Conference Agenda

Migrants make up a significant proportion of the labour force in high-income states such as Canada, where most transnational workers long entered the country through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) focused historically on filling jobs deemed undesirable to the domestic population. Yet partly as a result of public outcry over the exploitative conditions associated with the TFWP, starting in the mid-2010s Canada shifted the focus of its regime governing international migration for employment on a temporary basis to “mobility” programs under the auspices of its newly inaugurated International Mobility Program (IMP). Contrary to narratives of economic necessity and well-documented realities of exploitation associated with the TFWP, at a policy level, the IMP is cast as a program promoting economically beneficial migration that fosters worker voice and favourable conditions. It nevertheless remains unclear whether the IMP represents a genuine departure from the corrosive conditions associated with temporary migrant work under the TFWP.

This roundtable brings together leading scholars in the field of labour migration to discuss migration/mobility policy distinction underpinning the emergence and rationalizing growth of so-called new international mobility programs across different contexts and explore new directions and continuities in international migration for employment. Taking the publication of Migrant Work By Another Name: Differential Inclusion and Precarity in Canada’s International Mobility Program (University of Toronto Press 2025), and Vosko’s core arguments and analyses as its starting point, presenters will consider how contemporary (im)migration policy frameworks sort transnational workers in a manner contributing to different degrees of inclusion and perpetuate distinct forms of precarity with a focus on high-income receiving states.