Securing Borders: Detention and Deportation in Canada (review)

This book takes a "governmentality" approach to the study of detention and deportation practices in Canada over the latter half of the twentieth century. Like many similar studies, it proceeds from theory to phenomenon: armed with notions about risk management and neoliberal technologies, it sets out to find "governmentality" at work in immigration penality. It is somewhat humble in its goals, providing a large amount of detailed empirical discussion, rather than developing new theoretical insights or critiques.

Having said this, I should admit that I am one of those who is of the opinion that the concept of "governmentality," once it has been lifted out of Foucault's texts and made into a "theoretical framework," is just a little too easy to lower onto other sites. By this I mean that for some of us it is not a surprise that someone can find all of these things going on in a set of institutions and practices which haven't yet been studied in this way. This is because the neoliberal revolution has been all-encompassing in its reach — not in the sense that there is no escape from its clutches, or that it will last forever — but in the sense that it has permeated, to some extent, all aspects of daily life in the over-developed countries of the world, and has made significant inroads elsewhere. What would be surprising, therefore, is if someone were to do a study and find some spaces that neoliberalism hadn't managed to find first.

Given the fact of the ongoing neoliberal revolution, and our basically adequate theoretical understanding of how it works, what becomes important, I would argue, is raising awareness of its insidious modes of division, domination, and exploitation, and understanding better what can be done about fighting them. It is at this level — the level of the political — that I think this is an important text. And it is at this level, in fact, that the author situates its main contribution. Pratt says that while her study is not "explicitly prescriptive," it is also not "merely descriptive." Rather, it sets out to "demonstrate the need to unsettle and accept less readily the taken-for-granted myths and truths that shape policies and practices in this domain" (2). This is to say that it takes up the first part of the political task I have outlined above, in trying to draw attention to another aspect of the repressed reality of Canadian liberal multiculturalism.

On my reading, the central argument of the book is genealogical, and is given in the following sentence:

[A]s previously legitimate grounds for exclusion — race, morality, political ideology — were socially, politically, and legally delegitimated over the postwar period, the crime-security nexus articulated through the language of risk emerged as the guiding logic of border control and immigration penality .

(20)

Readers who are not too familiar with the history of Canadian immigration policy could find the discussion that is produced to establish this thesis enlightening. I found, however, that given the absence of any good reason — for me, a theoretical payoff — to read through long and detailed historical passages, I often skipped ahead to the next section or chapter heading. The gist of Chapter 4, for example, could have been presented in a paragraph or two, and the same could be said for Chapter 5. There were interesting moments, to be sure, but I would have enjoyed the book more if it had been edited so as to bring them out of the narrative shadows, to make a better story out of this history.

Michel Foucault was very good at this. He provided us with descriptions of the routines of total institutions that made the everyday seem fantastic, with images — such as the failed drawing and quartering that opens Discipline and Punish — that stick with us forever. Not everyone is a Michel Foucault, of course, but I do want to acknowledge the creative and powerful way in which the image of the Celebrity...