Seasonal migrants are a staple part of regional life, yet their livelihoods are tied to relatively unstable and unpredictable factors that ‘secure’ them in place through agricultural work. The seasonal nature of farm work is determined not only by crop and harvest cycles that respond to seasonal conditions, but also encompasses many other concerns: the market demands and supply chains that dictate agricultural labour and trade; the temporal aspects of migration programs and visa conditions determined by current political whim; and the pressing issues of global heating that make outdoor, laborious work subject to increasingly unpredictable weather events.
Arguably, these seasonal mobilities of migrants in farm work will become more insecure as climate change takes hold. The notion of the “seasons”, and the “seasonal” aspect of much labour mobility, therefore, has an increasingly insecure outlook.
In this paper I describe some of the insecurities that seasonal workers endure, and how this impacts their mobility and migration opportunities. I draw on empirical work from the Australian context where labour mobility visa programs continue to expand, as the federal government aspires to bring in hundreds of thousands of workers from the Pacific Islands through a dubiously framed “cultural exchange” of backpackers. I tie this focus on seasonal migration to recent discussions on emergency and insecurity in geographic and mobilities literature to highlight the insecurities and limitations of the Western concept of seasonality.