The Migrantisation of Agricultural Labour in the Global Core: A Longitudinal Test

Migrant workers have become a structural feature of agriculture across the global core, yet whether this dependence is deepening has not been established over a long time series or tested against a major shock. This article revisits the question through a longitudinal comparative case study of seven core states—the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Spain and Italy—selected on a most-dissimilar-systems logic and read through the world-ecology framework, in which cheap food rests on cheap labour. Drawing on primary statistical portals and administrative registers, it reconstructs the legal channels of entry into agricultural work and traces their evolution across roughly a decade and into the post-pandemic period, correcting and completing the evidentiary base of earlier studies. In every case, the dependence has persisted or intensified: where it has not continued to rise, it has settled at a historically high plateau, and nowhere has it reverted to its earlier level. It held, moreover, under conditions designed to curtail it—anti-immigrant administrations and COVID-19 border closures—as states reconfigured their migration channels to preserve the supply. The findings confirm that the migrantisation of agricultural labour is a structural and expanding condition of accumulation in the global core.