Agricultural crisis, refugee crisis, or health crisis? Migrant seasonal workers in Italian agriculture during the COVID pandemic

The concept of crisis has been widely used to describe European social phenomena which have become acute and unmanageable in recent years. Exceptionality and emergency have become attributes of the political strategies developed to address the economic, social, and environmental unsustainability of industrial farming; the flow of forced migrants; and the COVID-19 pandemic. This article is based on ethnographic data collected over more than 2 years among immigrant workers and their employers in northern Italy, before and during the spread of the pandemic. By relating the experience of the people involved and analysis of the structural dimensions, I show how the “refugeeization of the agricultural workforce” and the “normalization of precarity” are two interconnected and interdependent processes. My study contributes to the recent scientific debate on the “polycrisis” by highlighting how the agricultural crisis generated a demand for vulnerable migrant labour and this situation was exacerbated by the health crisis.