Benevolent State, Law-Breaking Smugglers, and Deportable and Expendable Women: An Analysis of the Canadian State’s Strategy to Address Trafficking in Women

The Canadian state undertook a major restructuring of the immigration and refugee program in the 1990s, committing itself to creating a new immigration act as part of this process. Trafficking is one major issue that the new act would concern itself with. In this paper I make the case that the state’s proposals for addressing trafficking enable the state to posit itself as responsible for protecting “Canadians” while carefully avoiding any responsibility for the wellbeing of women who are trafficked; demonize smugglers as the cause of trafficking; and override the concerns and interests of women who are trafficked by making deportation the only “solution” to their presence in Canada. Consequently, these proposals will further penalize the women, while protecting the interests of the Canadian men, women, and employers who profit and benefit from their exploitation. Further, while this approach does nothing to address the root causes of trafficking, the state’s enthusiasm for increasing trade liberalization will only exacerbate these very causes.L’État canadien a entrepris une vaste opération de restructuration du programme d’immigration et du droit d’asile dans les années 90, promettant de créer, comme partie intégrante de ce processus, une nouvelle loi sur l’immigration. Le trafic de personnes est l’une des grosses questions visées par la nouvelle loi. Dans le présent article, je soutiens que les propositions de l’état pour s’attaquer au trafic de personnes permettent à l’état : • De poser comme fait acquis qu’il a la responsabilité de protéger « les Canadiens » tout en évitant toute responsabilité pour le bien-être des femmes trafiquées ; • De diaboliser les passeurs comme étant la cause du trafic ; • De passer outre les préoccupations et les intérêts des femmes trafiquées en proposant la déportation comme seule « solution » à leur présence au Canada. Par conséquent, ces propositions vont pénaliser encore plus ces femmes tout en protégeant les intérêts des Canadiens, des Canadiennes et des employeurs qui tirent profit de leur exploitation. Il faut aussi ajouter qu’alors que cette approche ne fait rien pour s’attaquer aux causes du trafic illicite de migrants, l’enthousiasme de l’état pour étendre encore plus la libéralisation des échanges commerciaux ne fera qu’exacerber ces même causes

Closing the Nation's Doors to Immigrant Women: The Restructuring of Canadian Immigration Policy

This paper rejects the notion that Canada's immigration program is race or gender neutral in principle. Examining the changes introduced by the Immigration Act of 1976-77, I demonstrate how that Act represented historical continuities in racializing and gendering the nation and immigrants. Furthermore, the current restructuring of immigration will greatly reduce the access of third world women to enter Canada as landed immigrants who can subsequently make claims to citizenship.Cet article rejette l'idee que le programme d'immigration du Canada est en principe neutre sur la question de la race ou de l'equilibre entre les sexes. En etudiant les changements introduits par la Loi sur l'immigration de 1976-77, je demontre comment la Loi a represents la continuity historique en mettant une importance sur la race et sur les sexes. De plus, la restructuration actuelle de l'immigration reduira enormement l'acces aux femmes du Tiers monde d'entrer au Canada en tant qu'immigrantes recues et de pouvoir subsequemment demander la citoyennete

Closing the Nation’s Doors to Immigrant Women: The Restructuring of Canadian Immigration Policy

ABSTRACT This paper rejects the notion that Canada's immigration program is race or gender neutral in principle. Examining the changes introduced by the Immigration Act of 1976-77, I demonstrate how that Act represented historical continuities in racial izing and gendering the nation and immigrants. Furthermore, the current restructuring of immigration will greatly reduce the access of third world women to enter Canada as landed immigrants who can subsequently make claims to citizenship. RESUME Cet article rejette l'idee que le programme d'immigration du Canada est en principe neutre sur la question de la race ou de l'equilibre entre les sexes. En etudiant les changements introduits par la Loi sur l'immigration de 1976-77, je demontre comment la Loi a represents la continuity historique en mettant une importance sur la race et sur les sexes. De plus, la restructuration actuelle de l'immigration reduira enormement I'acces aux femmes du Tiers monde d'entrer au Canada en tant qu'immigrantes recues et de pouvoir subsequemment demander la citoyennete

What Do Apologies Apologize for? Rearrangements of State Violence

What do apologies apologize for? More precisely, what do the apologies regularly pronounced by states for some atrocity or other actually accomplish? This question animates my article. State apologies became an integral element of global political culture in the early 21st century. These politics of regret are reshaping Canadian national culture, most pronouncedly with the apologies for the Indian Residential School System (CBC News 2008a; McIntyre 2017) and the Komagata Maru (CBC News 2008b; Trudeau 2016). While Public Inquiries and Royal Commissions have long served as state responses to political mobilization, deployment of the machinery of regret has fast become the predictable response to accusations of atrocities, including genocide, enslavement and racial violence. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s and Walter Benjamin’s ideas on violence, colonial in the case of Fanon (1961), law in that of Benjamin (1996), I examine the apologies delivered to Indigenous peoples and South-Asian diasporic communities by the Canadian state. Locating these pronouncements in the histories of violence they index, I demonstrate how such apologies function as techniques of violence that advance settler power structures and narratives of nationhood. My argument here is that apologies are themselves acts of violence which rework histories of brutalization to meet the political destabilizations of the present. Apologies thus reorganize the racial violence of settler societies, drawing sections of subjugated populations into waging this violence and, in the process, derail resurgent politics of decolonization, abolitionism and anti-racism