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.

中文翻译：

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农业危机、难民危机还是健康危机？新冠疫情期间意大利农业中的季节性移民工人


危机的概念被广泛用来描述近年来变得尖锐且难以控制的欧洲社会现象。特殊性和紧急性已成为为解决工业化农业的经济、社会和环境不可持续性问题而制定的政治战略的属性；被迫移民的流动；和 COVID-19 大流行。本文基于两年多来在疫情蔓延之前和期间在意大利北部移民工人及其雇主中收集的人种学数据。通过联系相关人员的经验和对结构维度的分析，我展示了“农业劳动力的难民化”和“不稳定的正常化”是两个相互关联和相互依存的过程。我的研究通过强调农业危机如何产生对弱势移民劳动力的需求，以及健康危机加剧了这种情况，为最近关于“多重危机”的科学辩论做出了贡献。