A political anatomy of detention and deportation in Canada

This thesis examines exclusionary Canadian immigration law, policy and practices as a distinct penality: an immigration penality which polices non-citizens and which administers coercive sovereign sanctions under the authority of the Canadian Immigration Act. It traces the discursive shifts in the governance of this penality and it attends to the specific practices which these discursive developments have entailed. The first part of this thesis maps the shifts in the governance of immigration penality starting with the broadly discretionary, racist and otherwise discriminatory 1952 Immigration Act. The exclusions which it sanctioned were morally-charged, status-oriented exclusions which were governed largely through national purity discourses. It also expressed the continuing influence of Cold War anxieties relating to national security. Over the 1960s, these guiding rationales were increasingly challenged by liberal legal and humanitarian discourses. The 1976 Immigration Act arguably represents a key point in the extension of liberal legal and humanitarian governance to non-citizens. It 'de-raced' national admission policies, it curbed (some) discretionary powers and it entrenched a permanent on-shore refugee determination system. It legally constructed and confirmed the deservedness of 'genuine victims' of state sanctioned persecution in their countries of origin. However, this triumph of liberal legality and humanitarianism was short-lived. In the 1980s and 1990s, the deservedness of the rights-bearing refugee was increasingly eclipsed by the undeservedness of the free-loading, fraudulent and criminal immigrant and/or refugee claimant. This thesis details the discursive reconstruction of refugees from deserving 'victim' to threatening 'offender', and considers the legal and policy consequences which this reconstruction entailed. This analysis considers the steady erosion of the political currency of humanitarian liberal discourses and the rising influence of risk/danger, criminality and victim-focused discourses in the governance of most areas of public policy. Most relevant here is the way in which anxieties about the threats posed by refugees merged with the discourse on welfare fraud and with broader preoccupations with system integrity which construct the state as victim. The second part of this thesis examines the implementation of these policy developments. It offers a case study of the processes through which Somali refugees living in Toronto in the mid-1990s were reconstructed as fraudulent, free-loading criminals are examined as are the coercive consequences of this reconstruction. The contemporary preoccupation with criminality that today governs immigration penality and the proliferation of enforcement-oriented practices and techniques is documented in the second part of this thesis. In the year 2000, Canadian immigration penality is governed primarily through the rationale of risk/danger, mobilized through criminality, fraud and state-as-victim discourses and operationalised through the interaction of law and discretion. The form of power which is operationalised through this process is sovereign. This dissertation closes with a detailed description of the carceral conditions and penal practices of immigration detention at the Celebrity Budget Inn Immigration Holding Centre in Mississauga, Ontario and with some reflections on the future of detention in Canada.