Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives .

economic impact on local, regional, and national markets to examine human and labor-rights violations and the psychological trauma inflicted on migrants and their families. The book focuses on the SAWP’s relationship to multiple communities in Tlaxcala whose residents predominantly work in Ontario’s horticulture industry and make up a significant portion of SAWP’s participants in Mexico. Although 17 percent of SAWP participants hail from the Mexican state of Tlaxcala, these participants are scattered throughout Tlaxcala’s municipalities and constitute small percentages within these populations. In 2001 and 2002, Binford, with the aid of an interview team, collected close to 200 interviews with former and current migrant workers. In addition, Binford conducted fieldwork in southwestern Ontario in August and September 2003. The ethnographic research is supplemented with quantitative data and interviews with employers, administrators, public officials, labor organizers, NGO representatives, and academics. Organized into seven chapters, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the SAWP in Canada and Mexico. Chapters 1 and 2 trace the historical development of labor market complementarity in Ontario and Tlaxcala during the postwar period. Chapters 3 and 4 are the most compelling chapters because they speak to the racialization and structural violence embedded within the SAWP. Chapter 3 uses brief case studies to examine the reasons behind Tlaxcalans’ migrations. Money for housing construction, household maintenance, and educational expenses were primary reasons. Mexican migrants sacrificed time with their families to be able to send their children to school and improve their children’s future economic stability. Migrants also were reassured by the Mexican government’s oversight of the SAWP program. Chapter 4, co-authored with Kerry Preibisch, looks at the racialization of the SAWP and how Mexico came to be invited to participate and, eventually, dominate this program. Employers and administrators relied on similar discourses about “natural” abilities and docile, efficient labor that permeates the maquiladora (assembly) industry to justify worker placement and employer abuse. Chapter 5 shows that the SAWP may ease the economic burdens of migrant households, but because of its short contracts (with an average contract period of five months), this program does not eliminate poverty and, thus, makes very little impact on Mexico’s long-term economic development. Chapters 6 and 7 place the SAWP in broader context. Chapter 6 discusses the SAWP in relation to Mexican migration experiences with labor organizing in the United States. Because a number of his informants participated in the SAWP and the United States’ H-2A visa program, Binford compares the development of both programs and their histories with labor organizing. Chapter 7 engages with debates over post-national citizenship and its inclusionary practices. Binford questions these laudatory narratives by pointing out that TFWPs are popular because they “manage” migration and create a docile, disposable labor force within a global labor market, thereby curtailing rights and mobility simultaneously. This book does a wonderful job of connecting the macro and microprocesses that underpin and structure an international division of labor. It contributes greatly to scholarship in migration, labor and social movements, household economies, agrarian studies, and political economy. Although migration to the United States looms large in the Mexican imagination, Binford demonstrates that Canada plays an important role in shaping Mexican households and structuring Mexican foreign relations. One of the book’s strengths is the case studies of Mexican migrants. It is unfortunate that they were limited to one chapter. Binford references the gendered aspects of this labor migration but does not look at female migrant participation in the SAWP. How do these women navigate gender relations and household dynamics at home and while in Canada? Finally, Binford suggests that participation in the SAWP has led to the transnationalization of Mexican households, but that this process is not mirrored in local communities. More discussion of this intriguing claim would have enriched his analysis and added a new dimension to studies of transnationalism.