"Oral Statement on the occasion of the reviews of Mexico and Jamaica by the Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families", 07 April 2025

...Amnesty International is calling on Mexico and Jamaica, as countries of origin, to protect their migrant workers from discrimination and labour exploitation, by renegotiating bilateral labour mobility agreements that do not allow workers to freely choose and change employers.

Both Jamaica and Mexico have concluded bilateral agreements with Canada...under a subset stream of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), called the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP)...

Amnesty International’s research found that Jamaican and Mexican migrants working in Canada under the TFWP suffer a range of abuses, such as wage theft, excessive working hours, unsafe working conditions, racist physical and psychological abuse, surveillance, and others. These abuses are not isolated incidents or the acts of a few unscrupulous employers. They are a foreseeable and intrinsic outcome of the TFWP, due in large part to the inability of migrant workers to freely change employers.

In other words, these abuses stem directly from Canada’s immigration policies and are allowed by the labour mobility agreements that Canada has negotiated with Jamaica, Mexico...