Voices in the fields. Migrant farmworkers during COVID-19 in Spain and new forms of activism for dignity

The health crisis has revealed many of the structural and endemic problems that have existed in the agriculture sector in Spain over the last two decades: the high volume of foreigners in an irregular situation, the miserable informal settlements and substandard housing in which they are forced to "reside", and the extreme physical and social vulnerability of the workers, including those employed under official seasonal labor mobility schemes. These structural problems have traditionally been ignored by the administration, whose policies have focused on managing the mobility of migrants while neglecting the needs of migrant workers present in the territory. During the health crisis the emergence of the narrative on their "essential role", which was incorporated in the political discourse, together with the visibility of their poor working and living conditions, have generated, promoted or consolidated several struggles based on what we can call the right to live in dignity. In the Spanish case these struggles have been caused by three types of tensions that have become particularly intense during the Covid-19 pandemic: the tension between essentiality and disposability, between temporality and permanence, and between an active and a passive citizenship.

Ambivalent Resonance: Advocacy for Secure Status for Migrant Farm Workers in Spain, Italy and Canada during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Drawing on insights from scholarship on contentious action frames, this article examines the framing of demands for social justice for migrant farmworkers in Spain, Italy and Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus particularly on how activists in each country aligned their action frames with prevalent public discourses on the essential contribution migrants make to agricultural production, the need to guarantee "health for all,” and "increased vulnerability” of migrants' lives during the global health crisis. Using these diagnostic frames, activists in the three countries called for secure legal status for all migrants. Drawing on the literature on contentious action frames, we then analyze if action frames advanced by activists during the COVID-19 pandemic "resonated” with the understanding of these issues by policymakers. We challenge an approach to understanding resonance in binary terms as either present or absent. Instead, we introduce the notion of "ambivalent resonance” to draw attention to the fact that some frames are accepted only partially or only by some policymakers but not the others, as was the case in the three countries under study. We then situate this ambivalent resonance in the context of immigration priorities and recent trends in immigration policy development in these three countries and suggest that activists can build on ambivalences to advance migrant rights to status © 2023, Studies in Social Justice.All Rights Reserved.

Immobile, stranded, and excluded: the effects of COVID-19 on the international asylum system

The disruptions to international mobility dynamics caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have affected refugees particularly severely. This article analyses the impact of the health crisis on international protection, particularly its effects on specific phases of the process: access to the territory, access to the procedure, and reception and its conditions. Using comparative analysis that incorporates the dynamics observed in several different places, the article takes an in-depth look at the pandemic's effects on the consolidation of a new global asylum system whose roots lie in the transformations observed since the 1990s. It argues that the pandemic has accelerated certain trends that are symptomatic of an even more exclusionary and restrictive turn in the global system of so-called protection. © 2021. All Rights Reserved.

MIGRATION POLICIES, PARTICIPATION AND THE POLITICAL CONSTRUCTION OF MIGRATION IN SPAIN

This article offers a state of the art of research on migration policies, participation and the political construction of immigration in Spain. It starts with an overview of migration policy, addressing the impact of the 2008 economic crisis on the configuration of the political agenda. Secondly, it addresses the political participation of immigrants in Spain and their role as "new" voters. Finally, the appearance of the extreme right political party VOX has shifted the classic debates on the attitudes of the population towards immigration and built a new anti-immigration discourse. The article argues that academic interest and scientific production have been modulated in line with the various phases of Spain's configuration as a country of immigration. The text ends with some reflections on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, which has opened up a period of major challenge and uncertainty.