“Waiting for a Wife”: Transnational Marriages and the Social Dimensions of Refugee “Integration”

This paper addresses the gap in research on the social dimensions of refugee resettlement. This is accomplished by examining refugee belonging and definitions of “integration”through a case study of Acehnese refugees resettled in Vancouver, British Columbia, between 2004 and 2006. We analyze findings based on a survey and in-depth interviews conducted five years after resettlement. Our findings suggest that recently resettled groups like the Acehnese, who are “new and few,” face specif c integration challenges. Importantly,the lengthy timelines to enact sponsorship of a spouse and/or family reunification from Aceh unwittingly inhibit the social integration of the sponsors waiting in Canada.Cet article traite de lacunes en matière de recherche sur les dimensions sociales de la réinstallation des réfugiés en examinant l’appartenance de réfugiés et les définitions de «l’intégration» à travers une étude de cas de réfugiés acehnais réinstallés à Vancouver en Colombie-Britannique, entre 2004 et 2006. Nous analysons les résultats sur la base d’un sondage et d’entrevues en profondeur menés cinq ans après la réinstallation. Nos résultats suggèrent que des groupes récemment réinstallés comme les habitants d’Aceh, qui sont «nouveaux et rares», sont confrontés à des difficultés d’intégration particulières. Notamment, les longs délais pour établir le parrainage d’un conjoint et/ou le regroupement des familles à Aceh empêchent sans le vouloir l’intégration sociale des parrains qui attendent au Canada

Crimmigration and Refugees: Bridging Visas, Criminal Cancellations and ‘Living in the Community’ as Punishment and Deterrence

Australia’s status as the only state with a policy of mandatory indefinite detention of all unlawful non-citizens, including asylum seekers, who are within Australian territory is a fact that is both well-known and frequently cited. From its inception, mandatory immigration detention was touted as ‘the method of deterrence for those seeking asylum onshore’ and since then ‘mandatory detention has been at the forefront of a deterrence as control and control as deterrence discourse’2. The imagined subjects of deterrence are frequently asylum seekers presented as ‘bogus’ or as economic migrants, and the sites for control are Australia’s ‘immigration program’ and borders. While these dual factors have animated the implementation and continuation of the policy for over 25 years, the contemporary practice and enforcement of detention in Australia presents a much more complex picture

Disavowing 'the' prison

This chapter confronts the idea of ‘the’ prison, that is, prison as a fixed entity. However hard we, that is, prison scholars including ourselves, seek to deconstruct and critique specific aspects of confinement, there is a tendency to slip into a default position that envisions the prison as something given and pre-understood. When it comes to prison our imagination seems to clog up. It is the political solution to its own failure, and the preferred metaphor for its own representation

Seeking Status, Forging Refuge: U.S. War Resister Migrations to Canada

Often people migrate through interstitial zones and categories between state territories, policies, or designations like “immigrant” or “refugee.” Where there is no formal protection or legal status, people seek, forge, and find safe haven in other ways, by other means, and by necessity. In this article, I argue that U.S. war resisters to Canada forged safe haven through broadly based social movements. I develop this argument through examination of U.S. war-resister histories, focusing on two generations: U.S. citizens who came during the U.S.-led wars in Vietnam and, more recently, Afghanistan and Iraq. Resisters and activists forged refuge through alternative paths to protection, including the creation of shelter, the pursuit of time-space trajectories that carried people away from war and militarism, the formation of social movements across the Canada-U.S. border, and legal challenges to state policies and practices.Souvent, les migrants se trouvent dans des zones et catégories interstitielles entre les territoires des États, les politiques publiques et les désignations comme « immigrant » ou « réfugié ». Là où il n’existe pas de protection et de statut légal formels, les gens cherchent, forgent et trouvent refuge d’autres façons, par d’autres moyens et par nécessité. Dans cet article, je soutiens que les résistants à la guerre étasuniens au Canada se sont forgé un lieu de refuge à travers de vastes mouvements sociaux. Je développe cet argument en examinant les histoires des résistants à la guerre étasuniens et je me concentre sur deux générations: les citoyens américains venus pendant les guerres menées par les États-Unis au Vietnam et, plus récemment, en Afghanistan et en Irak. Les résistants et les militants se sont forgé un refuge à travers des voies alternatives vers la protection, incluant la création de lieux d’hébergement, la poursuite de trajectoires menant les gens à s’éloigner de la guerre et du militarisme, la formation de mouvements sociaux par-delà la frontière entre le Canada et les États-Unis et la contestation judiciaire des politiques et pratiques étatiques

Embodied geographies of the nation-state : an ethnography of Canada’s response to human smuggling

This thesis provides a geographical analysis of the response of the Canadian nation-state to human smuggling. I contend that nation-states must be examined in relation to transnational migration and theorized as diverse sets of embodied relationships. As a case study, I conducted an ethnography of the institutional response to the arrival of four boats carrying migrants smuggled from Fujian, China to British Columbia in 1999. I studied the daily work of border enforcement done by civil servants in the federal bureaucracy of Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), as well as the roles played by other institutions in the response to the boats. This "ethnography of the state" led me to theorize the nation-state geographically as a network of employees that interact with a variety of institutions in order to enact immigration policy. I also interviewed employees of other institutions involved in the response to human smuggling, including provincial employees, immigration lawyers, service providers, suprastate organizations, refugee advocates, and media workers. The thesis explores crossinstitutional collaboration among them and the resulting decision-making environment in which civil servants design and implement policy. Civil servants practice enforcement according to how and where they "see" human smuggling. My conceptual understanding of state practices relates to these efforts to order transnational migration. Diverse institutional actors negotiate smuggling at a variety of scales. Power relations are visible through discussions of smuggling at some scales, but obscured at others. I "jump scale" through embodiment in order to understand the micro-geographies of the response. This shift in the scale of analysis of the nation-state uncovers different relationships, interests, and negotiations in which state practices are embedded. This approach to geographies of the nation-state considers the time-space relations across which state practices take place, the everyday enactment of policy, the categorization of migrants, and the constitution of borders through governance. I argue that such an approach is key to understanding the relationship between nation-states and smuggled migrants. The findings suggest a re-spatialization of enforcement through which nation-states increasingly practice interception abroad and design stateless: spaces, and in so doing, reconstitute international borders.Arts, Faculty ofGeography, Department ofGraduat

Precarity and Enforcement: Exploring the Migration, Protection, Security Nexus

Bio: Alison Mountz is Associate Professor of Geography at Syracuse University and was the 2009-2010 Mackenzie King Research Fellow at Harvard University. Her work engages transnational migration, border enforcement, asylum, and detention. Her book, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (University of Minnesota Press), explores encounters between authorities and undocumented migrants in Canada and the United States and was awarded the 2011 Meridian Book Prize from the Association of American Geographers. Her current research examines island detention centers off the shores of North America, Europe, and Australia, and is funded by a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation