The racialization of Caribbean migrant farm labour

Chapters 3 and 4 have demonstrated that there has been a tradition of state intervention in the south-western Ontario fruit and vegetable industry. This intervention involved the mobilization of internal reserves of labour and the recruitment and incorporation of various forms of foreign labour into sites in production relations. The previous chapter demonstrated that the state also intervened by exclusion, and that the process by which permanent settlers were selected for entry to the country was structured by racism. This chapter documents the pressures placed on the Canadian state to admit farm workers from the Caribbean for the fruit and vegetable harvest on a migrant basis and the state’s response to these pressures.