Migrant Farmworkers Awareness Week - March 23 - 31, 2026
Migrant Farmworkers Awareness Week is an education and advocacy campaign led by grassroots community organizations, activists, and migrant justice scholars across so-called Vancouver. We aim to highlight the exploitative living and working conditions that many racialized migrant farmworkers face under Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Programs (TFWPs).
The week is designed to build public understanding, strengthen solidarity, create space for conversation, and lay the foundation for addressing structural barriers to the well-being and dignity of agricultural workers.
Migrant workers, refugees and international students deserve our respect. They help grow our food, support our hospitality and food service sector, care for our children and elders, build our homes. They are our neighbours and our community members, but are denied equal and fair rights. Rather they are often blamed for a weaker economy and collapsing public services as a strategy to divide working people and distract us from the real problem.
But a grassroots mobilization has been underway for years now calling for regularization of undocumented people, that would include granting of legals status, opportunity for permanent residency, addressing of precarious working conditions and making available all the services and supports that we all take for granted.
The Migrant Rights Networkcalls on Canada to “implement an immigration system rooted in justice, not exploitation. This means rights—not permits that expire; inclusion—not exclusion. Ensuring permanent resident status for all migrants is not only a matter of basic fairness and equal rights—it is essential for achieving gender, racial, and economic justice.”
Migrant Farmworkers Awareness Week follows the passing of the racist and xenophobic Bill C-12 in the Senate on March 12 and likely soon will become law. Bill C-12 (Strengthening Canada's Immigration System and Borders Act) is a dangerous anti-migrant law that allows the government to cancel permits en masse, increases sharing of personal information, and makes it easier to shut people out of refugee protection. Migrant Farmworkers Awareness Week is again a reminder that together we resist injustice and this anti-migrant agenda. That we refuse to collaborate with laws and policies that harm migrants, or making sure migrants can access the rights and services they need.
