Immigrant Labor and Migratory Regulation in Europe's Agricultural Enclaves. the Case of Moroccan Workers in Spain, Italy and France’s Agricultural Sectors.

Since the mid-1980s the restructuring of the intensive production of horticultural products has transformed the economic, labor and demographic dynamics of many agricultural enclaves. Their technological and productive transformation, their orientation towards external markets and their intensive use of workforce have converted the territories where this type of agroindustry is implanted in laboratories of new forms of labor and migratory regulation. Unlike the processes of complementarity and competition observed in other economic sectors, in these agrarian communities the national labor force has been gradually substituted by immigrant workers. The formal and informal recruitment of migrant workers into the agricultural sector has been the result of both spontaneous migration and labor incorporation dynamics as well as proactive recruitment mechanisms through temporary workers programs and new migratory laws and policies

The objective of this presentation, focused on the case study of Moroccan workers, is to analyze the reconfigurations and interrelations between new forms of labor relations and migratory regulation in the agricultural enclaves of southern European countries, using the concepts of temporality and precariousness. This analysis is based on more than 60 in-depth interviews conducted with Moroccan workers throughout 2015 and 2016 in some of the main agricultural enclaves of these three southern European countries: Huelva and Lleida (Spain), Salerno/Piana del Sele and Cuneo (Italy) and Bouches-du-Rhône (France), carried out under the TEMPER project.