Follow the commutes: the viapolitics of commuting within infrastructures of agricultural labour migration in The Netherlands and Belgium

Abstract

Migrant mobilities and infrastructures are often studied in either urban or rural socio-spatial contexts, whereas labour migration is often studied in either labour or non-labour realms. However, a too rigid division between these contexts might obscure a crucial part of migrant workers’ everyday experiences, struggles and aspirations. To overcome these dichotomies, this paper looks at labour migration from the middle and uses migrant commuting as an entry point to grasp the variegated infrastructures, their connections, and migrants’ infrastructuring practices and experiences. It deploys the notion of viapolitics to understand commuting infrastructures not as neutral elements but as relations of materiality, sociality and power. The analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork in two agricultural regions in the Netherlands and Belgium. Following three commutes across long and short distances, with different vehicles, and along variegated routes, the analysis disentangles how these material, spatial and social ingredients produce different articulations of viapolitics as part of the broader infrastructure of agricultural labour migration. The article argues that the different ways migrant workers commute not only reveal a wide array of formal and informal, material and social infrastructures, but also gives insights into different dimensions of migrant workers’ navigations of labour and migration regimes.

Keywords:

• Commuting
• labour migration
• agriculture
• infrastructures
• viapolitics

Introduction

Morning, noon, and late at night, a bus full of Poles drives down our street.

Look at them go, where do they come from, where are they hiding?

In the fields or on construction sites, they don’t pay much attention, they come all together.

For a few euros and a can of beer, they come to help, that’s why they’re here!

A little van, and a little van, and a little van full of Poles

A little van, and a little van, GO GO GO!

As reflected in the two verses of this Dutch Carnival song from 2009, the ‘Polenbusje’ (little van full of Poles) is a popular vernacular term in Dutch to describe the phenomenon of (Polish) labour migration. Despite being ridiculed, these vans are indeed a crucial feature in the infrastructure of agricultural labour migration in countries like the Netherlands and Belgium. Each day they transport thousands of migrant workers, not only from Poland but from all over Central and Eastern Europe, from their housing facilities to greenhouses, factories, and warehouses, many of which are located in agricultural regions such as Haspengouw in Belgium and Westland in the Netherlands. Contrary to the public imaginary of the ‘Polenbusje’, these commutes are more diverse and complex than implied, and are crucial for the trajectories of migrant workers as well as the circulation of agricultural migrant labour within the free market of the agri-food industry. But what is the role of these vehicles, routes and practices within the regime(s) of the agriculture – migration nexus (King, Lulle, and Melossi 2021)? What is their relationship with broader infrastructures of intra-EU labour migration? And how do they shape everyday experiences for those migrant workers working in Westland and Haspengouw as they navigate these?

Described as circular migration (Engbersen et al. 2013), shuttle-migration (King 2002; Morawska 1999), or mobile labour (Bastos, Novoa, and Salazar 2021), numerous studies on intra-EU labour migration underscore the highly mobile nature of low-skilled migrant workers both within and across borders (Bolokan 2020), particularly emphasizing the intricate relationship between this mobility and social mobility (Szytniewski and van der Haar 2022; Zampoukos et al. 2018). Yet despite these patterns of mobility, commuting mobilities have not been an object of analysis. Particularly, studies on labour migration from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to Western Europe have focused on the labour dimension (Engbersen et al. 2013; Jancewicz and Markowski 2021; Siegmann, Quaedvlieg, and Williams 2022; Strockmeijer, de Beer, and Dagevos 2019) or legal frameworks (De Lange 2011) to better understand the positions and (social) mobilities of migrant workers in the societies where they work. In countries such as the Netherlands and the UK, researchers have looked into the role of institutionalized migration industries, such as recruiters and employment agencies, in mediating and profiting from a ‘pool’ of flexible workers (McCollum and Findlay 2015; Siegmann, Quaedvlieg, and Williams 2022).

Although this focus is indeed relevant in a context with an intensified migration infrastructure (Xiang and Lindquist 2014) these studies ignore dimensions beyond labour, or other ways migrant workers navigate their everyday life in the societies they work (Szytniewski and van der Haar 2022). Recent work on arrival infrastructures (Meeus, Van Heur, and Arnaut 2019) and mobility infrastructures (Jung and Buhr 2022) depart from this infrastructural framework to explore the multiple and multimodal ways newcomers find their way upon arrival. Commuting between work and housing is a crucial part of the infrastructure of agricultural labour migration, requiring knowledge, networks, and practices. Similar to material infrastructures, they necessitate constant maintenance by various actors (Graham and Thrift 2007), while also being part of socio-technical networks and regimes. Therefore, considering commuting as a crucial infrastructuring practice entails examining how this infrastructure is continually constructed and reconstructed, governed, and resisted by different actors, including newcomers themselves. These practices connect agricultural work with living spaces and other infrastructures, shedding light on the everyday ways migrant workers navigate labour and migration regimes. Contrary to the spatial focus of studies on arrival infrastructures as well as on labour migration, these navigations are not necessarily embedded in either urban or rural socio-spatial contexts, or work or non-work settings, such as housing. Building upon these existing and underexplored research avenues, this paper thus explores the potential of migrant commuting as an object of analysis to grasp the variegated infrastructures, their connections, as well as migrants’ infrastructuring practices and experiences of precarity around agricultural work. It does so by using Walters (2015a) notion of viapolitics as analytical lens. With viapolitics, Walters encourages migration scholars to look at migration from the middle, namely the angle of vehicles and routes of migration journeys. Starting beyond a state-centric perspective, this entry point of vehicles will give new insights into the migration and mobility struggles materializing in these vehicles.

The first section situates (migrant) commuting within literature on mobility. It will then further introduce the notion of viapolitics and relate it to recent debates of migration- and mobility infrastructure. By bringing these debates together, the conceptual framework proposes a more explicit material and infrastructural focus on roads, vehicles and routes as mobile zones of governance and contestation to debates of migration and mobility infrastructures. Drawing from these latter debates, it aims to enrich the analytical tool of viapolitics with an ethnographic eye on infrastructural world-building and subjectivities shaped within various regimes. After a description of methods and the context of agricultural labour migration in Westland and Haspengouw, the subsequent sections will follow three commutes – each with distinct socio-spatial elements - to explore the relationship between the materialities, socialities, and experiences and struggles over autonomy. Following the material focus from the middle as proposed by viapolitics but extending this from migration journeys to everyday mobilities after arrival, I argue we should look more closely and critically to the socio-material and power constellations of these infrastucturing practices. Through this analysis, it will become clear that these commutes are a crucial part of the infrastructure where everyday struggles over autonomy and precarity within the regime(s) of agricultural labour migration play out.

Commuting, viapolitics and infrastructures: theoretical perspectives

Even though commuting mobilities have been extensively discussed in quantitative transportation studies, the direct experiences of movement, power dynamics, and inequalities in commuting have received less attention, as noted by Shaw and Docherty (2014). Qualitative studies tend to delve more into these dimensions. For instance, Mowri and Bailey (2023) delve into emotions and assemblages of safety among female commuters, and Butcher (2011) scrutinizes the interplay between power dynamics and embodied mobility cultures on Delhi’s new metro line. These are just a few examples of commuting scholars working within the politics of mobility framework (Bissell 2016; Edensor 2011) who highlight commuting is not merely a straightforward journey from point A (home) to point B (work). Instead, all these studies show commuting is ‘a particular mode of inhabiting the city, replete with interactions, negotiations, frictions and emotions’ (Plyushteva 2019, 408). Besides gender, age, ethnicity and class, migration as an axis of difference is also considered in some studies about commuting. For instance, Doody (2020), analyses the ‘experiences and habits of everyday mobilities’ (10) of New Zealanders in London, emphasizing the dynamic interplay of migration experiences with the everyday time-spaces of the encountered environments during commuting. In the context of intra-EU migration, Burrell (2011) examines low-cost shuttle flights between Poland and the UK as a significant dimension of the experiences and narratives of intra EU-migration, conceptualizing them as a ‘culture of migrant air travel’ for Polish workers in the UK. These collective experiences of repeated low-cost flights represent freedom of mobility, yet are also fraught with physical and emotional discomfort. It is this juxtaposition, Burrell argues, that heightens tensions around labour migration and highlights class hierarchies.

Collectively, these studies into commuting clearly show the significance of everyday micro-mobilities in revealing the unequal workings of mobility regimes (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). Furthermore, following the conceptualization of human mobility as enacted, experienced and habitualised through the body (Adey 2009; Butcher 2011; Cresswell 2010), they all emphasize commuting as an embodied experience. In line with this, the studies specifically on migrant commuting foreground how this commute can transform into a collective experience when shared frames of references, such as migration and/or similar labour contexts, are in place.

Viapolitics

Despite these merits, the mentioned studies overlook a crucial dimension in their analysis inherent to the mobility category of the commute; the implication of commuting mobilities with (late) capitalism and paid labour (Aldred 2014; Cresswell, Dorow, and Roseman 2016). This connection transforms mobility over space and time into a matter of productivity and logistics and thus a matter of control over movement. Cresswell, Dorow, and Roseman (2016) investigated employment-related geographical mobility in the Oil Sands zone of northeastern Alberta, Canada, an economic region concentrating various kinds of labour with different levels of precarity. The intertwined work-related mobilities within and towards this region differ significantly in space, time and meaning. They range from migration under the seasonal worker program, to permanent relocation, as well as daily two-hour commutes and even weekly fly-ins. In particular, they analyse how these interrelated mobilities are structured by relations and inequalities of labour, exposing how the mobility of some implies, or even demands, the immobility of others. Especially in the context of labour migration, it is thus crucial to explore this relation with labour and the amount of control involved in the commute. In other words, the commuting existing studies fail to adequately explore the governmentality of the via (Walters 2015a, 471–472; Walters, Heller, and Pezzani 2022, 6–7), during which these collective experiences, tensions, hierarchies related to migration and labour crystallize on the move.

It is this governance involved in the entanglement of bodies, movements, and vehicles, that Walters puts forward in his notion of viapolitics (Walters 2015a; Walters, Heller, and Pezzani 2022). First applied in analyses on aircrafts used for deportation, the concept of viapolitics positions vehicles and infrastructures and a view ‘from the middle’ as key entry points to understand migration and mobility struggles (Walters 2015a, 2015b, 2016). Walters further expands on the notion of viapolitics through three theses, namely that vehicles mediate migration controversies and public understandings of migration; that vehicles should be analysed in their own right because they are ‘mobile zones of governance and contestation’ (Walters 2015a, 473); and that these vehicles and infrastructures can become a site of strategic political action. Viapolitics has gained traction in research on migration, evident in the analysis of FlixBus in Europe as a mobile borderzone (Teunissen 2020), or examinations of intra-state deportations by bus in Syria (Hassouneh 2023). These and other applications of viapolitics have shown that the ‘space-time of travel and the vehicles enabling it become objects of contention and transformation, simultaneously a means through which people seek to move and a means through which their movement is governed’ (Walters, Heller, and Pezzani 2022, 7–8). In other words, viapolitics proves to be a valuable conceptual tool to foreground the entanglement of vehicles and people in migratory journeys, and specifically unveiling the conflicting knowledges and practices by states, migrants and other actors in which these movements are embedded. Despite being predominantly utilised by migration scholars, viapolitics should find broader application within the research field of mobilities or infrastructures, as argued by Freeman (2020). While Freeman applies this conceptual lens to abortion mobilities, this paper extends its application to another non-migratory form of mobility, thus broadening the scope from international migration journeys towards everyday commuting mobilities within a migration context. Analysing these mobilities through the lens of viapolitics shows how much energy is put into migration governance and moving people even within national borders (Hassouneh 2023), and by non-state actors (Lindquist 2022).

Infrastructures and regimes of labour migration

Finally, as previously mentioned, the following analysis considers migrant commuting as crucial infrastructuring practice within larger migration and labour regimes. It will thus go beyond viapolitics by ethnographically examining the broader arrival- and mobility infrastructures surrounding agricultural labour migration. As outlined in the conceptualisations of viapolitics (Walters, Heller, and Pezzani 2022, 7), ‘via’ refers to the routes and vehicles, which are integral material components of broader mobility systems (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006). Hence, these vehicles are not isolated from broader interlinked infrastructures of migration, including institutions, actors, and technologies that facilitate, block, or accelerate migratory mobilities (Xiang and Lindquist 2014). Recent infrastructural approaches have highlighted the importance of socio-material infrastructuring practices by and for migrants upon arrival and beyond, revealing the deep entanglement of migrants’ mobile trajectories and urban infrastructures (Jung and Buhr 2022; Meeus, Van Heur, and Arnaut 2019; Wasjberg and Schapendonk 2021). Wajsberg and Schapendonk (2021, 14) regard these infrastructuring practices by migrants as navigational tactics within migration regimes. Although not explicitly present in viapolitics, regime thinking is thus essential when studying these infrastructures and infrastructuring practices. Applying viapolitics to the study of infrastructures in this context implies commuting vehicles are not solely mobile zones of governance and contestation, but also connected to other infrastructuring practices collectively constituting (parts of) labour migration regimes. These interrelated regimes of migration and labour are understood here as practices, techniques, and rationales of governance and regulation involving a multitude of actors, and necessarily involving spaces for conflict and negotiation (Hess 2012; Tsianos and Karakayali 2010). These regimes and spaces of negotiation produce certain subjectivities as well as world-building practices (Meeus, Van Heur, and Arnaut 2019, 18–22), which will be explored by disentangling the viapolitics of migrant commuting. In summary, the following analysis explores the related (social) infrastructuring work performed through everyday navigations of labour migration regimes, as well as the power relations and struggles for agency embedded within them.

Fieldwork in Haspengouw and Westland

Westland and Haspengouw are renowned for their intensive agricultural industries, focusing on greenhouse horticulture, vegetable and flower cultivation in Westland, and fruit cultivation of both hard and soft fruits in Haspengouw. Migrant workers have been essential to these industries for decades, predating the first and second expansions of the European Union. Historically, Spanish, Italian and later Turkish and Moroccan guestworkers were employed in these industries. However, subsequent EU expansions led to a growing number of labour mobilities from Central and Eastern Europe to both areas (Heyma et al. 2008; Loose and Lamberts 2010). Slightly different histories, as well as organization and temporalities of labour resulted in distinct terminology for these workers, such as ‘seasonal workers’ in Haspengouw and ‘labour migrants’ in Westland. Throughout this article the term ‘migrant workers’ is used instead of either term, to underscore that these labour trajectories encompass not only seasonal, cyclical, or temporary employment.

Obtaining accurate statistics regarding the number of migrant workers in the agricultural sectors of Westland and Haspengouw is challenging. However, estimates suggest that in Flanders alone between 31,000 and 45,000 seasonal workers are employed in agriculture (Agripress 2022; Boerenbond 2021). According to the municipality of Westland’s own estimations, out of the 12,000 migrants officially working in their municipality, 4,500 migrant workers are registered residents (Gemeente Westland 2020). Both estimates underrepresent the actual figures due to the significant number of unregistered agricultural migrant workers. The nature of employment in these regions differs. In Westland, growers outsource labour to employment agencies, who provide temporary contracts, housing and sometimes also transport. In Haspengouw, seasonal workers are mainly employed directly by farmers during harvesting periods, often on non-contractual day-by-day work agreements. Migrant workers are not only working in the fields and greenhouses but also constitute the majority of the workforce in the sorting, packaging, and distribution of agricultural goods.

It is in these fields, greenhouses, and sorting factories I conducted more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork. On five different agricultural sites, I participated doing harvest work. The different and complex commutes began to emerge early in my fieldwork, particularly on the ‘plantages,’ the emic term for orchards in Haspengouw. The commutes emerging most prominently, and which formed the basis of analysis, were a commute by a tour bus and minivans between Westland and urban areas, a walking commute from a housing facility in Westland to factories and greenhouses, and a commute made primarily by Roma workers who shared cars between Haspengouw and Brussels. From this ethnographic starting point, I traced these commuting trajectories. This meant that I engaged in some of the commutes with migrant workers myself and conducted fieldwork in the spaces where the commutes led to; in migrant hotels and other housing facilities, neighbourhoods in urban areas, and other spaces where migrant workers spend time, such as shops and local NGOs targeting EU migrant workers. This participant observation was complemented with fifty in-depth ethnographic interviews with interlocuters I worked with or met in these sites, such as migrant workers (20), employers and farmers (8), policymakers (10), and other local stakeholders (12). The inclusion of this wide range of actors was crucial because, as mentioned before, migration and labour regimes are shaped and contested by various actors with complex social and power relations (Hess 2012; Tsianos and Karakayali 2010), which also manifested in the commutes. Analysis of these ethnographic encounters around migrant commuting was done in two steps. First, I visually mapped all ethnographic observations and conversations about crucial viapolitical elements of the commutes. The diverse socio-spatial elements were mapped, after which I added layers of materiality, social infrastructuring work, and power relations. Second, after fieldwork, a more systematic analysis in NVivo was done using the same analytical lenses.

Three commutes

This section is divided into three parts, each of which describes and analyses a different commute with different socio-spatial constellations producing particular articulations of the viapolitics of agricultural labour migration. These viapolitics will be disentangled by focusing first on the material dimension of the vehicles, roads, and routes. Subsequently, the commutes will be followed infrastructurally to better understand the spatial and social connections made through these commuting practices. It will then analyse the power relations at play, with particular emphasis on (everyday) experiences of autonomy and dependency, which manifest either directly or indirectly in these commutes. This analysis gives insights into crucial dimensions of the everyday ways migrant workers navigate labour migration regimes, concerning, amongst other things, the relationship between temporality and social (im)mobility.

The commute by minivans and tour buses: externalization and (in)dependency

The first commute takes place in the Netherlands, where every day a large touring bus with a Latvian number plate departs from Schiedam, making a stop in Vlaardingen before arriving at a tomato packaging factory in Westland. At the end of the day, it follows the same route in reverse. The bus is owned by an employment agency that provides migrant workers to the factory. In December 2011, this employment agency posted a social media advertisement featuring a newer version than the current run-down version, advertising their services to potential hiring (agricultural) businesses. The social media post featured a shiny new bus on which was written: ‘50 employees on their way, perhaps for you?’

Besides the act of reducing people to potential labour that, in order to be productive, needs to be not only depersonalized and commodified (Walters 2016, 437–448), but also on their way, on the move, or transported, this tour bus has to been seen as part of a specific type of commuting practice. In this type of commuting, the employer owns and controls shared commuting vehicles, which are usually part of one deal offered by employment agencies to migrant workers who just arrived. In addition to large buses like the one described here, agencies also offer smaller vehicles such as cars and minivans to some workers, who then become designated drivers, usually with some financial compensation depending on the employer. These agency-owned vehicles are hence essential vehicles connecting agricultural regions like Westland with more urban areas like Schiedam and Vlaardingen, but also The Hague and Rotterdam.

To overcome this distance between these urban areas and Westland effectively, the commute and the vehicles pose a challenge of logistics and control for employment agencies (Walters, Heller, and Pezzani 2022, 16), requiring a significant political apparatus, knowledge, energy, and ultimately, social infrastructuring work. More than 10,000 migrant workers living in various cities and towns commute to 670 different greenhouses and greenhouse industry-related companies (World Horti Center 2023). The intricate infrastructure work this demands was elucidated by Aleksandra, a Latvian office worker, whilst reflecting on her daily tasks at an employment agency. These included arranging the commutes, referred to as transport and drivers, for each following day.

Now, for me it’s easier because I know everything, I can arrange it faster. I don’t need to check how the transport is going. Because for the drivers we have a lot of locations, and I don’t need to open Google and check how is it from this location to this location. I know it’s five kilometres, then one driver can take people for two or three [different] companies from the same location.

Aleksandra, migrant worker, interview December 2021

From this statement, it becomes evident how much energy, knowledge, and skill are necessary to complete the daily logistical puzzle of ensuring that all the workers from Vlaardingen, Schiedam and various towns in Westland reach their worksites on time. However, this infrastructuring work is not solely carried out by the employment agencies owning these commuting vehicles; it also involves migrant workers themselves who rely on these vehicles and must connect with and commute alongside their fellow colleagues. The following statement by Athina, mentioning her partner’s decision to quit as driver because it was not worth the compensation, reflects the required, sometimes exhausting, social infrastructuring work externalized onto migrant workers themselves, making them integral components of the infrastructure (Simone 2004):

My boyfriend used to be a driver, but not anymore. He got to hear the day before from the agency: tomorrow you have to pick up those persons there. And he got their phone number, he has to connect with all of them on the phone, leave a lot earlier to pick them up, something can go wrong, maybe they don’ t speak English, or sometimes they are being difficult. He got tired. So, he decided to stop.

Athina, migrant worker, interview May 2022

Despite the negativity associated with this experience, it also implies that mobilizing the commuting vehicles and the complicated routes these vehicles have to take, serve a social purpose in terms of maintaining necessary social networks and connections. As discussed in studies on social infrastructures (Latham and Wood 2015), this creates affordances for specific kinds of connections and encounters within and across differences. However, it is also in this decentralized, externalized infrastucturing work, as will be shown now, that the controlling and regimenting nature of these infrastructures work on a viapolitical level.

When I assisted one of my interlocuters, Marjana, with grocery shopping at a local supermarket, we decided to use the agency car she normally commutes with to the greenhouse with three other colleagues. Being the driver for these workers, she is allowed to use the car for short private trips such as going for groceries. Before setting off, she showed me the detailed administration she must perform when using the car for both commuting and private purposes. Every kilometre must be documented, including the purpose of the trip and the names of the passengers. This is later digitalized and checked by the employment agency. Another employment agency operating in Westland does not allow their workers to use their vehicles for private trips. On their website they state: ‘All our vehicles have GPS-tracking and are only meant for transport from home to work’ (Stipt 2023). This GPS tracking, along with the self-administrative practices carried out by Marjana to facilitate and sustain her commute, are part of a specific form of data politics operating on a viapolitical level (Noori 2022). Examining the practices and techniques required to enforce these (self-)disciplinary forms of governance, Walters (2015a, 478) argues that vehicles are ‘a surface to be secured and a volume to be inspected,’ in this case, through GPS devices, checklists, instructional materials, and administrative procedures. These practices thus illustrate how the framework and terminology of logistics is used by commercial actors, like employment agencies, to channel the movements of migrant workers to (bene)fit the larger economy of agricultural labour migration, resulting in a form of territorialized migration corridors between urban areas and Westland (Lindquist 2022; Garelli and Tazzioli 2022). The minivans and tour buses bring together various actors, (social) infrastructuring practices, and disciplinary techniques through a logistical process that ‘encapsulates’ migrant workers in these vehicles in order to control and commodify them. This not only makes the minivans ubiquitous in the migration process of migrant workers, but also results in a rather coercive viapolitics of commuting (Lindquist 2022).

This coercive viapolitics of commuting profoundly shapes everyday experiences, which are marked by power relations. This manifests, first, in temporal experiences of deceleration and waiting before, during, and after the commute. Entering the coordinates of the departure point of the tour bus in Schiedam and the factory in Maasdijk into Google Maps, Google suggests a commute that should take twenty minutes. However, since every colleague needs to be picked up and dropped off at various places, this commute naturally takes more time. When I asked one of my colleagues at the factory, a Latvian worker commuting from Schiedam, what time she had to leave in the morning to get on the bus, she answered: ‘I have to leave very early to start here at 07.00. The bus comes to pick me up in Schiedam at 05.00, a bit earlier.’ A similar experience of deceleration takes place at the end of the working day, the time of which varies according to the amount of work. Small groups of people are waiting in the canteen on their fellow commuters to finish work, so that they can commute home to Vlaardingen or Schiedam. After a long day of working, Elena, a young Moldovan woman, was sitting and waiting next to me. When we talked about the tiring work we did at the same production line, she sighed: ‘Now I have to wait for this bus with thirty people to go to Vlaardingen, that is a problem, all lines finish at different times so you never know how long you have to wait.’ Both experiences of deceleration and waiting also reveal that the ‘smooth flow of people and goods across the global transportation system also generates a form of anti-logistics’ (Walters, Heller, and Pezzani 2022, 17). In this case, the same logistics that compress time and space for the tomatoes, concurrently cause friction and slow down time in the lives of migrant workers who do the picking and sorting. Their time waiting for, or in, commuting vehicles is deemed less valuable in the ‘larger economy of temporal worth’ (Sharma 2014, 8).

The spatial immobility that comes with waiting and deceleration also reflects social (im)mobility, formulated here through questions of dependency and autonomy. Different from the even more enforced encapsulating escorts of migrant workers in minivans by the Indonesian state described by Lindquist (2022), some migrant workers in Westland are able to find other means of transport and, through this, gain more autonomy over their everyday life. One interlocuter, a Latvian woman who was able to attain a more secure job at the factory, framed this move as a wish for independence: ‘But when I could get another contract, they said: you must find private house, private transport. […]. But also, before that, I really wanted to be independent.’ The aspiration to circumvent this lack of autonomy is thus partially projected on the vehicles and commutes, which she framed as being more or less independent. To achieve this social mobility, many interlocutors built on knowledge about these routes, as well as on social networks and friendships, which they accrued, amongst others, en route (Garelli and Tazzioli 2022). In viapolitical terms, this shows how vehicles are not only a site of oppression and control, but also a site for new social bonds and solidary relations, even within restrictive labour migration regimes (Walters, Heller, and Pezzani 2022, 6).

The walking commute: care, control and counter-practices

Just over one kilometre away from the aforementioned tomato production lines, one of the few large-scale 'migrant hotels’ in Westland is located. In fact, since distance is not an issue, the material dimension is different: instead of using vehicles most of the migrant workers commute on foot – walking through the industrial estate which houses packaging and logistical businesses related to greenhouse agriculture, to the packaging factory. Every morning around 06.30, they start their commute at the parking lot of the hotel, forming a small caravan of people, some in pairs of two or three, heading towards the factory. With the town centre on the other side of the dike, the streets are mainly meant for lorries transporting tomatoes, flowers, plants, and other vegetables, from greenhouses to packaging factories and auction centres, and from here to retailers all over Europe.

According to the employment agency’s policy, the ‘migrant hotel’ primarily hosts ‘short-term international employees’, implying migrant workers who recently arrived in the Netherlands or Westland recently. Rooms are shared with partners, other family members, friends, but also with strangers, fostering both existing and new social relations. These social ties constitute the commuting pairs to the tomato packaging factory, which becomes particularly important due to the location of the hotel. The relative remoteness of the hotel means access to other arrival infrastructures and basic amenities and services, such as shops, information for newcomers, but also public transport, is not easy, heightening reliance on the employment agency and the hotel manager. Many residents expressed feelings of loneliness and remoteness. One of them, called Kaspar, complained to me: ‘There is nothing here. I just walk to work and back to the hotel and all evenings I am lonely. Even to the Lidl it takes 40 minutes walking.’ While the remoteness of the hotel is relative, this sentiment resonates with research emphasizing the importance of place and spatiality of housing locations for migrants’ settlement and navigation upon arrival (Van Liempt and Miellet 2021). Other research on spatial dimensions of large-scale housing for migrant workers in the Netherlands (Ulceluse, Bock, and Haartsen 2022) similarly found that dislocation leads to experiences of limited social relations, both within the accommodation and within the local environment. This leaves them exposed ‘to social control and evaluation’ (Ulceluse, Bock, and Haartsen 2022, 1) further discussed below.

Despite its remoteness, some migrant workers prefer the hotel because of the relatively easy commute to the workplace. This was confirmed one afternoon at the factory where I worked, when an office employee inquired about my own experience staying at the hotel. After admitting the negative aspects of the hotel, such as the lack of privacy and the small rooms, she said: ‘But you know what? Whenever people come back to work here, they always ask me if they can stay at the hotel. They prefer it because it’s so close.’ Although this commute thus seems to allow for more autonomy, it should be contextualized within other regimes that reflect an ambiguous tension between care and control, similar to what Felder et al. (2020) call the ‘Janus-faced nature of arrival infrastructure.’ On the one hand, the hotel is part of an infrastructure that services specifically to those migrant workers who just arrive, providing them with housing, work, a relatively easy commute to nearby worksites in Westland, and multi-lingual information about all these services by the hotel managers. On the other hand, this ‘care’ upon arrival comes with control and confinement. Resistance by other residents of Westland against large-scale housing is mitigated by surveilling and controlling practices from both the employment agency owning the hotel and self-organized neighbourhood watches. Especially the residents want to prevent migrant workers to ‘walk around the town’. As suggested in Walters’ second thesis (2015a), walking, understood here as a means of transport, becomes a significant feature in local migration controversies. Consequently, the hotel and its surroundings are heavily surveilled, through 24/7 control of the employment agency, security cameras and the aforementioned neighbourhood watches. This turns the routes migrant workers are ‘allowed’ to take within this environment into objects of control. Garelli and Tazzioli’s (2022) viapolitical analysis of walking from Italy to France illustrates how rerouting migrants’ movements in certain directions can render the landscape, also called geophysical environment or terrain (Walters, Heller, and Pezzani 2022, 7), an important viapolitical tool for constricting mobility. While rerouting refugees across the dangerous terrain of the Alps, it steers migrant workers in Westland across a less dangerous but nevertheless restricting terrain: a relatively isolated agro-industrial estate. Reflected in the sighs of loneliness, isolation, and boredom uttered by Kasper, this planned landscape directing movements along specific routes (Garelli and Tazzioli 2022, 246), away from town centres and other arrival infrastructures beyond work and housing, results in the temporal experience of being ‘outside’ of normal life.

These techniques of steering not only cover designated routes, but also other vehicles. During an interview with one of the managers of the employment agency, he mentioned that initially, they expected the workers residing in the hotel to commute using bicycles:

We had arranged hundreds of bikes for them to cycle to the factory and some greenhouses. And everyone started cycling, but at a certain moment the weather became bad, and some people had private cars, so they arranged it among themselves. They charged two euros for transport, and they went back and forth. In the end, we stopped this and offered transport in the winter months.

Interview with Jan, manager of the employment agency, Maasdijk, March 2022

Though the manager did not elaborate on the need for regulation and control of these informally arranged commutes, it is worth noting that during fieldwork such 'informal’ commuting practices from the hotel’s parking area, organized by migrant workers with private cars, were ongoing. Utilizing both the material affordances of vehicles, knowledge of other modes of transport, and their social networks, these types of counter-knowledge and counter-practices (Noori 2022), however small, increasingly constitute a site of contestation (Walters 2015a). These minor struggles over vehicles and routes demonstrate that arrival or mobility infrastructures do not present themselves as unified structures, or regimes, of management and control (Wajsberg and Schapendonk 2021; Zack and Landau 2022). Instead, practices of transgression and improvisation hold equal significance within the infrastructures of labour migration, reflecting how migrant workers use these transgressive practices around the commuting to gain autonomy.

The commute from the city: negotiating risk, mutual dependency and mobile lifestyles

The last commute is situated in the region of Haspengouw, Belgium, focusing on a group of Romanian Roma workers I encountered during fieldwork who self-organise car sharing from Brussels. During the picking season, this commute is made daily by cramming into privately owned cars with (extended) family members. The commute takes around an hour, depending on traffic. This infrastucturing practice of sharing cars to make the commute thus relies partly on social ties with (extended) family, some newly arrived in Belgium, some permanent residents, and others coming only specific periods of the year. Additionally, this social infrastructure of connections between extended family members partially overlaps with the role of informal brokers, or koppelbazen, who play vital roles in connecting workers to farmers in Haspengouw, whilst also arranging administration and transport. These informal brokers rely on their shared kinship or shared ethnic background with those looking for work, established connections with farmers, language skills, and knowledge of horticultural labour in Haspengouw. Emerging from these collaborations facilitated by individuals, is an informal, provisional, social infrastructure that is not necessarily based on solidarity or altruism (Simone 2004). For the services and access to agricultural work they offer, including arranging transportation, some of these brokers ask either a percentage of the hourly wage or a fixed rate. As arrival brokers their position within spectrums of (in)formality and (il)legality varies (Hanhörster and Wessendorf 2020; Hans 2023). Enabling the means of transport towards paid labour, as well keeping control and profiting from it, their presence in the viapolitics of this commute highlights the ambivalent role of extra-legal commercial actors involved in the infrastructures of migration (Walters, Heller and Pezzani 2022, 8).

It is also within these spectrums that the ethnographic encounter in the vignette below should be further untangled, giving insights into different power relations involved. The scene took place during (field) work, picking the last pears of the season.

In the afternoon, I take a 10-minute break from picking pears in the fields. There are ten of us, including the farmer, who all commuted from various locations in Belgium. I notice the farmer, Marieke, talking to the group of Romanian Roma pickers from Brussels. There seems to be confusion. ‘No more work’, she says in French, ‘je suis désolée.’ Pointing to her clipboard, they request her to sign their hours for the day, and she does. Afterwards, she counts the remaining seven people at the plantation and realises there may still be too many. She asks her husband about the remaining work, appearing to be only a couple of lanes. Glancing at her clipboard, she decides that two more people must leave. She turns to me: ‘It makes no sense to have too many people on the picking platform.’ She informs a couple, Florin and Ioana, that they also have to go home. They look disappointed and confused. ‘Can we come tomorrow?’ one of them tries. ‘I don’t know yet,’ she responds. Writing down their phone number, she says: ‘I will call you tonight. I am sorry.’ Since they do not have their own transportation, they have to wait for the remaining two Roma pickers to finish before they can return to Brussels. As they find a place to wait, Marieke remarks to me that her actions may seem tough, but she cannot predict such situations. Throughout this exchange, I offer twice to leave instead of the Roma workers. My commute is only twenty minutes by bike, and I don’t have the financial necessity to work longer hours. Marieke insists, however, that the Roma workers should be the ones to leave. (Excerpt fieldnotes, September 2021, Sint-Truiden)

To understand why these Roma workers were the first to be sent home, despite their longer commute, it is crucial to consider this vignette within the context of (intersectional) migrant hierarchies operating within capitalist agricultural production (Lulle 2021). As consistently demonstrated, Roma workers across Europe are more likely to work without formal employment contracts and receive lower wages than other migrant and non-migrant workers (Černušáková 2021; Ravnbøl 2019). Roma workers not only face perceptions of being less trustworthy and less hardworking than, for instance, Polish workers, but are in this case also differently ‘fixed’ temporally and spatially (Lulle 2021). At the plantation I worked, Polish workers, deemed more skilled, are typically preferred for full-season employment and are provided housing on the premises of the plantation. This arrangement not only ensures their availability in terms of timing and location, with a convenient commute of only a few hundred meters, but also grants them a relatively stable position. Conversely, the group of Roma workers I encountered find themselves ‘fixed’ in an even more precarious situation. Their labour, and commute, are desired and demanded only when and where needed to complement the (preferred) workers. Reflecting on his decade-long experience in various precarious labour situations on plantations, first as an undocumented picker and later as a supervisor, Ajeet underscored the heightened precarity faced by Roma workers commuting from Brussels:

Those people leave there [Brussel] at six and have to drive for an hour. They work here eight hours. […]. If you have worked for two hours and it starts raining hard, boss says you have to stop. If you started at eight and you have to stop after two hours and go back. Those people don’t earn anything. You also pay for gas. Those people are not happy. […] So usually, we start with a team of twenty, but everyday two people less. They go look for something else.

Interview Ajeet, picker and supervisor, Sint-Truiden, September 2021

As indicated in the concluding part of this quote, this prevalent uncertainty regarding the amount of work, as well as false promises by farmers, dissuade some Roma workers from undertaking the commute. Others try to find work at other farms, where there might be more work or better wages. When questioned about the main challenges of managing a fruit farm, Marieke, the farmer mentioned in the vignette, responded:

To get the people, to get the people here (points down at the floor). At this spot. […] It is complicated in that sense that you cannot get the people here… Those people come here from Brussel only when we can say beforehand; can you stay today until that time. But we can’t do that, and they don’t care, sometimes they just come and go as they please.

Interview Marieke, farmer, Sint-Truiden, October 2021

While the previous commutes showcased varying degrees of autonomy, the insecurity described by farmers, pickers and in the vignette underscores a delicate mutual dependency, albeit still an unequal one. Pickers depend on insecure, precarious, and often informal work, while farmers rely on what they perceive as unpredictable and 'risky’ workers. This perceived 'risk’ of Roma mobilities extends beyond just farmers to state actors as well. Roger, Marieke’s husband, noted that Roma workers often get stuck en route from Brussels, adding further friction to this urban-rural circulation:

Those pickers often have troubles on the road from Brussels, but they are creative. They get stuck, or the police stops cars with Romanian number plates. They know something can be wrong with those cars, they drive in a four-persons car with eight people. So, we never know if they will actually make it.

Interview Roger, farmer, Sint-Truiden, September 2021

The political sorting and policing of ‘potentially unruly circulations of humans’ (Walters 2015b, 3) is thus specifically projected on the mobile vehicles, marked by their foreign number plates, and on specific routes (Walters 2015a). These practices of sorting and policing, as well as the other empirical material presented in this section, not only reaffirm the aforementioned hierarchies of labour, but also highlight how, in this case, Roma workers have to navigate these unequal mobility regimes compared to other migrant workers. Waiting in vehicles serves, again, both as a tool of governance and a subsequent temporal experience. Different from the previous cases, however, the (commuting) time Roma migrant workers put into this commute is deemed less valuable than the time of workers positioned higher in this hierarchy. The viapolitical articulation of this commute between Brussels and Haspengouw thus appears clearly as co-constituted by its racialized component.

While the viapolitics of this commute thus entails a complex interplay of mutual dependency and racialized control, positioning Roma workers precariously within agricultural labour regimes, it is crucial to note the role of this labour mobility among Romanian Roma compared to their other economic pursuits. Following this commute to Brussels, in the literal sense, revealed that fruit picking is just one aspect of their diverse livelihood strategies, which also include steel industry work, short-term construction jobs, and informal street work such as begging (see also Friberg 2020). This diverse economic manoeuvring, also termed patchwork economy by those studying survival strategies of Romanian Roma across European urban areas (Ravnbøl 2019), allows for another kind of intra-EU mobility, one that is not solely governed by seasonal labour regimes but also by ideologies of mobility and diversity. The infrastructuring practice of commuting through shared car rides, coordinated by family members and/or informal intermediaries, serves as a vital component stitching these patches together (Jung and Buhr 2022, 128).

Conclusion

Following three commutes in Westland and Haspengouw, this paper argued that for agricultural migrant workers commuting encompasses much more than the stereotyped ‘minivan of Poles’. The distances crossed, roads travelled, vehicles used, and connections with fellow passengers are not neutral elements, part of physical infrastructures bringing them from their living spaces to their worksites and back, but fields of control and contestation. The viapolitics of the three commutes discussed are and do different things, unveiling otherwise invisible facets of migrant workers’ everyday lives as they navigate the regimes of agricultural labour migration.

In the first case, I showed that the distance between urban areas and Westland presents a logistical challenge for commercial actors, such as employment agencies. To efficiently overcome this distance within the capitalist organisation of agricultural labour, the commute requires an infrastructure of control, resulting in the articulation of a rather coercive viapolitics of commuting. This coercive viapolitics operates on a temporal level, immobilising migrant workers through deceleration and waiting to enhance agricultural productivity, as their time is deemed less significant than the efficient and profitable flow of agricultural products. This (anti)logistical control and dependency transform the commute into both a site of struggle for, and a means of, social mobility. In the second case, the walkable distance allows migrant workers more freedom to organise their own commute. Nevertheless, the viapolitics of this commute manifests through other types of control and contestation. While walking offers a semblance of freedom and autonomy over people’s time, the landscape of the agro-industrial estate has been instrumentalized by local actors to reroute and restrict workers’ everyday mobilities, positioning them somewhat outside the timespace of ‘normal’ life. In this constrained spatial and temporal landscape, small acts of resistance are projected on the means of transport. In the final commute, between Brussels and Haspengouw, the relatively long distance has been taken up by Romanian Roma workers themselves, being relatively well embedded socially and spatially. The viapolitics of this commute reveals how intersectional hierarchies of migrant labour are intertwined with ideologies of diversity, in this case clearly reflecting the racialisation of workers. As such, their commute is perceived as ‘riskier’ for both farmers, as they are not sure if the workers they need will arrive, and the workers, who are not always guaranteed work even after they arrive and face the risk of increased police scrutiny on the way to Haspengouw. This, in turn, necessitates reliance on a broader infrastructure of livelihood strategies, making these economic manoeuvres less structured by seasonal labour regimes than the first two commutes.

While the precise ways in which vehicles, power, precarity, and agency interact is thus heterogeneous and dynamic (Hassouneh 2023; Walters 2016, 478), viapolitics elucidated that, and how, the freedom of movement for workers in the European Union falls short of reality and is influenced by labour relations and inequalities. The ethnographic cases demonstrated how the movement of EU migrant workers is controlled daily through vehicles, routes, and terrains, even within the borders of nation-states, to benefit the agro-industrial market. As such, these commutes are integral to broader exclusionary and restrictive regimes of labour migration, but also reflect nuanced variations of containment and autonomy in migrant workers’ freedom of mobility. These dynamics extend beyond dimensions of labour or housing typically explored by researchers in the field of labour migration. Besides showing how commuting vehicles become instruments of logistical control and means of (racialized) sorting, this article aimed to enrich the analytical tool of viapolitics with an ethnographic eye on the subjectivities shaped within various regimes. This revealed how the viapolitics of these three commutes articulate through diverse temporal experiences, such as deceleration, waiting, and temporal isolation, and their implications for social mobility. Moreover, perhaps unlike deportations by aircrafts Walters (2016) describes, there is an important accumulative dimension shaping the type and amount of resistance migrant workers can exert over their commute within the workings of viapolitics. Over time, migrant workers’ aspirations evolve, and some are able to utilize the social connections and resources accrued to gain more autonomy over their commutes and over the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, as I argued, small-scale practices of transgression, resistance, and solidarity throughout the commute remain important, although rarely surpassing the individual level.

To gain a deeper understanding of these agencies, future research should both zoom in and zoom out on the viapolitics of migrant commuting. Firstly, more attention could be paid to how the viapolitics of commuting impacts different migrant workers sharing the same vehicle or engaging in similar commuting methods, while considering racialised, gendered, and class-based hierarchies (Walters, Heller, and Pezzani 2022, 13). Secondly, instead of focusing solely on this micro-mobility scale, viapolitics could offer insights into other scales of (im)mobility involved in reproducing these horticultural economies concentrating in regions like Haspengouw or Westland, giving insights into other migratory as well as non-migratory configurations of inequality, privilege, and potential resistances.

Ethical approval

Research conducted for this paper was approved by the Science-Geo Ethics Review Board at Utrecht University, under project number ERB Review Geo S-21609.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation to everyone who shared their stories and experiences for this research. Moreover, I thank Karel Arnaut, Ilse van Liempt and Gideon Bolt for their incredibly valuable feedback, as well as Bruno Meeus for his initial suggestion to apply viapolitics. Lastly, I thank the valuable feedback of the reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research is part of ReROOT, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme.