Vol. 16 No. 3 (March, 2006) pp.246-249

 

SECURING BORDERS: DETENTION AND DEPORTATION IN CANADA, by Anna Pratt. Vancouver. University of British Columbia Press, 2005. 304pp. Hardback.  $85.00.  ISBN: 0774811544.  Paperback.  $29.95. ISBN: 0744811552.

                                                           

Reviewed by Greg Marquis, Department of History and Politics, University of New Brunswick Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, gmarquis [at] unbsj.ca

 

In the second half of the 20th century, Canadians prided themselves on a liberal approach to refugees. For the most part prior to 1970, refugees, like the larger immigrant stream, were white and European. Reflecting changes in immigration policy, and a more humanitarian approach, by the 1970s the country was accepting increasing numbers of non-white refugees. Canada had finally signed the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees which promised that refugees would not be deported to their homeland to face persecution. During the 1960s persons facing deportation were given the right of appeal. The Immigration Act of 1976 supposedly was a victory of liberal attitudes towards newcomers. Since that decade, the chief problem for Canada’s legal and bureaucratic apparatus has been identifying bona fide refugees and distinguishing those whom the public would deem ‘queue jumpers’ or cheats. The backlash against refugees was first noticeable in the 1980s, when public opinion, affected by high profile cases like the arrival of large groups of Tamils from Sri Lanka and Sikhs from India, influenced the Conservative government to tighten up the process. The cost associated with the refugee program, including a mounting backlog of claims, was also a politically sensitive issue. A backlash also was noticeable in the United States, where Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, effective in 1997, which aimed to remove ‘undocumented’ asylum seekers and resulted in more secretive proceedings and greater use of detention.

 

Anna Pratt, a sociologist who teaches criminology, examines an important aspect of Canada’s refugee policy – detention and deportation – from the perspective of human rights and social justice. She sees a larger pattern in connections between the federal government’s immigration and refugee policies, public concerns about crime and welfare fraud, media reporting on immigrant communities such as Toronto’s Somalis, and the trend towards neo-liberalism. On the other hand, the history of refugee policy since World War II suggests that despite explanations about the changed nature of the post-September 11 world, attitudes towards undeserving outsiders display considerable continuity.

 

In keeping with a trend in academic sociology, SECURING BORDERS is not so much a study of actual policy or law enforcement, but of “the shifting and historically specific discursive formations, transformations, and technologies of power” relating to refugee detention and deportation (p.1). The discourse surrounding the 2001 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, [*247] (IRPA) introduced by the Liberal government, was that crime and fraud, such as organized human smuggling, was a threat to Canadian national security. Pratt argues that, despite its name, the IRPA seeks to protect Canada from risky “foreign nationals” (p. 3).  She reviews a number of laws and policies, and considers claims by the media and the state that on the surface have little to do with the administration of refugee law, such as welfare fraud (welfare is a provincial government program) and Bill C-36, the Anti-Terrorism Act, passed two months after the terror attacks in the United States. Around the same time the two countries concluded a Smart Border Accord. A year later Canada signed a safe third country agreement with its neighbor that made it difficult for refugees to apply for asylum at the US-Canada border. A series of publicized violent crimes in the Toronto area (the destination of many refugees to Canada) has served to underscore concerns about public safety and national security.  Despite official pronouncements supporting multiculturalism, Canada was not always accepting of non-white immigrants and refugees from Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South America and Africa, the dominant sending societies of the 1990s (p.95).

 

According to Pratt, these policies and the discourse surrounding them are proof that attitudes toward refugees and stricter policies at the border are being governed by fears of criminality. She cites the work of Jonathan Simon and Nikolas Rose on how liberal (or neoliberal) states govern “through crime,” a process that excludes or oppresses the poor, the unemployed, minorities and immigrants (p.19). Criminologists also argue that increasing concern with victims and victims’ rights applies to immigration and refugee policy, but that the ‘victim’ is construed as the state and the broader host society. In the past, immigrants were excluded on the grounds of poor health, morality, racial homogeneity and suspected political radicalism. Starting in the 1990s, Pratt observes, many non-citizens were removed for reasons of criminality, and Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) became more of an enforcement agency. An organized crime unit was added in 1994. The minister of immigration announced that deportation would focus on “criminals first” (p.161). The Royal Canadian Mounted Police continued to develop ‘risk profiles’ of international airline passengers, a practice tantamount to racial profiling. In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, the mandate of the Canadian Intelligence and Security Service (CSIS) was expanded to provide the government with “strategic intelligence” concerning “transnational crime in Canada” (p.166).

 

In keeping with the trends of neoliberalism, welfare and humanitarian programs such as refugee resettlement are framed within a discourse of penality, where the emphasis is on preventing or uncovering abuse of the system. Technology has a role to play and so does the private sector. Pratt makes much of the case study of an immigration detention center operated out of an airport hotel near Toronto. The facility is operated under contract by the Global Expertise in Outsourcing Group, formerly Wackenhut Corrections, [*248] subsidiary of a US-based private security company. She describes the inmates of such facilities as victims of “the culture of fear and disbelief” that began to reshape many aspects of Canadian public policy in the late 20th century (p.213). Pratt also explores the concept of discretion not as an absence of governance, but as a form of governance.

 

Refugees are not without legal tools: the Supreme Court in the 1985 SINGH case ruled that they have the same rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as citizens, by declaring that the lack of oral hearings was arbitrary and a denial of fundamental justice (p.66). The Federal Court of Canada has also challenged the administration of refugee law. In 1997 and 1999, the Liberal government announced steps to lessen the burden for undocumented refugees such as Somalis (pp.131-132).  Convention refugees, who are sponsored by the government or assisted by NGOs and recruited from overseas refugee camps, are viewed as “deserving” future citizens. In contrast, many European nations do not allow refugees to become citizens. But overall, the trend has been towards restriction. Bill C-86 (1992), which followed on the heels of two 1987 laws that further criminalized immigration policy, broadened the definition of criminality.  Immigration officials did not have to prove a prior criminal record in order to exclude an individual (p.107).

 

The changes and attitudes discussed by Pratt are worrisome from human rights and legal

rights points of view, and it is unlikely that refugee policy, despite the continued horrors of civil war, state repression and ethnic violence in many parts of the world, will be liberalized in the near future. Yet Canada still has one of the more generous refugee acceptance rates among western industrialized nations. In 1989 the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) approved 86% of its cases; the figure fell to 58% by 2001. (The high rate for 1989 relates to the fact that most of the approved cases were assisted or sponsored ‘off shore’ refugees, as opposed to the individual or family group that show up ‘on shore’ (Jesuit Social Justice Center 2004)). The United States, with a population ten times that of Canada, since 1990 has limited visas for asylum seekers requesting permanent resident status and has created a large queue and a waiting time of more than ten years for permanent resident status, and twenty years or more for citizenship (Jesuit Social Justice Center 2004; Immigration and Refugee Services of America 2003, at 1-2). In addition, there is a heavy emphasis on detention (including of children). In 2003, Canadian detention centers and provincial jails on an average day held 440 persons. In September 2000, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service detained, on an average day, 20,000 (p.43; also see Human Rights Watch 2001).  Canadian refugee advocacy groups oppose the safe third country agreement between the United States and Canada because of the former’s greater use of detention and less generous provision of social and legal services (Jesuit Social Justice Center). [*249]

 

Finally, it is difficult to ‘prove’ that statistical variations in the detention and deportation of refugees are directly related to public or political concerns over immigrant crime, crime in general, or the presence of non-white minorities. Increases in detention and deportation for criminality may be a reflection of prevalence rates among asylum seekers, or better detection practices. Unlike Canadian citizens, all refugee claimants are fingerprinted by the RCMP (p.188). Pratt also may be guilty of interpreting the national issue from the point of view of one metropolitan area, Toronto. For the decade in which refugees allegedly were increasingly viewed as potential criminals, rather than victims, it is difficult to argue that crime was a pressing social issue on the national level. After a peak in 1991, national crime rates fell through the decade, and remained flat in 2000-02. The slight increase in 2003 was mainly attributable to crimes against property. The murder rate in 2003 was the lowest since 1967 (Statistics Canada 2004). On the other hand, it is not necessary to have high crime rates in order to ‘govern through crime.’ The recently-defeated Liberal government established a controversial national gun registry during a period of falling or stagnant crime rates, and the recently-elected Conservative minority government, as part of its “Stand Up for Canada” platform, urged voters to “Stand Up for Security.” The Conservatives promise to execute outstanding deportation orders, further tighten up the IRPA and install biometric screening technology at border crossings .  

 

REFERENCES:

Human Rights Watch. 2001. “United States-Immigrants’ Rights, World Report.”

Available online at:  http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/usa/index.html#immigrants        

 

Immigration and Refugee Services of America. 2003. REFUGEE REPORTS, Vol. 24 (9) (December 31, 2003).

 

Jesuit Social Justice Center, UNIYA. 2004. “Overview of the United States’ Asylum System.” Available online at: http://www.uniya.org/research/comparative.html

 

Statistics Canada.  2004.  “The Daily, Wednesday, July 28, 2004.”  Available online at:

http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/040728/d040728a.htm

 

CASE REFERENCE:

SINGH v. MINISTER OF EMPLOYMENT AND IMMIGRATION, [1985] 1 SCR 177.

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© Copyright 2006 by the author, Greg Marquis.