Rules of Disengagement: 'Low Skill' Migrant Workers, Law and the Social Dimensions of Exclusionary Inclusion

This thesis interrogates social exclusion among migrant workers under the NOC C & D (“low skill”) occupational stream of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program, a relatively new, fast-growing, and highly diverse stream which brings migrant workers into industry sectors and social settings where they were never seen before. The author develops a framework for understanding law’s role in producing social exclusion, and applies it to ethnographic data collected through interviews with migrant justice advocates and migrant workers in Brandon, Manitoba. This thesis ultimately establishes that migrant workers need not face spatial separation, discrimination from the community, or a historically gendered and racialized labour context in order to experience social exclusion; the author argues that social exclusion is legally constructed and that the legal framework of this program itself presents barriers to migrants’ full participation in the life of the communities in which they live and work.