Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border

NOTES

177 Introduction 1. Those migrantswho arrive spontaneously in Canada and make refugee claims are called “refugee claimants.” Those who seek protection once reaching sovereign territory in the United States or Australia are “asylum seekers.” 2. After the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, Citizenship and Immigration Canada remained intact, but the mandate to enforce borders was moved to a new agency called the Canadian Border Services Agency. 3. This field research saw many twists and turns. See Mountz (2007) for a fuller discussion. 4. Within CIC and other organizations, a small group of people were most involved in the response to these arrivals, which makes them easily identifiable. Pseudonyms are used and identifying details sometimes altered to conceal identities of participants. I specify the general location but not the specific dates of interviews due to the public nature of the schedule of some officials interviewed. 5. Often analyses of the contemporary political landscape operating under the rubric of globalization emphasize movement, flows (Appadurai 1996; Castells 2000), “the information society” (Castells 1996), identities, scales (Brenner 1997), ethnoscapes (Appadurai 1996), social movements (Guarnizo and Smith 1999), and networks (Agnew 1999) that supersede an ever-present backdrop of the more statically imagined nation-state. Still others see nation-states not as excluded by these networks, but rather implicated and embedded within them (Castells 2000; Hardt and Negri 2000; Taylor 2000). Saskia Sassen, for example, argues that nation-states are not dead but rearticulating, and she spatializes these rearticulations in the particular locales of body and border (1996, 2006). Arjun Appadurai (2006, 129), alternatively, offers the metaphor of the vertical vertebrate. 6. Understanding the ways in which nation-states see, classify, accept, or reject transnational migrant subjectivities shows the power of the state to produce identity and to thus materially reject those not included, as in Nevins’s analysis of the construction of the “illegal alien” (2002) in the United States, which Heyman asserts Notes 178 Notes to Chapter 1 is a key context to the organizational worldviews of INS officers (1995). The structural effect has an important impact on our understanding of border enforcement. Joe Nevins (2002) studied the history of U.S. enforcement of its border with Mexico. Nevins (2002, 160) argues that those practices that reify the artificial boundary between state and civil society are depoliticizing because they assume that nationstates act as autonomous decisionmakers. When people believe that states are allpowerful and mysterious, existing somewhere “out there,” they do not participate in protest or dialogue. 7. Kristof Van Impe (2000, 120) suggests that trafficking is the “degeneration” of smuggling, signaling a loss of control on the part of clients who cannot pay off debts. The distinction between these terms remains ambiguous—more a difference of degree than a dichotomy—and is complicated by the fact that so little is known about the conditions under which individuals are smuggled or trafficked and the conditions in which they ultimately live and work at the final destination (see Kwong 1997; Chin 1999). 8. Contemporary research on transnational migration often foregrounds migrant narratives to theorize dynamic subjectivities. These are interventions into what were once primarily structural macronarratives of immigration (e.g., Silvey and Lawson 1999; Lawson 2000; McHugh 2000). Because they focus on movement across borders, theorists tended to write about human mobility in celebratory fashion , wherein movement was a triumph over the constraints of borders (see Mitchell 1997a for a critique). They thus tended to overlook the structural impediments to mobility in a postcolonial, postnational era (see Appadurai 1996; Anderson 2000) of quick border crossings and dual citizenship. 1. Human Smuggling and Refugee Protection 1. The practice of turning away boats calls into question the integrity of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol, to which Canada is a signatory, a point to be explored further in chapter 5. 2. Fears of direct and indirect travel from particular regions have historical precedents in Canada. In 1908 the Canadian government passed the Continuous Journey stipulation to prohibit Indians who stopped in Hong Kong from entering Canada. 3. TrendsinscholarshiponU.S.bordersreflectthesegapsinknowledge.Although there is a substantial body of work on the U.S.–Mexico border (e.g., Andreas 2000; Nevins 2002), much less has been written by United States–based scholars about the forty-ninth parallel and Canadian immigration and refugee policies. See Koslowski (2004) and Sparke (2006) for discussions of security along the Canada-U.S. border. 4. These numbers were dynamic...