The 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic reinforced inequalities between the global North and South
amplifying pre-existing disparities between migrant and citizen permanent resident workers in
receiving and sending states worldwide. In contexts such as Canada it also underscored that
many workers in occupations and sectors deemed essential enough to be exempt from stay-at-home
orders and other public safety measures are migrants a sizeable number of whom sustain
Canada's food supply through their work in its agricultural industry.This book explores the
dynamics behind the pandemic's deleterious outcomes for this vital group of workers
highlighting migrant farmworkers importance to the Canadian economy society and the world of
work alongside the conditions they endured before and during the global health pandemic through
policy and media analysis and open-ended interviews with workers enrolled in two streams of
Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) as well as migrantswithout legal status
employed in agriculture located in Ontario and Quebec. Advancing the notion of transnational
employment strain the authors derive insight from the employment strain model a framework for
understanding risks to the physical and psychological well-being of workers and expand it to
account for migrants' relationships across transnational space.
