small family farms are not afforded the same levels of protection as those working on large farms. In Ontario, workplaces with more than 20 workers are mandated to have joint health and safety committees in greenhouse, mushroom, dairy, hog, cattle, and poultry farming. However, no legal requirement exists to have joint health and safety committees in fruit and vegetable fields and in orchards where migrant workers frequently work (McLaughlin et al., 2014). Viveros-Guzmán and Gertler (2015) studied the health and safety of Latino agricultural migrant workers in Saskatchewan. Due to Spanish-­ English language barriers, TAWs experienced three main barriers: (1) they were not included in making decisions about their work plans; (2) they experienced limited participation in decisions regarding their safety; and (3) they misinterpreted and misunderstood task-specific instructions. Structural differences including language barriers exacerbated their vulnerabilities and contributed to social inequality, social exclusions, isolation, and the salience of occupational risk factors. In the case of agricultural migrants who entered as SAWP workers with their visas and employment tied to a single employer, their ability to make any changes to the pre-existing safety procedures in their workplace was limited. This situation impacted on their occupational safety and contributed to ill health (Fairey et al., 2008). They were not permitted to visit their families or invite them to come to Canada during their eight-month stay. The fact that SAWP workers live on their employer’s property—and cannot separate their work from their home life—creates an additional barrier to health and safety (Perry, 2018). Additionally, most accommodation is poorly equipped and maintained, which causes not only a concern for the farmworkers but for the food they produce, as consumers are afraid for their safety. Factors such as separation from family, mental health problems, and difficulties with accessing health care in most rural areas can impact on

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their capacity to work and affect their occupational health (Basok, 2003; Campos-Flores & Dabrowska-Miciula, 2018). To keep their jobs and support their families, TAWs also risk their health and safety while enduring emotional stress. Recent scholarship also reveals that occupational and social pressures differ among male and female migrant farmworkers dealing with family issues and long-term family separation. Leaving family and children behind, without the care of a parent, engendered significant emotional stress and anxiety as reported by transnational mothers: Well the truth is it feels very ugly, because to think that you will leave your children. And you are thinking: ‘How are they? Has something happened to them? Where are my children at this moment?’ It is difficult, very difficult. (Preibisch & Santamaría, 2006: 116)

While TAWs are recognised for their hard work in their home countries, both men and women referred often to these opportunities of transnational labour as a sacrifice (McLaughlin et al., 2017). Researchers also report on occupational health and safety training deficiencies. An exploratory study of migrant workers’ employers in Southern Ontario noted the constraints faced by employers who have the responsibility to ensure safety at work: Of course, safety training is needed. But there is also a cost issue—to do it during work hours. We don’t have enough staff to implement more in-­ house kinds of training. This may be completely selfish, but I would like to see some subsidy for the training. (Narushima & Sanchez, 2014: 7)

The authors shed light on the fact that agricultural producers are not committed to providing for workers. Employers often are not aware of the long-term occupational health effects impacting on their seasonal employees. Furthermore, there is an overall attitude that the personal health of migrants is subject to business and financial considerations, which impact on decisions to provide training and injury prevention on farms.  se of Personal Protective Equipment and Education U The final step—use of personal protective equipment (PPE) and education— must address the diversity of individuals working in the industry to protect them from exposure to various physical factors (e.g., noise and chemical

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substances; Koehncke & Holness, 2016). PPE should be available in convenient locations on-site. Otherwise, it is not likely to be used. The list of potential barriers to using PPE equipment includes cost and the lack of training and monitoring necessary to ensure the workers use the equipment properly. TAWs generally work without being provided with PPE equipment, such as hearing protection or respirators. Cultural factors (e.g., exaggerated masculinity, lack of peer support) may create additional barriers for migrants who wish to wear PPE. Using sunglasses, sunscreen products, long-sleeved clothing or rain gear, and appropriate footwear is recommended to provide protection from hazardous weather conditions (Dabrowska-Miciula & Neis, 2016). Lack of education and a lack of available PPE are concerns for TAWs who were interviewed in Ontario. In a study in Ontario (Campos-Flores & Dabrowska-Miciula, 2018), a Mexican agricultural migrant who worked on a chicken farm and experienced allergic reactions to chemicals, including ammonia used to sterilise the cages, reached out to the community asking for information about injury protection and recommendations for affordable PPE equipment or a protection mask: ‘Can you tell me what can we do to protect our lungs? I do not want to get sick. They are using some kind of chemical there which bothers me. It’s hard to breath. I cannot sleep after work.’ No preventive measures were used to protect the respiratory health of TAWs at this farm. Neither were PPEs made available for employees. Another Canadian study found that almost half of all Mexican farmworkers who applied pesticides in their jobs did not receive training (Verduzco & Lozano, 2003). Additionally, supervisory positions are held by English-­ speaking Canadian domestic workers, and health and safety questions were not being addressed through translators. OHS regulations state that employers are responsible for providing PPE equipment to mitigate chemical exposures and ensure safe application of chemicals. The findings presented in this chapter integrate the six steps to safety framework into the TAWs’ occupational health trajectories. The scientific validity of the framework has been demonstrated in tests, which indicate that adherence to increasing numbers of steps results in reduction of the risk of occupational injury for domestic agricultural workers (Dosman et al., 2015). In the case of TAWs, the findings allow for a better understanding of the barriers impacting pathways to safeguarding equitable workplaces for migrant workers in rural Canada.

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Discussion  Developing ‘Transnational Optics’ for the Prevention of TAWs’ Health and Safety The analysis conducted in this chapter has demonstrated that TAWs are vulnerable and are recognised as a special at-risk population in terms of occupational injury and illness. They are a community with a specific social profile, because of their work as individuals performing temporary agricultural work in Canada, which has different interactions with workplace hazards compared to domestic workers (Agrivita Canada, 2017; Donham & Thelin, 2016). With the increasing numbers of TAWs and the estimated labour shortages in agricultural industries in Canada, this population’s OHS considerations will lead to an increase in the number of unanswered questions concerning healthy rural futures. From 1971 to 2016, the farm population declined in Canada by 62.7%, approximately 592,975 persons (Statistics Canada, 2018). Based on the labour shortage analysis and the countries of origin of TAWs, it can be assumed that these ‘Global South’ workers will experience significant barriers to safety, increasing their OHS vulnerability. The labour shortage in Canada’s agricultural sector is predicted to double by 2025, reaching approximately 113,800 unfilled jobs (Burt & Meyer-Robinson, 2016). The neglect of OHS among TAWs and non-documented agricultural labour indicate that changes in the Canadian workforce are being overlooked and that this segment of the rural population is being left vulnerable to exploitation and abuse without proper protection from occupational hazards (Campos-Flores & Dabrowska-Miciula, 2018; McLaughlin et al., 2014; Viveros-Guzmán & Bartlett, 2016). The various steps of the HOC outlined in this chapter raise serious social, political, and policy-related questions and it is beyond dispute that examining and implementing federal-level migrant labour legislation is increasingly important in preventing occupational injuries. The multimodal nature of TAWs’ occupational health trajectories makes it unlikely that any single policy or framework will be sufficient to eliminate OHS disadvantages in Canada without the involvement of governments from the low- and middle-income countries which are sending the temporary seasonal labour force. Integrated transnational strategies are required since temporary migrant workers’ programmes are governed at the federal level. In the case of SAWP, federal programmes rest on bilateral agreements

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signed between Canada and sending countries. Any modifications will need to be made via a Memoranda of Understanding at the level of the nation state. In the case of migrants arriving via TFWPs, where employers write contracts to meet Canadian programme guidelines, there is no involvement from foreign governments. Regardless of the programme, there is no federal oversight of OHS—the provincial ministries define health standards for workers and legislate OHS laws. Researchers have recognised layers of political and economic influences which exacerbate the OHS risks faced by transmigrant workers, the negative impacts of legal prohibition from bargaining collectively in Ontario, and the restrictive nature of the SAWP agreements (Basok & López-Sala, 2016; Dabrowska-­ Miciula & de Lima, 2020; Hanley et al., 2014). Additionally, some migrant workers are more vulnerable to exploitation because of a particular racial profile in some rural locations as well as the lack of legal rights (Preibisch & Otero, 2014; Vosko, 2016), which is also described by European scholars (Kerrigan, 2018). In the context of the six steps HOC model, key procedural controls and priorities are outlined and summarised in Table 4.3. These priorities represent a broad concept of prevention, explicitly connecting the TAWs’ environment to the local, provincial, and global regulatory frameworks that shape, restrict, and (re)produce particular vulnerabilities in their occupational safety trajectories. The contribution of these six steps to safety HOC model should serve as the foundation to improvements in safety and not simply be a bureaucratic initiative which involves documenting and reporting the specifics of incidents and injuries. As evidenced by the literature presented in this chapter (e.g., Hennebry, 2012), the state of ‘permanent temporariness’ of TAWs and extra-economic pressures to remain in the job in a ‘circular migration system’ (the average length of SAWP participation was 7–9 years) generate permanent volumes of bureaucracy and (re)produce global vulnerabilities in complex ways. Bureaucratic processes and administrative governing do not necessarily lead to better safety results or to secure leadership involvement to help reduce occupational hazards for workers and employers. In various organisations which have tried to introduce predictability, standardisation, and hierarchy control, the formalised rules of standardised responses to known problems have led to a greater specialisation of safety labour staff working separately from the operators doing safety-critical work, which ends up lowering rather than improving overall safety (see Dekker, 2014).

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Table 4.3  Actions and priorities for enhancing injury prevention among TAWs in Canada (modified from Agrivita Canada, 2017: 21) Steps of HOC

Rationale

Risk assessment & procedural controls

Ensure agreements contribute to promoting a fair relationship between stakeholders and clear contracts Procedural controls The need to identify the best ways to protect migrant workers and employers via comprehensive and fair employment contracts Procedural controls The need to establish guidelines for safer working environments Hazards identification Improved communication leads & risk assessment & to increased knowledge of procedural controls safety and prevention practices

Hazards identification & risk assessment & procedural controls & PPE and education

Most safety protocols and safety materials are available only in English or French; increased knowledge leads to safety and prevention practices Engineering controls Risks are exacerbated by a lack of training, complexity, and potential danger of equipment and size of machinery Hazards identification Injuries currently go mostly & risk assessment & underreported, and access to procedural controls health services may be problematic; challenges around transnational continuity of care

Priorities Examine Canadian labour cooperation agreements for agriculture/international and SAWP bilateral agreements Examine the potential of unions in protecting farmworkers and agricultural producers/ employers Develop policies for safer working conditions and OHS training for migrant workers Develop solutions to overcome language barriers between seasonal workers and employers; develop acculturation training and informal learning opportunities Develop safety sheets and other library materials in the main languages of migrant workers in Canada Reduce risk by proper maintenance of equipment, lower noise level, proper transportation of workers Develop a surveillance programme for injuries to migrant workers in agriculture in Canada; improve records for continuity of transnational care

Different priorities are required for dealing with the unique needs of each population of temporary/seasonal or SAWP workers coming through different programmes to work in rural places. The public sector—the Canadian and provincial governments—seems to shy away from taking responsibility for supporting the TFWPs programme directly. This is contributing to the disconnect between agricultural producers/farmers and

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the TAWs. Critical anthropological and sociological work has documented a long history of power issues preventing migrants from joining workers’ unions, blacklisting ‘vocal’ workers, or deporting them from the country after an occupational injury (Basok & López-Sala, 2016; Binford, 2019; Orkin et al., 2014; Vosko, 2016). The priorities highlighted here for eliminating workplace hazards require major governance changes at all levels to achieve the required safety standards are adhered to. The OHS system in Canadian jurisdictions makes employers and workers the primary parties responsible for workplace safety. Examinations of the stratified contextual environmental factors will not resolve all issues. Nor will the issues be resolved quickly. Without taking action, more dangerous work environments, characterised by weak labour standards, will continue to emerge in remote locations of the country. Adoption of the six steps to safety modified HOC model might help relevant authorities to envision the multilevel OHS initiatives and linked layers needed for the prevention of illness and injury in the agricultural industry. However, these new strategies will require strong public participation and support in rural places and leadership from the industry, government, and other stakeholders. The use of the modified six steps to safety HOC and its application in agricultural workplaces have been shown to be successful in developing a more comprehensive approach to the prevention of occupational injuries (Dosman et al., 2015). The application of these steps is clear and understandable to employers. In the Canadian context, improving the occupational health and safety of temporary workers may require further analyses of the political, cultural, and economic barriers to the prevention of injury. A notable limitation in terms of transformative OHS potential has been the lack of involvement of migrant farmworkers themselves. At present, the precarious status of TAWs, who are vulnerable to deportation and pressures not to speak out against their employers, makes their participation tremendously difficult. These factors are impacting on the lives of agricultural seasonal migrants in rural areas. Even though the TAWs’ health and safety trajectories are inseparable from global economic and political movements, better injury prevention programmes that are taken seriously by employers and governments may provide a long-term pathway to well-being. A significant effort from provincial decision-makers and employers/farmers who contribute to policy change is necessary. The role of occupational safety for the global agricultural labour force—and the spatio-temporal dimensions of their lives in

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the ‘global south’—impacts the rural futures and programmes in Canadian communities. The complex nature of risk management challenges us to call for greater collaboration of all stakeholders at the transnational level, carrying out credible occupational injury prevention programmes and risk management decisions.

Conclusion A fundamental message arising from the evidence this chapter has examined is that temporary migrant agricultural workers in Canada are a special at-risk population in rural communities. Protecting their health and safety in agriculture requires adopting multidisciplinary frameworks and working with transnational, multilateral agencies, across different levels of government, non-governmental organisations, and civil society. Many researchers have called upon the Canadian government to consider permanent and sustainable solutions to prevent abuses of human rights and provide protection for migrant agricultural workers. Farm safety is a prerequisite for sustainable food production and a critical part of global programmes of sustainable development. Poor occupational hazard management can potentially threaten the survival of agricultural operations through the injury and illness of farmers, family members, and employees. The six steps to safety framework based on the HOC provides an organising scheme for a planned approach to injury prevention for TAWs. Referring to the complexity of prevention of occupational illness and farm injury, cited in the Saskatchewan study (2015), if ‘caging all tigers may not be possible, then a contextual approach […] such as the hierarchy of control may at least identify ways of being able to live with them in a manner that causes the least potential harm’ (Dosman et al., 2015: 368). The most effective programmes for long-term improvement in health and safety are comprehensive multimodal programmes that incorporate theory and methods from several professional fields. Canada and other countries need to develop a set of global strategies aimed at minimising negative health impacts and improving the health of migrant workers (ILO, 2011). The role of rural communities, civil society, and labour organisations is fundamental in the process of policy change. Due to the numerous safety concerns for migrant agricultural workers around COVID-19, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW Canada) in collaboration with the Agriculture Workers Alliance (AWA) has initiated discussions

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with Mexican government officials for the protection of Mexican migrants and is calling on the Canadian government to address occupational health and safety measures for prevention of injury and death of TAWs. Further dialogue and research are necessary to inspire global stakeholders to take the occupational health and safety of all workers, but especially migrant workers, seriously.

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CHAPTER 5

Living Better but Separated: The Emotional Impacts of the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme on Transmigrant Workers Linamar Campos-Flores and Adriana Leona Rosales-Mendoza

Introduction Kearns and Andrews (2010: 311) state that well-being is about modes of feeling good. They maintain there is a tension between the persistence of a model that focuses its perspective on well-being from a medical and financial point of view and ‘the interest in both well-being and emotions in human geography’. What does it mean to feel good when one is seen as

L. Campos-Flores (*) Fonds de recherche du Québec-Société et Culture, Québec, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] A. L. Rosales-Mendoza Universidad Pedagógica Nacional-Ajusco, Mexico, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Kerrigan, P. de Lima (eds.), The Rural-Migration Nexus, Rethinking Rural, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18042-2_5

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an ‘alien’, as someone who’s wholeness is denied, is systematically discriminated and racialised, and is seen as ‘the other’? It is this question that the research presented in this chapter addresses. The emotional experience lived annually by men who are hired by the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme (CSAWP) in Quebec, Canada. This chapter aims to address the topic of well-being, understood as ‘an on-going process, encompassing physical and mental health contingent on social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental factors operating at different scalar levels’ (de Lima, 2016: 6); it discusses elements that cause distress to agricultural workers by drawing attention to the emotional dimension. The prevailing tendency in research and in the literature on individual well-being tends to mainly analyse—measure and observe— physical factors (e.g., nutrition, personal health, lack of sleep). This is reflected in the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Human Development Index (HDI) or the Legatum Prosperity Index (LPI) (Kearns & Andrews, 2010). However, from a qualitative perspective, we argue that ‘emotional well-­ being’ is also a critical component of well-being which is not included in these indices. We address this existing gap in labour migration research by arguing that emotional factors should be included and taken into consideration when racist and discriminating policies and practices are being analysed, most notably for transnational agricultural workers. Examining the relationship between these practices from some state and private actors, the study undertaken seeks to shed light on the emotional labour and work—in Hochschild’s sense (1979, 1983)—of transnational agricultural workers in Quebec. To set the context, the first section of this chapter introduces Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Programme  and the geographical and sociodemographic characteristics of the regions in Mexico where the migrants originate from to help understand the context for migration. This is followed by a discussion of the immigration policies theoretical section focusing on the articulation of migration policies, racist and discriminatory practices, and emotions of distress by exploring Satzewich’s (1989) propositions on citizenship, TenHouten’s perspective on emotions (2007) and Hochschild’s (1979, 1983) theory of emotional labour. The next section is followed by a description of the methodology used during our research, focusing on the use of visual methods. The fourth section presents an analysis of our findings which explores agricultural migrant workers’ experiences of emotional distress due to the discrimination and racism

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experienced because of migration policies and their employers’ attitudes towards them.

Context: The Canadian Seasonal and Temporary Agricultural Workers Programme and the Recruitment of Mexican Workers Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme. Since its inception, the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme (CSAWP) has attracted considerable attention from scholars and trade union leaders. A more detailed discussion of the evolution of migration policy that led to SAWP can be found in the next section. Much social research has been undertaken in response to the Canadian government’s decision to give preference to temporary migration, which exposed the unfair terms of the working conditions under which these workers were recruited (Basok, 1999; Basok et al., 2014; Depatie-Pelletier & Dumont, 2014; Handal, 2011; Hanley et al., 2012; Preibisch, 2007). In addition, some organisations such as the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) were concerned about migrant working conditions and they questioned the impact and pressure these kinds of jobs had on Canadian workers. Both researchers and advocates pointed to the exponential growth rate of SAWP migration: Mexico started by sending 203 workers in 1974, which grew to 26,339 entering Canada in 2019—a trend, which only declined in 2020 due to the SARS-II-­ COVID-19 pandemic (see Fig. 5.1). Hiring was driven by neoliberal ideology which was implicitly discriminatory based on race. Historically, the employer-tied contracts signed by transnational agricultural workers (TAW) showed the group had an increased risk and exposure to abuse, exploitation, lack of recognition of occupational illnesses and more generally, experienced violation of their rights and liberties enshrined in Canadian Law. Geographical Spaces (i): A Sociodemographic Overview of the County of Arriaga, Chiapas, Mexico Arriaga comprised a group of families who settled in the region known as Valle de Jalisco belonging to the county of Tonalá, named Arriaga in

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25331 25344

27000 23892

*22130

24000

21499 19829

18502

21000 17626

16492

18000

15809

15000 12000

Women

9000

Workers

6000 3000

510

770

751

760

716

644

594

555

528

494

474

362

48

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2004

1994

1984

1974

0

*September 2020, lesser participation due to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fig. 5.1  CSAWP: Mexicans entering Canada 1974–2020. Source: Authors, with data from the Ministry of Labour, Mexico

1910. Currently, Arriaga has 40,000 inhabitants of whom a little more than 6000 refer to themselves as being part of the aboriginal population, despite being monolingual Spanish (Mexican Government, INAFED, 2017). According to the 2015 census undertaken by The National Institute of Information, Statistics and Geography (INEGI), the state of Chiapas had 4.8 million inhabitants who lived in 122 counties. The median age of the population in Chiapas was 22  years, the lowest median age in Mexico. Among Chiapanecans, 58.5% identify themselves as Catholic, while 27.5% were members of other religions (Protestant, Evangelical, non-­ Evangelical), and 14.3% were not religious or did not specify their belief (INEGI, 2015a). This southern state has the second-highest percentage of indigenous people who speak their native mother tongue: 17% of those aged five years old and above. The rural population has decreased significantly in Chiapas, down to 51% of the inhabitants who continue to live in rural areas (INEGI, 2015a). The state had the highest poverty rate in Mexico (e.g., less than 1.25 USD a day). 76% lived below the poverty line, and nearly a third of poor people in Chiapas lived in extreme poverty (CONEVAL, 2016). This situation could be argued as the main reason to be enrolled in CSAWP.

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For decades, the produce harvested in La Fraylesca, a region known as Chiapas’ breadbasket, was transported to Arriaga, where the train containers were filled and sent to Veracruz, and from there on to Mexico City. In the words of one of our interviewees, who agreed to participate without revealing his identity, Arriaga was a prosperous city where employment was abundant because many industries and manufacturers were located there and thus attracted investment and people from other provinces. Questionable political decisions lacking in transparency have transformed Arriaga into a kind of ghost town where people from Central America wander around while waiting for La Bestia (The Beast). From there, the train took them to ‘the North’—to the “American dream”—their destination. While livestock farming remains an activity practiced by its inhabitants, most of the economic and productive activities are currently concentrated in the neighbouring county of Tonalá, where the fisheries and tourism industries require a labour force which is met in part by Arriaga’s citizens. This historical context helps to explain the reasons why Chiapanecan civil servants in the Federal Administration may have taken the opportunity to promote the recruitment of peasants from Arriaga for the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme given the lack of employment opportunities. The first inhabitants from Arriaga were sent to Canada in 1990. In 2018, the number of agricultural transmigrant workers hired by the SAWP amounted to 278, representing 26% of 1052 Chiapanecans working in the programme (see Fig. 5.2). Geographical Spaces (ii): A Sociodemographic Overview of the Main Counties of Yucatán Registered in CSAWP In 2015, the state of Yucatán had 1.9 million inhabitants who lived in 106 counties. The median age in Yucatán was 26 which is the same as the national figure. Catholics represented 79.5% of Yucatecans while 14% were registered as Protestants, Evangelicals, non-Evangelicals, or other religions. The state has the fifth-largest proportion of indigenous language speakers in Mexico, with 30% of its population –mainly Maya speakers (INEGI, 2015b). In Yucatán, in contrast to Chiapas, both poverty and extreme poverty rates are lower than the national average (46 and 12.5%, respectively). The state has a much lower rural population than Chiapas, with only 16% of its population living in rural areas. Considering that only communities with less than 2500 inhabitants are classified as rural in

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300 250 200 150 100 50 0

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Ontario

B. Columbia

Quebec

Others

TOTAL

Fig. 5.2  Arriaga: Participation in the CSAWP by Canadian province of destination 2010–2020. Source: Authors with data from Ministry of Labour, Mexico 1150 950 750 550 350 150 -50

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Alberta

B. Columbia

Ontario

Quebec

Others

TOTAL

Fig. 5.3  Yucatán. Participation in the CSAWP by Canadian province of destination 2010–2020. Source: Authors with data from Ministry of Labour, Mexico

Mexico, the percentage of the rural population in Yucatán may be underestimated. While in Chiapas almost 40% of workers participating in the CSAWP hail from Arriaga, in Yucatán this population is distributed across different regions. Figure 5.3 presents information for the entire state of Yucatán, rather than data from the two selected counties, Maní and Tahdziú. This data demonstrates that while a single municipality in Chiapas sent 278

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workers to Canada in 2018, Yucatán State (with 106 counties or municipalities) contributed 422 persons to CSAWP. In Tahdziú, an agricultural area which produces habanero chilli, corn, beans, squash, and honey, nine out of ten individuals live in poverty and half of its population survives in extreme poverty. Hence, the municipality is classified as the poorest county in Yucatán (CONEVAL, 2016). The participation of natives of Tahdziú in the SAWP began in 2010. Only men are employed and they go to work in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. Mani is a county with 5250 inhabitants (INEGI, 2011). It is a tourist area where hammocks and other handcrafts are made. Agriculture is an important activity, cultivating henequen, corn, and fruits. According to a key informant in the municipality, the first participants in SAWP worked in Manitoba. The Canadian Seasonal and Temporary Agricultural Workers Programme: Othering as Policy Discriminatory and racist practices towards temporary agricultural foreign workers have been prevalent in Canadian legislation since 1966, when the CSAWP started (Mize & Swords, 2011; Satzewich, 1989; Sharma, 2006). The evidence shows immigration policies were openly racist before 1966, and the Canadian legislations were a response to the pressure exerted by some Commonwealth countries. These claims led to: a White Paper [which] called for an end to racist exclusions and quotas in immigration law […] [hence] a reformed Immigration Act passed in 1966 that eliminated most overtly racist clauses and paved the way for the recruitment of Jamaican workers (Mize & Swords, 2011: 220).

According to these authors, Caribbean citizens could only aspire to enter Canada as agricultural workers in Ontario to help producers during the tobacco, fruit, and vegetable harvest period, but not to become residents or Canadian citizens. In other words, the legislation enacted in 1966 did not represent a real change but instead reinforced discriminatory and racist policies. It is through the “Non-Immigrant Employment Authorization Programme” (NIEAP) that a new migratory category was enacted (Sharma, 2006). These changes led to creating specific differences between

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Canadian born workers and foreign-born workers who carried out similar activities: despite sharing the same space-temporality, they lived two different realities determined by immigration status. This program laid the foundations for the ‘need’ for a workforce coming from overseas. Foreign temporary workers came to be more numerous after implementing NIEAP (See Table 5.1 showing the statistics of the CSAWP). Sharma (2006: 123) asserted that non-white populations were categorised as ‘migrant workers’. A label that would situate them outside the benefits afforded to full citizens. In her analysis, she points out the ‘ideological practices of governance’ embedded in CSAWP transformed our understanding of freedom (an essential value for democratic human societies) by creating an ‘unfree working-class’. A dichotomy that coexists today is ‘a workforce of free/unfree people’. Satzewich (1989: 329) defines these concepts as follows: Free labour refers to those social relations of production where persons are forced by the condition of propertylessness into selling their labour power for wages. [While] unfree labour refers to those relations of production in which political or legal compulsion is used to force people to provide labour power for others.

In short, because agricultural temporary foreign workers receive a salary, it does not mean they are free workers. Citizenship has become a pivotal mechanism to distinguish ‘local workers’ from those who are not. In most countries, citizenship is used either to ‘extend or withdraw economic rights and lower the cost of the labour force’—in this case, agricultural migrant workers (Satzewich, 1989: 321). Although immigration policy is the responsibility of the Federal Government, Quebec’s migration policies have been based on differentiation with the rest of Canada’s provinces to assert its autonomy in this regard. During the 1980s, interculturalism was adopted as a policy which was preceded by ‘Bill 101’ (1977), making French the official language in Quebec. This was a major event in Quebec’s political life, and in developing migration policies. This approach insists on two central principles: that equality between cultures requires a ‘francisation’ and secularisation of public space. In 1991 the ‘Canada-Quebec Accord’ was signed to this effect. The province then obtained total control of the process of selecting economic immigrants, as well as in their integration and francisation. At the beginning of the century, the Quebec government promoted diversity

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Table 5.1  Characteristics of the CSAWP workers interviewed Worker

Village Age Education of origin

PROVINCE: CHIAPAS 1 Armando Arriaga

26

2 Rafael

Arriaga

44

3 Benito

Arriaga

4 Isidoro

Religion

Children Years Activity in of Mexico work

Incomplete Catholic High school Elementary Catholic

2

4

Agriculture

4

15

32

High school

Catholic

2

10

Arriaga

40

Catholic

4

11

5 Artemio

Arriaga

49

Evangelist

3

14

Agriculture

6 Eliodoro

Arriaga

53

Evangelist

3

26

7 Ernesto

Arriaga

47

Catholic

3

14

8 Miguel 9 José 10 Ricardo 11 Leonel 12 Oscar

Arriaga Arriaga Arriaga Arriaga Arriaga

39 53 40 56 46

Catholic Catholic Catholic Catholic Catholic

2 2 3 2 2

14 9 13 21 8

Cattle breeding Cattle breeding Agriculture Agriculture Agriculture Agriculture Agriculture

13 Manuel

Arriaga

48

Catholic

2

14

14 Francisco

Arriaga

46

Catholic

3

10

15 Alfonso

Arriaga

48

Catholic

1

26

Agriculture/ draftsman

16 Ariel

Arriaga

33

Catholic

2

11

Agriculture

17 Jorge

Arriaga

46

High school High school High school High school Elementary Elementary Elementary Elementary High school Incomplete Elementary High school Incomplete High school Incomplete High school Incomplete High school

Cattle breeding Day labourer/ Cowboy Pig farming

Catholic

–

2

Debt collector

Cattle breeding Agriculture

(continued)

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Table 5.1  (continued) Worker

Village Age Education of origin

Religion

Children Years Activity in of Mexico work

18 Gerardo

Arriaga

38

High school

Catholic

2

8

Merchant

PROVINCE: YUCATÁN 1 Víctor Maní

39

Catholic

2

8

Agriculture

2 Joel

Maní

38

Catholic

3

9

Agriculture

3 Fernando

Maní

38

Catholic

3

4

Agriculture

4 Rodrigo

Maní

32

Catholic

2

5

Agriculture

5 Julio

Tahdziú 37

Presbyterian 5

7

Agriculture

6 Jaime 7 Gonzalo 8 Uriel

Tahdziú 58 Tahdziú 42 Tahdziú 34

High School Incomplete Elementary High School Incomplete High School High School Elementary Elementary High School

Presbyterian 7 Presbyterian 2 Catholic 2

8 6 6

Beekeeping Beekeeping Agriculture

Note: All men are married and work in Quebec as farmworkers. Names are fictitious

and the fight against racism and discrimination, even though there was much controversy regarding what might be defined as reasonable accommodation policies created to ‘govern intercultural relations in Quebec’ (Encyclopédie Canadienne, 2021). These policies are a response to several complex challenges that Quebec faces, including: the challenges of an ageing population and a reduction in the potential labour pool and shortages of specialised workers in certain industries; and the regional distribution of the population in rural areas and their age distribution among the Canadian population which continues to decline. However, despite the implementation of inclusion policies, meaning measures that promote equal opportunities and the fight against racism and discrimination, have not been sufficient to eliminate the social inequalities experienced by (im)migrants because they continue to occupy the lowest-ranking and lowest-paid jobs. This is a reality that is exacerbated by the turn to temporary and seasonal migration, a decision that keeps the economy running without having to worry about integration.

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This decision has made permanent residence (and therefore citizenship) beyond the reach for the workers on these programmes by constructing a utilitarian category of ‘migrant workers’ who will never be candidates for becoming full members of Canadian society (Sharma, 2006). Cultural differences are more visible in CSAWP as integrating agricultural temporary foreign workers is not a priority for migration policy. Consequently, most of these workers do not seek integration into Quebec society because of immigration restrictions (e.g., not to be able to sponsor brothers, sisters or members of the extended family). Furthermore, lack of knowledge of the official languages (English and French) prevents workers from fully defending the rights granted in the work contract, clearly understanding instructions or warning signs and communicating with ‘host’ residents. The Quebec government’s lack of interest in providing French courses to these workers reinforces the idea that their stay in Canada is temporary. Moreover, these policies reinforce differential treatment given that individuals’ who participate in SAWP are categorised as low-skill workers. This contrasts with those considered as high-skill workers, who receive accompanying services. This differentiation is even practised by some Quebecers who avoid interacting with temporary workers and engage in acts of discrimination against them where racism is implicitly present (Depatie-Pelletier, 2018). Paradoxically, Canada was the first country to adopt a public policy in 1971, which was focused on cultural diversity which could be said to include migrant workers. The Canadian government sought to integrate migrants into the economy and society based on international and national human rights conventions. However as highlighted by Peña Muñoz (2016) informal practices marginalised Mexican workers and reproduced the idea that ‘there is no racism in Canada’: This legal framework’s effectiveness is at the very least controversial. For its less severe critics, it is a substitute for an anti-racist policy. For its most severe critics, what we have here is a model that uses liberal rhetoric to sell diversity to reinforce the political and economic interests of dominant groups. (Peña Muñoz, 2016: 16)

Furthermore, discriminatory practices begin long before migrants arrive in Canada, as transnational agricultural workers (TAWs) are assigned to an employer without their full consent. This decision is made by the

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Mexican Ministry of Labour and the Canadian employer and is known as a ‘tied visa.’ This: reinforces the employee’s perception of being ‘owned’ by an employer, or at least being trapped in an employment relationship, even where that ­relationship is abusive. A tied visa risks creating a hidden undocumented workforce of escaped workers who are illegal, invisible and fearful, living outside the protection of the law—all of which increases their vulnerability to further abuse (Depatie-Pelletier, 2018: 535)

Conditions are dependent on the visa status. In the case of temporary agricultural workers their access to the labour market is limited, a situation that is not exclusive of SAWP, but a common practice worldwide. For instance, Anderson (2001: 309) argues that in the UK: ‘The new system continues the previous principle, that those categorised as economic migrants can only work for a recognised work permit holding employer’. These conditions are becoming the norm in labour migration internationally. The denial of legal citizenship through the promotion of temporary visa programmes is a discriminatory practice towards TAWs. This status serves to maintain a disciplined and low-cost labour force at the national level, guaranteeing competitiveness in world markets (Preibisch & Hermoso, 2016). Moreover, within the programme, 94% of workers are men. Sexism is rife as employers make decisions based on gender. Employers argue that for specific tasks the strength of men (in the field) is required or that the skill of women in selecting and bailing flowers is preferred. In other words, gender discrimination is being practised despite its prohibition in Canadian legislation. Frequently questioned on the topic, Mexican authorities have justified the situation based on the employers’ requests of specific individuals (men). Recently (2018), the authors were told that the Mexican Secretariat of Labour would start asking for a written response from the employers to justify why men were ‘needed’ over women to perform jobs. This is a position that could be seen as political correctness rather than legitimate concern to eliminate gender discrimination against women. This is a subject primarily addressed by researchers (Becerril, 2007; Encalada, 2011) who have reported about the discriminatory treatment women receive from authorities, employers, and even male co-workers.

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Restriction of rights and liberties is another challenge for TAWs. The structure of CSAWP generates inequality between workers, as it contributes to creating and maintaining a cheap labour system, prevents the right to social mobility—having the right to change jobs and access better-paid work—nor does it afford full exercise of rights and liberties on equal terms to those offered to Canadian citizens and permanent residents. Extra-legal coercion mechanisms are embedded in the programme to control and discipline temporary workers. An example of this was relayed by two informants, who said their boss took away their passport, which although is against the law, is still a common practice among employers. In this way, SAWP contributes to reproducing practices of segregation and racism (Paz-Ramírez, 2013). Racist practices are also evident in the choices that employers make regarding the nationality of their workers, based on alleged qualities such as responsibility or reliability: Indeed, while practices of segmentation and replacement based on nationality, race, or other axes of social difference existed under the CSAWP, the liberalization of source countries deepens the scope of employers to seek out what they perceive to be the most ‘willing’ and ‘reliable’ workers. (Preibisch, 2010: 421).

Agricultural producers who employ migrants under the CSAWP benefit from being able to recruit workers from a changing pool of nationalities over time. By recruiting new staff from different nationalities, they undermine the possibility of workers who have been on the programme for several year from organising against their work conditions. A clear example of this is the replacement of Jamaicans for Mexicans and the latter for Guatemalans. These selective practices contribute to weakening migrant workers’ bargaining power in the workplace. Finally, the Quebec Human Rights Commission (CDPDJ, 2011) has demonstrated and challenged systemic discriminatory policies in Quebec through ‘Judicial Advice’ (Avis juridique) making several recommendations to the government, which, to date, have been ignored. Why Emotions Matter: The Emotional-Affective Turn and Migration With the exception of some research during the 1980s, the beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed the importance of the inclusion of

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emotions into the social sciences. This interest in emotions was brought to attention by different scholars from a range of different social science disciplines producing what is known as the emotional turn (Ahmed, 2004; Davidson et al., 2007; Bernard, 2015; Goodwin et al., 2011; Hochschild, 1979, 1983; TenHouten, 2007, 2013, 2017). Differentiating their views from those centred in evolutionary and psychological sciences, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and political scientists proposed that emotions are social constructs that human beings learn through experience. However, these human phenomena have bodily repercussions that cannot be ignored. In this chapter, we take emotions to be both: physically subjective and socially experienced. Real and imagined stressors play a critical role in the everyday lives of transnational agricultural workers, factors that trigger or repress their emotional experiences, particularly those related to discrimination and racist practices. One of the complexities and tensions regarding theories of emotions is that there are wide ranges of approaches. For the purpose of this chapter, emotions are understood as a phenomenon of affective life which has its origin in an external stimulus that is perceived and interpreted from sociocultural codes, influencing, and affected by spatial interactions and psychophysiological processes (Campos-Flores, 2018). This draws on TenHouten’s views (2007, 2013, 2017) which integrate various theories about emotions, recognising the contributions of cognitivism/constructionism and the concept of primary emotions, which allow for a better understanding of the psychosocial processes of human activity. As TenHouten (2017: 72) argues: ‘feelings and emotions do not only involve brain work, but also emerge at the intersection of the body, the mind and society’. Ekman (1992, 1999), Plutchik (1962) and TenHouten (2007, 2013, 2017) are proponents of the existence of six primary emotions, identified across cultures: joy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise. These are crucial for the process of information exchange and resolution of the problems of human life. We follow these classifications of emotions (and their combinations) for the purposes of our analysis. Complementing TenHouten’s (2017) perspective, we refer to the ‘emotional labour’ that transmigrant workers engage in to manage their emotionality in the workplace, following Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) approach. Emotional labour is defined by Hochschild (1983: 561) as ‘managing feelings to create a publicly observable facial and body display’. In other words, the term refers to the process through which workers (particularly those who provide services) are expected to implement an act

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(surface or deep acting) that will modify their own emotions so as not to affect the emotional state of others. An important distinction for the discussion is that between ‘emotional work’ and ‘emotional labour’. The former is limited to personal performance (private acts), whilst the latter refers to an employee’s performative action in response to standards of behaviour and performance established by their employer. It is the second meaning that we will refer to throughout this chapter. As Hochschild (1983) emphasises, emotional labour or management refers to the effort, the act of trying, and not the result of it, which may or may not be successful. In the context of TAWs, they are always expected to maintain an attitude of calm and obedience, regardless of the stimuli received or the stressor to which the worker is exposed, (e.g., being unjustifiably admonished by the employer or engaging in presenteeism while feeling sick). TAWs have to suppress their feelings and present an external appearance –a performative act–to ensure that the employer reacts appropriately, as they do not want to jeopardise their employment. As discussed in the section that follows, workers frequently repress their emotions. However—and following Hochschild (1983)—on some occasions they are capable of transmuting felt emotions, by performing what she calls the work ‘in depth’, meaning that it is not a superficial or fake acting, but an authentic inner emotional change. For example, despite being frustrated the worker might smile sincerely and not because that is the expected response. We also argue that there is a reciprocal relationship between the working conditions (terms of the contract, performance of repetitive tasks, long working hours, lack of safety and hygiene measures at work), and the workers’ psycho-emotional stressors. Factors that may compromise how humans preserve physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual balance (Lindert et al., 2015), especially given the conditions TAWs are subjected to which allow for limited emotional expressions. In short, this reciprocity affects or can severely affect the well-being and physical and mental health of agricultural workers.

Methodology The data used within this chapter is based on Campos-Flores’ Masters and Doctoral research projects undertaken from 2013–2020, and a study conducted by both authors from 2018–2020. For this chapter, we are presenting the results of 26 interviews with 18 Chiapanecan and eight

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Yucatecan men in the agricultural municipalities of Mexico and in Quebec, Canada (See Table  5.1). A visual methodology of photo-elicitation—or emotional images as we call it—was used in the research process. The use of selected images made an ideal tool to ensure that the participants did not feel anxious about ‘good/bad’ responses. The technique is similar to that used by Collier (1957) and Chiozzi (1989). Images were used to help elicit participant memories in situations where other techniques fail (Harper, 2002: 14–15). Harper (2002: 23) indicates that the use of photographs not only ‘may add validity and reliability to a word-based survey, [but] mines deeper shafts into a different part of human consciousness than do words-alone interviews.’ Banks (2001) and Rose (2012) argue that the use of images to obtain information for qualitative research has several advantages. One of the strengths of the use of photographs is that different topics can be addressed in different ways, which may not be as easy to access when asking direct questions in interviews. Secondly, the interviewees’ use of materials allows for the exploration of events in their daily life, which can be overlooked. The technique also creates agency among interviewees, since it requires collaboration between the researcher and the participants, helping to facilitate tapping into the experiential and emotional experiences during the researcher-researched interaction (Banks, 2001: 95–96; Collier cited by Harper, 2002: 13; Rose, 2012: 305–307). We acknowledge that the use of visual techniques may be an obstacle. Pink (2006) notes their use arise from experience in data collection during the investigation, driven by the need to obtain ‘less thought-out and more felt’ responses. In our research, images were selected based on an interview questionnaire that was created from the emotions expressed below. More specifically, the selection was based on their responses in relation to two related questions ‘What do you feel/experience when you see this image?’ and the selected photograph. For example, instead of asking which emotions are experienced when not understanding something said or written in French, an image of a written advert was shown. Following this, we questioned participants about their feelings when confronted with such experience. The conversation was guided to delve into the emotions expressed. When there was difficulty responding, a series of terms related to different emotions –contained in the interview questionnaire—were offered: joy, concern, gratitude, loneliness, anger, resignation, acquiescence, anguish, nostalgia, frustration, anxiety, stress, satisfaction, sadness, helplessness, depression, among others. Interview responses were digitally

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recorded, unless a participant requested that the interview was not to be recorded. In the case of the latter notes from the conversation were taken. Approximately 30 images were used, which varied according to the workers’ origin, especially those related to cultural particularities (celebrations, food, places). Some pictures were taken by the authors (LC), and others were taken from mainly open sources available on the internet. For those that were copyrighted, we obtained consent for these to be used. We created codes (keywords) during the analysis process, which were then converted into categories (see Table 5.2). These categories of analysis refer to the discrimination and racism experienced by agricultural workers, which were then later linked to the emotions of sadness, anger, anguish and fear (as stressors). In contrast, feelings of joy, happiness, and satisfaction—their state of well-being—were correlated to having a job. What also became evident was the internalisation of gender roles for men and women was influenced by culture. Male identity was strengthened by proving a ‘sense of sacrifice’. For the individuals interviewed, the sense of sacrifice meant to put aside their personal interests and situate their family first, even if they had to live away from their loved ones.

Table 5.2  Categories of analyses used in our research Categories

Meaning

DISCRIMINATION Prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, in this case due to race or nationality. WELL-BEING: Being emotionally comfortable. Joy Happiness Satisfaction DISCOMFORT: Being mentally or emotionally uncomfortable. Sadness Anger Anguish fear SACRIFICE Between well-being and discomfort. Sacrifice meant putting aside their personal interests and situating their family first, even if they had to live away from their loved ones.

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Distress among Chiapanecan and Yucatecan Workers A reading of the terms of the migrant workers’ employment contract confirms that there are three conditions that exert additional tensions in creating situations of extreme vulnerability for TAWs: (1) an employer-tied work permit; (2) the obligation to reside with or where the employer decides, and (3) the privilege of the employer or the consular representative to decide the repatriation of the worker at any point during the contracted period. These conditions also have greater implications at the level of psychosocial integrity, as well as their dignity, because of the limited rights given as they work and reside in Quebec. This is echoed by Depatie-Pelletier’s (2018: 584) findings, which argues that immigration policies and working conditions established and promoted by the Canadian government and not contested by its Mexican counterpart are policies that result in ‘psychological stress imposed by the state’. As we discuss in the following sections, the testimonies offered by the workers interviewed confirm the stressful experience to which the Mexican agricultural workers participating in the CSAWP are exposed to continuously during their stay in Canada. Additionally, stress has been recognised as a major component in the everyday lives of TAWs. Men know that they are being exposed to several stressors during their working hours, but also in their place of residence. Avenirse, hallarse, acomodarse (to settle in, to fit in) is considered as an essential quality that an agricultural migrant worker should practice if he wants to succeed. The challenges they face such as not meeting expectations, having an accident that leads to an injury, mixing with ‘undesirable people’ like activists and researchers, being homesick and becoming depressed, drinking too much alcohol, and being deported or blacklisted are major threats hanging over their heads. These stressors translate into one word: fear, an emotion that Pain (2009: 467) described as something that could be ‘felt, patterned and practiced in everyday life,’ and that is evidently used as a form of control to enforce both written and unwritten rules. Depatie-Pelletier (2018: 639) states that it is because of the fear of deportation and ‘to secure their jobs, [that they have] had to increase their productivity and compete with their co-workers.’ In case of an accident, ‘they are less likely to take time off to receive medical treatment.’ This competition ‘will foster an atmosphere of hostility’ which leads to lack of trust with each other and further results in not ‘seeking out support for the emotional and physical problems they face’. An agricultural

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transmigrant worker is limited by his working conditions and, much more significantly, by the socialised fear in the conversations that workers have in their places of work and country of origin. Intimidation—a threat that underpins the emotion of fear—is thus used to enforce state control which aims to maintain the workers’ acquiescence and obedience; it emphasises the fact that belonging to the SAWP must be perceived as a ‘privilege’ which can be revoked at any time. Related to the emotions that generate stress in workers, Hochschild (1983: 12) argues that all societies make efficient use of the emotional labour of its members, and that: any system of exploitation depends on the actual distribution of many kinds of profits –money, authority, status, honour, well-being. [It is] the underlying system of recompense that raises the question of what the cost is.’ It is evident that in this model of rewards in a neoliberal globalised system, the emotional cost that migrant workers must pay is high.

Emotional Images The photographs shown depict a building where advocacy volunteers offer legal services and counselling, where a group of men stand up for their rights. These images are intended to evoke blacklisting, another tactic used to intimidate TAWs. This would result in a premature end of the contract through deportation which is used to silence and control TAWs. In 2015 the Mexican Consulate in Vancouver was officially accused of blacklisting fellow citizens to discipline TAWs because they decided to become members of a workers’ union. Vosko (2018: 8) argues that the threat ‘contributes to their apparent acquiescence to dirty, dangerous, demeaning working conditions (3D jobs).’ This discourages TAWs from looking for advocacy services, assessment or initiating any legal complaints against their employer. Manuel (a TAW from Chiapas) says when shown one of the photos mentioned above: In the beginning, some were enthusiastic because, well, it sounded interesting that we could go with those who know about the contract, the Law, and speak French, and who can understand each other and defend you. Later, we heard that the patrones (bosses) were bringing more guatemalas because the Mexicans were getting ‘brave’ (courageous). The truth is, we were scared, and we gave up. I don’t know if it was good or bad, but one is afraid of getting into trouble, losing the job, and never returning to Canada.

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Some Yucatecan and Chiapanecan men when asked if they had experienced discrimination because of their nationality and their indigenous identity in Canada responded affirmatively: Yes, the truth yes. I must work very fast, and the foreman told us that if we did not perform at work, they would suspend our payment. When I return to Mexico—God willing—I will go to the Secretary of Labour, because I don’t want [to] return to work here anymore. I was in Toronto and the treatment is more dignified there, I was better. (Joel, Maní, Yucatán).

Canadian actors and Mexican authorities engage in discriminatory practices by subjecting the workers to a kind of subtle violence that can be deemed as discriminatory. These include practices directed at undermining the individuals enrolled in the programme by reminding them that they are the socially abject. The workers are made to wait for a long time before receiving a response from Mexican bureaucrats, who expect bribes in return for a contract and getting them their documents and show no empathy or understanding when TAWs face a health issue. These actions result in positioning TAWs in a place of inaction, passivity and docility, transforming them into ‘patients of the state’ who are subjected to ‘invisible elbows’ (Auyero, 2011). In other words, state violence takes on a more subtle, less perceptible and gentler form which punishes and disciplines individuals from groups of the dispossessed and vulnerable (invisible elbows). As Bourdieu (2000, 5) stated: ‘Making people wait… delaying without destroying hope…adjourning without totally disappointing are integral parts of the working of domination.’ The concept of social abjection helps to explain this phenomenon. Imogen Tyler (2013: 21) proposes that ‘abjection describes the violent exclusionary forces of sovereign power: those forces that strip people of their human dignity and reproduces them as dehumanised waste, the disposable dregs and refuse of social life.’ An aspect of Tyler’s concept of social abjection refers to the states of exclusion to which certain people are subjected, forced to survive in marginalisation (Tyler, 2013: 4), with which they are deprived of their rights as human beings. However, these people are part of the ‘residual populations’ that cannot be completely excluded as they are necessary to reproduce social order and power (Tyler, 2013: 20). Concretely, Tyler (2013: 28) states that

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abjection is spatializing, in that the abjecting subject attempts to generate a space, a distinction, a border, between herself and the polluting object, thing or person. Abjection describes the ongoing processes of bordering that make and unmake both the psychological and material boundaries of the subject.

What this chapter has attempted to unpack is how processes of exclusion, racialization, and otherness are enmeshed into citizenship policies, notably Canadian migratory policies. Drawing upon Kristeva’s work, Tyler (2013: 30) reminds us that the individual who is perceived as a foreigner ‘is a substitute, a scapegoat, for the abject maternal […] a border abject’ manageable through aversion. Abjection serves, ‘to mark out and disqualify from juridical modes of belonging populations that are at the same time contained within the state as an interiorised other’ (Butler cited in Tyler, 2013: 48). The interviewees referred to the many ways in which they were reminded that they belonged to the ‘working class’ and that their labour was expendable. This is demonstrated in the following case where after a workplace injury an interviewee was unable to re-join the programme for several years: We were lifting a trailer, and the patrón inadvertently hit me on the back. Because of the circumstances, they sent me back to Mexico for treatment, so I went directly to my home. Several weeks later I went to the office in Mexico City to arrange my medical care and insurance and they told me that I had no right, because I did not show up immediately, but how was I going to do it, if I could barely move? I was uninsured and returned to the programme only six years later … I felt angry and discouraged, but what could I do? They [the authorities] decide (Artemio, Chiapas)

Using images where workers are shopping for groceries or standing at a supermarket, the interviewees referred to some cases which confirmed the perception of having to contend with the views among Canadians who perceived them as taking their jobs: Over there (in Canada) there are many racists. I have met some in the streets, they look at you and they tell you that you are stealing their jobs… and the patrones like you only when you work, when you are productive as

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they want, and the day that you don’t perform ‘bye, bye, good luck’… I feel disappointed, frustrated and somehow offended, not appreciated… (Armando, Chiapas) Canadians are suspicious of us because they think we have come to take away their jobs. However, we come to do a job that they do not want to do because if they did this job, we would not have the opportunity to come. So, frequently, they do not understand it either. They think that we are stealing their job, and no, we come because the bosses call us. I think they do not want to work in this, and if they do not work, the Canadian government gives them money. We need to work to get a salary. (Fernando, Maní, Yucatán)

TAWs often felt discouraged about making complaints and were afraid to protest or say anything about the treatment they received: Sometimes the employer did not take us to do groceries. Although I was disappointed by their treatment, I did not say anything. However, this year I reported it to the Consulate, even though they did not like it. Yes, I was also afraid to say something, but no more, I do not stay silent any longer (Ernesto, Chiapas) I have felt discrimination because they should pay us a better salary and treat us better. After all, I know that I must work. My boss doesn’t have to tell me so often what to do, to receive orders every moment. Here the foreman is rude, and he doesn’t treat us well. I would like what you are recording could be in other people’s hands; the Mexican government should listen and do something. Before leaving Mexico, an employee of the Secretary of Labour gave us some talks and told us that Canadians would treat us well (Rodrigo, Tahdziú, Yucatán)

TAWs also felt CSAWP actors are not empathetic of the difficulties they face because of the language barrier. When shown pictures of an injured worker (who died after three months in hospital), and some advertisements written in French, Jorge (TAW from Chiapas) recounts the accident that affected his arm which disabled him. He describes his frustration and powerlessness of not understanding what was being said to him: [in the hospital] I was feeling that I could not move my hand, thinking that my chance [to continue as a SAWP worker] was over. I didn’t understand anything of what the nurses, doctors and people said; or what the insurance

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agents asked once and again as the person who translated said… I was like ‘stuck’ [blocked], between anger and frustration; powerless and thinking of what my wife was feeling. What I wanted was to go back home, to be healed, that someone helped me with the insurance… to talk with someone I trust

Equally important are the struggles experienced when the men would reside in their accommodation. In the early days of SAWP, workers were placed in makeshift buildings where they would have to share a space with containers of crop chemicals: spaces so precarious that they were compared to barns. Today, even though there have been improvements in their living conditions, they inhabit places that frequently do not comply with the standards established in the contract—for example, shared rooms with several bunk beds without closets and only one bathroom shared between six people, and inadequate access to adequate drinking water. This reflects the discriminatory attitudes of employers who are aware that a Canadian worker would never accept living in such conditions while being employed to do a similar job. Sharing a room with other men has been reported by workers as ‘something hard,’ challenging intimacy and causing unintended consequences such as bullying because of certain habits or attitudes leading to pejorative nicknames. Eliodoro (a TAW from Chiapas) took some images showing a standard room where TAWs are accommodated and pointed out to them while answering the question ‘What is the most troublesome thing about being in Canada?’: This: …share the room with others, with people you have not seen before, that’s the most challenging thing for me. Sharing your room is something intimate, meaning the habits that each one has, the smells, the noises. Maybe others do not care, but it is something that causes me lots of struggle. It is something hard, that demands lots of tolerance. Then, after a few weeks, because of one’s tired, it goes away. One gets used to, but it’s always challenging for me.

Conclusion As Pain (2009: 477) suggests, our research should not ‘focus in on emotions, risking their depoliticisation or trivialisation, but to demonstrate that they, and their spatialities, are fundamental to the layout of society.’ Following these statements, as signalled at the beginning of this chapter,

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we argue that many crucial questions remain unanswered within the field of emotions in labour migration. Our chapter has sought to contribute to the debate by proposing another lens for analysing the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme (SAWP). It emphasises the role played by discriminatory and racist policies and practices within this programme on the well-being and emotional labour of the participants and their families in our research. Research related to labour migration from an emotional perspective has predominantly focused on the experiences of women, who in addition to becoming a growing migrant population, must leave their children under the care of their parents or grandparents, with more drastic consequences, since the expected role of women is to be the provider of care and attention at home (Rosales-Mendoza & Campos-Flores, 2019). This chapter has sought to include a focus on the experiences of men involved in labour migration from an emotional perspective. For men, migration has historically been regarded as natural or even ignored (Hibbins & Pease, 2009). Tanya Basok (1999) and Kerry Preibisch (2007) have asserted that the Canadian government’s role is limited to a kind of monitoring. Its authorities have relinquished responsibility for the health, well-being, safety, and respect for the rights of ‘low-skilled’ workers, who systematically do not receive support, language learning services, or advocacy assistance when abuse or the blatant violation of relevant laws occurs. The Quebec government has ignored the recommendations from the provincial Human Rights Commission (CDPDJ) even though systemic discrimination of the migrant workforce has been demonstrated. TAWs continue to be segregated, mistreated, and their work goes unrecognised by those who benefit from their presence, including the government, private actors, and the general population. As Giorgio Agamben (1998: 126) states ‘in the system of the nation-­ state, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state’. In other words, to be a citizen, according to Agamben, means to experience and be politically sanctioned zoē—the conception of political life which takes precedence over the sheer biological fact of life (what Agamben calls, drawing from ancient Greek philosophy, bios, or the way life is lived). This means citizenship is always an entanglement of zoē with the bios. TAWs, in this context, because they are not given full citizenship rights but are still expected to contribute to Canada’s food production system are stuck in

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the liminal state of bare life (Agamben, 1998). That is, the state of being in which migrant workers are reduced is to that of the bios but with an expectation to work with the Canadian agricultural system without being granted full rights and privileges; something that is decided through the sovereignty of the state, a deliberate strategy used to draw on the human capital of temporary agricultural workers while still positioning them as outsiders/’others’ in the context of the nation state. In this sense, agricultural businesses emphasise that the men and women who come through SAWP are mainly in Canada ‘to work’, nothing else. Thus, they enact the state’s sovereign power to hold TAWs as necessary to the socio-economic development of the country while simultaneously policing the boundaries of their inclusion. Paradoxically, they are seen as irreplaceable elements of a production chain, but not as individuals who are part of a family unit, that is, members of a household with life partner, daughters and sons, as well as members of an extended family. Our findings demonstrate that both the Canadian migration and labour policies exemplified in the current labour contract for the SAWP, and the dominant discourse among some members of the Canadian population who interact with TAWs from Chiapas and Yucatán promote discriminatory attitudes. This results in permanent stressors for TAWs which impact their well-being, while causing pernicious effects on their physical, mental, and emotional health. Among the temporary workers who participated in our study, we found a significant association between the anguish caused by feelings of discrimination through racist ideas and practices and the emotions they experienced. In Canada, they must act under the guidelines set by emotional labour rules: to be productive, responsible, willing to work without complaining, transforming, or repressing their feelings about the acts of discrimination they experience. They are expected to accept that they are in Canada temporarily and not expect rights, such as equal and fair treatment granted to others in similar occupations and fundamental rights that are granted to Canadian citizens or permanent residents. Our findings provide evidence that the stressful experiences transformed into stressful emotions (e.g., anguish, fear, sadness, anger, powerlessness, frustration) which are not taken seriously and considered less important than meeting their work obligations. Canadian migratory policies, working conditions, Mexican authorities, lack of support and abuses, employer’s mistreatment, non-recognition, and empathy from the local

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population become stressors which, in the long term, may have severe repercussions for their well-being, emotional, physical, and mental health. One limitation to our study was time. Longitudinal research is necessary to provide greater detail on migrants’ geographies of emotional labour and assess the extent to which workers from other provinces are hired through other similar programmes have similar experiences. To consolidate the proposal that emotions need to become a category of analysis—as a central concept in qualitative research—we argue that it is critical to address emotions of labour migration on TAWs hired under the SAWP. It is important that more research addressing emotions in labour transmigration continues to be undertaken to support the evidence that this population is subjected to the working conditions which expose TAWs to harmful situations, which is detrimental to their well-being and their family members.

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CHAPTER 6

Migrants, Refugees and Settlement Camps in the Rural and Urban Fringes of Serbia: Cultural Repertoires, Changing Understandings and Imaginings of the Other Geraldine Lee-Treweek, Branislav Radeljić, and Marko ­Stojanović

Introduction European rural regions remain places of gradual change, which is considered immunised against some of the worst excesses of urban living, such as crime, social unrest and social and race and ethnic differences. In Serbia, while the concept of rurality may not be as romanticised as in other countries, such as the United Kingdom, the narratives of the rural are no less compelling and are set against the reality of rapid urban development,

G. Lee-Treweek (*) School of Social Sciences, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Kerrigan, P. de Lima (eds.), The Rural-Migration Nexus, Rethinking Rural, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18042-2_6

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particularly within the accession framework of Serbia joining the European Union. These areas are being shaped by various migrations, including transmigrations of displaced people. Most Serbians live in either cities or towns and there has been a de-ruralification process ongoing for many years (Radmanović, 1996; Simić, 1973). But at the same time, Serbia has undergone changes relating to migrant and refugee transit since the early twenty-first century. Serbia is central to the Balkan corridor route for refugees travelling across the Mediterranean and seeking passage into EU states. When that route was closed in 2016, and fortress Europe drew up the drawbridge by blocking the train routes across the Western Balkans borders and building walls/fences as boundaries, refugees found themselves ‘stuck’ in Serbia (Pavlović, 2016). Refugee and migrant camps are sited mostly in Serbian rural areas or on the edges of the rural/urban divide. The changes in Serbia due to transmigration have increasingly gained attention and have become the focus of right-wing politicians, social media commentary and Serbian public narratives more generally. This chapter examines the nature of these public narratives around the presence and settlement of migrants and refugees in Serbia who typically are housed ‘out of place’ in camps in the rural fringes of Serbian towns and cities. The term ‘migrant’ will be used in this chapter, unless participants have used ‘refugee’ in their interview data. The displaced people in Serbia have come from many backgrounds, although it is accepted that most will have been forcibly displaced by conflict, extreme hardship or economic conditions. In our study, we have adopted an innovative theoretical approach that relies on examination of cultural repertoires, from which public narratives draw, about migrants in Serbia. The analysis reports on public perceptions about these migrants, as to where they stay, what they do, who they are and so on. The chapter examines the accounts of NGO workers, who have long-term field experience in roles developing and supporting migrant camps and supporting actual migrants themselves,  to

B. Radeljić Department of Government and Society, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates e-mail: [email protected] M. Stojanović Western Balkans Institute (WEBIN), Belgrade, Serbia e-mail: [email protected]

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identify dominant ideas and aspects of Serbian cultural repertoires around these national and rural ‘interlopers’. It will be argued that, through being housed in rural or urban fringe locales, migrants have become the subject of public narratives that position them either as threatening, either socially, culturally or otherwise, or as non-threatening. This dual construction hinges on migrants’ perceived mobility status as either on the move and mobile, or as being fixed-in-­ place, thus potentially permanent. Fears around loss or damage to Serbian cultural identity and misunderstandings about potential cultural differences will be shown to haunt public perceptions of what migration represents and might contribute to rural areas. However, concurrently, public policy and rural dwellers recognise there is need to develop and revitalise the rural, which is difficult to achieve without incomers. This chapter examines some of the key tensions emerging out of the 2015 ‘migration crisis’, and the impact on rural or urban fringe communities through examining the repertoires in play around migration.

On the Road to Change: The Rural and Urban Fringe as Collateral Space? Contemporary Serbia is defined by the International Monetary Fund as an upper middle-income country, with a free market economy, having transitioned from communist Yugoslavia into a state that is seeking accession into the EU. Serbia has regularly found itself at the epicentre of European change and, characteristically, this has positioned the country as central to the continent’s history, stability and development (Judah, 1997; Pavlowitch, 2002). Serbia has experienced numerous iterations of settlement, being overrun by multiple empires and states. Romans, Ottomans and Austro-Hungarians annexed and shaped Serbia, and those histories of diverse occupation still have impact today in terms of language, cultural markers, physical structures, as well as attitudes (albeit somewhat diluted or modified over time) (Baker, 2018). This has also meant that Serbia has experienced a variety of religions and socio-political influences, including the relatively recent widespread impact of the Yugoslav period under Josip Broz Tito (1945–80), which tied Serbia into the wider political context and system of the Yugoslav federation. Following the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, characterised by economic decline and disintegration of social services (Živojinović et al., 2019), Serbia experienced democratic change in 2000 and embarked on a process of transition. Its transition is still a work

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in progress, requiring immense economic and political development, commitment to the process of change and aspiration to become a key Western Balkan power and EU member (Uvalić, 2010). Whilst this has been happening, there has been a strong nationalist discourse visible in politics, the media and public debate (Zurnić, 2019). Such attitudes have been deeply embedded in Serbian culture for years, but the deployment and mobilisation of this discourse for political and social ends has increased in the face of change and development. Serbia was granted EU candidacy status in 2012, having met structural and institutional changes required by EU criteria. The emergence of the 2015 ‘migrant crisis’ offered the Serbian government a means of demonstrating affinity, allyship and use-value to the EU, through fulfilling the role of housing, or ‘warehousing’, migrants outwith (current) EU borders. Despite this, the momentum of the move towards EU accession has slowed down due to political fear of change that might be unpopular in Serbia and related to the Serbian role in the ‘migrant crisis’. According to ̵ Vice-President of the European Movement in Serbia, the Vladimir Medak, status of Serbia’s membership negotiations casts doubts on the strength of the political will required to implement reforms that ‘will essentially change Serbia and direct it towards the EU’ (Euroactive, 2021). That said, Serbia is still managing to attract substantial EU funding to support required development (Glušćević et al., 2017). On the road to EU accession, rural development is key because the fast pace of change in urban areas has been accompanied by depopulation in the rural facilitating profound social problems, including high rates of poverty, inequality, unemployment (especially among young people) and social exclusion (Antic et al., 2017). From 2016, when Europe closed its borders to migrants, Serbia has experienced difficulties in supporting recent transnationally displaced people from Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the African subcontinent and other areas of the world. Travelling up through the Balkan corridor, these people arrived in Serbia seeking passage to the EU (Pavlović, 2016). Since the border’s closure, the EU’s Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations Department has provided emergency assistance for the provision of food, shelter and health care (European Commission, 2019). These are migrants who never planned to stop long in Serbia. Many speak English, French or German as their second languages, not Serbian. National and supranational policy is now to place migrants in camps, typically located in zones between urban and rural

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areas. Serbian migrant aid policy and practice has engaged in balancing aiding migrants and managing the expectations and views of rural and urban fringe populations, who now find their communities the site of camps and humanitarian activity (Fig. 6.1). The Serbian landscape is dominated by ‘failing’ rural spaces, and according to administrative criteria, 80% of Serbian territory is defined as rural. Within this, there are 131 municipalities and 4542 settlements (Antic et  al., 2017: 324; World Population Review, 2022). However, Serbian rural and edge of urban habitation suffers from weak infrastructure, with relatively poor roads, transport systems and years of underinvestment in agricultural industries. Populations in these areas, while being older than those of urban areas, tend to possess lower education and skills and earn less than the average Serbian wage. As in many parts of Europe, depopulation of the rural is a recognised problem, with many areas, such AUSTRIA

HUNGARY

SLOVENIA CROATIA

SERBIA

BULGARIA MACEDONIA

GREECE

Fig. 6.1  Diagram showing the typical ‘Balkan Corridor’ migration route. Source: Abikova and Piotrowicz (2021).

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as Vojvodina, experiencing declining village settlement, school closures and labour shortages (Petsinis, 2020). EU accession negotiations require alignment with EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), addressing a range of obligations in relation to rural and agricultural matters, such as quality of life, infrastructure and rural employment, greater/better community/social services and participative/locally engaged rural development strategies (Erjavec et  al., 2021). However, the CAP also places emphasis on the importance of the social within the rural, stipulating appropriate development and progress in services, and social and community wellbeing. It is clear rapid change in Serbian rural regions is needed, but the recent move to place migrants in rural locales is more likely expediency rather than well-founded public planning, and the role of migrants in future rural development has not been articulated. However, it is not an outlandish idea that new migrant populations might help to revitalise Serbian rural areas. Historically, Serbian rural areas have been places of extraordinary change and vicissitude, with areas altering from being central (and having sustained development) to complete settlement disappearance (Baker, 2018). Moreover, there is a history of settlements of different ethnic groups and religions, with the rural being a site of diversity, reflecting interactions with ‘the Other’. At the same time, and as the result of conflicts and resolutions, there is an embedded history of forced displacement of people, internal and transnational migrations and the resettlement and rebuilding of communities after clearance and disintegration. Serbia is well-placed, historically, experientially, and pragmatically to support various forms of displacement and new settlement and to make good use of migration for socio-economic development. Existing Racialised Difference in Rural Serbia Contemporary Serbia and its rural regions continue to be characterised by patterns of social exclusion and inequality, with public planning failing to generate new opportunities arising from diversity. This is the case with Roma populations, often housed/settled in the rural or edge of urban peripheries, sometimes without basic services, such as regular access to water, electricity or sanitation (Bašić & Marković, 2018). Whilst Roma exclusion can be traced back centuries, the relatively recent (within living generations) experience of internal displacement, from Kosovo and other areas has revealed a continuous lack of political and public administrative vision and drive to ensure inclusion. Rural and edge of urban peripheries

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have served as means of answering the quandary of what to do with these communities, providing out-of-place, relatively excluded, settlement sites. At times, towns and cities have physically sought to separate Roma communities from non-Roma residents, with infamous examples of walls being constructed and/or major roads being used to demarcate separation, for example, in Kruševac, with the building of a wall around the Marko Orlović Roma encampment (Environment Justice Atlas, 2019). But the separations are more than social and physical; they can be cultural and deploy global signifiers. For instance, the Roma settlement on the rural outlands of Niš is nicknamed by locals as ‘Bangladesh’. The name demonstrates an assumption of underdevelopment (referencing social assumptions of underdevelopment of another global space), whilst also potentially hinting at stereotyped and racialised differences in skin tone between Roma and long-term citizens. Therefore, there is history of use of Serbian rural areas as a convenient space to deal with the warehousing of communities who raise societal anxieties. What is of interest to this chapter is use of the rural and urban ‘fringe’ for the exclusion of recent migrants and the global change and associated threat that they are believed to represent. Centre, Periphery and Migration In Serbia, notions of centre and periphery have primarily been concerned with questions of opportunities and socio-economic development (Reill & Szelényi, 2011). The problem of rural poverty was a serious and long-­ lasting feature of Titoist Yugoslavia (Bogdanov & Cvejić, 2011), yet largely ignored in the light of urbanisation and industrialisation. During the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the periphery was a major source of food supply, especially in the light of externally imposed trade sanctions. One International Crisis Group (2000) study nicely summarised this, saying, ‘Farmers have long been expected to produce food for the masses, sons for the army, and votes for the ruling party’. Still, the continuation of old practices and the increasing gap between the functioning centre and completely impoverished periphery made the latter unattractive and many of its inhabitants chose to leave in search of better livelihoods, either in urban areas or abroad. In the case of East-Central Europe, the post-Cold War transition and subsequent accession to the European Union has also been characterised by a greater interest in periphery and its gradual revival (Bański, 2019; Pedrosa da Silva Duarte & Pascariu, 2017). The transformation of the

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post-Yugoslav space has witnessed similar trends, albeit at a significantly slower pace. In Serbia, the post-Milošević governments have promoted investment in environmental and socio-economic development of rural areas (Sörensen, 2009). Rural tourism, including a range of rural activities and a unique accommodation experience, has become recognised as a key marketing instrument (Erdeji et al., 2013; Medojević et al., 2011). While acknowledging the peripheral revitalisation in some industries, some other less optimistic authors have focused on the problem of infrastructure and unemployment rates, as well as discrepancies in success levels between areas across the Serbian state: ‘Regional differences in rural poverty rates are significant and follow the relationship that exists between regions in terms of overall poverty, [with] the most unfavourable situation being in southern and eastern Serbia, and the more favourable being in Vojvodina’ (van Berkum & Bogdanov, 2012: 106). This observation is important when considering migratory flows and potential settlement of migrants in Serbia. Since 2014, and the establishment of a corridor enabling the passage of migrants from Greece to Western Europe through the Western Balkans, Serbia has played a key role in EU migration debates (Pavlović, 2016). Acceptance and provision of basic migrant needs by the Serbian leadership represented an opportunity to showcase the government’s determination to respect so-called European values, as per EU accession criteria: The government proclaimed that Serbia would never erect walls, always respect international laws on human rights, and not restrict the movement of people searching protection. Images of migrants in the Belgrade parks and smiling policemen holding refugee/migrant children were juxtaposed in the media with cages in which refugees/migrants were being held in Hungary, or angry Macedonian officers beating migrants on the border. While nearly all other states that made up the formalised corridor restricted the free movement of migrants, forcing them into closed camps and putting them on special direct trains from one border to the other, the situation in Serbia was relatively liberal: people could choose their means and routes of transport, camps were of an open type, and people could stay in parks or hostels. (Beznec et al., 2016: 55–56)

By this point, members of the Serbian political elite had already become known for exploiting any opportunity to consolidate power, suggesting a policy of pragmatism, including the ideological framework of the Serbian

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Progressive Party (Radeljić & Djordjević, 2020). For example, back in 2015, while visiting a park in Belgrade, where hundreds of migrants were camped before journeying into the EU, Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić stated that Serbia would not erect walls or fences, as in the case of Hungary: ‘The pressure is growing upon us, but we will never call it a problem, like others are doing, and we will solve it. We will not build barbed wire or walls or anything similar, we will treat these people like good people’ (Reuters, 2015). Moreover, on various occasions, the Ministry of Interior banned protests against migrants in Serbia, stating that it would ‘not allow the expression of intolerance and hatred to be something that is characteristic of Serbia … The fears of refugees are irrational’ (Jovanović, 2015). As Pupavac and Pupavac (2015) comment, here was an opportunity for Serbia to address some of the negative international views of the country by supporting those fleeing for safety. However, when surveys showed increasing public attitudes against the accommodation of migrants and on occasions when the EU turned against the Serbian authorities, such as when the EU depicted the regime as semi-­ authoritarian and highly corrupt (Radeljić, 2019), the government U-turned towards more right-wing, anti-migration discourse(s). Therefore, the policy addressing the presence and treatment of migrants in Serbia has often been used as leverage in Serbia’s relations with the outside world, globally, but in particularly with the Brussels administration. The Serbian initial welcoming stance towards the increasing presence of migrants started to change in early 2016, coinciding with the closure of the official Balkan corridor. With people still on the move and trying to reach their final destination, the protection of human rights was promptly replaced with policies focusing on protection of state borders and Serbian state interests. This culminated with the decision to deploy security forces along Serbian borders with Bulgaria and Macedonia, ‘politicians started making remarks about how Serbia would not become a collective centre for migrants or a parking lot for migrants, while the migrants arriving in Serbia were described as “those who no one in the EU wants even to see”’ (Beznec et al., 2016: 56). The ruling elite’s clear intention to encourage the differentiation of ‘good us’ and ‘bad them’ was embraced by many of the inhabitants of the areas involved, in reframing migrants as a nuisance and a potential threat. Moreover, growing opposition to their presence was additionally sustained by the idea that the EU was trying to outsource

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the migration problem to geographical and political hinterlands, for example, the Serbian state (Prodromidou & Gkasis, 2019). For inhabitants of the periphery of Serbia (the rural), the mushrooming of camps in their surroundings has been controversial (Babić & Volarević, 2018) not least because the stationing of migrants in rural and the fringe of the urban has been perceived as a risk to already stagnating development. Such insecurities are further sustained in the absence of clear guidelines concerning migrant integration (Zarić, 2018). Thus, even if the local communities are sympathetic and ready to welcome newcomers, the fact that they are confronted with lack of infrastructure and necessary investments, as well as discursive manipulation conjecturing that migrants might eventually seek to impose their own values on long-term residents and threaten local/national interests should not be downplayed. Indeed, long-­ term residents continue to have reservations about migrants’ cultural, primarily Muslim, backgrounds and imagined negative impact on the lifestyle of host communities. According to some observers, this fear indicates that the migrant crisis is less about numbers, but much more about prejudice: ‘First, Europe must confront – and change – its biases on race, religion and ethnicity. Second, there should be an honest conversation on European values and identity. Third, Europe needs to acknowledge the urgency of rebooting relations with African states and other emerging countries’ (Islam, 2020). As Europe has gradually moved away from its supposed core values of tolerance and solidarity, disqualification of the concerns characterising the Serbian periphery becomes even more difficult. The top-down spread of anti-Muslim sentiment across Europe equals ‘a social pandemic’ (Sasnal & El Menouar, 2020), with both liberal and right-wing groups being sceptical in their own ways about the presence and integration of ‘the other’. For countries on the outskirts of fortress Europe, and who are striving for full EU membership, migrant policy is a complicated matter; countries that are in the process of negotiating EU accession know that replicating the behaviour of some EU members, such as Hungary, who erected fences on the border with Serbia to exclude migrants, would negatively impact accession applications. Such bigotry, apart from exposing the discrepancies that dominate EU political and socio-economic developments indicates more general deficits in ethical and human rights responses to the needs of displaced people in times of crisis. This paper examines the context of the Serbian rural emerging as the answer to the complexity of providing humanitarian aid to migrants who

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are no longer ‘on the move’: examining the way migrants are currently seen and how their needs and potential is understood within the rural context is important for the Serbian state, Serbian people and migrants themselves.

Methods and Cultural Repertoires Theory Our exploratory qualitative research project involved online semi-­ structured interviews with eight NGO staff (five men and three women), all of whom identified as ethnically Serbian. The average length of experience participants had in working with migrants in Serbia was ten years, with the majority of interviewees occupying senior positions in NGO management for at least five years, as well as considerable fieldwork experience. All of the participants had moved between various NGO migrant support contexts, including INGOs and local provision and were well versed in the policy and practice of migrant support work in Serbia. The participants here are given pseudonyms. The sample size is small and so ethically for best practice we have not identified the participants organisations, as they might become identifiable. The theoretical approach used is based on cultural repertoires theory. Swidler (1986: 273) argues that social action is shaped by culture through providing a non-prescriptive set of possible options that allow individuals to select and then apply—‘a repertoire or “tool kit” of habits, skills and styles from which people construct “strategies of action”’. Culture, therefore, does not influence action by providing fixed ways of doing things or beliefs; it offers a reservoir of possible cultural repertoires from which individuals, social groups and societies may draw when speaking, acting and understanding phenomenon. Other scholars summarise this approach by stating that ‘sociologists have emphasised “cultural repertoires”, defined as the available schemas, frames, narratives, scripts and boundaries that actors draw on in social situations’ (Lamont et al., 2017: 866). This model shifts away from those that emphasise cultural homogeneity and stasis in cultural beliefs, foregrounding instead a tool bag approach to culture, where the focus of study should be examination of the choice and deployment of cultural repertoires. With this in mind, it is important to understand the emergence of new repertoires (their origin and nature) as well as the use of older repertoires for new situations or different social groups. In this chapter, the cultural repertoires approach serves to identify and examine cultural and social ideas and sets of knowledge in relation to

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Serbian understandings of migrants, including the components of myths and misinformation. While being an exploratory study, these issues are approached through the lens of NGO staff with specialisms in working with migrants, who have accumulated knowledge of social attitudes from working in the field and being part of Serbian society as citizens. We are interested in how cultural tools emerge at particular points by becoming more salient, relevant and thus important, as well as why those precisely, and not others, are visible and are deployed out of all the possible repertoires available.

Changing Attitudes: Borders, Politics and Expediency All the participants noted changing public attitudes towards migrants since the start of the 2015 ‘migration crisis’. They noted the shift from high degrees of identification and public understanding of human need to greater hostility on the part of the Serbian general public. The initial public’s relatively positive attitude to migrants was argued to have historical antecedents. A large majority of the participants mentioned a historical affinity or cultural familiarity in relation to Serbia and migration, which had led to early positive responses to Balkan corridor migrants. These comments usually made reference to a cultural memory of war and displacement in the wider Western Balkans: Serbia has a heritage of dealing with migrations as part of the conflicts within Yugoslavia. (Participant 1) With a history of movement and understanding of moving under risky situations, ordinary people recognise this from the past of Serbia. (Participant 5)

The participants reported that a legacy of understanding of people on the move and strong public sympathy towards migrants. This was evident early in the 2015 ‘migration crisis’. For example, one participant reflected upon this time stating: The public responded well, showing understanding; while migrants were passing through, people would give food and support. (Participant 2)

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This could be compared with allegations from neighbouring states and what the Serbian public heard and believed about migrants’ treatment there: People heard about treatment of refugees in Hungary. And before they got to Serbia, from Bulgaria where they had known the police brutality, Serbia was able to offer a different response because we know about migration from our history. (Participant 1)

The participants situated this earlier response within the legacy of experience of past migrations and displacements. Their comments also showed a sense of difference: The Bulgarians are very bad, many migrants report abuse, and the doctors in the camp told us that there are marks on their bodies, their dogs certainly bite. You will know about the famous reports from other national borders, caught on film. This is not the Serbian response, our police do not do this, and we are trying to help. Serbia is showing the way with this good response. (Participant 5)

All the participants were keen to outline that early responses to the 2015 ‘migration crisis’ involved diverse provision in a range of areas: informal food points; local citizens contributing food and water; use of park spaces in cities and towns by EU borders; state organisations and NGO and faith organisations provided information and advice; as well as dedicated camps typically in the rural and rural/urban borderlands between conurbations. An informal camp was set up behind Belgrade’s (now defunct) railway station, in an old siding building, and for over two years this was tolerated in the centre of the city, as was the use of the city’s parks for gathering and camping out. This did not last; following the closure of the station camp, migrants were pushed towards city-fringe formal camps, such as that in Krnjača, northeast to Belgrade, separated from it by the Danube. A key factor in changing Serbian public attitudes was presented by the participants as related to public understandings and perceptions of transit versus longer-term settlement issues. Participants reported that although

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there were migrants and refugees, camps and centres of support before EU borders were blocked, migrants and refugees were ostensibly ‘on the move’ and understood by the Serbian public to be on route to the EU, with Serbia being a stop-off point or a terrain to be traversed on the road to other destinations. Once borders were closed, the nature of Serbia as a geographical space changed, not only for migrants, but also for the EU, the Serbian government and the general public. The former stop-off point was now boundaried by EU countries that refused migrant and refugee entry, deflecting them back into Serbian territory and this was politically reinforced through Serbian government agreement with the EU to take responsibility for migrant ‘management’: When the borders closed, it changed everything, there was no way forward for refugees and back. Camps have become less temporary, different services have become needed, local people have now realised that these people are there for longer time. (Participant 6)

Border closure fixed migrants in place within camps in rural and urban fringe spaces and this radically altered public perceptions: from temporary visitors to Serbia to migrants becoming fixtures within in it. Participants also reported that a shift towards more negative public attitudes to migrants was strongly connected to Serbia’s wider political position in relation to the EU, its candidacy and desire for accession, and as a result, its willingness to be ‘helpful’ to Europe. Participant seven referred to Serbia’s new role as “storage” and participant four, as a “storehouse for migrants”. The expediency of this new role was visible to the general public: To stay in the positive view of Europe, this had to be done. Serbia had also received EU assistance for this, and this moved the work of refugee support from NGOs to the Serbian government, [who] now had big funding. It was presented as positive by the state and media outlets, being the friend to Europe. (Participant 8)

Provision of migrant support changed in terms of the donors and the movement of previously NGO-dominated provision of assistance into government administration. Concurrently, the nature and reason for the

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support also changed; state camp support was premised on fulfilling a favour to the EU.  Positioning of these camps in rural spaces served to lessen the likelihood of public complaint: The cities are populated with young and active [people], older, poorer countryside residents were not going to cause so many problems about camps. (Participant 1)

Rural areas had lower demographics because of previous out-migration to cities, poorer social capital and networks and they were socio-­ economically deprived. It was a pragmatic and fair assumption that resistance to migrant camps would likely be lower here.

Concerns Around Culture, Extremism and Narratives of Risk Prior to 2016, when migrants first began passing through the Serbian territory in high numbers, there was initial public sympathy and concern for their wellbeing. One interviewee, for instance, stated: People were even making food, going to the railway or the bus station to share what they had. (Participant 4)

Whilst not everyone was doing or could afford to do this, the participants reported widespread shared sympathy with migrants at this time. Concurrently, there was also widespread recognition that the global aid community was in Serbia too, with INGOs, along with local NGOs highly visible (e.g., World Vision, Save the Children, Médicins Sans Frontières). Helping migrants, or at the very least, not seeing them as a problem, was also supported by citizens who recognised that they were not always accepting of state help: The international aid community was mobilised and were visible, especially in cities, giving advice and food. Some refugees were in camps, but many were not and were on the streets of the cities and in the parks, not trusting the state because of their experiences of mistreatment when travelling … for

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Serbian people too, not trusting the state is common, perhaps we understood these people for that. (Participant 8)

Migrants’ visible lack of trust of state aid services may have initially appealed to commonplace Serbian suspicions about the role of the state. However, blocking of transitory routes for migrants and the move to settlement in camps in rural areas had impact on public views and drew attention to difference, potential competition and resource strain: Serbia is not a rich country, but it did all it could, with people moving through it as not being a problem at all; however, when people are stopped and cannot move because of the EU politics that is a different matter. (Participant 7)

Whilst people ‘moving through’ made sense to residents’ understandings of the need, for instance, for agri-workers, fruit pickers and so on, people fixed-in-place (some might say, stuck) appears from the participants’ accounts to have been considered a different matter. Mobility did not constitute threat, as undoubtedly, it was a component of older aspects of the Serbian ‘rural story’. However, fixed-in-place incomers symbolically threatened social and cultural imaginings of Serbia’s rural regions. The shift of concern and sympathy was shaped by the EU border closures and socio-political repertoires around cultural difference and potential threat to way of life: Initially, I think that the state focus on the needs of migrants, made people feel that these people are like us, they could relate to times of displacement historically effecting Serbians, but then the focus has changed towards cultural difference because they are stuck here. What are these people going to do, are they here forever? What will happen to our culture, will they take it over, change it? What will happen to Serbia and Serbians in this? (Participant 5)

Participants argued that once the EU blocked transitory routes, the Serbian state upped its coverage of the ‘good work’ of supporting migrants through conventional TV and radio coverage presenting positive stories. However, social media (right-wing commentators, as well as informal xenophobic pages and groups) reinterpreted this narrative through the idea that migrants received more help that Serbians could obtain:

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Right wing social media have been winning because they can say “Look at what these people are getting, but what do they give in return”? Of course, the money for this comes from the EU, Serbia is not paying for it, but that is not the message, it creates jealousies. (Participant 6)

Migrants were not only transformed into a potential threat to rural heritage and the normalcy of rural life, they were also an additional burden to attracting investment to deprived rural areas that were already wrestling with socio-economic and development problems. With migrant camps positioned in the rural and the fringes of the urban (in the areas of least recent cultural change and socio-economic development), these unsurprisingly became the spatial sites and focus of fears of potential threats to an essentialised Serbianness, nationalism and culture, threats not only to idealisation of current rural life, but to a potential rural future. Fear of Crime and Reports in Social Media Fear of migrants as involved in criminal activity featured strongly in participants’ accounts of public fear and narratives around the presence and existence of camps in Serbia. Conventional media, including TV, radio and newspapers, often had stories that reported state activities to support migrants, demonstrating how well Serbia was doing as part of its obligations to the EU.  However, these were noted to be not as influential as ideas in social media, which served as the main vehicles of stories around incidents that fuelled concerns. The main social media stories related to the fears of sexual assault and rape of local women and girls, specifically centred around the belief that the majority of migrants were adult males. There was consensus that real or imagined disparities between men and women in camps were feared as a risk for potential gender-based violence (GBV): In some camps I have worked there were a bit more men, which does worry local residents. They see men travelling alone or in groups of other men as a potential threat to their women and girls, who they see as the vulnerable … even where nothing has reported to be happening. (Participant 3)

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For most participants, their experience was of a typical small imbalance towards males in camps, with participants indicating that a usual breakdown might be 60/40 males to females, although it was acknowledged that some camps may well be exceptions. Nevertheless, all participants noted that fear of sexual assaults, the perception that GBV might occur, was not matched with actual cases. Participant one argued: ‘There has not been one case of rape or sexual assault by a migrant in Serbia that I know about, but if you ask people, they will tell you there is’. The lack of reports and prosecutions was also noted by another participant: These [migrants] are seen to be all males, travelling and living here. People ask, “Where are the women and families?” All they see is single men … but if you work in the camps, you see families, with women and children less likely to leave the camp; … you also have some unaccompanied boys, 12–16, who are actually children but publicly might be viewed as men. They are children. (Participant 6)

The participants all noted that male migrants were more visible, likely to leave camps to search for food and opportunities, whereas children and women were relatively invisible and more likely to stay within camps. Two participants noted that women and children were also less visible due to expected norms around women being at home and near to children, and children’s involvement with school and other educational programmes. Similarly, narratives about fear of extremism also focused on fears of what was seen as mainly male migrant influx and settlement across camps. Again, participants indicated that it was through social media that extreme right-wing ideology was able to propagate such views: The stories online have no means of discussing examples of extremism in Serbia, because such cases have not happened, but they can point to cases in Europe, the USA and globally, and say “this can be us, watch out’ … Moreover, recent discussions online and which then spread by mouth focus on the issue of the number of males, that these males are ready and willing to harm others, to kill potentially. (Participant 8)

All the participants argued that fears of extremism were influenced by cases that had happened outside Serbia, as there had been no cases of

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migrants involved with extremist acts within the country. The type of crimes that participants stated had been reported in relation to migrants involved human need. Moreover, these crimes were reported to have taken place in the rural and semi-rural areas, where there were second homes left empty for long periods of time: There have been taking over of houses to live in them, when the owners have not been there … there have been stealing of food or other items, things like this. (Participant 4)

The other types of crimes mentioned were cases of stealing/robbery in the street, which then were reported far and wide, including on social media. These cases were particularly interesting because the same crime was often reported as happening at numerous sites: You may have the case of the mobile phone stolen from someone in Niš and then you see the same story with the same details reported in Belgrade and so on … the same story, lots of places, the same words, with the name of the place changed. (Participant 2)

Such stories were said to find their way into the social media circuit and to be presented as having happened at multiple sites. These were said to have a ‘cut and paste’ quality that suggested the stories were not true, or at least, there might have been one original occurrence and then different locations added as forwarded on. The fear and possibility of migrant crime was core to reporting; the potential of men and boys as a reservoir of possible risk was a strong theme. It was also noted by each participant that, on occasion, there were upbeat stories in the media about migrants and crime: ‘Sometimes you have positive stories, but not so much, something like, “migrants saved the granny from the robbery”’ (Participant 1). Whilst not as prominent or prevalent as the negative stories, such stories provided partial balance. Overall, participants agreed that uncovering the reality of migrant crime in Serbia was difficult because of report and recording issues but, undoubtedly, the reality of migrant crime was a far cry from its presentation in various media.

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Cultural Risks and Battlegrounds Another area of identified perceptions about migrants that was reported to be prevalent, related to a sense of migrants representing cultural risks, bringing cultures that might overcome the local and the national. This could be said to employ repertoires of wider fears and risk of cultural dilution: Some Serbians are concerned about how many migrants there are and how this might affect local attitudes. If you have so many migrants coming into a fairly small area, could they change Serbian culture? (Participant 5)

Another participant argued: As you will see, many camps are on the roads out from the centre to the borders. In general, these are small places. It is easy to see how people making trouble on social media can say that migrants will soon take over … in a few years, will these places be the same, or will migrants change everything forever? (Participant 2)

Again, social media was identified as a place of (dis)information and in terms of addressing fears and helping communities to discuss issues, the state was reported to be losing the battle on social media. Whereas, in conventional media the presentation of migrants was primarily around positive activities of the state in caring for them, including examples of integration, such as a kayaking contest between one town and migrants from a camp on its outlying areas. Reportedly though, what is not happening is meaningful broad public engagement in explaining migrant and cultural issues, and formalised state challenges to public misunderstanding and narratives of difference-as-risk. Schools also represented a cultural battleground in the areas where camps were situated. Despite participants indicating that migrant families were more tolerated than single males, it was clear that there was contradiction in attitudes. Participants reported that in many areas, Serbian parents complained about their children mixing with migrant children and incidents of bullying were reported:

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Some local parents didn’t want migrants’ kids to go the same school as theirs. So, the local organisations that work with migrants, had to accompany the migrants’ kids all the time, in order to prevent incidents … in general, the migrants’ kids spoke the language, not perfect, but they did most usually, there were petitions against them though … in Serbia, this also happens with the Roma kids, with the locals not wanting to mix with them. They are perceived as misbehaving and low educational capacity. (Participant 4)

Similarly, another participant noted: The incidents in schools against migrant children is not acceptable, beating them, calling names and humiliating. Then requesting they be excluded, for no reason. Most NGO staff know it is common, then to say that [migrant] families are accepted is not quite true, children too suffer … It is strange but the migrants are like the worst to the Roma, taking over this place. (Participant 7)

Here the participant sought to indicate that migrants are possibly ‘taking over’ the lowest place in a social hierarchy rarely spoken in Serbian society; one in which Roma communities have traditionally found themselves at the bottom. Both groups share a physical and social positioning as on the borders of mainstream communities, often in rural excluded enclaves. Migrants in Rural Imaginings and Rural Life The issue of the future-scape for rural Serbia is a moot point. Agriculture still remains core to the economic success of these areas currently, with meat production, soft fruit and vegetable production dominating. However, agro-tourism is also growing, with Serbia seeking to make use of areas of beauty to attract tourists. Participants were asked about whether there was a future for migrants in Serbia. In wider Serbia, a couple were sceptical, commenting that the most recent migrants had generally lower skills than those who had come earlier and travelled onwards to countries such as Germany and Italy. However, in relation to the rural, six out of the eight participants did see a role for migrants and focused on the out-­ migration that rural areas had experienced and the growing need for labour:

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It has to be remembered that some of these areas were very successful in the past, but without people this is not possible. The schools close, the young move on, migrants can bring life to such areas. (Participant 3)

Similarly, another participant observed the following: I sometimes say to people, we need to give them an opportunity in these areas, or who will pick the fruit? Who will do the agricultural work? Although members of the public don’t think this way, they are aware of the problems we have with people leaving and moving away from the countryside. (Participant 1)

For three quarters of the participants migrants could, if influenced to stay and their skills harnessed, be used as part of the reinvigoration of rural regions, in crop-picking, animal husbandry, new entrepreneurial businesses in rural areas, even agro-tourism, and to repopulate areas that were losing people. However, two participants argued that they did not think migrants represented a pool of sufficiently skilled labour to be able to do this, they doubted the contribution that they could make. Moreover, they argued that migrants themselves would likely not want to stay as they often had a main objective—or dream—to move onto Western Europe, especially English or German speaking countries. Despite the opportunities that having a population move into rural areas and a ready workforce, participants noted that discussion of migrants as staying was not visible in public discussions. Moreover, the state had not opened such public conversations, or transparently discussed with the wider population what migrants staying for any time could potentially mean for rural/edge of urban development. Fixing migrants in place in the rural areas, whilst being perceived by rural dwellers as a threat to culture, was far less likely to draw public concern than doing so in the urban areas. It might be argued that the rural and fringes of the urban were acceptable collateral damage within the wider plan to be useful to the EU and to support Serbia’s EU accession process. At the same time, this represents a missed opportunity to harness migratory change to revitalise a depopulated countryside.

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Discussion A cultural repertoires approach focuses attention on where knowledge and narratives come from, who has used them in the past and what they might mean for understanding the contemporary. The pattern of narratives and chosen repertoires applied to those who fall outside of ‘convention’ or accepted Serbian attitudes and lifestyle, are a challenge to the future of the country, to social cohesion and sustainability, even potentially Serbia’s ability to demonstrate its commitment to the EU’s strong equality and diversity policies. The choice of responses to any issue, the way that key players are presented, the language used about them, the strategies and narratives deployed by ordinary people, the media and politicians, these are all of interest as they are shaped through repertoires that have been used in other contexts historically, but still have power today. At the same time, new repertoires that integrate much older themes can emerge, whilst they also draw on global tropes or EU narratives and so on, and they are applied to a modern problem. In the discussion above, the context of Serbian rural spaces and settlement camps, are discussed as the focus of diverse cultural repertoires. The case of transmigration into Serbia provides insight into wider cultural narratives about ‘the other’, strangers, xenophobia, Europeanization and change in the country. As identified above, the participants reported that migrants are understood by the public to be a source of societal concern and risk. As migrants effectively became ‘stuck’ in Serbia, due to the shutting of migratory flows through the Western Balkans, and the Serbian state took over the main role in managing, accommodating and providing welfare for them from NGOs, these concerns increased and have been fuelled by social media and misinformation. At the same time, the Serbian government have not overtly challenged negative attitudes and accounts, electing instead to keep presenting positive stories of their migrant support, through conventional media. However, engagement by the state with the public in relation to policies around migrants, or even an attempt to engage the public in a discussion about their possible futures in case of permanent residency, planning or cultural issues, has not been forthcoming. The public has primarily been left to their own debates and discussions, typically on social media, around migrants and their placement in rural and edge of urban spaces. With a long history of change in the Balkans, human displacement, conflict and tensions, the general public have a wide range of sets of knowledge to draw upon (and personal, familial and/or

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community experiences). However, participants reported that there has been a sea-change in attitudes, moving towards domination of these with fear and concerns, often supported by social media narratives, stories and accounts, many of which do not appear to have basis in fact, or which have been amplified. Along with long-suffering Roma community settlements, migrant camps, are literally placed on the fringe of the urban or in the countryside, separated out in spaces that are used to people on the move for agricultural work and so forth, but not migrants stuck and immobile in their midst. With little articulation of the role and contribution migrants might play, it is hardly surprising that fixed settlement in the rural has led to use of negative explanatory and descriptive discourse. The fear of crime is shored up by a gendered narrative around the risk of individuals and groups of male migrants towards Serbian women. Whilst up to date figures on the demographic characteristics are hard to find, the UN Women’s (2016) Gender Assessment of the Refugee and Migration Crisis in Serbia and Macedonia states that women and children comprise 17% and 25% (47%) of the total population respectively that had travelled through Turkey by sea to Greece, and onwards through the Western Balkans. The Serbian office of UNICEF (2020) likewise notes that between a quarter to a third of migrants are children. This appears to indicate that, whilst there is a gender imbalance, if anything, the biggest imbalance is in relation to the young age of migrants. Therefore, the main concern is high numbers of displaced children, some of whom are unaccompanied but living with non-related adults in camps and opening them up, potentially, to exploitation, abuse and other risks. The reported migrant rape and sexual violence stories, which find an audience, particularly on social media and through word of mouth, are especially interesting in their use, not least because of lack of evidence for their veracity. Sexual violence and rape have been a topic widely discussed internationally around war crimes in the Western Balkans wider region but does not feature highly in social or political discourse. Indeed, women’s groups note the silence on this matter in the Western Balkans, despite there being evidence of high familial and general levels of gender-based violence and harassment (European Fund for the Balkans and European Policy Centre, 2018). Recent press about alleged rapes by actors and politicians are taken by some to show a societal shift towards recognition of gender-based violence in the country, paralleling the #MeToo movement seen globally (Independent, 2021). As can be seen in the participants accounts, stories of migrant abuse of Serbian women are visible, especially

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in social media discussions, which can overshadow the reality. A process of amplification ensures the same stories involving migrants are either represented as occurring in different areas, or one case become emblematic of all migrants and is used as a ‘case study of one’. For instance, three participants noted that one incident of sexual harassment of a female taxi driver in Novi Sad by migrants appeared to have travelled through social media to represent wider ‘threats’ of male migrants to women and was used in various contexts to evidence the problem. The amplification of events in the echo-chamber of social and other media, political accounts and so forth, serve to reinforce distinctions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Discussions of migrants as criminals, settlements as hot beds of disorder, of immovable local resident and migrant cultural differences, and the outlining of migrants as a burden gaining services that other Serbians cannot, parallel accounts of, and reported beliefs about, Roma communities. The similarities in the cultural repertoires selected (from the range available from Serbian history and contemporary life) around migrants, in comparison to ideas deployed around the Roma, is striking. Pushing the unwanted out onto the liminal, spatial borders, appears a common narrative and policy strategy to deal with those who are ‘different’. The tropes of the culturally different outsider, potentially a risk to traditional ‘Serbianness’, a nebulous threat to society, the sense of potential disorder, perceptions of being unable to contribute to society and undeservedly using up resources, are also issues that have echoes in rhetoric about Roma communities (Walsh, 2019). Finally, this exploratory research indicates that some of those who have worked closely with migrants can see that potentially they have much to offer rural and edge of urban areas that are dealing with depopulation and skills-losses. Some of these areas are plainly failing in sustainability terms, with villages emptying, schools closing and quality of life disintegrating, and less people to work the land, as people move away, it is pertinent to examine if migration may provide an antidote to the ongoing problems in rural Serbia. Participants were split on whether migrants could solve some of the deep-seated issues of imbalanced social change and social problems on the edges of the urban and in the rural. Debates are needed in Serbia involving local populations, politicians, policy makers and employment stakeholders about the possibilities for positive change that migrants, who are already sited on the edge of the rural, might bring, if able to work, encouraged to contribute, and enabled to gain a sense of identity and belonging in Serbia.

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Greater examination needs to be applied to who is excluded in the rural, how exclusions are spoken and written about and how that exclusion might act against the wider aims of society. As Serbia attempts to further align itself with the EU within the accession process, such considerations and action to redress exclusion and discrimination will be expected. Moreover, consideration of the potential possibilities or drawback around the role migrants could play is needed by policy makers, politicians, and the general public. Key to all of these areas would seem to be the encouraging of wider public dialogue and participation around the vital question of what role migrants can play if they stay in rural camps in Serbia.

Conclusion This chapter has provided an examination of the issues surrounding migrant experiences in Serbia, living as they are typically currently forced to do, on the peripheries of the urban and in the rural. The migrant crisis remains a predicament to those on the borders of Europe: countries, residents/citizens and for migrants themselves. Whilst the EU has managed to stem movement into its territory, it has effectively contained the issue outside its own borders, forcing peripheral non-EU countries to deal with the issues. EU candidate countries, situated on those borders, are under pressure to take the strain. Serbia is doing so because it demonstrates its commitment to Europe as part of the game of accession and the EU is prepared to fund the ‘management’ of transnationally displaced people out within its current borders. However, as demonstrated here, the experience of transmigration has not been evenly shared across Serbia. The position of migrant camps has come to be recognised in much political and public discourse as a strain, focused primarily on rural or edge of settlement areas, places where socio-­ economic problems have been identified for years. The issue remains of how to integrate groups of people who previously were welcomed when ‘on the move’ and transiting Serbia. Serbian political and social discourse has currently turned to managing migration for EU funds, setting the ‘migrant crisis’ squarely in the area of problem, rather than opportunity. This overlooks that rural and urban fringe areas need development and that in-migration creates conditions that can be harnessed. It appears that it is fixity-in-place and potential permanence of settlement in rural areas and the urban fringes that have become prominent in the anxiety, fear and

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threat repertoires used about migrants. These are influenced by wider nationalist political and social tropes about othering, difference and diversity as threat, risk and competition. This obscures the possibilities for failing rural locales of new migration. Incomers offer opportunities for depopulated and economically challenged rural locales; many migrants are skilled and young, representing a ready and active labour force, with the potential for economic and social reinvigoration this affords. To finish, it is important to remember that in Serbia, despite negative attitudes, there is also much kindness, compassion and attempts to redress negative repertoires around migration. As Pavlović (2016: 64) notes, ‘[s]ome people … did something, offering their hospitality to a multitude of millions of people. For most people, it seems, this multitude brought to Europe nothing but crisis, rise of radicalism and threat to its existence; but, fortunately, both EU and Serbia still has those who feel it actually showed that the idea of Europe continues to exist’. It remains to be seen whether the Serbian leadership and policy makers can fully recognise and exploit the ‘migrant crisis’, to build new opportunities for socio-economic development and change. Such change may well benefit Serbia as a whole, as well as the sustainability of its rural areas.

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CHAPTER 7

Being Global and Being Regional: Refugee Entrepreneurship in Regional Australia Branka Krivokapic-skoko, Katherine Watson, and Jock Collins

Introduction In the last few years, the world has witnessed unprecedented flows of displaced people. Since 2017, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHCR, 2017, 2019) has recorded higher levels of displacement on record. In the past year ‘at least 79.5 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 26 million refugees, around half of whom are under the age of 18’ (UNHCR, 2020a). The UNHCR estimates that in 2017, 44,400 people were forcibly displaced every day as a result of conflict or persecution (UNHCR, 2018). Forced displacement has almost doubled since 2010, from 41 B. Krivokapic-skoko (*) Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] K. Watson • J. Collins University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Kerrigan, P. de Lima (eds.), The Rural-Migration Nexus, Rethinking Rural, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18042-2_7

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million to 79.5 million (UNHCR, 2020b). In 2019, more than two-thirds of worldwide refugees came from only five countries: Syrian Arab Republic, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia (UNHCR, 2020b). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have reported that ‘warfare and instability in the Middle East and Africa, with countries in the Mediterranean area under particular pressure’ has put humanitarian immigration flows at the top of the global immigration agenda and ‘is also causing countries to review the ways in which their humanitarian programmes and procedures are working’ (OECD, 2015: 49). This is certainly the case in Australia, which in 2018 was ranked by the UNHCR as third overall (behind Canada and the United States of America) for resettlement of refugees to a new state, and second per capita relative to national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (behind Canada), with resettlement of 12,706 refugees in that calendar year (Refugee Council of Australia [RCOA], 2020). However, very few refugees gain access to resettlement, with less than 0.4% of the total refugee population (just 92,424 refugees) being resettled from one country to another in 2018 (RCOA, 2020). Where individuals with refugee status are included, over a ten-year period between January 2009 and December 2018, Australia recognised or resettled 0.89% of the 20.3 million refugees recognised globally, ranking 25th overall, 29th per capita and 54th relative to national GDP (RCOA, 2020). The humanitarian or refugee programme has been the most controversial component of the Australian immigration system. This controversy centres on the number of ‘boat people’ (irregular maritime arrivals) on the north-western Australian shores seeking asylum, and on the political and public debate about appropriate responses, with the current policies of offshore processing and mandatory detention being particularly controversial (Marr, 2011; Marr & Wilkinson, 2003; Nakhoul, 2011). But not all refugee arrivals are ‘boat people’: most of Australia’s asylum seekers have arrived by air (Phillips, 2015: 6). Another aspect of the refugee controversy relates to the difficulty that humanitarian entrants experience with settlement in Australia. Many refugees have experienced trauma (and sometimes torture) in their home country and have had traumatic experiences journeying to Australia and (for those incarcerated under mandatory detention) after arrival (Westoby & Ingamells, 2010: 1759). There have been attempts by the Australian government to direct refugees to regional and rural communities, mainly based on the potential benefits to those communities, such as boosting the labour force in more

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remote areas, as well as to ameliorate pressure on resources and services in urban centres. Dispersal of refugees has also been a global policy agenda, aiming to take greater control over refugee and asylum seeker settlement patterns. In the case of some European countries (like Sweden, Norway, and the United Kingdom), this was driven by the need to ‘relieve the concentration of ethnic minorities in some large cities and its perceived negative consequences for social cohesion’ (Schech, 2014: 604). But in countries like Canada and Australia, refugee dispersal is justified mainly in terms of economic, social, and cultural benefits (Hugo et al., 2006). Increasing numbers of refugees/humanitarian migrants have been settled in regional Australia, with evident contributions of revitalising local economies, resolving issues of labour shortage (Sampson, 2016) and increasing diversity and cosmopolitanism (Krivokapic-Skoko et al., 2018; Schech, 2014). Many immigrants, including those who arrive on humanitarian visas and as ‘boat people’, have turned to entrepreneurship after settling in Australia. Yet while there has been extensive research on the entrepreneurial experiences of many immigrants (Collins, 2003a, 2003b; Collins et al., 1995; Collins & Low, 2010; Collins & Shin, 2014; Lever-­ Tracy et al., 1991) there has been little research into refugee entrepreneurship in Australia or, indeed, globally. The refugees who moved from around the world and started up their own businesses in regional Australia have also been part of global migration flows, maintaining and expanding social and trade networks initially established with other refugees during their time in transitional refugee camps overseas. Those trade networks and interconnected chains of activities between buyers and suppliers, and culturally based arts-crafts, now link the global and local Australian rural space. Rural communities, in most cases, are the locations for organising logistics and production across national borders or supplying some specific ethnic/cultural markets. Due to the advancements in communication—and globalisation in general— these refugee enterprises (mainly small) are no longer confined by location and now able to operate in a global environment. Therefore, in the context of regionally based entrepreneurs, boundaries are being shifted, in the sense that refugee entrepreneurs operating from small rural towns are setting up trading activities within diasporic networks, simultaneously becoming global and rural. This chapter explores the global-rural nexus embedded within the context of regionally based refugee entrepreneurs by focusing on the diasporic and ‘born global’ businesses that they are setting up (Kuemmerle, 2002:

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103). The chapter starts with an overview of the main aspects of refugee/ humanitarian migrant settlement in rural and regional Australia. It then outlines theoretical developments and empirical research in the sub-­ discipline of refugee entrepreneurship. The last two sections draw on recent Australian fieldwork involving 22 refugee entrepreneurs who settled in regional and rural areas of three States (New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland) to understand the nature of refugee entrepreneurship, and to identify the strategies that refugees adopt to overcome barriers, and how they engage in global and diasporic networks.

Settlement of Refugees and Humanitarian Migrants in Regional and Rural Australia: An Overview Settlement of refugees in regional Australia was largely informal until the mid-1990s. As Hugo et al. explain (2015: 72–74), the first large cohort of non-British immigrants invited by the Australian government arrived after World War II.  Displaced persons from Eastern Europe immigrated to Australia with the provision that they work for the first two years in non-­ metropolitan areas as directed by the government. Regional and rural locations benefited from the influx of workers, though mostly in unskilled roles, on both minor and major projects, including the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme in regional New South Wales. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government teamed with Non-Government Organisations to settle Vietnamese refugees in regional centres like Whyalla in South Australia (Viviani et  al., 1993). Since the mid-1990s, regionalisation of Australian immigration policy has become more apparent, with the introduction of several initiatives encouraging new immigrants to settle in non-metropolitan areas. In 1996 State–specific migration mechanisms (SSMMs) were introduced to allow the states and territories to use immigration programmes to actively resettle refugees to address skills shortages or to achieve a more balanced dispersal of skilled immigrants. These regional immigration policies/schemes have also been described by some scholars as ‘new paradigms in international migration’ (Hugo, 1999: 1) because they oppose and challenge the predominantly metropolitan settlement of migrants which occurred from the 1950s onwards (Hugo et al., 2006). Most recently, more government policies have targeted ‘unlinked migrants’, that is, ‘refugee-humanitarian settlers who [do] not have

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established family linkages upon arrival in Australia’, to be placed in regional Australian locations (Hugo et  al., 2015: 73). This followed a review of settlement services for migrants and humanitarian entrants undertaken in 2002–2003, and interest shown by state governments in new entrants settling in regional areas with labour shortages (Department of Parliamentary Services, 2011: 20). In 2009 the Government supported increasing humanitarian settlement in regional areas ‘with existing settlement infrastructure, mainstream services, employment opportunities and community support’, under the Sustainable Regional Settlement Program (Department of Parliamentary Services, 2011: 21). Under this programme, there has been a four-fold increase in the numbers of refugees initially settling in non-metropolitan areas of Australia (Fig. 7.1). Despite government initiatives to redistribute the settlement of refugees, the literature is clear that humanitarian entrants have greater problems with settlement compared to those in other categories of Australia’s immigrant intake. They also experience greater socio-economic disadvantage in Australia than other immigrants do (Hugo, 2011). Fozdar and Hartley (2013) maintain the problems that refugees face are in the areas of housing, employment, and health as well as with social connections. Humanitarian immigrants experience more problems in the labour market than other immigrants do. In 2016 the South Sudanese, with a population of about 24,000, were the fastest-growing ethnic group in Australia, but suffered an unemployment rate of 28.6%—far above the national average of 5.7% (El-Gack & Yak, 2016); one-third of refugee-humanitarian entrant

Percentage of refugees

Refugee settlement outside capital cities in Australia 20 15 10 5 0

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

Fig. 7.1  Percentage of refugees settling outside Australian capital cities, 1996–2011. Source: adapted from Hugo et al. (2015: 74)

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settlers remain unemployed after three years of settlement in Australia (Hugo, 2011: 104). When they do get jobs, humanitarian immigrants face what Hugo (2011: 109) calls ‘occupational skidding’, that is, they do not get jobs commensurate with their qualifications and generally end up working in low-skill and low-paid occupations irrespective of their human capital (Colic-Peisker & Tilbury, 2007). Thus, some humanitarian arrivals are trapped in low-income jobs in secondary labour market niches or they remain economically excluded. However, Mungai (2014) demonstrates positive experiences of refugee settlement in small regional communities, where the relaxed lifestyle, friendly people, housing affordability, and particularly the safe environment were identified as key indicators for refugees’ positive experiences. The numbers of refugees living outside major urban centres are still relatively small. Even though the proportions of refugees initially settling in communities outside the capital cities quadrupled in the preceding decade, less than 20% of new refugee arrivals did so in 2011 (Feist et al., 2015: 7). Between 2011 and 2016, only 10% of all new arrivals settled in regional Australia (Regional Australia Institute, 2019: 3). Recently, in 2019, the Australian government quarantined 23,000 of the 160,000 permanent migrant cap for two new regional skilled visas, requiring people to live and work outside the big cities for three years before being eligible for full permanent residency (McCauley, 2019). Despite their small numbers, these newcomers are critical to regional and rural Australia and represent a turning point in Australian immigration history, with a potential to benefit those areas. The settlement of new migrants and refugees are expected to address issues of sparse population, solve skills shortages in regional areas (across the occupational range from entrepreneurs and professionals to farm labourers), foster innovation, contribute (with a wide range of skills) to the growth of a region or industry, and contribute to the revitalisation of small country towns (Hugo, 2011). It is also suggested that refugee rural settlement policies can contribute to development of trade links to global markets (Parsons, 2013). This economic narrative of refugee settlement is discussed further later in this chapter. Some Australian regional towns, which have traditionally been isolated, inward looking, and homogenous in terms of demographic structure (Dempsey, 1992), now see value in regional resettlement of refugees, and are becoming actively involved in arguing for more refugee and migrant settlement (Stilwell, 2003). Local multicultural histories are now celebrated (Schech, 2014) and as Cooper et  al. (2017: 1) argue, articles in

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regional newspapers and the regional media in general carry a positive tone, using ‘positive, humanising frames and a broader range of sources in articles on local topics such as refugees’ personal stories’. Value is not only seen in economic terms, but also in a variety of socio-cultural impacts, coming from increased diversity and the more cosmopolitan character of towns (Schech, 2014; Stilwell, 2003). Such cosmopolitan orientation is a result of the global movement of refugees and immigrants settling in and transforming rural Australian spaces (Argent & Tonts, 2015; Krivokapic-­ Skoko et  al., 2018). It also reflects how rural settings in Australia are impacted by processes of change and globalisation, and the way in which new transnational networks open rural spaces to the global.

Refugee Entrepreneurs: Theoretical and Empirical Overviews The literature on immigrant entrepreneurship has demonstrated that immigrants move into entrepreneurship by drawing on their class and ethnic resources (Light & Gold, 2000; Light & Rosenstein, 1995), ethnic solidarity (Bonacich & Modell, 1980), and ethnic community and family social networks (Portes, 1998). To understand the dynamics of immigrant entrepreneurship, Waldinger et  al. (1990) stressed the importance of understanding the interaction between the group characteristics of immigrant communities and the opportunity structures of their host country when they settled. Kloosterman and Rath (2001) developed the influential ‘mixed embeddedness’ approach (see also, Rath, 2002) that recognises that potential immigrant entrepreneurs are embedded in, and constrained by, the economic, social and political structure of the broader society. This ‘mixed embeddedness’ approach also recognises the complex interplay of entrepreneurs’ social networks, of local and national policies relating to immigration and business ownership, and of variations in the market dynamics of different types of goods and services, as key factors in shaping the opportunities for immigrant entrepreneurship. More recently, Meister and Mauer (2019) have linked the mixed embeddedness approach with the development of transnational immigrant enterprises, arguing that migrants and refugees may benefit by drawing on the resources of their transnational networks. While ethnic entrepreneurship has received considerable attention over recent decades, research on refugee entrepreneurship is still scarce. Wauters

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and Lambrecht (2008: 898) called for refugee entrepreneurship to be approached as a separate research domain because of the significant differences between immigrants and refugees that have consequences for starting up and running their own businesses. Refugees are often escaping from their country without possibilities of returning, without taking economic capital or, indeed, any funds with them, and suffer from broken social networks and trauma, which impede self-reliance. Starting up their own businesses is one strategy adopted by many refugees to overcome blocked labour market mobility (Collins, 2003a, 2003b). A general narrative has emerged where refugee entrepreneurs usually suffer unfavourable employment opportunity structures in their host countries, and therefore entrepreneurship appears as an alternative to overcome this issue (Bizri, 2017; Wauters & Lambrecht, 2008). A recent report from the UK argued that ‘[e]ntrepreneurship empowers refugees. It gives refugees the opportunity to take direct control over their lives and enables them to overcome barriers they face in the labour market’ (Centre for Entrepreneurs, 2018: 7). Furthermore, a key theme within contemporary research is the way that entrepreneurship aids integration and settlement. According to Alrawadieh and colleagues (2019: 735) ‘entrepreneurship might be utilised as a tool to help refugees to develop a sense of social belonging and stronger identity within the community’, and in the words of Jones and Ram (2013: 5), entrepreneurship can be seen as ‘ethnic minority liberation’. Research in the UK (Lyon et  al., 2007) and Belgium (Wauters & Lambrecht, 2006) has emphasised that, as well as a means of employment, humanitarian immigrants/refugees consider that setting up a business gives an opportunity to ‘integrate’ into the community. The argument is that entrepreneurship offers newcomers a unique pathway to integration, blending economic independence with increased self-confidence and co-operation within communities. Indeed, the rate of refugee entrepreneurship has been used as a metric of integration in European studies (see Koff, 2008), a subset of the social impact of the role that immigrant entrepreneurs play in ‘cushion[ing] the social incorporation of new communities in British society’ (Jones et  al., 2019: 153). The economic narrative of refugee entrepreneurship is strongly aligned with the UNHCR statement (2002: 8) that: ‘[r]efugees can also make an important economic contribution by creating new businesses and jobs, filling labour market gaps, and helping to improve productivity’. In the context of Australia, an economic framework has been prevalent in public

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discussion around refugee settlements, by focusing on the contribution of refugees and on how they might become economically independent citizens (Sampson, 2016: 103). Contradicting views that refugees could be a financial and social burden on society, RCOA (2010: 3) argued that ‘[t]here may be short-term costs as refugees are resettled and adjust to their new surroundings but once successful integration has occurred refugees are able to quickly make permanent cultural, social and economic contributions’. Furthermore, RCOA identifies the following ways in which refugees contribute economically: (a) expanding consumer markets for local goods; (b) opening new markets, (c) bringing in new skills, (d) creating employment, (e) filling empty employment niches, (f) increasing economies of scale, (g) fostering innovation and flexibility, (h) supplying labour and stimulating labour markets, and (i) stimulating economic growth in regional areas. Nevertheless, documenting and measuring the extent of the economic contribution of refugees is a complex task. As RCOA acknowledges, there are substantial cultural and social contributions by refugees, and these extra dimensions can overlap with economic benefits. Similarly, Parsons (2013) points out that some of the contributions made by refugees cannot be measured quantitatively: quantitative modelling excludes contributions such as social and civic efforts, like volunteering and community participation. He argues that to assess economic contribution, ‘qualitative studies need to be integrated into a summary of key messages that are easily communicated’ (Parsons, 2013: 17–18) and that the relatively high economic contribution made by refugees is ‘by virtue of their entrepreneurial spirit’. There is a need to understand the nature of this economic contribution that derives from business ownership and entrepreneurship (Parsons, 2013: 17–20). Alrawadieh et al. (2019) suggest that refugee entrepreneurship can best be understood in the context of ethnic enclave economy. According to Portes and Jensen (1987), the ethnic enclave has certain characteristics: substantial clustering of ethnic businesses in one location, unpaid family workers, and many employees from ethnic minority backgrounds. Living in an ethnic enclave provides refugees with continuing socio-cultural support and protection. By clustering in close geographical areas, refugees, like immigrants in general, tend to develop migrant networks—systems of interpersonal relations through which participants can exchange valuable resources and knowledge. They manage to capitalise on social interactions by transforming information into tangible resources, lowering the cost of

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migration. Information exchanged may include knowledge of employment opportunities, affordable housing, and government assistance programmes. Thus, by stimulating social connections, ethnic enclaves generate a pool of intangible resources that help to promote the social and economic development of their members. Access to material and non-­material resources (e.g., information, a cheap ethnic workforce, funding) allows for those migrants with fewer resources, like refugees, to become entrepreneurs. In Australia, one of the biggest barriers to refugee entrepreneurial success is reduced social capital: long periods of displacement mean that diasporic networks are fractured, and family and friends—a common source of loans for start-up funding—have no savings to draw upon (Collins et al., 2017: 33). While other immigrant entrepreneurs also faced many constraints, they often arrived into large, established immigrant communities that provide ethnic niche market business opportunities as well as family and community networks that could be a source of capital, labour and supply chains for their new business venture (Collins et  al., 1995). However, refugees in Australia usually do not have well-established or pre-­ existing family or co-ethnic-based social networks in the community. Instead, they rely on support of other refugees they meet during the transitional period. Those who arrive by boat face mandatory detention for long periods before settling into the community. Ironically, the mandatory detention experience allows the formation of new diasporic networks (Collins et al., 2017). Research by Collins et al. (2017) on Hazara refugee entrepreneurs in Adelaide shows that their business network structure involves a distinct set of local network ties that are few but strong. This relatively small network of business associates enables close control. This strategy is aligned with the most recent literature on refugee entrepreneurship which argues that network connections with local business associates make refugee entrepreneurs stronger, with control over processes enabling customised service from those few relationships (Bizri, 2017). While the literature largely suggests that refugees engage in entrepreneurship as an alternative to unemployment, some studies argue that the reason for engaging in entrepreneurship derives from an internal desire by refugees to be in control and fulfil personal ambitions (Immonen & Kok, 2016: 60). However, refugee entrepreneurs are not a homogenous group, since some of them can or do utilise resources and networks (in both the host and home countries) and their entrepreneurial action can be largely shaped by individual skills and capabilities. Shepherd et al. (2020: 1) refer

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to refugee entrepreneurs as displaying resilience under substantial adversity, and profile them as proactive problem solvers able to generate positive outcomes such as self-reliance and realistic optimism. There appears to be a paradox here in Australia: despite the barriers, refugees—those who arrive on humanitarian visas—have a much higher rate of entrepreneurship than immigrants who arrive on skilled or family-­ visas. Collins et  al. (2017: 33) refer to this as a ‘refugee entrepreneur’s paradox’. While arguing that a focus on the barriers that refugees face generates a deficit model of refugee entrepreneurship that does not permit adequate appreciation of refugee agency, refugee entrepreneurship is explained by refugee agency and self-determination (Collins, 2016; van Kooy, 2016; Legrain & Burridge, 2019: 24). In striving to establish and maintain their businesses in Australia, refugees often draw on their diasporic social networks in other countries for support. Hence, the concept of diasporic entrepreneurship is particularly relevant to understanding the processes whereby refugees from newly established immigrant communities move into entrepreneurship. Immonen and Kok (2016) explain how transnational aspects influence the refugee entrepreneurial process, arguing that these have increased the networks and resources available to entrepreneurs and have proved significant for their success. According to Lentin (2006: 1), theories of ‘immigrant transnationalism […] assumes a category of migrants who … engage in long-distance, cross-border activities … and trans-border entrepreneurship’. Literature on immigrant entrepreneurship has moved away from the term ‘transnational entrepreneurship’ (Light, 2007), and instead begun to focus on an idea of ‘diasporic entrepreneurship’, stressing the critical role that transnational social networks of immigrant communities play in the dynamics and success of immigrant enterprises (Rezaei, 2011). Consequently, Newland and Tanaka (2010: 23) have argued: ‘[e]ncouraging members of the diaspora to pursue entrepreneurial ventures seems a matter of common sense as an element of development policy’. Additionally, an analysis of global networks (de Tona, 2006; Lentin, 2006) highlights the fluid and multifaceted identities of migrants, as well as the sustainability of interpersonal connections across borders due to affordable new communication technologies. Furthermore, connectivity and interaction across borders allows a new, more prominent role for regional areas, especially as regionally based migrants connect more regularly across geographical distances, making distance or rurality/remoteness less problematic. The local, national, and international social diasporic

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networks of humanitarian immigrants provide entrepreneurial niches for humanitarian immigrant enterprises, assist in raising start-up capital, and provide supply chains, labour, advice, and support. These transnational networks and pathways for mobilising resources and connecting humanitarian immigrants/refugees across borders link up rural and global spaces.

From Around the World to Regional and Rural Australia: Researching Refugee Entrepreneurship The stories in this chapter are those of 22 new immigrants who arrived from different parts of the globe as refugees, but forged businesses for themselves in regional Australia. As part of a research project which involved refugee entrepreneurs in both metropolitan and regional areas of Australia, focus was maintained on regional Australia since increasing numbers of immigrants, including 10% of humanitarian immigrant arrivals, had settled outside metropolitan areas in the previous decade (Collins & Krivokapic-Skoko, 2011; Hugo, 2008). Regional Australia includes all towns, small cities and areas that lie beyond the capital cities of its six States and two Territories, and comprises both communities which are small, isolated and rural—with farms, vegetation and open spaces—but also cities with industry and service hubs (see Krivokapic-Skoko et  al., 2018: 3). The research, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC Discovery Grant [2015–17] DP150104059), was undertaken over a period of three years, with the aim of developing a detailed understanding of contemporary entrepreneurship involving refugees, and to contribute to the development of the theory of diasporic immigrant entrepreneurship. The research team tapped into extensive contacts within immigrant community networks to facilitate community participation in the field, beginning with non-government organisations providing settlement services to migrants, such as Settlement Services International and the Multicultural Council of Wagga Wagga, in metropolitan and regional New South Wales respectively; AMES Australia in Victoria; and Access Community Services Ltd. and Multicultural Australia Ltd. in Queensland. These organisations guided the choice of locations, nominating areas where refugee businesses were established. Relationships (Mackenzie et  al., 2007) were established by applying an iterative consent process, through engaging in preliminary discussions with humanitarian

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community leaders and employing bi-lingual research assistants (BRAs) from those communities to assist in the fieldwork (see e.g., Collins et al., 2017). In-depth semi-structured interviews (de Fina, 2009) were conducted with informants from a variety of businesses and a wide range of national backgrounds. Chief investigators travelled to respondents’ businesses, accompanied by a local bi-lingual research assistant, who arranged interviews beforehand and interpreted during the interview where needed. There was also an additional researcher who took handwritten notes, since informants preferred that interviews were not recorded; thus, relations of trust between interviewer and informant were maintained. Informants were asked about their experiences, the barriers they faced, the way they overcome these barriers, the problems that constrain their existing business activities, and the embeddedness of their enterprise in family and diasporic networks. Primary attention was placed on pre- and post-migration experiences, how each informant’s business evolved, and what were perceived as critical factors contributing to success. The analysis followed Riessman (2008) and Cope (2005), focusing on categorical content of the interviews and looking for patterns and coherence across the narratives of humanitarian immigrant entrepreneurs talking about and making sense of their business experience. Responses were tabulated, and some aspects quantified manually (Nzabonimpa, 2018). Over one hundred private entrepreneurs were interviewed in metropolitan and regional areas of four States. The present chapter focuses specifically on the refugee entrepreneurs (12 males and 10 females) who had settled in regional or rural locations in three States: New South Wales (NSW), Queensland (Qld), and Victoria (Vic). These newcomers arrived between 1990 and 2015 and they were interviewed between April 2016 and October 2017. Most of the informants (12) arrived between the years 2006 and 2012, a period during which the proportion of Australia’s intake of refugees born in Africa was decreasing and of those born in Asia was increasing (Department of Immigration and Border Protection, 2016: 24). The majority of those interviewed (almost 70%), including all the women, were of African origin. Five men were born in Asian countries and two men in Middle Eastern countries (Table 7.1). While the majority of those born in Africa secured passage through registration with a UNHCR programme, both Middle Eastern men (M6 and M7) and two of the Asian men (M12 and M13) took the risk to come to Australia by boat through people smugglers.

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Table 7.1  Location of settlement and country of origin/ethnicity of informants State

Location

Informant Age Country of origin or M = male ethnicity F = female

Total

NSW

Wagga Wagga

F1 F2 M1 M14 F12 M15 F11 F13 M16 F18 F19 M23 F10 M8 M10 M11 M12 M13 F5 F6 M6 M7

3

Queensland Ipswich

Logan

Victoria

Rockhampton (‘Rocky’) Geelong Shepparton

44 50 37 36 29 60+ 27 45 40 39 39 47 40 28 36 36 33 39 31 48 31 45

South Sudanese Sudanese Myanmar Sudanese Sudanese Congolese Congolese Rwanda Burundi Somalia Somalia Somalia Congo Congo Myanmar Hmong Tamil Rohingyan South Sudanese South Sudanese Hazara Iraq

6

7

2 2 2

Global Connections with Rural Australia En Route to a Business Most of the refugee entrepreneurs included in this study had no idea that they would one day be running a business. Yet much of the know-how and many of the connections that they would use in their business in Australia were gained along their migratory journey and through remaining embedded in their ethnic traditions. A south Sudanese woman who now runs a home handcrafts business (F5) has built her business on family traditions in her homeland, that of selling handcrafted goods. While working as a nurse, her mother had a shop selling hand-made clothes and embroidery, and her uncle made shoes, earrings, and handbags. Her dad had a farm

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business growing flowers and trees. Now, living in regional Victoria, she works full time as a cleaner and is training for aged care work, but at the same time sells handcrafts from home. She sells items made by her mother, living in Egypt, but also makes things herself, such as incense and perfume, as well as doing catering for restaurants and festivals: biscuits, ice-­ cream, roast flowers (roses), juice, coffee… ‘also my tea, chai’ (F5). This young woman is brimming with ideas: ‘also we have beautiful nuts—natural medicine. One day I could bring them. Expand—source them myself and sell’. Many of the participants had lived in refugee camps en route to Australia. Within the Dadaab refugee complex in Kenya, the largest in the world, ‘naturally grown towns’ have become commercial hubs (UNHCR, 2021), establishing networks between north-eastern Kenya and the homelands of refugees from southern Somalia. Refugees, like F12, learn to survive there: ‘Thank God I was talented doing African hair. I learned by myself playing with my dolls—then neighbours, young girls. I worked in a salon too before coming here’. Through periods of long-term stay in the transitional refugee camps in Africa, they had to learn and acquire different survival skills as they had different levels of protections. For instance, four of the participants in this study spent time as refugees in Egypt, with little protection from the UNHCR. There too refugees survive on connections to family, receiving remittances, or as Zohry (2005: 1) put it, taking on jobs ‘that ‘host’ Egyptians do not want’. F2 worked as a kindergarten teacher in Sudan for twelve years, then in Egypt as a babysitter for Egyptians outside the refugee camp. Another newcomer explained: ‘in Cairo—life is a struggle over there. There is no education there… There are no work rights…You look after yourself’ (M14). Another described her work experience: I was selling in Africa. Not in a refugee camp—in the city. If you are a refugee there, they ask if you can look after yourself. Then you can live in the city, then get a refugee business. You have to have a business to make enough money to live in the city (F10)

The characteristics shown in these stories developed through life experiences and consolidated while living as a refugee—characteristics of determination and resilience as well as reliance on family networks—are valuable in running a business (Bizri, 2017; Fong et al., 2007). The large numbers

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of refugee-owned businesses in countries such as Uganda provide employment for other refugees and long-term residents alike (Betts et al., 2014: 42), strengthening cross-cultural networks. Skills, particularly for women, are often embedded in ethnic traditions, including hair braiding, handcrafts, and hand-made clothing: In Uganda I applied for a job and was working for someone dealing in crafts and I got interested. The business was good, and I had plans of starting up mine but we moved to Australia (F11)

The situations described above illustrate the role family-based and wider social networks can play in the settlement process (Henoch, 2006; Rezaei, 2011). In the case of newcomers, exposure to global networks was also gained in the experience of finding their new home in Australia, whether registered, through humanitarian networks, or unregistered through people smugglers. One Iraqi told his story: I left Iraq in 1991 for Iran. Then from Iran to Australia in 1999… We left Iraq then wait one month in an American Camp between Iraq and Kuwait. No country would take refugee, only Iran… Just me moved to Australia (M7).

Another, a Rohingyan born in Myanmar explained, ‘I very small when we went to Malaysia—there for twelve years. I don’t have any nationality or support—UNHCR registration card. I came by water’ (M13). Many of the newcomers were children when they fled with their parents from their home country. Some were able to access an education as refugees, or further their training. F2 had been trained in early childhood education and eventually set up her own childcare business. M7 learned to cut ‘family hair’ while they were in hiding in Iraq, and subsequently had formal training as a barber in Iran. A lack of recognition of qualifications and training was also noted by the refugees who had some formal education before reaching Australia. However, one Asian male was able to carry through his previous training and experience into a new business venture in Australia, after an initial setback: I applied for a job. I was an auto electrician back in Thailand— “roadworthy?”—I didn’t have a clue! I said “I can change engine”—“no,

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no, no!” [they said]—I didn’t get that job… Overseas and here is quite different (M10).

He in a way joked about his experience by linking the concept of ‘roadworthiness’- which is a term used in Australia to describe the condition of a vehicle mandatory for vehicle registration—to the recognition of the degree obtained overseas. Establishing Diasporic and ‘Born Global’ Businesses Diasporic entrepreneurship, where migrants and their descendants undertake entrepreneurial activities that ‘span the national business environments of their countries of origin and countries of residence’ (Riddle et al., 2010: 398), has been shown to be beneficial to economies at both ends of the connection (Newland & Tanaka, 2010; RCOA, 2010) and can extend globally to benefit other communities as well. Some refugee entrepreneurs tend to adhere to a model of ‘born global’ entrepreneurs (Kuemmerle, 2002: 103) as they have more experience of living and working outside their home countries—due to forced migration, wars and civil unrests, and long stays in transitional refugee camps. Through these circumstances, some refugees gain the experience and networks that help them identify business opportunities. However, Qui and Gupta (2015: 1) argue that new immigrant enterprises ‘are more likely to first enter the markets which are physically distant’ and engage in the strategy of mobilising scarce human and financial resources via family and both ethnic- and non-ethnic-based networks. In the case of the refugees included in this research, at one end is the country of refuge, where the newcomer lived and made connections en route to the settlement country, and where their relatives often still reside. For some refugee business enterprises, these relatives and friends became suppliers of stock to the businesses in the settlement country. Handcrafts businesses provided work or ‘economic opportunity’ (Nielsen & Riddle, 2009: 435) for women in Africa. F5 supports her mother in Egypt by selling her mother’s handcrafts: I send money to my mum then she’ll do them and post them … I do the selling and organising here. Then when I get paid, I send it. I'm not getting any benefit from it.

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Similarly, a female refugee from Congo met and worked with groups of women in a transitional refugee camp in Uganda, who all now supply her craft business in Australia. They make items to raise funds to support groups like women, refugees, people living with HIV, and widows: I send money and they send [the craft]. I sell the craft they send me. It’s mostly African jewellery… I say I want these beads and this sewing, … wall hangings and baskets (F11)

Other contacts made in former countries of residence also became suppliers. A female refugee from Sudan (F12) trained in a salon in Kenya now turns to that country for products for her salon in Australia: ‘I ship supplies all the way from Kenya. I knew the hair extensions in Kenya is really good and really fair’. Similarly, a female refugee from Rwanda (F13), who lived in Namibia for over ten years, has always relied on African suppliers for her clothing sales in Australia: I bring some—I start from home—shoes, clothes, cosmetics—all from Africa—Uganda, Rwanda—different kinds of clothes… Shoes—I buy them from Africa—where they get them I don’t know [laughs]—could be Europe.

Thus, these businesses in Australia create businesses and jobs in former countries of residence, directing economic capital to them, developing international social capital (Newland & Tanaka, 2010), and playing a crucial role in the success of enterprises back in their home country (Henoch, 2006; Rezaei, 2011). Moreover, ‘more intangible flows of knowledge, new attitudes, and cultural influence’ (Newland & Patrick, 2004: 2) are involved in these global enterprises. This can be illustrated by a young clothing entrepreneur (F3) from metropolitan Melbourne, who employs multiple sewers and two supervisors in Ethiopia. Her business brings economic benefits to her parents’ former country (see Lencho, 2017)— ‘[there is a need to] nurture industry—natural resources—in Ethiopia’ (F3)—and by moving away from traditional clothing styles in that country, it fosters knowledge there of global fashion mores, while promoting the cultural motifs of her own culture to the West and combining them with Australian and other global fashion. This clothing entrepreneur, who aims for high-end fashion with ethical credentials, preserves and intensifies the use of traditional materials and production methods such as dyeing,

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and brings to her customers in Australia the knowledge of these techniques and issues: [my clothing company] is more for an audience who care about ethical and can afford it… Cotton/linen is a dying art—used only for wedding gowns… So, I’m trying to make mainstream clothing (F3)

Another instance where intangible knowledge transfers to the local customers involves the hair salon owner, a female refugee from Sudan (F12), who is relying on the hair products and braided hair styles coming from Africa, in this case Kenya. She recognises the making of hair extensions in Kenya as more superior and noted, ‘we are always after the quality, and I grew up with them and knew the quality so we go for them’. Although from Sudan, she is relying on the goods and practices of braiding hair styles associated with Kenya, as well as with wider African countries. This also illustrates the transnational business activity where looking for best quality products and borrowing aspect of fashion and from different African countries was of a primary importance. Diasporic entrepreneurs also contribute economically to the regional communities. Stock supplies were not always sourced from overseas, so there were benefits to the local economy. Grocers and the supermarket owner sourced their products locally and interstate: ‘I get stock here in Australia—not enough money to get it from Africa’ (M16). This not only expands consumer markets for local goods, but also potentially opens new markets (RCOA, 2010) by introducing new products to different areas as well as new knowledge. Ethnic food was one commodity which appealed not only to a specific ethnic community—the ethnic niche market—but to ‘host’ Australians as well. Some products, such as halal meat, cater to the ethnic communities specifically, but other products, such as a particular kind of bread, appeal to all: ‘most of my customers come for the bread— Aussies come from a long way. They love it. Indian, Pakistan, Iranian community—it’s for all of them. And for mainstream Australian’ (Hazara business owner, M6). In these ways, refugee entrepreneurs not only benefit the local economy, but also bring new skills (RCOA, 2010) and ‘knowledge and understanding acquired outside the country that may help them to see possibilities that are not apparent to people who have never lived elsewhere’ (Newland & Tanaka, 2010: 24). Clothing and handcrafts businesses contribute in similar ways. Cultural traditions, tastes,

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and practices are essential to these businesses. Those with handcrafts businesses also bring traditional perfumes and foods, even medicines. Customers were mainly from the entrepreneur’s own community, but some, for example a female refugee from Congo (F11), attracted ‘mixed’ clientele, including ‘host’ Australians. Although hair braiding is an African tradition, female hairdressers enjoyed customers of all ethnicities, especially ‘host’ Australians: ‘braiding is the [African] culture… White customers also. I do dreadlocks [too]. Mostly Aussie. Africans do braiding anyway’ (a female refugee from South Sudan, F1). Furthermore, diasporic entrepreneurs, particularly refugees, extend their global business reach beyond their countries of departure and arrival. Where ties to social capital in countries of origin have been broken (Collins et al., 2017: 34; Wauters & Lambrecht, 2008), and finding a new home has necessitated exposure to global networks, refugee entrepreneurs make new global connections for their business enterprises. After being forced from home and making it to a new land where they desperately want to rebuild their lives, they are already equipped with the key entrepreneurial strengths of resilience, risk-taking and resolve (Legrain & Burridge, 2019: 7)

These entrepreneurs are ‘uniquely positioned to recognize opportunities’ (Newland & Tanaka, 2010: 1) in countries other than their country of origin, and to ‘exploit such opportunities as “first movers”’ (Newland & Tanaka, 2010: 1). A Hazara currency exchange business in regional Victoria serviced people all around the world, including in remote Afghanistan. Hazara scrap metal dealers in Dandenong also had global connections, some exporting all over the world, including India, China, Japan, Korea, Pakistan, and Indonesia. One hair and beauty salon owner in regional NSW negotiated new networks in China: wholesalers are in Sydney and Melbourne, [but] I went once to China. It was crazy. I went on my own. A lot of people go there. Some go Africa, some China, America. A friend of mine he goes to China—he gave me the address… I didn’t even find the address there. But there are a lot of Africans there. I found the things I was looking for… I’m happy with the price—they deliver. I will go again (F1)

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Handcrafts businesses provided work, or ‘economic opportunity’ (Nielsen & Riddle, 2009), for women in Africa. These businesses in Australia create businesses and jobs in the former countries of residence, directing financial capital there, as well as developing social capital across networks (Newland & Tanaka, 2010) in other countries, playing a crucial role in the success of enterprises beyond countries of residences (Henoch, 2006; Rezaei, 2011). ‘[M]ore intangible flows of knowledge, new attitudes, and cultural influence’ (Newland & Patrick, 2004) are involved in these enterprises-across-borders.

Rural-Global Connections The refugees included in this research settled in regional parts of Australia, yet they are connected to global diasporas in multiple ways. The most frequent reason given for starting a business was to help others or to serve the community (see Bizri, 2017; Nielsen & Riddle, 2009). Half of the participants mentioned this as a motivation, showing a strong ‘internal desire to be in control and fulfil personal ambitions’ (Immonen & Kok, 2016: 60). Economic support for overseas communities was in the form of employment opportunities for friends, relatives, and others back in the country of refuge, but in the settlement country, those opportunities are extended to people with no previous connection. Newly arrived refugees from all over the world have been lifted out of unemployment through work as family day care educators, as for instance, in a childcare agency run by a female refugee from Somalia: Three partners in the business. All refugee women. Two Somalian, one from Zimbabwe. Different religion but we work together… Since we started, we empowered a lot of women… Forty-four home educators [are employed] … They are happy. Before they were on Centrelink but now… Educators come from different parts—Africa, Arabs—all parts—Burma, Bangladesh, Indian, Pakistan… They are more confident… Childcare is different here. Back home you can do it without all the certificates. Here they are not babysitters, they are educators (F19)

These entrepreneurs are ‘uniquely positioned’ (Newland & Tanaka, 2010: 1) to recognise preferences for ethnic-specific childcare and the appropriate labour force. They contribute economically by creating

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employment and by filling empty employment niches (RCOA, 2010: 3). Others help their communities by providing culturally specific products or services. Promoting businesses occurred through local networks which included festivals, religious institutions, community events, and associations. Ethnic connections provided support for business ventures, enabling utilisation of ‘networks and resources not available to traditional entrepreneurs’ (Immonen & Kok, 2016: 60), as a female refugee from South Sudan explained, ‘I buy and sell—I get [handcraft] orders. Friend to friend. Other Africans—they have other traditions—we learn from each other’ (F6); or as a young clothing entrepreneur (located in metropolitan Melbourne, F3) explained: East Africans came [to Australia] in the early 80s or 90s. They are well established—they lean on each other as a support network… An expert helped me with the trademark. Friends in Melbourne could help in many areas. I work with the community to get my brand out.

Living in rural or regional Australia not only enables further networking, but also enables learning about different ways of life and cultures. A grocery owner, a former refugee from Myanmar who initially experienced settlement in a big city, stated that in fact it was in a small regional town where he learned about the host community: ‘when I was at Wagga I learned more about Aussies’ (M1). This grocery shop owner learned more about others as well: African will buy some stuff—a funny thing, and this culture have their own food. China, Cambodia, Lao can share—all from Southeast Asia. But Japan and Korea have their own—each have their own food (M1)

Despite trepidation, refugee entrepreneurs can thrive in regional areas (Shepherd et al., 2020) and ‘[d]ue to quieter and comparatively smaller geographical contexts’ (Curry et al., 2018: 439) can develop strong and lasting friendships with the local people. The newcomers also downplayed any experiences of racism, showing resilience and the intention to stay as a female refugee from Sudan put it: Ipswich is the best place for me to be. People used to say it is racist, but I’ve never had racism. Everyone—they are so social—it’s so good… I love it… the business. I will survive and I think I’m gonna be here for a long time. This is my home (F12)

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Conclusion The aim of the empirical research described in this chapter was to explore the nature of refugee entrepreneurship located in regional and rural Australia, the processes of setting up businesses and the strategies refugees adopt to overcome barriers, acquire knowledge and mobilise resources. However, the main themes emerging from the field work converged around the global business and social networks being established by those refugee entrepreneurs as well as their trading activities across borders. Those global networks were built on pre-existing family or community networks, or on friendships formed as long-term refugees overseas. The refugees included in this field work maintain strong business and presumably private relationships with not only their country of origin but also other refugees who are still living in transitional refugee camps overseas. In that sense it may be argued that the common use of the concept of diasporic entrepreneurship may be too narrow considering this context. One of the core elements of diaspora—homeland orientation—may not be of high relevance in this context, as these refugee entrepreneurs were seen to be transnational and spanned different cultural, ethnic, and religious identities. The concept may need to be further transformed considering the movement patterns and entrepreneurial orientation of some more recent refugees. By being in regional Australia on one hand and being an active part of global social and business networks on the other, these refugee entrepreneurs are connecting rural spaces with the global. This book chapter was primarily focused on the global connectivity of regionally based refugees and their diasporic business networks. However, the ways and extent to which those links with the global will specifically change local rural townships, in the long term, are yet to be analysed. Gender aspects of those global networks were also uncovered by the field work. African female refugee entrepreneurs were entering and creating sets of overlapping private and business networks, both global and local. These African women actively used their connections both in their new country of residence as well as in their home country and were able to reach beyond their ethnic ties to expand to other markets. Furthermore,

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by involving other female refugees of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, located transnationally, they utilised their own innovative capacity, without being constrained by lack of experience or resources. The support, mobilisation of resources and exchange of knowledge generated by gendered global and diasporic networks can further lead towards empowerment, impacting on other dimensions of the lives of female refugees.

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CHAPTER 8

Conclusion Nathan Kerrigan and Philomena de Lima

Despite the persistence of cultural tropes associated with rural places, the contributions presented throughout this edited collection have highlighted the ways in which rural areas are (and have always been) incorporated and embedded within a global world through the mobility of capital, goods, services, and individuals. This embeddedness and relationality of rurality challenges the notion of rural as remote, disconnected, and lacking in agency. The mobility of global capital is reflected in the increasing ownership by multinational corporations and the global capital of businesses operating in sectors located in rural areas, including agriculture, forestry, aquaculture, fish farming, food processing, resource extraction, tourism, energy production, and so on. The mobility (migration) of populations is a constitutive feature of this trend (Hanieh, 2019). Contemporary

N. Kerrigan (*) School of Social Sciences, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] P. de Lima Centre for Living Sustainability, University of the Highlands and Islands, Inverness, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Kerrigan, P. de Lima (eds.), The Rural-Migration Nexus, Rethinking Rural, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18042-2_8

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patterns of migration are diverse, increasingly temporary, and often involve frequent movements within, between, and across nation-states, regulatory regimes, and spatial boundaries in the context of changing geopolitics and power dynamics. In the last two decades, international labour migrants in rural areas of Europe, North America, and Australia have received growing academic attention. This scholarship has largely focused on demonstrating the contribution of labour migrants to sustaining rural economies of receiving societies, rural integration policies, the exploitative working and living conditions migrants experience in rural areas, a lack of access to appropriate support and services, strategies of adaptation and demonstrating the increasing cosmopolitan and globalised nature of rural communities in support of a ‘global countryside’ narrative (Arora-Jonsson & Larsson, 2021; de Lima & Wright, 2009; Gibson & Annis, 2019; Kasimis et al., 2010; Keim-Malpass et al., 2015; Woods, 2007). The rural-migration nexus cannot be understood as an isolated phenomenon but as a lens through which to uncover contemporary relational patterns of society within and across different spaces and scales—local, regional, national, and transnational. The complexity that underpins diverse migratory trends are accumulative, long standing, and deeply imbricated in changing geopolitics, globalised capital accumulation, and neoliberalism in its various manifestations. This raises questions about the adequacy of current conceptual framings and methodological approaches employed in researching rural migration (Sassen, 2014: 5). To unravel and make visible these subterranean trends and their impact across different spaces and scales, it is important to go beyond normative conceptual framings and methodological approaches. The central task of this edited collection has been to challenge the notion that migration arises from ‘a variety of factors “somewhere else” and ends up at “our” borders demanding a policy response’ (Hanieh, 2019: 51). Instead, ‘international migrants are produced, they are patterned, and they are embedded in specific historical phases’ (Sassen, 1999: 155). Migrants—in particularly, labour migrants and refugees which this book focuses on—are not a mere epiphenomenon of globalisation and capital accumulation processes underpinning the contemporary world economy and changing geopolitics. Rather—as was set out and emphasised in the Introduction—international labour migration is a central and constitutive feature of the world economy in which rural places and communities are not passive bystanders but are deeply imbricated within it. The transnational and translocal activities generated through these processes transform local places, community experiences,

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and practices—of the ‘here’ and ‘there’—and shape the conditions, lived experiences, and adaptive strategies among migrants as well as local agencies as illustrated by the chapters in this edited collection. Moreover, this conceptual framing of international migrants denotes the fluid nature of migrant identifications/categorisations which avoids reductionism and gives due attention to the diverse nature of rural migrations, including the recent settlements of refugees which is not captured by the term ‘labour migration’. The fluid nature of migrant categories is illustrated in Chaps. 2 and 7 of this edited collection. These chapters highlight the ways in which migrant categories shift contingent upon governance and the processes of welcoming, belonging, inclusion, integration, and assimilation prevalent in ‘host’ communities/nations as well as the strategies adopted by migrants. Sotkasiira’s account of asylum seekers in Chap. 2 explores the process of ‘becoming’ a migrant which was only possible when they were given permanent residency status. In Chap. 7 Krivokapic-skoko and colleagues illustrate the ways in which refugees in rural Australia moved into the category of ‘labour migrants’ only once they engaged in entrepreneurial activities drawing on their transnational and translocal connections. The rural-migration nexus—the conceptual framework which we have developed throughout this book—situates international migration as dynamic, fluid, and deeply imbricated in complex globalised capital accumulation processes and systems that have long underpinned the contemporary neocolonial economic world order. Chapters in this book have included a discussion of the following: the dynamic nature of geopolitics, the historical and local contexts in which migration is located (see Chaps. 3 and 6), the complexities of ensuring agricultural migrants’ well-being in a globalised industrial context (Chap. 5), and the translocal activities which stretch across national spaces impacting on sending and receiving communities in relation to temporary workers’ mobilities between Moldova and Switzerland (Chap. 3) and Mexico and Canada (Chap. 4). These chapters illustrate the importance of moving beyond methodological nationalism that has tended to characterise much of the research on international migrants in rural areas. For many, temporariness and precarity is a long term and permanent state of being. Bolokan in Chap. 3 utilised the lens of coloniality/decoloniality and its intersections with gender to further highlight the unequal dynamics of geopolitics as well as raising the importance of not treating migrants as a homogenous category. The adoption of life-course ethnographies made visible not only the processes that shape the ‘hypermobile’ lives of temporary migrants but also the

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negative impacts on their health and well-being as well as on the local places and people left behind. The issue of well-being (especially emotional well-­being and geographies) was taken up by several authors in this book. Sotkasiira’s use of a narrative approach in Chap. 2 provided a critical perspective on the ‘welcoming community’ initiatives in Finland. Whilst framed within a national methodological framework, she extended the concept and focus of ‘welcome’ to a more migrant focused sense of well-­ being that included the importance attached by migrants to being active members of the wider community they found themselves in and the importance of affective relationships. Campos-Flores and Rosales-­ Mendoza (Chap. 4) and Dabrowska-Miciula (Chap. 5) also address the issue of well-being of temporary labour migrants working within the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers programme drawing on translocal and transnational frameworks. Chapter 5 examined the occupational health and physical injuries associated with a globalised agricultural industry in Canada, while Chap. 4 focused specifically on the emotional labour temporary migrant workers experienced and had to negotiate when living away from their family, removed from the social and cultural geographies of ‘home’. The boundaries between ‘temporary’ and ‘permanent’, ‘home’ and ‘away’ blurs as these migrants spend decades migrating back and forth each year often to the same country but not always as highlighted by Chaps. 3 and 4. Collectively, the chapters presented in this edited collection illustrate migration as contingent on a complex range of factors, with varied, conflicting, and sometimes contradictory impacts on rural places, communities, households, and individuals. The following sections draw out selected emergent themes from the chapters of this edited collection which provide a narrative of the rural-migration nexus as well as providing some fruitful areas for further research and enquiry beyond the current foci of international rural labour migration debates.

Rural Translocality and Migration The chapters of this edited collection emphasise rural spaces as relational, challenging the idea that urban areas are invariably the node from which all dynamics of globalisation emanate. It is also important to recognise that although rural spaces have their own dynamics of globalisation, these are also simultaneously deeply imbricated in national and international activities and spaces (Castells, 2000). The chapters in this collection

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critically engage with a dynamic and relational understanding of rural places which are deeply enmeshed in processes of mobilities intensified by globalisation. To move to another place—rural or otherwise—is not only a question of dislocation to another cartographic point, it is also about establishing new relations in specific localities as well as across different localities encompassing the past (Montulet, 2005), which may persist over time and space (Walford, 2007). Translocality is recurrently experienced through the multiple actions that people take and produce in and across specific localities and spaces (e.g., work, family/households, voluntary activities, and so on). Chapters in this edited collection have engaged with a range of concepts to varying degrees: in Chap. 2, the focus is on negotiating belonging including ideas of well-being and welcoming migrants at a local level in the host society; by contrast in Chap. 3, the concept of translocality is used as a lens to explore the ways in which temporary migrant workers continually negotiate and renegotiate their hypermobile lives between local places in their countries of origin and host countries; the affective and emotional practices and physical and mental harms of working ‘elsewhere’ and in globalised industries are highlighted in Chaps. 4 and 5, and the hostility temporary migrants experience when placed in rural locales as denoted in Chaps. 6 and 7. The concept of translocality has received growing attention among migration scholarship in the past decade from a wide range of disciplines (for a review, see Greiner & Sakdapolrak, 2013). Brickell and Datta (2011: 3) define translocality as a type of simultaneous situatedness across different locales which provide ways of understanding the overlapping place-­ time(s) in migrants’ everyday lives. They emphasise the importance of focusing on ‘spaces, places, and connections’ without privileging the national to include the local quotidian and mundane encounters, experiences, and activities—in neighbourhoods, family/households, friendships, and so on. Focusing on these various ‘sites of encounters’ opens up the potential for exploring the ‘embodied, corporeal and affective experiences in different locales’ (Brickell & Datta, 2011: 16), which were explored in Chaps. 2–5 of this edited collection. In the context of rural migration, translocality emerges in the work of a range of authors, primarily as a way of challenging reductionist and binary views of places (e.g., urban-rural, national-international) as well as addressing temporal and socio-spatial complexities (Hedberg & do Carmo, 2012; Milbourne, 2007). The notion of ‘networks of rurality’

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(Murdoch, 2000) stresses interactions on both national and international scales, the mutual direction of networks and flows, and the awareness of their duration in time through engagement with mobility discourses in different contexts. For instance, Halfacree’s (2004: 285) notion of ‘networks of rurality’ emphasises the connectivity of rural areas through migrants and ‘host’ residents’ everyday practices. This scholarship recognises that when people move from one place to another, they carry with them their past experiences, identities, connections, and representations, denoting the durable and tangible translocal linkages established between the ‘here’ and ‘there’ that contribute to development processes and dynamic initiatives for all localities involved in the process (see also de Haas, 2005; Faist, 2008; Skuras & Dubois, 2015; Webster, 2017). However, the bodily and affective experiences of migrants in a new place may involve new ways of interacting and behaving, adjusting to climatic conditions and so on, all of which impact on the well-being of migrants that has largely been neglected in the rural migration literature on ‘welcoming migrants’ and integration with a few exceptions (e.g., Herslund & Paulgaard, 2021). Translocality as a type of ‘situatedness during mobility’ (Brickell & Datta, 2011: 3) allows for a ‘place-based’ as opposed to a ‘place bound’ emphasis that has tended to characterise research and literature on international migrants in rural areas which has largely worked within the framework of methodological nationalism. Translocality also provides a bridge between ‘sedentarist’ biases and notions of ‘nomadism’ which have characterised the fields of migration and mobilities (Smith, 2011). Working with understandings of places as shaped by and through connections to the outside (Massey, 2005) that may vary in scale from the local, regional, national, and transnational allows for a better understanding of migrants’ life trajectories as well as that of the communities and places they have migrated to. It facilitates an active understanding of places, people, and communities as mutually constitutive, active, and always in the making. Drawing on translocality and its place-based focus also facilitates a situated understanding of migrant lives by making visible and grounding national and globalising forces in its various manifestations at local levels (Brickell & Datta, 2011). This can be seen in Chap. 3 which draws on a life-course global ethnographic approach. An exception in rural migration studies which the field of rural migration could do more of. One of the possible unintended effects of recent discourses associated with international migrants in rural areas in the ‘global north’ is the

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exclusion of all other forms of migration (e.g., internal, out-migration, lifestyle migration, and so on) that are part of rural communities, reinforcing their otherness. Viewing mobilities and the materialities of migrants’ lives as experienced and lived in specific (rural) localities across different scales and spaces opens possibilities of shifting the gaze beyond essentialising Cartesian dualities of internal-international migrants, migrants and non-movers, urban-rural and passive-active rural. Increase in mobilities also results in  locales changing, becoming ‘stretched and transformed’ (Castree, 2004: 135, cited in Brickell & Datta, 2011: 6). Employing a translocal approach to the study of migrants and migration—or mobilities in general—offers the potential for moving beyond bifurcated, essentialising, and bounded stances in relation to these categories by encouraging researchers to pay attention to their fluid and dynamic nature as well as identifying the similarities and differences between migrants and nonmigrants and their various intersecting identities across different spaces and scales. Moreover, adopting a translocal lens would facilitate a whole community approach—that is a consideration of migrant experiences in relation to exchanges with other migrants, non-movers, and the rest of the community across different spatially unbounded—relationally connected—locales and spaces such as neighbourhoods, households, public spaces, and so on in ways which capture the everyday, mundane realities of living. This would help pave the way for a more grounded approach to understanding how and in what ways mobilities and relational exchanges are physically, socially, symbolically, and culturally impacting on rural locales for different inhabitants over a period of time. This would provide a contrast to much of the current focus on rural migration where the overwhelming focus is one-off short-term studies on migrants lives in host communities where their pasts have been erased through ‘integration’ and ‘welcoming’ discourses. There is also little or no understanding of nonmovers and other residents and how they are experiencing and adapting to changes in their locales and how they might be supported together with movers/migrants.

Emotional Well-Being and Geographies Until recently, migration theories ‘have tended to be a narrative of migration with emotions written out’ (Brooks & Simspon, 2013: 170) which is applicable to the discourses on migration in rural areas. The ‘emotional’ turn in the social sciences and its conceptualisation and application to the

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field of migration studies has been receiving growing attention, particularly in urban contexts (see Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015; Brooks & Simspon, 2013). These have included understanding how emotions shape the migratory experience (Campos-Delgado, 2021). This research has also demonstrated how international migration influences the transformation of the familial (including the emotional dimensions of parenthood across borders, maintaining closeness with family members from afar and the emotional responses of family members left behind; see Montes, 2013; Nobles et al., 2015; Baldassar et al., 2016). There has also been scholarship that has explored the emotional interactions with members of ‘host’ communities (Askins, 2015, 2016); the attachments and social networks created and facilitated through migrants’ religious practices (Bony & Odgers, 2014); the role of emotions in constructing senses of belonging (Alarcon et  al., 2016); and migrants’ affective states because of their migratory status (Aquino Moreschi, 2015). However, it is widely acknowledged that the study of emotions and migration is a complex field covering a range of disciplinary perspectives, practices, and methodologies (see Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015 for a review of the field). While this research emphasises the importance of the situatedness and relationality of emotions that arise because of the migratory experience, its focus is largely on the macro-level and contextualised within the urban. The emotional labour embodied in migration processes is another theme that is addressed in Chaps. 3–5 in various interconnecting ways. The emotional geographies of migrants presented in these chapters—both explicitly and implicitly—demonstrate the importance of including emotions when examining migratory experiences in the context of the rural (see also Anderson & Smith, 2001; Davidson et al., 2005; Wood & Smith, 2004). Chapters 3–5 demonstrate the ways in which rural ‘places, spaces, landscapes, and environments may themselves be redolent with emotions and may act as powerful sources of affect, in the sense of affecting what is felt and what takes place’ (Bondi, 2009: 446). All three chapters reveal how as people moved from sending to receiving destinations, emotions became part of the journey. They were shaped and negotiated through different spaces, life circumstances, and social and cultural reference points, providing insights into migrants’ subjectivities, their interactions with ‘host’ communities and other movers as well as the dialecticism between emotions and place (Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015). This was evidenced in Chaps. 3–5 through the emotional ambivalence of migrants’ experiences of simultaneously feeling hopeful for a better life through achieving

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employment abroad and the mental and physical health implications that meeting these expectations entailed. For instance, Bolokan (Chap. 3) explored the emotional ambivalence embedded within the mobility agreements between Switzerland and Moldova and some European Union states that manifested as part of a repressive labour regime based on postcolonial logic. Participants in Bolokan’s chapter highlighted how feelings of hopefulness of securing a better life ‘elsewhere’ and sadness of leaving one’s family behind and being disconnected from ‘home’ were not bifurcated feelings in which one negative emotion is forgotten (e.g., sadness) and replaced by another, more positive one (e.g., hopefulness) as they moved between sending and receiving destinations. Rather, the full range of the migrants’ emotional register was dis-embedded, translocated, and re-embedded, often cultivating—and therefore having to manage—new hybridisations of emotions, as affected by the migratory process. Similar experiences were noted in both Campos-Flores and Rosales-Mendoza (Chap. 5) and Dabrowska-Miciula’s (Chap. 4) chapters. Part of the emotional turmoil experienced by the Mexican temporary migrant workers in these chapters was the result of the rupture between the want of the ‘here’ (e.g., wanting to stay and live in their home country) and the need of the ‘there’ (e.g., needing to work as part of a seasonal workers programme elsewhere to provide for family members). This was most evident in Campos-Flores and Rosales-Mendoza’s account of the ways in which working in Canadian agribusiness made Mexican temporary migrant workers yearn for the materiality and figurality of ‘home’, to migrate back to Mexico and be reconnected with their families and the socio-cultural values of their home country. Entangled with the emotions facilitated by the rupture of mobility expressed within Chaps. 3–5 were the capitalist economic logics embedded within the labour migration and capital accumulation processes of countries from the ‘global north’ that migrants were imbricated in. Addressing Boccagni and Baldassar’s (2015: 77) call to see the relationship between economic motives and emotions, Chaps. 3–5 highlight the nuanced ways in which the economical (and therefore, by extension, the political) pervade into the emotions and feelings experienced by migrants. The mobility of migrants—specifically around rural labour migration, from sending to receiving destinations—is often based on employment opportunities within sectors located in rural regions which tend to be the most hazardous. In this context, emotions embodied in the migrants’ experiences are not only those based on their migratory journey—of loss

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due to dislocation from their homeland and of hopefulness of finding ‘better’ opportunities abroad—but also emerge from the exploitative and hazardous conditions of working within industries in rural areas resulting in negative physical health implications, mental illness, and long-term occupational injuries. Both Campos-Flores and Rosales-Mendoza (Chap. 5) and Dabrowska-Miciula (Chap. 4) address the exploitative and hazardous conditions of temporary Mexican migrant workers working in the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Worker’s Programme. While Campos and Rosales-Mendoza’s chapter discussed the mental health impacts on migrant workers having to live away from ‘home’ for long periods of time, Dabrowska-Miciula acknowledged the physical harms (e.g., occupational injuries) caused to migrants working within the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Worker’s Programme and the need to respond to such concerns through adopting better health and safety standards. Chapters 3–5 in this edited collection have thus emphasised the influence of emotions and emotional geographies as equally crucial to the migratory experience as part of a broader rural-migration nexus. For migrant bodies moving from one locale or locales to others within and across national spaces will involve new corporeal, affective, behavioural, and emotional experiences that they have to learn to navigate. For example, in the migratory journey between sending and receiving rural destinations, migrants do not leave their attachments, connections, and sensibilities behind. They carry these emotions with them—the ruptures that come from, for example, removal from family, loss of familiarity of the social and cultural norms and values of one’s home country, feelings of isolation, and so on—across their migrant journeys whilst also having to navigate the stresses of life and work in new locales (see Chaps. 3–5). Understanding migrants lives from a mainly ‘host’ society perspective—a situation that characterises much of the research on rural migration—does little to conceptually unpack the varied ways in which emotions are enmeshed within the labour migration process. This lack of interest in the past lives of migrants—and migrant labour in rural areas in particular— stems from a utilitarian view where the focus is on extracting labour and where the past does not appear to matter, and emotional and affective factors are not seen to be relevant. This reflects an ethnocentric tendency which sees the emotional experiences of migrants as ‘monolithic and essentialised collective categories’ (Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015: 75) in which migrants seek to emotionally remove themselves from identifications with homeland and increase feelings of belonging to the ‘host’

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community/nation (Alba & Nee, 2003), with the shift from a homeland to a host community/nation orientation being the desired outcome. However, as Chaps. 3–5 of this edited collection have shown, the erasure of the ‘emotional’ as part of a wider rural-migration nexus has failed to acknowledge the complexities and contingencies that shape migrants’ affective as well as physical/bodily experiences while moving across and between different spaces and places. This highlights a need to move current rural research trajectories towards examining the ways in which emotions are embodied in the migration process and experience, and in particular the relationality of emotions, migrants, and place in the context of contemporary rural migration trends.

Welcoming Migrants and (Hostile) Hospitality Much of the discussion on ‘welcoming migrants’ particularly in North American and European rural contexts has emerged within the context of policy making in host communities as well as local development practices. The emphasis on the recruitment, ‘integration’, and retention of international migrants in rural communities of North America, Australia, and Europe has to be understood against a background of changing demographic trends and labour market needs and shortages of labour in certain sectors. There are currently varied perspectives on what ‘welcoming communities’ might mean; from those emphasising migrants having the opportunity to fully engage in community life (Belkhodja, 2009; Corriveau & La Rougery, 2006; Vatz Laaroussi & Walton-Roberts, 2005) to those focusing on facilitating civic participation, equal access to services, and meaningful employment (Gibson et al., 2017). Gibson and Annis (2019) drawing on a review of literature conducted on migration by Esses et al. (2010) developed a list of characteristics communities should exhibit to be considered a ‘welcoming’ state including the following: respect for diversity, accessible public services, educational opportunities, the promotion of health and well-being, safety, the sharing of leisure spaces and activities, and an acknowledgment of faith and spirituality. These characteristics of welcoming communities were identified as facilitating dialogue, and planning by governments, third-sector organisations supporting migrants and ‘host’ communities as to how best to attract, settle, and integrate migrants into rural areas. These characteristics emphasise the contextuality of local place, its infrastructures, processes,

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and dynamics that shape whether a specific rural community is identified as ‘welcoming’ or not. At the policy level, the concept of welcoming communities has been embraced by multiple governments such as Canada and Finland as a way of directing government investment towards migration to support the development of their country’s rural and regional areas by supporting place-based initiatives (Gibson & Annis, 2019). At the local level, community-­based stakeholders have become engaged in proactive measures to facilitate the settlement and integration of migrants. However, local development practices and policies related to welcoming communities are complicated by governance structures and precarious funding which vary across nation-states. The provision of support for international migrant communities in local rural areas is a shared responsibility between national governments and local host communities (Carter et al., 2008). However, the roles and remit of each—national government and host community—involved in processes of welcoming are different and potentially conflicting. In the Finnish context, the government is responsible for immigration legislation and determining who can enter and under what conditions as well as providing funding. This constrains and undermines the ability of host communities to be welcoming and can lead to not only blurring of organisational boundaries but also hindering potential possibilities of multiagency partnerships towards the inclusion of migrants into local rural community life. This is highlighted in Tiina Sotkasiira’s examination of Finland’s ‘Welcoming Countryside’ policy in Chap. 2. By contrast, processes of welcome are different in the Canadian context in which from a governance and fiscal perspective provincial governments can negotiate with the Federal government on quotas of certain categories of migrants to be welcomed and fulfil a specific demand. Welcoming communities also implies an element of hospitality. According to Jacques Derrida (2000: 4) ‘hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be threatened with hostility when he (sic) arrives on someone else’s territory’. Hospitality has long been perceived as a desirable attribute, with different scaler contexts—from communities to nation-­ states—all wishing to project an image of themselves as being good and gracious hosts (Darling, 2014). This is reflected in initiatives and public statements made by governments in Europe concerned about rural depopulation (Patuzzi et al., 2020; Scottish Government, 2021). For migrants, then, hospitality can be a useful and at times necessary accommodation, a sign that incoming migrants can begin to make a home in a new area,

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region, or country (regardless of its temporality) as migrants move—transnationally or translocally—from one employment opportunity to another most of the time out of necessity. Using hospitality as a political tool in such a way denotes its problematised nature. That is, for nation-states to welcome and to be hospitable means to simultaneously (perceive to) support cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, while enforcing the right to exclude those seen as unworthy of welcome, on the other—not all migrants are equally welcome (Hall, 2014)—as demonstrated by the recent focus on ‘gold visas’ in the UK, which also occurs in other countries globally. This contradiction embedded within welcoming processes was observed by Tiina Sotkasiira in Chap. 2 at the local level. She acknowledged the contradictory processes, through which migrants are, on the level of regional politics, constituted as important members of rural communities, while simultaneously in their everyday lives experience discrimination and face difficulties as they attempt to navigate life locally. Furthermore, the conceptualisation and incorporation of well-being into the ‘welcoming’ discourse presented in Chap. 2 adds an important nuance which tends to be lacking in much of the discussion around welcoming. By situating the lived realities of migrants at the centre of ‘welcoming’ discourses, Sotkasiira afforded the possibility to see migrants concerns and experiences to be included into the broader ‘welcoming communities’ framework within Finland, but also in Europe, Australia, and North America, through engagement with migrant communities to ensure their ‘voice’ is being heard as part of wider discussions around welcoming. We need to be careful not to overstate the originality in Sotkasiira’s contribution. Migrants’ voices in welcoming have been a constitutive feature in many countries’ welcoming policy initiatives. What is significant in Sotkasiira’s contribution, however, are the various elements included in framing discourses and policies of welcome, with the migrant ‘voice’ implicitly embedded and not as a targeted policy response, highlighting an area for further research and enquiry. Likewise, in Chap. 6, Lee-Treweek, Radeljić, and Stojanović illustrate the ways in which the Serbian government positioned migrants to achieve accession into the European Union, seeing them as both a resource and an urban problem within rural areas of Serbia. Such processes were also demonstrated in Branka Krivokapic-skoko, Katherine Wilson, and Jock Collins’ chapter on migrant entrepreneurs in the context of rural Australia (see Chap. 7). In this chapter, Branka Krivokapic-skoko and colleagues demonstrated how migrants’ ability to be included (and therefore to be welcomed and experience senses of belonging) was contingent on

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the recognition of migrants’ extra-local skills and resources to support development, leading to a utilitarian view of refugees where their acceptance into the local communities was premised on the skills, resources, and economic capital they brought into the rural regions. Hospitality, however, as Jacques Derrida (2000) reminds us, is not a straightforward positive act of engaging difference. Rather, hospitality is a constant negotiation between competing demands—of welcome and regulation simultaneously. Hospitality is based on the prerequisite ‘that the host … remains the patron, the master of the household, on the condition that he [sic] maintains his [sic] own authority in his [sic] own house’ (Derrida, 2000: 7). To be hospitable, then, is to territorialise space, to demarcate it as one’s own and to assume that one has the right to both welcome and reject the presence of strangers within it. Written into the very constitution of the act of hospitality are sets of conditions and expectations, about who is the ‘host’, where the limits of welcoming lie and to whom it may be extended. Governments/‘host’ communities (the hosts) can, therefore, exercise capacity and power to welcome migrant populations through asserting their ownership and control of the nation/‘host’ community (home). But this welcome is severely limited and always conditional upon their guest’s gratefulness and conformity to specific national values and customs (Gibson, 2007). This aligns with Robinson’s (1999) analysis of migrants being welcomed into rural Wales; for migrants to be welcomed into the nation, they had to adhere to specific conditions, what Derrida calls conditional hospitality. When conditional hospitality is given, it is accompanied with laws or rules which must be followed; the state remains in control of the migrant ‘guest’, negotiating the welcome that is received. The concept of hospitality problematises welcoming processes. Welcoming migrants—at least as Jacques Derrida (2000) would argue—is not merely about the reception of migrants by their ‘host’ nations/communities, but rather about acknowledging the problems of living alongside people with different cultural, religious, and social practices, attitudes, discourses, and habituses than your own as part of a globalised world. As the world becomes figuratively smaller through the distanciation of time-­ space (Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1989), individuals are confronted with the ‘other’—or more precisely, those perceived as others—without any past referent point nor any future set of expectations and obligations (see Bauman, 2016). Thus, processes of welcoming (with all the bells and whistles of hospitality attached) affords recognition of otherness without

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seeing the ‘other’ as a threat or danger. This is achieved through contradictory processes of ‘incorporation and expulsion’ (Ahmed, 2000: 97) or ‘inclusive exclusion’ (Laachir, 2007: 178), where the hosting social group welcomes the migrant ‘guest’ (or aspects of the migrant guest) who is tolerated, while firmly holding them in a position of one who is welcome but not fully included. Because of this, the very act of welcoming is often revealed to be ‘not very hospitable’ (Ahmed, 2000: 190). To be welcoming and to perform hospitality means to also cross the line between hospitality and hostility, it depends on the willingness of ‘host’s’ efforts to create openings while simultaneously policing boundaries. This apparent contradiction is present in Derrida’s (2000: 5) understanding of hospitality (or, what he calls ‘hostipitality’, a portmanteau of hospitality and hostility) as a ‘self-contradictory concept and experience’ in which to be hospitable means to simultaneously enact limits around the hospitability that is received, reproducing hostility towards the guest through the controlling and regulation of actions, discourses, practices, and space. Such processes of ‘hostipitality’ (Derrida, 2000: 5) affords the ‘host’ nation/community the ability to maintain ontological security in a globalised world—where the settling down alongside strangers is the routine—through enacting modes of biopolitical governance (see Foucault, 1979) where the act of hospitality consists of ‘welcoming particular guests and […] as a result, not others’ (Naas, 2003: 164), empowering the ‘host’ to decide which migrants should be included and which should remain suspended in bare life (Agamben, 1998). Concepts of welcoming communities and hospitality are thus ideologically contingent as they enable the ‘host nation/community’ to have ‘fantasies of control’ (Hage, 2002: 165) that reproduces sets of power relations in the hosting and welcoming of migrants that has the capacity to exclude and racialise migrant bodies in place. The rhetoric of welcoming and its characteristics as highlighted above overlaps with concepts of hospitality. Both do little to engender positive feelings and sensations associated with inclusion and belonging. For the migrant, to be welcomed means to occupy a liminal space as an individual who is welcome but not fully included. What the discussions in Chaps. 2, 6, and 7 have highlighted, therefore, are the dissonances between the seemingly positive ‘welcoming’ policy discourses and the lived realities of migrants in a broader context where rural communities in Europe, North America, and Australia have experienced the effects of neoliberalist policies—for example, cuts to services, increasing centralisation, closure, and the privatisation of public

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services—that are experienced by all rural residents but exacerbated for migrants. As the above discussion(s) has demonstrated, such an emphasis has not led to working with local communities to help them to adapt to the changing local communities they find themselves in. Thus, strategies of welcome and of hospitality become more aligned with those of hostility. That is, current initiatives towards welcoming migrants are very much about the regulation and control of migrants’ actions, discourses, and the spaces they are authorised to use—as to ensure the needs and ontological security of ‘host residents/citizens’—than it is about facilitating unconditional welcome. In addition, the ‘welcoming’ discourses and literature on rural migrants have rarely explicitly acknowledged the prevalence of racist attitudes and ‘racisms’ which underpin attitudes and interactions towards international migrants among some sections of the rural population. Welcoming policies are unlikely to work unless initiatives on attracting migrants to specific local places simultaneously engages with local residents in migration initiatives at the local level. This could involve research to understand their experiences of local labour markets and the communities they live in, their experiences and views on the changing dynamics of their local places and communities, and ways in which they might engage with migration issues. Therefore, moving forward, rural research needs to address not only the ‘challenges’ migrants face but also the changes which are happening for all residents within localities. This can only be addressed by taking a whole community approach which Chaps. 2, 6, and 7 have begun to address. However, further research is needed to fully address how best to support migrants and ‘host’ communities as migrants move within and between different locales across varying scales and spaces— local, regional, national, and international.

Future Directions By drawing on different perspectives and approaches to illuminate the rural-migration nexus in Europe, North America, and Australia, the chapters in this edited collection captures the complex and often contradictory ways in which rural spaces and locales shape and are shaped by migratory patterns and flows. The chapters also highlight the importance of understanding migration as contingent on the historical, political economy, geo-­ political dynamics, and governance of each nation-state. The central argument underpinning the contributions in this edited collection is that

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rural places need to be understood as spatialised nodes where people and places are mutually constitutive, dynamic, and stretched within and across different scales—local, regional, national, and transnational—facilitated by migration. The actions and activities migrants perform within rural spaces, how migrants are perceived and welcomed in rural areas as well as the affective and emotional dimensions of their migratory journeys are all imbricated and shapes the flows of people, goods, services and capital across national and international spaces. Collectively the chapters present a nuanced picture and understanding of the workings of the rural-migration nexus by drawing on the experiences of temporary migrant workers, refugees, and asylum seekers all of whom encompass many diversities. The chapters draw on different methodological approaches, from one-off small-scale to large-scale qualitative studies and surveys to use of visual imagery and longitudinal ethnographic and biographical life history approaches. The contributions in this book also provide a rich diversity of different perspectives on rural migration drawing on, for example, literature on the affective, emotional, and bodily experiences, transnational, translocal, and postcolonial/decolonial perspectives grounded in ‘global ethnography’, and occupational health and entrepreneurship. The chapters have not only explored a plurality of issues some of which have received scant attention in rural migration scholarship but are part of the wider discussion on migration and merit more attention in relation to the rural-migration nexus scholarship. Some potential issues which have merged from these chapters and which merit further attention include the following: occupational health (physical, mental, and emotional) issues and the adequacy of national legislation in the globalised agribusiness and food processing sectors; emotional impacts of separation on male as well as female temporary migrant workers and on those left behind; impacts on local places, households, and communities in countries of origin; contradictions of hypermobility as a form of resistance as well as the negative health consequences on migrants; issues of differential power, welcome, and conditionality of acceptance; the performativity of being a good ‘migrant’ ‘refugee’ in rural communities and its impact; the importance of transnational and translocal connections in navigating life in rural communities; adopting a ‘whole’ community approach to researching migration at local levels, the role of regional/local mediating organisations, and inclusion of migrants’ voices; the performativity of governments in relation to migration and countering the use of migrants by governments as

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instruments in national projects and in negotiating geopolitical dynamics. Although this collection does not address the many issues that merit attention to locating the rural in discussions on processes of international migration, it does, nevertheless, provide a useful starting point for further debate and research.

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Index

A Agricultural workers, 15, 16, 51–73, 79–104, 111–136 Agriculture, 2, 7, 14, 26, 51–59, 63, 64, 66–69, 72, 79, 82–89, 92–93, 103, 117, 161, 201 Australia, 2, 4, 6, 17, 24, 171–194, 202, 203, 211, 213, 215, 216 B Borders, 2, 11, 16, 25, 26, 52, 55, 58, 62, 64, 68, 71, 131, 142, 144, 148–156, 160, 161, 165, 166, 173, 181, 182, 193, 202, 208 Brexit, 2, 3, 11 Businesses, 13, 17, 24, 32, 34, 35, 84, 97, 135, 162, 173, 177–193, 201 C Camps, 16, 141–167, 173, 185, 187, 188, 193

Canada, 2–4, 9–11, 15, 24, 79–104, 112–115, 117, 118, 121, 126, 128–131, 133–135, 172, 173, 203, 204, 212 Children, 37, 39, 59, 60, 63, 65, 66, 97, 134, 148, 158, 160, 161, 164, 186 Circular migration, 14, 15, 55, 65, 68, 71, 72, 100 Cities, 9, 16, 17, 23, 26, 27, 36, 37, 142, 147, 153, 155, 173, 175, 176, 182 Collins, J., 17, 173, 178, 180–183, 190, 213 Communities, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10–12, 14–18, 23–45, 52, 53, 56–61, 68, 69, 72, 80, 81, 84, 98, 99, 103, 115, 143, 145–147, 150, 155, 160, 161, 164, 165, 172, 173, 175–183, 187, 189–193, 202–204, 206–208, 211–217 rural, 11, 12, 14, 23–45, 56, 59, 61, 103, 172, 173, 202, 207, 211–213, 215, 217

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Kerrigan, P. de Lima (eds.), The Rural-Migration Nexus, Rethinking Rural, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18042-2

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INDEX

Concept, 5, 7, 13, 14, 16, 24, 25, 28, 30, 44, 55, 71, 84, 100, 118, 124, 130, 136, 141, 181, 187, 193, 204, 205, 212, 214, 215 Context, 2–13, 24–31, 33, 38, 54, 55, 59, 72, 79, 81, 88, 89, 100, 102, 112–125, 134, 135, 143, 150, 151, 162, 165, 173, 178, 179, 192, 193, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 211–213, 215 Countries, 2–4, 8–11, 14–17, 23, 26–29, 32, 33, 36–39, 41, 43, 54, 55, 57–64, 66–72, 81, 86, 87, 91, 94, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 117, 118, 121, 123, 129, 135, 141, 143, 149, 150, 154, 156, 159, 161–164, 166, 172, 173, 176–178, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186–191, 193, 204, 205, 209, 210, 212, 213, 217 Cultures, 5, 28, 37, 39, 82, 95, 118, 124, 127, 144, 151, 155–162, 188, 190, 192 D Development, 1–4, 6, 12, 24, 25, 27–30, 33, 41, 45, 68, 84, 103, 135, 141, 143, 144, 146–148, 150, 157, 162, 166, 167, 174, 176, 177, 180–182, 206, 211, 212, 214 E Emotions, 16, 111, 112, 123–129, 133–136, 207–211 Employers, 9, 27, 29, 86, 87, 89, 92, 94–98, 100, 102, 113, 121–123, 125, 128, 129, 132, 133, 135

Employment, 2, 3, 9, 10, 23, 24, 26–29, 31, 33–36, 40, 43, 54, 55, 57, 63, 65–67, 70, 71, 81, 85, 87, 88, 91, 94, 96, 115, 122, 125, 128, 146, 165, 175, 178–180, 186, 191, 192, 209, 211, 213 Entrepreneurship, 17, 34, 171–194, 217 immigrant, 173, 177, 178, 181, 182 Europe, 2–4, 9, 14–16, 51–73, 142, 144, 145, 148, 150, 154, 158, 166, 167, 188, 202, 211–213, 215, 216 F Families, 8, 10, 12, 17, 26, 32, 35–39, 43, 51–54, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 82, 83, 86, 92, 96, 97, 103, 113, 121, 127, 134–136, 158, 160, 161, 175, 177, 179–181, 183–187, 191, 193, 204, 205, 208–210 Farms, 37, 51, 53–57, 59, 60, 62–64, 66, 67, 70–72, 81–84, 89, 91, 93, 96–99, 103, 176, 182, 184 Fear, 27, 64, 70, 71, 81, 94, 124, 127–129, 135, 143, 144, 149, 150, 157–160, 164, 166 Finland, 3, 10, 14, 23, 25–27, 29, 32, 34–38, 43–45, 55, 204, 212, 213 Focus, 5, 7, 12, 15, 16, 25, 30–32, 45, 52, 56, 58, 72, 73, 82, 83, 85, 111, 133, 134, 142, 151, 156–158, 163, 181–183, 204–208, 210, 213 Food production, 8, 10, 51–53, 56, 57, 60, 69, 70, 72, 80, 81, 103, 134

 INDEX 

G Globalisation, 1–7, 13, 18, 55, 58, 173, 177, 202, 204, 205 Governments, 7, 10, 15, 30, 62, 82, 86–89, 99–104, 113, 118, 121, 123, 128, 132, 134, 144, 148, 149, 154, 163, 172, 174–176, 180, 182, 211–214, 217 H Health, 4, 8, 10, 15, 16, 23, 27, 33, 34, 52, 55, 58, 59, 69–72, 79–104, 112, 125, 130, 134–136, 144, 175, 204, 209–211, 217 Home, 15, 16, 28, 36, 37, 40, 63–66, 69, 70, 72, 83, 87, 96, 97, 131, 133, 134, 158, 159, 171, 172, 180, 184–188, 190, 191, 193, 204, 209, 210, 212, 214 Hospitality, 30, 31, 167, 211–216 conditional, 214 Host, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10–12, 16, 18, 24–26, 30, 34, 38, 40, 43–45, 121, 150, 177, 178, 180, 185, 189, 190, 192, 203, 205–208, 212, 214–216 Hostility, 128, 152, 205, 212, 215, 216 Hostipitality, 215 I Immigrant communities, 26, 177, 180–182 Immigrants, 24–41, 43–45, 83, 95, 118, 173–183, 187 new, 24, 174, 182, 187 Immigration, 15, 25–30, 38, 43, 45, 68, 72, 81, 83, 112, 117, 118,

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121, 128, 172, 174, 176, 177, 212 Individuals, 7, 9, 11, 24, 26, 33, 43, 45, 59, 68, 71, 93, 95, 97, 99, 112, 117, 121, 122, 127, 130, 131, 135, 151, 164, 172, 180, 201, 204, 214, 215 Integration, 2, 4, 10, 11, 14, 24, 27–29, 34, 43, 72, 82, 118, 120, 121, 150, 160, 178, 179, 202, 203, 206, 207, 211, 212 International migration, 3, 4, 7, 24, 174, 203, 208, 218 Interviews, 14, 16, 17, 32–38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 55, 57, 59, 82, 98, 115, 125–127, 131, 142, 151, 155, 183 J Jobs, 2, 17, 27, 28, 57, 62, 64–70, 80, 88, 89, 94, 95, 97–100, 113, 120, 122, 123, 127–129, 131–133, 176, 178, 185–188, 191 L Labour, 2, 6–11, 13, 15–17, 26, 27, 34, 36, 44, 51–61, 63, 64, 66–73, 80–82, 85–89, 92, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 112, 115, 118, 120, 122–125, 129, 131, 134–136, 146, 161, 162, 167, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178–180, 182, 191, 202, 204, 208–211, 216 market, agricultural, 52–55, 71, 72, 86 migrants, 1–3, 8, 10, 81, 86–89, 99, 202–204, 210

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INDEX

Life, 4, 13, 14, 28, 33–40, 51–73, 96, 118, 124, 126, 128, 130, 134, 135, 146, 156, 157, 161–163, 165, 185, 192, 206, 208–213, 217 London, 9, 11, 16, 66, 122, 178, 213 M Mexico, 82, 86, 87, 93, 95, 112–116, 126, 130–132, 203, 209 Migrants, 2, 23–45, 55, 79, 86–89, 112, 141–167, 173–177, 202 Migrant workers, 9, 15, 53, 55, 72, 79, 81, 82, 85–88, 91, 93, 95–100, 103, 104, 112, 115, 118, 121, 123, 124, 128, 129, 135, 204, 205, 209, 210, 217 Migration, 1, 8–12, 24, 55, 80, 112, 123–125, 142, 147–151, 173, 201, 204–207 Mobilities, 4, 12–15, 17, 26, 52, 55, 57–59, 61, 67–69, 71, 72, 79, 82, 87, 123, 143, 156, 178, 201, 203, 205–207, 209 Moldova, 15, 51–73, 203, 209 N Narratives, 3, 7, 11, 15–17, 25, 33, 34, 36, 53, 59, 68, 72, 141–143, 151, 155–165, 176, 178, 183, 202, 204, 207 New Immigration Destinations, 26, 27 North Karelia, 25–27, 29, 31–36, 39, 43, 44 O Occupational health, 4, 8, 79–104, 204, 217 Online, 64, 151, 158

P Participants, 14, 32–41, 43, 44, 81, 84, 117, 126, 127, 134, 142, 151–165, 179, 185, 191, 209 Policies, 2, 7, 10, 13–15, 18, 27–30, 41–45, 53, 59, 62, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 80–82, 88, 89, 92, 99, 102, 103, 112, 113, 117–123, 128, 131, 134, 135, 143–145, 148–151, 163, 165–167, 172–174, 176, 177, 181, 202, 211–213, 215, 216 Population, 2, 3, 5, 8–11, 13, 15, 23–25, 27, 28, 51–53, 59, 60, 64, 81, 84, 89, 99, 101, 103, 114–118, 120, 131, 134–136, 145, 146, 162, 164, 165, 172, 175, 176, 201, 214, 216 Programmes, 10, 14, 15, 24, 26, 30, 34, 40, 59, 62, 63, 67, 68, 81, 82, 84, 86–88, 99–103, 111–136, 158, 172, 174, 175, 180, 183, 204, 209 R Racism, 2–4, 7, 8, 11, 38, 112, 120, 121, 123, 127, 192, 216 Refugees, 4, 7–11, 13, 16, 17, 32, 34, 72, 141–167, 171–194, 202, 203, 214, 217 Research, 12, 15, 16, 18, 24–32, 39, 41, 43, 45, 52, 54–58, 72, 80–85, 91–94, 104, 112, 113, 123, 125–127, 133, 134, 136, 151, 165, 173, 174, 177, 178, 180, 182, 187, 191, 193, 203, 204, 206, 208, 210, 211, 213, 216, 218 Rural areas, 2, 4, 6–16, 23–25, 27, 29, 31, 32, 37, 41, 43, 44, 56, 60, 69, 82, 96, 102, 114, 115, 120, 142, 143, 146–148, 155–157, 159, 161, 162, 166, 167, 174, 201–203, 206, 207, 210–213, 217

 INDEX 

S Safety, 8, 15, 79–104, 125, 134, 149, 210, 211 Seasonal Agricultural Worker Programme (SAWP), 86–88, 96, 99–101, 112, 113, 115–118, 121–123, 128, 129, 132–136 Serbia, 6, 16, 141–167, 213 Serbian, 17, 142–157, 160, 161, 163–167, 213 Services, 4, 9, 23, 24, 26–31, 34, 35, 40, 83, 121, 124, 129, 134, 143, 146, 154, 156, 165, 173, 175, 177, 180, 182, 192, 201, 202, 211, 215–217 Settlement, 9, 14, 24, 29–31, 43, 45, 141–167, 172–179, 182, 184, 186, 187, 191, 192, 203, 212 Society, 4, 14, 25, 28, 29, 31, 33, 43, 52, 60, 68, 103, 118, 121, 124, 129, 133, 151, 152, 161, 165, 166, 177–179, 202, 205, 210 Spaces, 1, 3–6, 11–14, 18, 40, 59, 60, 70, 80, 113–118, 131, 133, 143–151, 153–155, 163, 164, 173, 177, 182, 193, 202–205, 207, 208, 210, 211, 214–217 States, 2, 3, 6–9, 11, 13, 28, 29, 34, 35, 38, 41, 58, 71, 98, 100, 111, 112, 114–116, 125, 127–131, 134, 135, 142, 143, 148–151, 153–157, 160, 162–164, 172, 174, 175, 182, 183, 203, 208, 209, 211, 214 Switzerland, 3, 15, 51–73, 203, 209 T Time, 5, 10–12, 16, 27–30, 34–38, 40, 41, 54, 55, 57–61, 64, 66, 69, 83, 84, 89, 92, 94, 123, 128–131, 136, 142, 143, 146, 147, 150, 152, 154–156, 159,

227

161–163, 173, 185, 193, 205–207, 210, 212, 213 Transnational agricultural workers (TAWs), 15, 79–104, 113, 121–123, 125, 128–130, 132–136 U Understanding, 6, 15, 23–45, 55, 56, 58, 66, 73, 89, 98, 118, 121, 124, 126, 130, 132, 141–167, 177, 181, 182, 189, 205–208, 210, 215–217 W Welcoming, 10, 11, 14, 23–45, 149, 203, 207, 211–216 communities, 24, 30–31, 41, 43–45, 204, 211–213, 215 migrants, 10, 43, 205, 206, 211–216 Women, 32, 35, 37, 41, 54, 61, 64, 97, 122, 127, 134, 135, 151, 157, 158, 164, 165, 183–188, 191, 193 Work, 2, 5, 6, 11, 12, 15, 16, 27, 31, 32, 34–37, 39–41, 43–45, 52, 54–57, 60–72, 79–81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91–102, 112, 117, 121–125, 128–132, 134, 135, 143, 151, 154, 156, 158, 161, 162, 164, 165, 174, 176, 185, 187, 191–193, 205, 209, 210, 216 Workers, 14–17, 51–73, 79–83, 85–89, 91–104, 111–136, 142, 174, 179, 203–205, 209, 210, 217 Workplaces, 8, 79, 81–84, 88, 89, 94–96, 98, 99, 102, 123, 124, 131