In Part 2 of this two-part series on human trafficking, the focus shifts from sex work to migrant labour, and what is left out when trafficking frameworks dominate policy responses. Joined again by co-hosts Dr. Katrin Roots (Wilfrid Laurier University), Dr. Jessica Templeman (Memorial University), and Dr. Ann De Shalit (University of Windsor), this episode centres the work and expertise of migrant justice organizer and scholar Dr. Evelyn Encalada-Grez. Drawing on decades of organizing with migrant farm workers, Evelyn exposes how Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and immigration enforcement actively produce the very conditions (precarity, coercion, abuse, and violence) that anti-trafficking discourse claims to address.
Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez is a transnational labour scholar and community-labour organizer committed to critical sociology and decolonial theories of knowledge production that centres diverse ways of knowing and precarious workers’ experiences within the margins of the global economy. She is the co-founder of the award-winning collective, Justice for Migrant WorkersJ4MW), that has advocated for the rights of migrant farmworkers in Canada for two decades. Her research bridges grassroots activism with academic scholarship. Through this approach, Dr. Encalada Grez has extensively documented the lives of Mexican migrant farmworker women who work and forge transnational livelihoods between rural Canada and rural Mexico. As a public sociologist, Dr. Encalada Grez has mobilized her research through various media sources such as documentaries, and given talks in venues such as Parliament Hill, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and at the United Nations in New York. She has also worked transnationally with export-processing workers in Mexico and Central America, and as lead travelling faculty teaching US university students in over 6 countries. For three semesters, she was also the Academic Director of an intensive social justice study abroad program in her city of birth, Valparaiso, Chile. Dr. Encalada Grez is driven by her immigrant working class experiences and committed to decolonializing and transformative pedagogies.
Dr. Katrin Roots is an Assistant Professor in Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University and has researched Canada’s anti-trafficking efforts for over 15 years. She is the author of Domesticating Human Trafficking: Law, Policing and Prosecution in Canada (2022) and co-editor of Trafficking Harms: Critical Politics, Perspectives and Experiences (2024).
Dr. Jessica Templeman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her research focuses on exclusionary migration law and policy in Canada, including deportation for criminality and human trafficking.
Dr. Ann De Shalit is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Work at the University of Windsor and teaches at Trent and York Universities. She has conducted critical trafficking research since 2009 and has supported grassroots migrant and labour justice activism for over a decade.
This two-part series was supported by a Knowledge Synthesis Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). CRSP Talk is a production of the Centre for Research on Security Practices (CRSP) at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Misaligned Frameworks (Part II): Migrant Exploitation and Anti-trafficking Efforts
Centre for Research on Security Practices (CRSP)
Interviewers: Avery Moore Kloss, Katrin Roots, Jessica Templeman, & Ann De Shalit
Participants: Evelyn Encalada Grez
Length of Interview: 00:48:47
[Introduction Music] 00:00:00
00:00:08 Avery Moore Kloss
Welcome back to CRSP Talk, a podcast from the Center for Research on Security Practices at Wilfrid Laurier University. I'm Avery Moore Kloss.
A quick note that this episode is the second in a two-part series on human trafficking. So if you haven't listened to part one yet, we suggest going back one episode and getting caught up first. And if you did listen to part one already, you'll know that for this series, I'm joined by three researcher co-hosts. Can you all just remind us who you are?
00:00:34 Ann De Shalit
Hi, everybody. My name is Ann De Shalit. I'm A SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the School of Social Work at the University of Windsor, and I also teach at Trent and New York Universities.
00:00:45 Jessica Templeman
Hi, everyone. I'm Jessica Templeman. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland.
00:00:52 Katrin Roots
And my name is Katrin Roots. I'm an assistant professor in the criminology department here at Wilfrid Laurier University.
00:00:58 Avery Moore Kloss
Awesome. Well, welcome back, everyone. In part one, we had a really important discussion about human trafficking and how harmful policies and definitional vagueness have led to an overwhelming focus on domestic sex trafficking in Canada, a focus that often ends with the conflation of voluntary sex work to trafficking. And today we're looking at how at the same time, exploitation, force, coercion, abuse, and related conditions in other labor sectors like the Temporary Foreign Worker Program or TFWP is often ignored. So I wonder to start off if Katrin and Jess, could each of you share an insight from our last episode that you'd like to bring into this episode? And as a reminder, we heard author, activist, and movement strategist Chanelle Gallant about her work advocating for sex workers. And we heard from lawyer and professor Vince Wong about the legal and historical lens focused on the Canadian context. Katrin, maybe you can go first.
00:01:53 Katrin Roots
Yeah, so last time we heard from Chanelle about how anti-trafficking laws don't just fail to protect sex workers, but that they're actually actively harming them. Chanelle pointed out that the harms happen through an aggressive policing of sex workers and their associates, which is carried out under the guise of dealing with or combating human trafficking. She also talked about racial profiling and the use of deportation as a tool against these workers under this logic of rescue, which I think provides a crucial foundation for this episode, where we're shifting our focus to how similar dynamics of precarity, abuse, and exploitation are largely ignored in the migrant labor context.
00:02:37 Jessica Templeman
Yeah, I think it's also important to note that in the first episode, Vince Wong explained that trafficking frameworks reduce exploitation to isolated bad actors, quote unquote, while ignoring the structural reality that immigration law and labor programs themselves restrict freedom, enforce discipline, and extract value from migrants, thereby creating a situation where exploitation is not just possible, but it's actively facilitated. Like in this context, the state appears as a savior even as it's perpetuating harm.
00:03:17 Avery Moore Kloss
And then Ann, did you have something you wanted to add there too?
00:03:20 Ann De Shalit
Quickly, the disconnect between rhetoric and reality is really profound and quite concerning because we have anti-trafficking discourse claiming to protect vulnerable workers, but also consistently ignoring and displacing state mechanisms that create that vulnerability, including how the TFWP itself is set up, which necessarily produces an exploitable and deportable workforce. And this state violence is often absent from our conversations about trafficking, but it is important that we continue to hold the state accountable.
00:03:58 Avery Moore Kloss
I think that flip is a really important setup to this episode. And you're going to take the reins here. So I wonder if you could set up for us who our new guest is and why her expertise is so important to this discussion.
00:04:11 Ann De Shalit
Definitely. So in this episode, we invited Evelyn Encalada Grez to build on these arguments that we've been unpacking, but from the lens of someone working with migrant workers in Canada. Evelyn is a longtime migrant justice organizer. She's the founder of Justicia for Migrant Workers and is an incredible and critical scholar with an acute understanding of how Canadian immigration and labor policies and criminalization work in tandem to manufacture conditions of exploitation force abuse, violence, coercion, discrimination, and so on, the types of activities or conditions that we typically associate with one bad actor or one bad apple. So here's Evelyn.
00:05:00 Evelyn Encalada Grez
Hi, my name is Evelyn Encalada Grez, and I'm an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University and also an organizer with Justice for Migrant Workers. We started our work as a collective back in 2001. So it's been about 24 years. So we've done a whole range of things. Our work is really multi-pronged. We realize that we cannot do just research. We realize we cannot just do an organized protest. We realize that we cannot just work within Canada, but also we have to go back to where the communities that migrant workers come from. We have met with many families so that way we can understand the migration circuit more holistically among those left behind and what happens, when migrant workers are here, what happens back home and why migrant workers actually have to leave, what their communities look like? What does it look like in terms of their livelihoods, you know, so that way we can actually see the push and pull of migration, not just the pull here, but the push back in their home countries.
00:06:10 Avery Moore Kloss
So we started off by asking Evelyn who the anti-trafficking discourse actually benefits, if not migrant workers whose conditions meet, for all intents and purposes, international anti-trafficking laws. And just to note that in this clip, you'll also hear Katrin jump in with a follow-up question.
00:06:25 Evelyn Encalada Grez
I guess it's benefiting the discourse of there's a few bad apples type of discourse. So it's benefiting the government itself, the actual structure of these agricultural corporations and different sectors, not just agriculture, but it's benefiting how capital actually operates because it just singles out a few cases rather than looking at particular sectors as a whole or looking at capitalism as a whole, which of course it's really difficult to do and overwhelming, but also quite for the layperson, but quite necessary for us to unpack. And workers, they do have this temporary residence status available to them if they could prove actually that they are quote unquote victims of trafficking. But the process is very onerous. The process does not guarantee that they will be able to stay. And while they are applying, they become unable to work anywhere else and they become vulnerable for a long period of time. And if it's hard for workers to even try to get a vulnerable work permit, it's even more difficult to get a temporary resident status. So the recourses that are available actually render workers even more vulnerable and there's no guarantee that they will be able to stay in Canada. And most of the times it'll just result in them being sent home. and being even more precarious and underground here in Canada. And in Canada, it's very, very difficult to be undocumented. In the city, also in the countryside, it becomes nearly impossible to survive. So it almost acts like the frameworks that are available, it almost acts as a deterrent in itself because it's so impossible to actually benefit and obtain any protections from the actual framework. So it doesn't work.
00:08:22 Katrin Roots
Maybe add a little bit to how anti-trafficking policies specifically create harms to migrant workers. Because we know that there's so many policies that on paper look good, right? But when they're actually enforced, it looks completely different. Are there any specific anti-trafficking policies that you know of that are actually not as good or harmful?
00:08:50 Evelyn Encalada Grez
That's a difficult question for me to answer because of the fact that Justicia as an organization, we stay away ourselves from any trafficking discourses. So when we talk to workers, when there are problems with workers, we don't even go there at all, but I mostly see the damage and the harm of these anti-trafficking discourse in creating misinformation, in appealing to morality rather than action, than concrete action among the population to understand the root causes of migration of displacement and exploitation. I am reminded now of also, there was a time when Canada had an exotic worker program, but because of all of this anti-trafficking panic, that program, and then there was a scandal too with somebody who was a part of that program who was working for this federal politicians campaign way back when. But that was a clear example of how also the trafficking panacea impacted like a range of women. Some men were a part of that program, but mostly women. Anyway, so then that program was completely canceled. But then they left all of these folks completely vulnerable and they were desperate to also gain status in the country so they could stay in Canada after all of these networks they had built. And then out of all of the work that they were doing here in Canada, they built a life for themselves. They worked towards their dreams and all of a sudden they were cut off from that because of this moral panacea. And at that time, there was a lot of women that were looking to get married so that way they could stay in the country, but then they could be stepping into relationships of very unequal power because of the need for status. The women were completely abandoned by having this program disappear from one night to another. But then I know that the Canadian government was trying to protect the women, mostly women, that they were protecting, but in the end they harmed them and they just abandoned them. They were further marginalized in precarious conditions of work and housing as well.
00:11:13 Avery Moore Kloss
Katrin, in this section you asked Evelyn a follow-up question, and it was a good question. I wonder if you can start us off with some of your reflections about what Evelyn says here.
00:11:22 Katrin Roots
So there are a few important points to note here. One is that Justicia and other migrant justice organizers who work directly with or are sometimes themselves workers experiencing unacceptable labor conditions, some of which actually meet the criteria for human trafficking, they avoid engaging with this anti-trafficking framework. Evelyn explained that the anti-trafficking framework can't address issues of exploitation, abuse, violence, coercion, control, and so on because it's founded on carceral and racist logic, which themselves produce these very conditions.
00:11:59 Ann De Shalit
Yeah, I'd love to play a clip from Evelyn's interview where she shares a really powerful story about a woman named Laura. Laura is a migrant farm worker whose experience really perfectly demonstrates state complicity and violence and trafficking, as we discussed here and also in the previous episode. So here's Evelyn again.
00:12:19 Evelyn Encalada Grez
One story that comes to mind right away is a story that I actually took to the United Nations in New York. It was the case of Laura. I wrote about her in the Toronto Star many years ago, and it was a case that I was involved with really closely, so I can speak to it very intimately. It was a case of a migrant woman. Again, I'm pointing to a woman because their gender just creates more vulnerability, right? And she was run over by a tractor trailer that ran over her leg twice, not just once, but twice. So her leg was fractured in several parts. And so there you would figure, she has workers' compensation, she has OHIP because this was in Ontario. And she had everything, she had all the recourses to stay in the country and receive treatment. But as soon as that accident happened, the Mexican consulate at the time, this was several years ago, they just wanted her out of Canada and the employer wanted her out because sick workers, for some reason, they're not very productive for employers. Employers do not want human beings. They want machines that don't break down at all. They want machines that don't have any social connections outside of work. That's why they migrate or they're not allowed to bring their families anyway. So and also employers don't want their premiums to go up if workers have to go on workers comp and they just don't want to bother with any paperwork. They just want workers to work, work, work. And then they just want to focus on the produce and all the money they make from their profits. So the worker, Laura, she was being pressured to go back to Mexico and just give up on all of her treatment in Canada. And they were the Mexican consulate at the time and also the employer were promising that she was going to receive treatment back at home in Mexico. But if you're from a rural area, most of these medical facilities are in the city. And also, if you're from a rural area, you don't have all of this money floating around to pay up front for all of these medical expenses and then wait to get reimbursed, right? That's completely impossible for many rural families in the global South. So she knew us from Justicia, and so she decided to stay in the country and also use up her OHIP. And one day we went to visit her at her farm to make sure she was okay because workers cannot basically live anywhere else. If they have a tied work permit with one particular person, even when they get injured, they're supposed to live and be in those premises, right? So we couldn't take her out of the farm, otherwise she could indeed be in trouble with border patrol. But when we went to visit her, the farmer found out that we were there and he was very antagonistic and aggressive towards myself and another organizer. And when we were leaving that night, he approached us again as we were walking to the car and it was really dark. It was at the end of the night after speaking to Laura and all of the women in the farm about next steps and what had to happen or what could happen. And one of the things that we were all worried about is that Laura, when everybody was working, could just be taken by the Mexican consulate or by the employer and taken to the airport and just sent home to Mexico. So we were worried about her being left by herself in such a vulnerable state. And mind you, at this time, she was living in a portable and after you have a horrible accident when you see your life flash before you, you're in pain, the last place you want to be is in a very substandard portable that's not even meant to be used as housing. So it wasn't the most ideal place to actually heal, right? And so that was really horrible to see, like where she had to be and how she had to be by herself because she couldn't work and then having that pressure on her. So the employer at that end of the night, he warned us if we ever came back to the farm that he was going to call the police. Like I couldn't drive at that point because I was so agitated and I was so upset. Because you know, things with organizing, you go through a range of emotions and you see all of this injustice. And of course, it's hard not to be affected. That's why we do the work that we do. And so I couldn't drive. So I asked the other organizer if he could drive instead. And so he got into the driver's seat and I was already in the passenger side and the employer all of a sudden opened up the door to the driver's seat. He grabbed the other organizer from by his jacket and as if he was going to eject him out of the car and start beating him up or something. And then I took the employer's hand and I said, stop it. I felt like I was in a movie scene, something like that. And, here in Canada, if somebody touches you like that, it's like assault. So I couldn't believe it. And then this is like in a rural area in Ontario, it's dark. The street of the farm is named after the family that owns the farm. You know, there's all of these, I don't know, small town logics that operate in these places. You know, there's a lot of money, a lot of power that these farm owners actually have. And then here we were like activists from Toronto, you know, and also like of color and not a good scene. And anyway, so we decided we couldn't leave Laura there that night because our fears were most likely going to come true, right? And so we ended up having to call the police so that way the police wouldn't be called against us. And that's the last thing we want to do, right? As people of color, as people that work with vulnerable population, but we were justified at that moment. Like we had to think about it. We had to be really strategic, right? And some people would probably not think twice about calling the police, but we had to think twice, three times, four times. But we wanted to get Laura out of the farm. And if we went back, then we could have been arrested because it was private property, right? So it was a really hard call. But we also knew somebody from the local community. Luckily that we also called as well to be our witness because, and then that's the other thing too, maybe if I was a white woman, I wouldn't have thought twice or three times about my strategy, but we went with the OPP because it was a rural area. And then one of the police officers said, wow, like an apple's never going to taste the same way again. And so they work in the community, but they had no idea also what happens behind closed doors. And this was a farm that was segregated along the lines of gender and race outside of the portable where these women lived. There was a sign for the Jamaican males that said no men allowed. What ended up happening is that we left with Laura so that way she was in a safe place and she could continue receiving what she had a right to, which is health care. But the employer called border patrol and accused her of absconding the program. So she was basically barred from coming into Canada for two years because she enforced her right to health care after having a workplace accident. And so she was penalized and it took her years and years to come back to the program and I just saw her a few weekends ago in the Niagara region. She's back there.
00:20:35 Avery Moore Kloss
So, we recorded this interview with Evelyn a few months ago, and I have thought about this story more than a dozen times since then. I think this story really does speak for itself. But Ann, I wonder, can you reflect on Laura's story for us and why it's so important in the context of this conversation?
00:20:51 Ann De Shalit
Absolutely. So Laura's story is important because it gives us a look into the role of the state in manufacturing harm. After suffering a workplace injury, Laura was eventually banned from entering Canada for two years. So it raises the question of how can any worker in a precarious position like hers report their experiences or exploitation and abuse by an employer, which are often also in those circumstances difficult to prove, harder than physical injury, for example, if they may suffer the same or worse consequences. This is similar to our recent research on definitional practices, where Evelyn points out the politics of what gets defined as trafficking, who's protected from or against trafficking like conditions, who's not. But even when attention is directed to a situation or a person through the lens of trafficking, protection is not guaranteed. And in fact, as we heard from Chanel in the previous episode, people in these circumstances often continue to experience harm and must navigate complicated bureaucratic and legal hurdles in order to have their victimhood recognized.
00:22:09 Katrin Roots
And we actually asked Evelyn about the challenges of obtaining state-issued trafficking-specific temporary resident permits, which we often hear to be these supportive government options for people that are fleeing trafficking-like conditions. And here's that portion of the conversation.
00:22:27 Katrin Roots
From what you've seen in the cases that you work with and the individuals that you work with, what kind of evidentiary proof is required? What are they looking to see to label somebody as a justified or legitimate victim of trafficking?
00:22:43 Evelyn Encalada Grez
Oh, they're looking to see hardcore evidence, evidence through whatever you can have on your cell phone of abuse. And many times, workers are not even allowed to even use their phones anywhere around the workplace. And even when there is evidence like the case of some Mexican workers that were brought in to work in Canada, not all of them were able to stay in the country because not all of them qualified for the temporary status. So it all depends on the particular official that is overseeing your case. So then it's very subjective. There's no guarantee that whatever evidence that you provide is going to be good enough for that particular person that is overseeing your case, your file. But a lot of this evidence, yeah, a lot of workers are not able to obtain because of language barriers, because they're so isolated, because they don't have the same access to communications and tools that we do because of their vulnerability.
00:23:51 Katrin Roots
So the government keeps reporting that they're fulfilling like 90% of the requests, right? Like 90% of the people that apply are getting TRPs. What's been your experience with those people you work with?
00:24:07 Evelyn Encalada Grez
I haven't seen many people actually receive the TRPs, but some folks that were in the film Migrant Dreams were granted this TRP, but it was a difficult process. And then I always think about, what exactly are the consequences of going through these processes, and sometimes along the way when workers are applying for these types of statuses, they end up losing their families, right? Because they spend so much time through the bureaucratic layers of the Canadian government. And at the end, okay, they may get status, but then they lost so much along the way. And so those are the things that we don't really think about, what is actually gained and what is actually lost, right? And then there's so much lost emotionally and effectively that we should also be taking into consideration. But in my experience, I haven't seen many workers receive this status. And I've been working with this population for 24 years. So that I think says a lot.
00:25:12 Avery Moore Kloss
I wonder if you can just talk about how media portrayals of trafficking and migrant workers and the public discourse, like how that actually leads to these communities being faced by like a real lack of options and harm.
00:25:30 Evelyn Encalada Grez
Oh yes, I see this all the time or I hear about this, you know, that migrant workers have options and actually they have rights. And actually a lot of like the most powerful agricultural groups, they keep on insisting that migrant workers have the same rights as Canadian workers. And okay, maybe that could be in print, but actually it's not a problem of workers not knowing their rights or not having rights. It's the problem of lack of enforcement. But then also the problem of when workers do enforce their rights, they get punished and they get sent home. So sometimes I give talks and then, somebody will be like, I don't know, panicking within themselves. Maybe, the other family has a farm with migrant workers and they want to quickly point to there's only a few bad apples and it's just bad apples and, workers, all they need is to be taught their rights. So it puts the onus also on workers. And then time and time again, we've seen when workers do enforce their rights, like leaving horrible housing conditions. Well, what happens? Then they are left without housing and without status. Like it's a whole chain of events that happens that leaves them completely excluded from everything, including health care, right? Health care and they cannot work anywhere else until a temporary visa could be issued. But in the meantime, where do they go? Where do they go? How do they survive? Oh and I forgot to mention too, or maybe it was a question here, like one of the main pillars of exploitation within these programs, the most precarious of the programs within the temporary foreign worker architecture, is the fact that workers are bound to one employer, one employer, a closed work permit, and so that creates all of these conditions for abuse and for exploitations, but workers, okay, who are they? Workers are coming from all of these impoverished communities back in Guatemala where there are Canadian mining companies, mind you, know, that are operating in many of these parts of the world, including, there was a time, for instance, in Guatemala when US Americans could actually they had to, if they wanted to be treated more diplomatically, more kindly, they would used to use a Canadian flag on their backpack or wherever. Well, now Canadians use many, many communities. Being Canadian could mean antagonism from the local population because there are Canadian mining companies that are displacing communities. In Mexico, for instance, the North American free trade that was established a long time ago, that also resulted in a lot of small farmers losing their livelihoods because that meant more agricultural foodstuffs were able to be just dumped into Mexico. And so that created another flux of outward migration north, not just north to the United States, but also to Canada. So it's very interesting for me how Canada has been able to hide behind the empire for so long, like we are too complicit in this displacement in this global apartheid system. And I think Canadians now are just realizing, oh, that also they're vulnerable to the wrath of the empire, but we've always been in the, we've always been complicit with the empire in creating this displacement and what this displacement does is makes available all of this labor, labor to be disciplined and free labor to be coerced legally by all of these federal programs.
00:29:20 Avery Moore Kloss
Okay, so I just want to jump in here and say that in part one, we asked Chanelle and Vince to offer their view on an alternative approach to addressing the root cause of the harm of the current human trafficking framework. And so we also asked Evelyn that same question, and I think her response is really powerful. So here's Evelyn.
00:29:38 Evelyn Encalada Grez
Like I would want to speak to the mainstream Canadian public. Before you get on a plane and go to Mexico, go to Jamaica, where a lot of migrant workers are from, get to know about the countries in which you're going. Get to know about structural adjustment programs. Get to know about free trade programs, free trade deals that have deprived people of their livelihoods. Think beyond the resorts. Educate yourself. Join us in making more noise for status. During the pandemic, we thought that there was a window for Canadians to actually see or the general public to actually see the importance of migrant farm workers as essential workers. That didn't come with any new rights, that didn't come with any tangible protections. It didn't come with a raise, not even temporarily. And then that window was closed and now we're seeing an immigrant backlash. where I'm seeing some former immigrants even going against immigrants. So I say, let's wake up and actually realize that the crises that we're living are crises of capitalism, of unfettered capitalism. We can't continue on in the same way that we have been operating by destroying the earth, by extracting from the earth, extracting from people. And it's completely, if you wouldn't, if pointing to and trying to appeal to any morality. It's completely immoral to expect that people of color, people from the global South, continue to subsidize the economy, to subsidize our lives as so-called citizens. Sometimes when I give talks and say that workers need better rights, better pay. At least one or two people will point to, oh, but if we treat them better, then our grocery bills will go up. I can't believe that people would say that out loud. And guess what? Our grocery bills have gone up. And where is that money going to? And that hasn't translated into workers having better lives. And then when we think about workers, we can't just think about them by themselves. They're connected to communities. They're connected to families. And so I say what we need is to raise the floor for everyone from the community up. And that starts with making noise around status, status upon arrival. And then I also think about that this status, the idea of status, should be status that we also think about globally, that we all have a right to life, that we all have, if we're here, we have a right to live. And right now we're going into or already have stepped into a post-human rights world. And so I say that before it becomes too late, we have to fight for each other's humanity, from Gaza, from here, from the farms, from everywhere.
00:32:46 Avery Moore Kloss
I feel like this portion of Evelyn's interview was such a powerful moment. And I think at least for me, it made it crystal clear why this alternative approach is one that we need to all be thinking about. But I wonder what part of this call to action from Evelyn has stuck with each of you?
00:33:02 Jessica Templeman
So for me, Evelyn's commentary on the limitation of rights-based protections is particularly powerful. She talks about the contestation around extension of rights to migrant workers, which publicly appear as a finite resource whose use by migrants impinges on the rights of others. And it's this individualistic perspective that sustains the systemic oppression of marginalized people. We can't challenge the systems that maintain subjugation when we're fighting each other.
00:33:38 Ann De Shalit
Also, as we can see, Evelyn reminds us of the interconnected struggle. I took that piece to be exceptionally powerful. Also looking at the power dynamics and global capitalist relations. So essentially, for anyone who thinks, for example, that migrants are none of their business or that what goes on in other parts of the world is not their problem, we really don't have that option living in a globalized world where what happens here affects what happens elsewhere, especially Canadian corporations that are also responsible for influencing economic relations as well as environmental conditions in the global South, which then influence and affect immigration flows and needs.
00:34:25 Katrin Roots
What stood out for me is how much our imagination for change has become limited to these conversations about what is or what exists. So for example, whether or not we would be as a society willing to pay more for groceries and so on rather than really talking about bigger changes, right, talking about the need to recognize and honor the dignity of all people. And Evelyn really does a good job of reminding us that these debates are very limited and that they are human created, right? So they're not natural and so they're something that we can change and we can move past. And there's just one more story that Evelyn shared that I think we should play and I think it really sums up how harmful and how exploitative this temporary foreign worker program can be.
00:35:11 Evelyn Encalada Grez
One case that I have in mind here that I wanted to share with you is a case that I had to deal with in the context of BC recently. And it just shows that women in particular, migrant women, are placed in these really impossible situations without there being recourse that really responds to their vulnerability and that response to their particular needs. So to actually, one migrant woman reached out to me because she was living with another migrant woman. So there was only two of them in one particular farm in the Okanagan. And they lived in a farm that also sold the produce right there. But on the weekends, after like 5:00 or so, whenever the fruit stand was closed, that entire farm was locked up. And that meant that they were locked up themselves. They couldn't leave the farm beyond the business hours. And so on the weekends, they would be left alone and locked up in their farm. The owners of the farm, they lived somewhere else. The main patriarch of the family who was the main boss at the farm, he started sexually harassing one of the women. And so imagine being locked up, being isolated, not knowing the language, not even being able to leave your farm because you were locked up on the weekends and after business hours during the week. What do you do, right? And so I was telling and relaying to the migrant woman what her options were. But the options were very limited. She didn't want to report the farmer because she knew that her, herself and the other migrant women would completely lose their job and would completely lose maybe not just that year, that particular contract where they were relying on a particular wage, where their families were expecting to receive remittances for that particular time frame that a contract actually is. They had an eight-month contract, so they didn't want to end their contract early, but it wasn't just losing their contract and losing all those wages. It was potentially never being able to come back to Canada ever again because there are a few positions for women. And so once women are not called back by a particular farmer or a particular employer, most likely they will not return. They won't be sent back to Canada. And so I said, you could denounce and we can send local government officials to the farm, but they didn't want to risk losing their jobs. And at the end, this particular migrant woman who was having all these issues of harassment, she wasn't called back to the farm and she ended up having to migrate undocumented to the United States. And so it shows how the recourses that we have basically punish migrants, especially women, because these programs for agriculture, they're mostly all for men, and there are a few positions for women. And so women, many times, they have to basically go against their own well-being and adjust as much as possible to keep their work. Going through the temporary residence status or even the vulnerable work permit process was completely out of reach and completely unrealistic for her and the other migrant woman to apply for because they would have been left without housing, without any means to provide for themselves and completely up in the air wondering how to survive or not being able to survive. So sometimes workers, when they're in those situations, either they have to leave completely and that's the only way to get out of a situation by going back to their communities or they have to migrate somewhere else in order to survive, insisting to survive by migrating for work. It's a form of survival. And so the system here in Canada is completely flawed. I think in the mainstream we could have all of this discourse around anti-trafficking that applies to issues of morality, but then on a concrete basis, these systems don't work at all and then they leave completely protected or in place all of these structural systems that as organizers and as academics we've been trying to point to that are the main reasons why people find themselves in these situations.
00:39:58 Avery Moore Kloss
For me, this is a story I've thought about again and again since Evelyn shared it with us. And I think it's really indicative of the actual human cost of what is happening here. And I'd love to hear from each of you as we wrap up. What have you learned from putting together these two episodes? You did an incredible amount of work on these episodes. And I really value your opinion here. And I'll ask you kind of each the question we always end on in CRSP Talk, which is what research do you still think needs to be done in this area? What's on your wish list?
00:40:30 Ann De Shalit
What I'm taking away is that we really can't talk about our study trafficking in isolation from these larger structural and systemic conditions. So looking at immigration systems, global capitalism, labor relations, and also sex work myths and stigma which really play into how we understand trafficking as we heard in the last episode. When we factor all of this in and also knowing the historical context of anti-trafficking efforts, I think it becomes clearer and clearer that the anti-trafficking framework simply is not capable of capturing these crucial elements. In fact, I would argue it exists to silence and displace them and to serve a different set of moral and political concerns that have really little to do with actual experience of exploitation, force, abuse, coercion, and so on. And so those of us who are concerned with these conditions, especially grassroots organizers who have been serving and supporting these communities for a very, very long time, know that the carceral and racist anti-trafficking response is harmful in many ways. And we need supports and services and scholarship that are in service of movements for justice, not for of state institutions. So to that end, I think research needs to continue to build, to continue to expose the harms of anti-trafficking. Of course, that alone is not enough. It also needs to continue to gather information that's useful for grassroots organizing and services and importantly needs to continue to be informed by workers themselves or anyone else who might be experiencing the conditions that are typically associated with trafficking. And this might include best practices around worker and migrant safety, unionization, employer and state responsibility and accountability measures, for effective reporting tools and so on and these are efforts that are already happening and just need further support.
00:42:41 Jessica Templeman
Ann I think your summation is so powerful and it really reflects some of the themes that resonated with me throughout these episodes as well. It's specifically the limitations of the present trafficking framework and the challenges in seeking to address migrant harm through law. So from my perspective, further research is required on the operations and effects of human trafficking discourse within the Canadian immigration system more broadly. Grassroots workers like Chanelle and Evelyn have really made clear the experiences of migrants with exploitation, abuse, force, control, coercion, etc. But the reality is that there is a lack of substantive academic research in Canada to confirm these experiences. And as academics, we have a responsibility to do the work of exposing the source of the harms denoted, including in law, policy, and legal decision making as employed by actors across the immigration system specifically.
00:43:41 Katrin Roots
For me, these episodes highlight, and this is in line with what Ann and Jess have already said as well, is just how essential it is to listen to and be guided by the lived experiences and expertise of those individuals that are directly impacted by anti-trafficking efforts and by the temporary foreign worker program. Because so often our policies, laws and sort of quote unquote solutions are talked about and created by these policy makers and lawyers and academics who really have no direct experience of these systems. But without the meaningful inclusion of the voices of those that are actually living these realities, those interventions are often at best incomplete and oftentimes are deeply harmful. So these conversations should really be the central to what we consider the problem to be and the way that we imagine justice to look like.
00:44:34 Avery Moore Kloss
Thank you all for sharing your really thoughtful research wish list in this area. And thank you for the incredible amount of work you put into these interviews and creating this two-part series, because without your research, your connections, and obviously your expertise, none of this would make it to AIR.
00:44:52 Ann De Shalit & Katrin Roots
Thank you, Avery.
00:44:54 Avery Moore Kloss
We decided to keep the most powerful moment from our interview with Evelyn for the end. And we did that because this reminder is a really powerful way to conclude these two episodes. So here is Evelyn.
00:45:08 Evelyn Encalada Grez
Workers have dreams like all of us, right? We all have our dreams and workers, a lot of them migrate because of the love that they have for their families. They love their children. They want to provide the best for their children. So they try their best to get by in Canada with whatever conditions they're presented with in order to be able to afford to send their children to school and to ensure that their children have some type of education beyond high school. But oftentimes what we've seen throughout the years is that the migration pattern continues with the next generations. And a lot of my work or our work in Justicia is reminding people in Canada that migrant workers are people, but we shouldn't have to do that. You know, we all have the right to live with dignity and respect. It's not just about surviving, which a lot of migrant workers are embedded in, that survival mode, but let's remember that we all have dreams and migrant workers have dreams. And right now, those who are actually winning are the elites that have pinned people against each other, right? And then we all lose.
[Music] 00:46:22
00:46:27 Avery Moore Kloss
Thank you for listening to CRSP Talk. Our guest for this episode was Evelyn Encalada Grez. She's a transnational labor scholar and community labor organizer committed to critical sociology and decolonial theories of knowledge production that centers diverse ways of knowing and precarious workers' experiences within the margins of the global economy. She's the co-founder of the award-winning collective Justice for Migrant Workers, J4MW, that has advocated for the rights of migrant farm workers in Canada for two decades. Her research bridges grassroots activism with academic scholarship, and through this approach, Dr. Encalada Grez has extensively documented the lives of Mexican migrant farm worker women who work and forge transnational livelihoods between rural Canada and rural Mexico. A big thank you to our co-hosts for this two-part series. Dr. Katrin Roots is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University. She's been researching Canada's anti-trafficking efforts for over 15 years and is the author of Domesticating Human Trafficking: Law, Policing, and Prosecution in Canada, published by the University of Toronto Press. And she's the co-editor of Trafficking Harms, Critical Politics, Perspectives, and Experiences, published by Fernwood Publications. Dr. Jessica Templeman is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her research focuses on exclusionary migration law and policy in Canada, namely around deportation of migrants for criminality and human trafficking. And Dr. Ann De Shalit is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the School of Social Work at the University of Windsor. She also teaches at Trent and York Universities. She's been doing critical research on trafficking since 2009 and has been involved in grassroots migrant and labor justice activism for about a decade. You can find a link to any research mentioned in this episode in the show notes. CRSP Talk is a production from the Center for Research on Security Practices at Wilfrid Laurier University. For more research stories, listen to past episodes of this podcast. For more information about the work we do with the Center for Research on Security Practices, please visit our website at crsp.online. Thank you for listening to CRSP Talk. We'll be back again soon with more research to uncover. I'm Avery Moore Kloss.
[Outro Music] 00:48:40