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Anna Pratt, Securing Borders:
Detention and Deportation in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005)
Reviewed by Harsha Walia
The Rain 4:1 (Winter 2006): 1
As attention to national borders has figured prominently in the
post-9/11 world, Anna Pratt’s Securing
Borders provides readers with a comprehensive history and
analysis for organizing against Canadian immigration processes and
policies that have wreaked havoc in the lives of thousands of migrants.
In this book, Pratt unearths the historical origins of the “tough on
immigration” policies that have come to dominate today’s political
landscape and societal consciousness. The beefing of national security
forces at the borders that mark the space for the West is repeatedly
portrayed as the first, and most important, line of defense against
crime and terrorism. As Pratt writes, “Detention and deportation are
the two most extreme and bodily sanctions of this immigration penality,
which constitutes and enforces borders, polices non-citizens,
identifies those deemed dangerous, diseased, deceitful, or destitute,
and refuses them entry or casts them out. As such, detention and
deportation and the borders they sustain are also key technologies in
the continuous processes that make up citizens and govern populations”
(1).
Using a Foucauldian power analysis, Pratt examines the means through
which the growth of the administrative state and its domination over
society—“the governmentalization of the state”—has rearticulated state
sovereignty and discipline through discursive, legislative, fiscal,
organizational, and other resources of the public power. Disciplinary
regimes, such as those in prisons, factories, and schools work to
instill obedience by encouraging the internalization of methods of
control. In chapter two, for example, Pratt deals with various aspects
of the detention system and penal practices of the immigration system,
including the horrifying narrative of the death of Michael Akhimien at
Celebrity Detention Center in Toronto.
Regimes that govern through liberalism can also be understood as a
political rationality. Chapter three is particularly valuable as Pratt
explores the notion of administrative discretion by analogizing the
discussion of discretion in immigration enforcement to administrative
discretion in welfare regulation. Discretion, as Pratt explains, is
central to the operation of immigration policy, despite the typically
held view by many advocates that discretion of individual immigration
officers is antithetical to the exercise of immigration law. Most often
discretion is constructed either as a problem, where individual
immigration officers are seen as having too much arbitrary power, or as
a humanitarian solution to permit the general rules of law to be
adapted to individual circumstances. However, as Pratt discusses,
discretion and law are not in opposition to each other. Rather the
operation of legal power depends on the existence of discretionary
power. “It works to reconcile the universality of liberal legal
principles and the particularity of specific legal cases and contexts”
(57). A quotation by Peter Fitzpatrick in the book aptly characterizes
the relationship between law and discretion: “it is because of the
particularist and pervasive powers of administration that the rule of
law can be maintained in all its aspects of universality and equality
and seen as marking out fields for free action. Administration is the
necessary ‘dark side’ of the law” (57). This discussion therefore
appropriately analyzes the nature of discretionary power-making and
debunks the traditional view held by liberal advocates that solutions
to the immigration system lie in more or better regulated laws, which
end up sustaining the primacy of the liberal legal paradigm and detract
from a structural understanding of the immigration system.
In chapter four, Pratt maps out the transitions in the governance of
immigration policy from 1945 to the present day Immigration and
Refugee Protection Act.
Set in a historical context, the book maps the evolving discursive
formations and power relationships that have surrounded the development
of immigration policy. As Pratt discusses, over the past fifty years as
legal-rights talk became more entrenched, explicitly racist and
moralistic grounds for exclusion became de-legitimized, and in their
place categories of criminality and security were reconfigured as
threats to the nation-state. What happened after 9/11 was the further
entrenchment of the crime-security nexus that was already
well-established. It becomes evident that although different eras have
been dominated by different perceptions of what has constituted threats
to the nation-state, each era has formulated threats as being external
to the nation-state thus
justifying exclusionary immigration policies.
Through the mapping of historical developments, in chapters six and
seven, discursive formations that regulate the notion of good versus
bad refugees become apparent. Historically and currently, “genuine
refugees” are seen as those who are forced to leave their country due
to persecution and through no personal fault of their own, while “bogus
refugee claimants” are regarded with suspicion and as system-abusers
because they are perceived as being voluntary (typically economic)
migrants. It is only the genuine refugee who deserves Canadian
protection and access to the benefits of Canadian citizenship, while
Canadian society becomes constructed as a victim to system abusers—i.e.
fraudulent refugee claimants. Therefore, like welfare policy, the
deserving refugee only exists in opposition to those constructed as
undeserving and undesirable. As many movements like No Borders and No
One is Illegal have reiterated, the category of legitimate versus
illegitimate migrants merely goes to further strengthen the power of
the state to construct humanitarian categories that control people’s
right to self-determination. Therefore the book contributes to
dispelling the myth of the “deserving refugee”, which invokes a sense
of pity and charity, in opposition to the “bogus refugee
claimant”.
This book does fall short, however, in relating the construction of the
Canadian nation-state through the use of exclusionary immigration
policies to a broader anti-capitalist or anti-colonial analysis. There
is no mention of the colonial project of Canada that is founded on the
occupation and genocide of indigenous peoples. Nor does the book
connect the processes of immigration to the broader powers of an
imperialist and capitalist state that requires borders to be
established and maintained for its financial security. The state,
through its internationally-sanctioned right to discriminate
non-citizens, is able to offer employers the cheapest and most
vulnerable group of workers simply by denying most people the ability
to gain legal citizenship status. Furthermore, the book does not, at
least explicitly, discuss the ways in which the construction of the
Canadian nation-state is racialized and depends on a racialized
understanding of who
belongs and who does not. The success of border panics, for example,
deeply depends not merely on the construction of “foreigners” but
depends on the construction of racialized foreigners who are to be
regulated by Canadian (read: white) society. Finally, the book does not
(and certainly does not claim to) provide any inspiration in discussing
movements of resistance against border policies.
The assertion of Canada’s sovereign right to be selective with respect
to whom it allows to enter and remain in Canada has always represented
the bottom line in the justification of immigration law. Canadian
multiculturalism and conversations about race relations will hardly
dismantle an immigration system that thrives on and nourishes the
racism hidden within the deep structures of our society. As stated by
Prime Minister Mackenzie King in 1947, “I wish to make it quite clear
that Canada is perfectly within her rights in selecting persons whom we
regard as desirable future citizens. It is not a ‘fundamental human
right’ of any alien to enter Canada. It is a privilege. It is a matter
of domestic policy. The people of Canada do not wish, as a result of
mass immigration, to make any fundamental alteration in the character
of our population.” Given that the detention and deportation of
non-citizens is so readily accepted and unquestioned in society as the
legitimate exercise of state sovereignty, this books goes a long way to
render visible the material conditions and tangible practices of the
detention and deportation of undeserving and undesirable non-citizens,
who are essentially being criminalized for the mere act of migration.