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Research Notes and Reviews

Vol. 5 (2014)

Temporary Foreign Workers in New Brunswick’s Rural Communities

Submitted
November 17, 2014
Published
2014-11-13

Abstract

Faced with local labour shortages, businesses in New Brunswick’s rural communities have been turning to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) to hire workers to fill “low-waged” jobs even though the federal government has been wary of the fact that migrant workers are being hired in areas where unemployment has been high. This research note argues that while the TFWP can be seen as a way to respond to the recruitment and retention problems of New Brunswick businesses, it does at the same time leave migrant workers in a precarious legal state. Taking as a future case study the village of Cap-Pelé, where migrant workers have been filling jobs in the fish and seafood processing plants, it suggests that there is a need to ethnographically investigate the impact that the TFWP has on migrant workers, the businesses that hire them, and the rural communities that welcome them.