Liberating Temporariness?: Migration, Work, and Citizenship in an Age of Insecurity 9780773592223

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l i b e r at i n g t e m p o r a r i n e s s ?

Liberating Temporariness? Migration, Work, and Citizenship in an Age of Insecurity edited by

Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Robert Latham

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-7735-4381-2 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4382-9 (paper) 978-0-7735-9222-3 (ePDF) 978-0-7735-9223-0 (ePUB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication   Liberating temporariness? : migration, work, and citizenship in an age of insecurity / edited by Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Robert Latham. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4381-2 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4382-9 (pbk.). – ISBN 978-0-7735-9222-3 (pdf). – ISBN 978-0-7735-9223-0 (epub)   1. Foreign workers – Canada. 2. Foreign workers – Canada – Social conditions. 3. Foreign workers. 4. Foreign workers – Social conditions. I. Vosko, Leah F., editor of compilation II. Preston, Valerie, editor of compilation III. Latham, Robert, editor of compilation HD8108.5.A2L52 2014   331.6'20971

C2014-901300-0 C2014-901301-9

Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in 10.5/13 Sabon

This collection is dedicated to our children, Sydney, Simon, Elizabeth, Alegra, and Shiran, for whom we wish a world abounding in time for all.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Liberating Temporariness? Imagining Alternatives to Permanence as a Pathway for Social Inclusion  3 Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Melisa Bretón pa r t o n e  

s e c u r i t y , t e m p o r a r y s tat u s , a n d r i g h t s

1 Rethinking Canadian Citizenship: The Politics of Social Exclusion in the Age of Security and Suppression  35 Yasmeen Abu-Laban 2 Permanent Patriots and Temporary Predators? Post-9/11 Institutionalization of the Arab/Orientalized “Other” in the United States and the Contributions of Arendt and Said  60 Abigail B. Bakan 3 Indefinitely Pending: Security Certificates and Permanent Temporariness 76 Mike Larsen pa r t t w o  

i n t e r n at i o n a l o r g a n i z at i o n s a n d

t r a n s n at i o n a l d y n a m i c s o f t e m p o r a r y w o r k

4 Managed Migration and the Temporary Labour Fix  99 Christina Gabriel 5 Institutionalizing Temporary Labour Migration in Europe: Creating an “In-between”’ Migration Status  126 Tesseltje de Lange and Sarah van Walsum

viii Contents

6 The Permanence of Temporary Labour Mobility: Migrant Worker Programs across Australia, Canada, and New Zealand  152 Emily Gilbert pa r t t h r e e  

t e m p o r a r y s tat u s , s o c i a l w e l fa r e , a n d

m a r g i n a l i z at i o n

7 Brain Circulation or Precarious Labour? Conceptualizing Temporariness in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service 177 Parvati Raghuram 8 Language Training and Labour Market Integration for Newcomers to Canada  201 Eve Haque 9 Resituating Temporariness as the Precarity and Conditionality of Non-citizenship 218 Luin Goldring 10 Constructing and “Liberating” Temporariness in the Canadian Non-profit Sector: Neoliberalism and Non-profit Service Providers 255 John Shields pa r t f o u r  

(re)framing

temporariness

11 Mexican Migrant Transnationalism and Imaginaries of Temporary/ Permanent Belonging  285 Marianne H. Marchand 12 Temporariness: Other than Permanence, and in the Lives of People – Always …  305 Deepa Rajkumar 13 Temporal Orders, Re-collective Justice, and the Making of Untimely States  339 Robert Latham Contributors 365 Index 373

Acknowledgments

This collection is the product of two linked initiatives, a year-long seminar sponsored by the Vice-President Research and Innovation, York University, the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, the York-based Centre for International and Security Studies, the Gender and Work Database, and CERIS – The Ontario Metropolis Centre; and an International Workshop funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada on the theme of “Liberating Temporariness?” As editors, we are grateful to these institutions for their financial support and we appreciate the initial support of David Dewitt in helping to get this project off the ground. We offer our thanks to all the individuals who volunteered their intellectual energies to this endeavor, including not only the book’s contributors but participants in the seminars whose names do not appear on these pages, especially Anna Agathangelou, Claudia ­Aradau, Gerald Kernerman, Peter Nyers, Silvia D’Addario, and ­Cynthia Wright. We thank as well other colleagues, including C ­ ynthia Cranford, Jennifer Hyndman, Stan Shapson, Deatra Walsh, and Marion Werner, who critically engaged with contributors along the way, as well as the two anonymous reviewers of the volume. Championing the idea of a collection on “temporariness” from the outset and deftly assisting us in bringing it to fruition, Philip Cercone and the staff of McGillQueen’s University Press also offered superlative support. Finally, as with all our creative work, we owe a great debt to our loving partners – Joe, Dalia, and Gerald – for their enduring encouragement and good humour.

l i b e r at i n g t e m p o r a r i n e s s ?

introduction

Liberating Temporariness? Imagining Alternatives to Permanence as a Pathway for Social Inclusion r o b e rt l at h a m , l e a h f . v o s k o , va l e r i e p r e s t o n , and melisa bretón1

Temporariness is being institutionalized as a condition acceptable for growing numbers of people worldwide (Stasiulis and Bakan 2005; Fuller and Vosko 2008; Stasiulis 2008; MacDonald 2009; Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration 2009), including those whose residency status is shaped by national and multilateral measures that secure national borders (De Genova 2002; Balibar 2004; Nyers 2006), those for whom temporary employment is the norm (Vosko 2000; Pellerin 2004; Ruhs 2005; Sharma 2005), and those who have limited social rights (Bosniak 2002; Joppke 2007; ­Macklin 2007; Leitner and Preston 2012). The expansion of temporariness is occurring as activists (No One Is Illegal, Shelter Sanctuary Status, Justicia for Migrant Workers, etc.) and scholars (Nyers 2010; Carens 1987; Latham 2010; Prier 2009; Sharma 2002) develop alternative approaches that contest the contexts and injustices associated with temporary status. Some posit alternative ethical understandings and claims regarding temporariness and permanence, and others contest the single citizenship state-society model as the predominant frame for understanding and delineating membership that secures life, work, and belonging. On the surface, the two trajectories – one, state-led, expanding temporariness and the other, activist-led, contesting its implications and contexts – are seemingly distinct pathways, in tension with one another. One is moving toward the containment and channelling of

4  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

temporariness into hard categories that inhibit mobility and choices among migrants, whereas the other is moving toward a strong ethics of liberated mobility wherein the hard opposition of categories of permanence and temporariness softens and ultimately no longer stands as an underlying logic determining the terms of inclusion within late capitalist societies. It is important to emphasize that while many progressive efforts to resolve the problems of temporariness have focused on ensuring permanent residence, often termed denizenship (Hammer 1990), for all people, permanent residence does not necessarily guarantee full access to citizenship rights, such as those related to employment, housing, and education, nor to civic participation. For example, the rights to residency of those deemed permanent residents can be lost under specific circumstances. Permanent residents in Canada, the United States, and other nation-states can be deported after conviction and punishment for criminal offences. Permanent residents also often face deportation if they are judged to be security threats. In the context of a widening and deepening security regime, even permanent residents and naturalized citizens can suffer restrictions on their daily lives and the threat of citizenship loss (CBC 2013). Permanence is predicated on an exclusionary definition of the nation in which only citizens have full rights. Permanent residents and temporary residents do not normally enjoy all rights. The benefits of permanent residence are guaranteed only for citizens; not even those permanent residents who have an unlimited right to residency are assured of them. In this sense, permanence is inherently exclusive as well as inextricably intertwined with the production of temporariness. The scope, desirability, and (un)intended consequences of the practices and structures associated with temporariness and permanence are not the only issues that need to be explored in a discussion of social inclusion. Also relevant are the conditions of (re)production of temporariness as well as its “liberating” possibilities. In using the phrase liberating temporariness, we recognize two meanings. One meaning is the freeing of individuals and social groups from temporariness as an assigned inferior status or condition. By this meaning, we do not simply intend to denote pathways to permanence. In our view, following such pathways does not free one from temporariness insofar as being rendered temporary  – through, for example, new laws or ascribed violations  – always hovers as a



Introduction 5

possibility for those on the road to permanence. Moreover, many migrants can never embark on a pathway to permanence, and even for some who obtain permanent status the possibility of reversal is all too real and the consequences of having been temporary are too weighty, especially for groups otherwise disadvantaged by their social location, such as people of colour. Liberation from temporariness implies problematizing the binary of permanence/temporariness as well as its hybrid manifestations like permanently temporary, for instance, through modalities such as alternative temporal imaginings (Rajkumar, chapter 12 in this volume) and collective reframings (Marchand and Latham, chapters 11 and 13 in this volume). There is no one pathway toward liberation but rather multiple processes through which individuals and communities can navigate and move beyond the temporary/permanent divide. A second meaning is the liberation of temporariness itself from the effects of the framings and social structures that render it harmful (Lenard and Straehle 2012). Can temporariness as a status, life condition, or identity be freed from the limits imposed on it by permanence? In its most basic form, this liberation might be pursued through affirmations of temporariness as a condition of equality and process of equalization that should apply to all people, not only removing its stigma – and breaking through the binary – but opening the way toward rethinking and negotiating the terms of collective political and social life. We might see the very act of migration, by which one frees oneself from places and situations of constraint, oppression, and permanence, as an – often unreflexive – affirmation of temporariness (Latham, chapter 13 in this volume). Furthermore, liberation, across these two meanings, takes various shapes and forms. For instance, for some contributors to this volume, it involves greater mobility between states, access to social protection schemes and better working and living conditions (De Lange and van Walsum, chapter 5 in this volume), and longer term and more sustainable financing of programs for nonprofit agencies as well as less burdensome accountability rules (Shields, chapter 10 in this volume). For others, the processes of liberating temporariness are much more fluid and open ended. They may include abolishing abusive institutions (Larsen, chapter 3 in this volume) and engaging with notions of “unfinished politics” (Mathiesen 1974 as cited by Larsen) or approaching justice in an iterative fashion (Latham, chapter 13 in this volume). There is also the question of whether

6  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

l­iberating temporariness from neoliberal logics can only take place if the logics of capitalism are themselves altered in progressive directions away from neoliberalism (Gilbert, chapter 6 in this volume). The objective of this volume is not to advocate for temporariness per se, certainly not as most migrants currently experience it. Nor is it to negate permanence as a tactical or strategic pathway to forms of security for individual migrants – and their families – facing insecure migratory status with all its implications for employment and social conditions.2 Indeed, in the here and now, many people experiencing temporariness rightfully prefer the securities offered by permanence.3 Rather, contributors to this volume question whether deeper reinforcement of the permanent/temporary binary – as when permanence is assumed to be an end in itself not a means  – is the only way to advance the well-being and status of temporary residents. By interrogating the assumption of permanence as the norm, they also raise questions about our understanding of the nation-state as the space for belonging and membership in it as the grounds for (privileged) access to rights and obligations. The dialogue across the volume focuses on unsettling the taken-for-granted links between status, belonging, and inclusion in a single nation-state. This volume also underlines the multi-dimensional nature of temporariness, at different scales (e.g., sub-nationally, nationally, and internationally), across different domains (e.g., security, work, and settlement), and at different points in time (e.g., before and after the events of September 11, 2001). Reflecting on contributors’ interventions, as editors we aim to highlight the diverse manifestations of this phenomenon, both those that are troubling and confining and those that open up new possibilities. In this way, the notion of liberating temporariness becomes more complicated than simply proceeding to permanence. It also calls attention to a broader group of migrants than the “high-skilled” and business migrants who, under certain agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, are constructed as beyond the temporary/permanent divide itself. Under “de-territorialized capitalism” (Mundlak 2009), these largely business migrants enjoy many of the rights associated with permanence despite their temporary status. The different options posed by contributors to this volume do not present the same coherence and simplicity as the dominant call for a pathway to permanence (Alboim



Introduction 7

2009). Rather, they open alternative possibilities that redefine the meanings and implications of temporariness and permanence. the construction of the permanent/temporary divide

With respect to migration, the temporary/permanent divide is constructed through enforcement of different entry categories and forms of legal residency status. Contributing to a series of tiered (non)citizenship statuses, entry categories create paper borders that are made up of the various restrictions, limits, and containments regarding people’s mobility. Policy-makers are deepening the articulation of rules, codes, and access in increasingly restrictive ways for growing numbers of people who are rendered temporary. In liberal democratic states, there are also increasing restrictions on the ability of individuals to change their legal residency status. Temporariness, thus, becomes more complicated, taking on multiple forms and layers. In all its various forms, temporariness is cast as a problem and a risk to be addressed through discretionary distrust and through practices such as expulsion or revocation of citizenship (Macklin 2007). Temporariness challenges many states’ assumptions that integration is a prerequisite for full incorporation, assumptions that are central to intensification of security at the border (Latham 2010). The state attempts to keep potential threats out of national spaces, while ensuring that only people who can be potentially integrated are admitted (Goldring, Berinstein et al. 2009). The terms of presence for a tourist, student, investor, lawful permanent resident, refugee claimant, and temporary worker are predicated on this distinction (Nyers 2006). At the border, there are multiple channels of passage: the lawful permanent resident follows an integrative path into national society, the temporary entrant faces different modes of provisional presence, and the illegal entrant bypasses the external border but runs up against internal borders (De Genova 2002; Balibar 2004; Sharma 2005). As citizenship rights are expanded for some, states simultaneously create more categories of exclusion by categorizing some people as incapable of integration and others as temporarily temporary, creating a middle (indeed a “testing”) ground for the potential extension of secure legal residency and associated citizenship rights.

8  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

In their emphasis on entry categories, immigration policies also distinguish increasingly between the economically desirable who are often considered to be “high skill” and the economically necessary who are often considered to be “low skill.” With the decline of fulltime permanent employment relationships and the rise of diverse forms of temporary employment, women, older and younger workers, and recently landed lawful permanent residents are increasingly hired for forms of temporary work, including those labelled as seasonal, fixed-term/contract, casual, and agency (Fuller and Vosko 2008; MacDonald 2009). Simultaneously, temporary migrant work programs have expanded in the Global North (Ruhs 2005; Sharma 2005; Fudge and MacPhail 2009; Hennebry 2012). Both permanent and temporary migrants experience the labour market insecurity associated with temporary employment and broader shifts away from the standard employment relationship as an employment model around which labour and social policies are organized in liberal democratic countries, but its impacts are particularly severe for temporary migrants (Lenard and Straehle 2012). State restrictions on social rights also heighten temporariness, especially for those deemed to be “low skilled” workers. Social service provision is often conditional on entry category and permanent residency. Temporary migrants admitted to do necessary work rarely qualify for income security programs and social services such as social assistance, student loans, job and language training courses, subsidized housing, and legal aid. Even when eligibility for social and statutory entitlements is extended to temporary residents, many cannot exercise them. Without access to social services and income security programs, temporary residents find it difficult to maintain their health and well-being, let alone to use and improve their socially recognized skills through education and training and other activities. As a result, they are also ineligible for “high skill” jobs that might offer a path to permanent residency. conceptual dimensions of temporariness

Many different structures and circumstances shape the temporary/ permanent divide in different places and at different points in time. Discerning the range and complexity of factors associated with temporariness is aided by considering three interrelated but distinct dimensions: policies and practices producing temporariness, artifacts



Introduction 9

of temporariness, and contestations and alternative understandings of temporariness. These conceptual dimensions emerge across all the chapters in the volume. Policies and Practices Producing Temporariness We recognize that temporariness is produced by a wide array of policies and practices enacted by states, supranational institutions, corporations, and civil society organizations. They range from laws, legislation, and policies governing migration for employment and judicial decisions to police patrols and aid efforts by nongovernmental organizations. Contributors to this volume highlight the multiple ways in which various policies and practices put different conditionalities associated with temporariness and permanence into effect. In Canada, the state has influenced contemporary understandings of temporariness and permanence through its actions related to labour, immigration, and settlement policy, which have taken shape, for example, in temporary work programs. Through the provision for circular migration under Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), the federal government, in cooperation with the provinces, has institutionalized the availability of so-called unskilled labourers who perform agricultural work for a limited period of time, anywhere between six weeks and eight months. The terms of the program tie workers to a single employer, and workers must live on-site in employer-provided housing (Gabriel, chapter 4 in this volume). In 2008, more than 21,000 workers participated in SAWP. The majority of the SAWP workers are from Mexico, most are men, and the largest number works in Ontario. Significantly, the number of temporary workers in Canada rose by 148 per cent between 2002 and 2008, with workers in “lower skilled” occupations accounting for the largest share of this increase (Hennebry 2012). The shift from Keynesian welfare policies to neoliberal state policies has also produced new forms of temporariness and exclusions. For instance, the neoliberal emphasis on individual independence and self-sufficiency has marked immigration policies in countries like Canada, which is increasingly favouring economic migration over family reunification schemes. According to Haque (chapter 8 in this volume), Canada admitted the largest number of economic immigrants in fifty-seven years when 281,000 landed in 2010. The type of language training programs, a key subset of settlement s­ervices,

10  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

now offered to these skilled workers demonstrates the neoliberal goals of contemporary immigration policies. The government offers brief language training courses that emphasize technical vocabulary required for a specific occupation. Language training also responds to a host of anxieties about national belonging and the construction of the “desired citizen subject.” Language courses serve as a space for the production and reproduction of temporariness because they are a form of screening that renders particular migrant subjects “integratable” and other subjects “non-integratable” and therefore temporary, depending on their language competency. The movement of transnational capital has also contributed to the institutionalization of temporariness as a permanently vulnerable condition for many people. According to Gilbert (chapter 6 in this volume), a type of muscular neoliberalism has come to define the era of the Rudd government in Australia (2007–10) and its relations with other Asian Pacific countries, replacing the more military-oriented approach of the past, with free trade, foreign investment, regional partnerships, and the implementation of market-­driven initiatives. In this context, the Australian Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme (PSWPS) enables Pacific Islanders to temporarily migrate to Australia to address labour shortages at low cost. Through this program, which mimics the SAWP in Canada, temporary labour mobility is being made permanent through structures of the globalized, capitalist economy such as free trade agreements between Australia and neighbouring countries. Although the PSWPS creates some employment opportunities for Pacific Islanders, the economic benefits are offset by the permanently temporary status of the workers. Their status leaves these workers vulnerable to many types of exploitation in the workplace. The capitalist system stays unfettered by employment schemes that ensure that certain national economies grow at the expense of precarious forms of employment for workers therein. Permanent vulnerability as a condition is also produced by security policies. According to Bakan (chapter 2 in this volume), the USA Patriot Act was deployed to manage the proliferation of internal enemies in the context of national security concerns in the United States. Signed in 2001, shortly after the events of 9/11, it understood and institutionalized temporariness as the “enemy within,” with the Arab/Muslim Orientalized as the terrorist “other” and treated as an uninvited immigrant. This discursive construct stands in sharp contrast to the patriotic non-Arab/Muslim permanent resident of the



Introduction 11

United States. The act thus links temporary status to the unpatriotic predator and creates a legitimate ground for deportation, justified on the basis that a security measure is necessary to protect the patriotic self. International fora are also interesting spaces for the articulation of different meanings of temporariness in national and international policies. These spaces set limits on the possibilities of temporariness and restrict forms of cooperation regarding labour, migration, and working conditions, constructing global policy discourses on managed migration that aim to inform supranational, national, and subnational policies and practices (Vosko 2010). As Gabriel (chapter 4 in this volume) argues, these are important spaces to scrutinize when exploring temporariness because through them the meaning of a “migrant worker,” for instance, is discursively constructed. Other discursive constructions include a particular mobile subject that is welcomed by destination countries, but only on the latter’s terms – as a non-citizen temporary worker. Artifacts of Temporariness There are a range of material and social objects that structure the various registers of temporariness. We call these objects artifacts, by which we mean things intentionally made or produced for a particular purpose (Hilpinen 2011) by individuals or groups, through social interaction. Although artifacts have a material basis, they have important social, conceptual, and linguistic aspects. Artifacts only exist by virtue of collective recognition or acknowledgment (Searle 2006). They have meaning ascribed to them in order to function. Artifacts arise from policies and practices, but they can also shape them as resources that policy-makers deploy for different purposes at different times. The chapters in this volume illustrate a large number and variety of artifacts that help shape contemporary experiences of temporariness. They are numerous and diverse across a range of documents (work permits, employment contracts, citizenship papers, security certificates, medical registrations, and certificates of language competence) and institutional spaces (detention centres, border crossings). Security certificates in Canada, for example, are legal mechanisms that assign status of indefinite detention or permanent ­inadmissibility. As Larsen points out in chapter 3 in this volume, they are ­increasingly

12  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

part of the complex repertoire that the Canadian state uses to manage certain individuals and groups in the context of heightened national security. The deployment of these artifacts enables the formation of modalities of temporariness (detention, pending expulsion) even for individuals who hold permanent residence. Artifacts can function individually but also in relationship to each other. For instance, in addition to temporary work visas, overseas doctors in the United Kingdom confront other forms of temporariness through the medical registration system. According to ­Raghuram (chapter 7 in this volume), the four-year limited registration for these doctors clearly linked migration status to training so that they could only shift to permanent registration on obtaining advanced training. The blockages associated with this artifact in terms of career advancement were significant because the inability to acquire advanced training denied migrants the opportunity to obtain permanent registration. Detention centers constitute material spaces where the complexities of temporariness become visible. In the case of Australia, under John Howard (1996–2007) the government established detention centers on Nauru and Papua New Guinea where asylum seekers had to stay and undergo a mandatory detention. These centers acted as a buffer zone to deter and control asylum seekers arriving by boat off the shores of Australia. Certificates of language competence shape the ways in which many people experience temporariness. In the case of Canada, as Haque illustrates in chapter 8 in this volume, language competence is a tool for measuring “integration” and “integrate-­ableness” among newcomers. Those newcomers who fail to demonstrate sufficient competence are judged to be incapable of being integrated and rendered temporary in various ways. It is important to highlight that the artifacts of temporariness that populate the world of migration and nation-states have direct effects and carry meaning in and of themselves. These are objects and things that can be studied as holistic social forms. Through direct encounter with these various artifacts, people experience temporariness as uncertain rights to residency, as precarious jobs, and as limited access to language training, with tangible effects on their daily lives. We therefore seek to distinguish between artifacts of temporariness and the policies and practices with which they are associated and that reproduce and institutionalize temporary status. Through



Introduction 13

this distinction we seek to bring into view the processes by which these objects function and proliferate.4 Our distinctions are conceptual and we acknowledge that, in many instances, artifacts are part and parcel of the production of temporariness. We argue that these distinctions are analytic tools instructive in analyzing the design, application, and implementation of policies in different domains. Another important element of artifacts of temporariness is that they are not static. They can enter and exit, move through, and intersect with different policy and historical contexts as they have a history and trajectory of development of their own (e.g., a history of the passport or border zones). Artifacts of temporariness are also becoming more differentiated and complex (e.g., many kinds of different work permits, types of residency statuses, employment schemes). Artifacts of temporariness represent an important starting point to address the complexities of temporary status because their existence and increasing differentiation, sophistication, and hybridization help reveal how temporariness is produced and sustained in time. Contestations and Alternative Understandings of Temporariness The policies, practices, and artifacts that shape societies, communities, and lives along temporary and permanent lines create a variety of subjects contending with the pressures and insecurities of temporariness. These subjects struggle, contest, and resist temporal impositions and their effects. While acknowledging the role of the state in producing temporariness and permanence, we also recognize the importance of an array of actors and practices that function beyond the purview of the state. Contesting constructions of temporariness and permanence responds to state action as well as opens up the possibility of undermining – on an individual and collective basis – the territorialized spaces defined and defended by states. In the context of contesting modalities of temporariness there are two processes that are important to highlight: resistance and alternative framings. Resistance, on the one hand, is response driven; it is often understood to be constituted by a rejection and a refusal. Alternatives, on the other hand, are processes that seek to construct different framings and meanings of what is constructed as the norm. Some authors in this volume focus on the ways in which people navigate the difficult terrain of temporaries and articulate ­rejection and

14  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

resistance through different spaces, networks, and ways of ­expressing and understanding temporariness (Marchand and Rajkumar, chapters 11 and 12). Other authors theorize resistance and reframing as processes that take place simultaneously, reinforcing each other (De Lange and van Walsum, chapter 5). More generally, contributors point to the existence of a multiplicity of spaces in which to engage in processes of liberating temporariness. Temporariness is resisted, for instance, when people engage in transnational practices that make visible the contingent yet omnipresent nature of borders (Balibar 2002). Temporary migrants challenge and contest fixed notions of territoriality that confine their activities within the boundaries of one nation-state. The case of Mexican migrants in the United States is relevant here, as their transnational activities have been modified significantly by the American state’s war on terror, the Mexican state’s war on organized crime, and the current economic crisis (Marchand, chapter 11 in this volume). As a result of the economic crisis and increasing immigration raids, fewer migrants are sending remittances and those who continue to do so are sending, on average, smaller amounts. However, in the midst of difficult daily lives, many migrants and their families find ingenious ways to cope. They tap into the social capital created within migrant communities in the United States. As Marchand explains, migrants have not only engaged in transnational life but they have created an in-between space distinct from the national spheres of host and sending states. For instance, Mexican migrants resort to strategies that include pooling or borrowing money from family members or friends in both the United States and Mexico to survive setbacks, looking for a job within the (migrant) community after having been laid off, or using contacts within the same community to find a new job. During the 2008–09 economic downturn in the United States, family members in Mexico wired money and sent other forms of support to migrants struggling to remain in the United States. Resistance to constructions of temporariness can also take place in the context of knowledge production. In chapter 12 in this volume, Rajkumar challenges clear-cut distinctions and representations of normalizing discourses about the “nation,” the “refugee,” the “citizen,” “borders,” and “time” that tend to follow linear and fixed meanings. Through forms of storytelling, where the academic lines that distinguish the researcher from the object of study are



Introduction 15

constantly being redrawn, Rajkumar demonstrates how thinking through and writing about processes of violence and exclusion can themselves constitute forms of contestation. Emerging out of, and associated with, the diverse acts of contestation and resistance are temporal desires, understandings, formulations, and subjectivities that are alternatives to those imposed by different policies, practices, and artifacts. It is through processes of resistance that subjects construct experiences and framings of temporality different from those produced by the state. Individual and collective responses to the uncertainty and insecurity of temporariness may include alternative constructions of social security and access to social services and engagement in novel transnational practices and ways of belonging. Filipino and Ghanaian domestic workers in Holland, for instance, subvert notions of temporariness that are imposed on them by the state when they piece together housing and social security for themselves and their families in receiving and sending economies. Both groups of migrants construct alternative notions of belonging despite their temporary status. Ghanaian migrants, for example, played a crucial role in the establishment of calamity funds in their home countries. These funds ensure that in the event of an emergency, their families back home can have access to certain social provisions without having to ask them to send money on short notice. Another common practice among Ghanaian migrants, according to De Lange and van Walsum (chapter 5 in this volume), is the construction of dwellings in their hometowns to express their success as migrants and their commitment to the extended family in Ghana but also to secure shelter for themselves in their own old age, in a place where they expect to be looked after and kept company by their kin. Excluded from formal arrangements of social protection in their country of residence, Filipino migrants lacking residency rights engage in projects linking them to rural financial institutions in the Philippines. These institutions finance development projects that are screened for their business potential by micro-finance experts and are covered, to a degree at least, by an insurance policy funded by nongovernmental organizations. Transnationally coordinated investment projects, like the one described here, form an alternative strategy – and thus an alternative framing of social protection schemes – to ensure some financial security for these migrants upon their return to the Philippines.

16  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

Furthermore, alternative understandings of temporariness, as Latham contends in chapter 13 in this volume, can start with the recognition, among academics, activists, and migrants alike, that the claim to permanence is the central barrier to liberation or that claims-making occurs in a context defined by the temporal logics of Western modernity. Claims to permanence – however desired – ultimately ought to be rejected, since they limit the possibilities of liberation beyond the strict temporary/permanent binary. For Latham, then, in order for rejection to be productive it must involve reframing. To reject permanence as the way toward liberation, Latham proposes a “temporal inversion” in an effort to overturn the grounds for permanent settlement that lie at the heart of the modern state and to struggle for re-collective justice. This process of reframing can open the way for reconstituting collectives such that the history of oppression, restriction, and exclusion is revived, the agency of the oppressed to shape the grounds of collective life is assembled, and possibilities for the reorganization of resources and reparations are on the horizon. Elements of the need for such reformation are evident in the observation that in the case of security certificates in Canada it is not enough to just reject these legal mechanisms. Larsen (chapter 3 in this volume) criticizes those who favour the criminal justice system – where people can at least have the ability to defend themselves or the “charge or release” logic – and proposes the adoption of a carceral abolitionist perspective. This perspective involves both rejection (abolishing security certificates) and the creation and sustainability of a competing contradiction that will go beyond the substitution of one law for another. A competing contradiction can be carried out through Mathiesen’s (1974) notion of unfinished politics, as something that rejects the dominant logics of the system without presenting concrete alternative structures that could be co-opted and absorbed. Regarding security certificates, this would involve abandoning the dichotomy of permanence and temporariness and deconstructing the logic of security without advancing a reformist vision of a better security certificate. The notion of the unfinished carries with it possibilities for thinking about and enacting liberation precisely because it calls for negative reforms (the abolition of structures and practices of confinement and control) without demanding that the resulting holes in the system be filled with something (see also Neocleous 2008).



Introduction 17

For Latham as well as for Larsen, the complexities of temporariness lead, then, to complex and multiple ways of searching for liberation that ultimately need to reject but also articulate open-ended, rhizomatic, and undefined processes that can lead to alternative imaginaries – sometimes yet to come. As the long history of conceptual development of the term liberation has repeatedly established (Sonn and Lewis 2009; Surin 2009), what is critical is freeing oneself from the oppressive underlying material and ideational structures that make a world. Such freeing typically means more than just stepping aside from those structures. It requires changing the structures themselves and thereby remaking that oppressive world. o r g a n i z at i o n o f t h e v o l u m e

Initially, we asked authors to examine the complexities and multiple manifestations of temporariness with respect to three domains of daily life: security, work, and settlement.5 Contributors’ analyses inevitably challenge permanence as the basis for civil, social, and political rights. To better understand temporariness, one must interrogate the meaning and significance of temporariness and of permanence. In expanding upon these meanings, the contributors scrutinize the conditions and logics shaping current manifestations of temporariness to explore possible alternatives for inclusion: that is, possibilities for living, working, and belonging that are not limited to territorialized and permanent understandings of national citizenship. At the same time, the authors assess critically the celebrated forms of temporariness mentioned earlier that are often available only to a small, privileged minority. Across the volume, the authors interrogate policies, practices, and forms of power that impose, structure, and regularize categories of temporariness and permanence at the national level (i.e., in nation-states) and international levels. Several authors ask what is constructed and reproduced through particular deployments of temporariness and permanence in nation-states consumed by security concerns. By analyzing the political exclusion of Arab-Canadians, the impact of security certificates in Canada, and the Orientalizing effect of the USA Patriot Act in the United States, Abu-Laban, Larsen, and Bakan describe manifestations of temporariness that have arisen in response to contemporary security fears (chapters 1, 3, and 2, respectively). The chapters underscore different forms of

18  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

v­ ulnerability as experienced by migrants in the current era in which many nation-states are emphasizing security logics. State policies that limit temporary migrants’ rights to benefits from the welfare state also regularize temporariness. Unable to qualify for on-the-job training and language classes, temporary workers can never obtain the qualifications required for permanent residence. They are rendered indefinitely and permanently temporary (Haque, chapter 8 in this volume). Similarly, temporariness is also experienced by non-profit service providers, their workforces, and the health, social, and human services that they provide to vulnerable communities, owing to the restructuring along neoliberal lines of the relationship between the state and non-profit service providers (Shields, chapter 10 in this volume). In the international arena, temporary labour migration policies also shape emerging forms of temporariness, raising questions about the sovereignty and blurring boundaries of nation-states. Gabriel and Gilbert (chapters 4 and 6 respectively) examine what is enabled and what is breached in the shifting negotiations between nationstates that affect contemporary forms of temporary labour migration. They recognize that migrants are also adept at jumping scales, drawing on transnational ties to mitigate some of the insecurity associated with temporary status as a foreign worker (Marchand, chapter 11 in this volume). International agreements categorize migrants, many times consigning them to various forms of temporariness, while the workers’ own transnational connections influence and indeed often cushion the negative impact of temporary status. Transnational activities are only one of the avenues through which people navigate and resist the typically negative consequences of temporariness. Threatened by their temporary and undocumented status, many migrants carry on with everyday life, adjusting their activities to reduce the possibility of exposure. The contributions to this volume are drawn from selected liberaldemocratic states, where people are rendered temporary on the basis of relations between nation-states and between these nation-states and supranational and international organizations. The examples from different countries show how different legal regimes, market regulations, and transnational practices shape temporariness and permanence. The chapters include analyses of international agreements governing temporariness and the migration of certain professionals whose occupational associations encourage temporary



Introduction 19

migrant work as an essential part of career development ­(Gabriel, Gilbert, and Raghuram, chapters 4, 6, and 7 in this volume). Through the discussion of different national contexts, diverse forms of agency also become visible, as people engage in multiple and different transnational practices to cope with the changing forms of temporariness in their lives. A common element among contributors is the need to identify possibilities of resistance to the idealization of permanence as the foundation for achieving justice and well-being. Canada is the focus of several chapters that analyze how temporariness and permanence are constructed, resisted, and experienced through migrant programs (such as the SAWP and the language training programs for newcomers), security measures post-9/11 (such as security certificates and funding cuts to ethnic minority groups like the Canadian Arab Federation), the efforts of different migrant groups to resist being rendered temporary, and the impacts of neoliberal restructuring processes in sectors such as non-profits. Reflecting similar dynamics in other liberal democratic states, the contributions – especially those centred on Canada – underscore the complexity of temporariness that takes multiple forms; the presence of multiple political, economic, and social processes shaping outcomes; and the provocations generating diverse forms of resistance. Other contributions to this volume consider temporariness that arises in transnational situations in Europe, the South Pacific, the United Kingdom, and along the border between the United States and Mexico. These chapters document how temporariness is constructed, resisted, and lived in nation-states like the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, where seasonal agricultural workers and many other workers are engaged in temporary migrant work programs. The international lens they adopt highlights simultaneously the local specificities of temporariness and certain global patterns of temporariness in a period of neoliberal capitalism characterized by heightened notions of national security. Individual Contributions In Part One, entitled “Status, Rights, and Security,” Yasmeen AbuLaban begins by exploring the complexities of citizenship in the context of Canada’s history as a settler state. Her central analytical point is that the condition of temporariness versus permanence should not be treated as a static binary but as dynamic and continuous across

20  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

a spectrum, especially since citizenship itself is being destabilized since the events of September 11, 2001. Abu-Laban asks readers to approach temporary migration with a view to neoliberalism and its emphasis on the self-sufficient male worker/investor rather than on family-sponsored and refugee immigrant classes. For Abu-Laban, temporariness restricts political dissent and participation on the part of residents deemed temporary or outside the nation. In her view, the restriction of political rights represents one of the gravest and most insidious effects of temporariness because it denies residents the means to promote political change. Recognizing the dynamic nature of the permanent/temporary binary, Abu-Laban uses the metaphor of the Spirit of Haida Gwaii to problematize the possibility that there is a fixed end point for liberating temporariness. In the next chapter, Abigail Bakan focuses on the association and institutionalization of temporariness with predatory status and identity. She argues that predatory status is linked typically to the racialized, Arab/Orientalized “Other” and contrasted with the idealized, permanent “patriotic American.” This binary has become especially pronounced in the United States post-9/11. Patriotism is seen as permanent, and terrorism is viewed as permanently temporary and predatory. Bakan analyzes how the normalization of this binary affects notions of citizenship and their links to bilateral relations between the United States and Israel: to this end, she argues that the politically and socially constructed binary of the permanent patriot and the temporary predator can be understood to have been advanced, at least in part, through historically recognizable political and normative patterns along a spectrum of citizenship/non-­ citizenship relations, specifically associated geopolitically with the American state’s identification with Israel. Mike Larsen, in turn, explores the process for the production of permanent temporariness through the certificate regime in Canada in the post-9/11 context. According to Larsen, “certificate subjects are constructed as permanent outsiders before the law and the Canadian political community, as well as the social organization of the certificate regime as an interwoven network of ad-hoc institutions and practices.” The status of “indefinitely pending,” which means “being permanently caught in a web of transitory processes and conditions that are ostensibly in furtherance of a future state of total expulsion,” also produces residents who have permanently temporary rights to residence in Canada. By examining an artifact



Introduction 21

of temporariness, security certificates, Larsen challenges the institutionalization of temporariness and raises questions about takenfor-granted distinctions between permanent and temporary statuses. The dynamics of temporariness and permanence in a global context are examined through the lens of paid work in Part Two, entitled “International Organizations and Transnational Dynamics of Temporary Work.” Christina Gabriel explores how temporariness is being legitimized and institutionalized at the international and national levels. She investigates the relationship between Canadian policies and programs – specifically, the SAWP and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program  – and global organizations such as the Global Forum on Migration and Development (initiated in 2006). She considers how emerging global discourses and policies in effect rationalize – and thereby justify and legitimate – temporary migration for employment as beneficial to all involved (sending and receiving countries, migrants, the global economy). They also emphasize the need for worker protections (supplying a human face to temporary migration). The Canadian programs are typically held up – in Canada and internationally – as models that are workable and beneficial to all. But Gabriel points to how the longer standing SAWP program largely disregards the needs of workers (in the workplace, to organize, to be securely resident, and to be mobile in the labour market of the host country) and how the newer Temporary Foreign Worker Program is moving in a far more under-regulated (and neoliberal) direction that has even less protection for workers. In these ways, her chapter provides contemporary evidence of the pressing need to liberate temporariness in the sense of altering the current conditions attached to this status. Focusing on the Dutch case, Tesseltje de Lange and Sarah van ­Walsum review, on the one hand, two proposed European Union directives on migrant work – the seasonal workers and intra-company transferees directives under discussion  – and, on the other hand, informal transnational strategies adopted by migrant workers holding irregular status to secure specific social services and income security programs. The two authors offer a critical assessment of developments at the level of the European Union and show that whereas the proposed directive on intra-company transferees, which is geared to “high-skilled” workers, requires employers to provide for social security coverage, the proposed directive on seasonal workers, a group of migrants presumed to be “low-skilled,” requires

22  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

minimalist support in the form of social security on the part of the receiving country, effectively creating an inferior membership status for this group. At the same time, de Lange and van Walsum illustrate, via ethnographic research conducted with migrant domestic workers and their families in Ghana and Philippines, how migrant workers holding irregular status currently organize their social security. Albeit in different ways, these distinct cases illustrate how temporary status is being reified as well as being increasingly distinguished from permanent status and how such processes impel those who are rendered temporary to take progressive action. Emily Gilbert examines how temporary worker programs in Australia reinforce and reproduce temporariness as part of a globalized free trade agenda. Comparing the proposed Australian program with its predecessors in Canada and New Zealand, Gilbert draws out the ways that temporary residency status renders migrants vulnerable to abuse by their employers and through their work in unregulated workplaces. She notes that informal modes of inclusion are often closed to temporary migrant workers who are required to leave after short stays as agricultural workers, subject to the threat of deportation if their visas lapse. Gilbert argues that employers’ demands for flexible labour fuel policies in which temporary migrant workers are valued only for their labour, not as potential citizens. By attaching discussions of temporary migrant workers to trade agreements, Australia reinforces the instrumental view of these workers that underpins and consolidates their tenuous access to rights and residency status. According to this analysis, the rise of temporariness is linked inextricably with the dominance of neoliberal political and economic philosophies. Part Three, entitled “Temporary Status, Social Welfare, and Marginalization,” focuses on the exclusions and marginalization that emerge from the temporary residency status of (otherwise fairly privileged) migrants. To start, Parvati Raghuram offers an intriguing analysis of the ways that policies concerning rights to residence intersect with regulations governing a profession premised on workers’ permanent residence; she shows how foreign physicians have become increasingly temporary, in residency terms, in the United Kingdom. Her analysis of the movements of “highly skilled” medical workers into the United Kingdom illustrates that temporariness is as much spatial as temporal. Medical training in the United Kingdom is premised on short-term, professional employment. All physicians



Introduction 23

in the United Kingdom have temporary appointments, initially as unpaid clinical attachments, then in paid, short-term locum posts, and eventually as paid fellows. The series of temporary appointments allows physicians to work in diverse clinical environments, acquiring broad experience with the medical system. For foreign-trained doctors, the system worked when short-term locum positions were readily available and medical qualifications from abroad were easily recognized. Changes in the demand for physicians and in their supply now heighten the temporary nature of employment, and hence residency, situations of foreign-trained doctors. Medical workers are rendered temporary residents and their ability to achieve professional advancement and recognition is threatened by professional regulations that require permanent residence for advanced training. Without advanced training, physicians from abroad can never achieve permanent residence. The analysis in this chapter fits well with Gilbert’s and Haque’s (see below) analyses by illustrating how labour market policies, in this case professional regulations, interact with policies concerning the right to residence. Foreign-trained physicians are in a Catch-22 that heightens both their temporary employment and residence situations, thereby thwarting their efforts to liberate themselves from the temporary/permanent divide and its consequences. Eve Haque’s chapter explores how current language training policies reinforce the continuing racialization of immigrants in the labour market that renders them temporary. Newcomers who fail to integrate successfully into the labour market never become fully participating members of Canadian society; they are, rather, treated as perpetual outsiders. The chapter unfolds with a profound critique of language policies based on the assertion that homogeneous language use within a territory is a central dimension of cultural identity. Haque’s analysis of language training programs begins from the observation that many recent newcomers are more skilled than their predecessors and they are more likely to have some knowledge of Canada’s official languages. Nevertheless, their average earnings are much lower than those of equally qualified Canadian-born workers and the wage gap between these groups is both deeper and more persistent than in the past. She argues that current language training programs reinforce the notion that newcomers do not have adequate language skills for jobs commensurate with their qualifications. Her analysis illustrates how neoliberal ideologies that construct the ideal

24  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

migrant as skilled and rapidly self-sufficient reconfigure government programs that are designed overtly to assist with permanent settlement such that they often reinforce the marginalization of newcomers that is construed here as temporariness. After analyzing administrative government data, Luin Goldring presents a complex picture of entry and status boundary-crossing in the Canadian context. Goldring advocates a broad analytical and conceptual lens for analyzing temporariness that draws on the concept of precarious migratory status. The notion of precarious migratory status allows for a dynamic “chutes and ladders” approach to migration and citizenship policy. Using this approach, temporariness becomes one dimension of precarious status and an aspect of the conditionality that constitutes legal status, but it is no longer the main problem in discussions of membership. John Shields provides a fascinating analysis of temporariness in the non-profit sector in Canada that investigates its multiple forms as well as its causes and thereby links a sector critical to the economy to the growing insecurity of already marginalized social groups, which include not only non-profit service providers but also those who receive these services, such as newcomers to Canada. The increasing importance of the sector is evident in its recent growth, which outpaced growth in the public and private sectors in the early 2000s. The impacts of neoliberalism on service delivery by nonprofit providers, their workforces, and the communities that they serve are described at length. The analysis indicates how growing insecurity characterizes the availability of services, the jobs of workers in the sector, and efforts to meet the needs of vulnerable populations. By demonstrating how temporariness in the labour market heightens the vulnerability of clients as well as workers who deliver vital services, the chapter shows how contingency, liminality, and marginalization, Shields’ conceptualization of temporariness, have advanced in the non-profit sector. Finally, under the title, “(Re)framing Temporariness,” Part Four of the volume deals with alternative notions of temporariness that push the boundaries of the temporary/permanent divide by applying different frames and narratives to these temporal claims. In the opening chapter of this section, Marianne Marchand argues that the securitization of the US-Mexican border since the early 1990s, with such initiatives as Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the Line, has pushed Mexican migrants to make their stay in the



Introduction 25

United States more permanent. Against this backdrop, Mexican migrants have developed different transnational practices to navigate the temporary-permanent divide, such as creating hometown associations, engaging politically, economically and socially with their communities of origin through development projects, and making claims on the Mexican state for dual nationality and the right to vote while abroad. Marchand addresses contemporary Mexican migrant transnationalism and how it has been transformed since the events of September 11, 2001 and the war on organized crime by Mexico’s Calderón government. She focuses, in particular, on how these migrants’ transnational practices reflect and produce a range of imaginaries of permanent and temporary belonging. For instance, how is the construction of a house in the community of origin the product of a transnational sense of belonging and a temporary absence (of the migrant), while at the same time reflective of a sense of permanent return (in the future)? Is this imaginary, moreover, feasible in reality? To what extent does it collide with the actual temporariness or permanence of migrants’ settlement in sending and receiving communities? Through this discussion, Marchand combines an analysis of the role of states and institutions as well as the themes of mobility and territoriality, revealing how transnational practices can alter temporary residents’ imaginaries and experiences and effectively contribute to the liberation of temporariness. On a different level, as she draws on extensive ethnographic research involving listening to the voices of those rendered temporary, Deepa Rajkumar in her intervention challenges clear-cut distinctions and (mis)representations of what have been constructed as normalizing discourses of the “nation,” the “refugee,” and the “citizen” but also “borders” and “time.” These multiple efforts at understanding the state, while challenging its prominence, are productive moments for thinking about liberating temporariness – questioning power structures and relations between those involved and exploring possibilities of resistance through the process of narrating life stories of “the temporary” and “the permanent” and those in-between. In the concluding chapter, Robert Latham argues that the dilemmas posed by temporariness and permanence, as they are deployed by states to limit the rights of migrants and indigenous peoples, ought to be confronted. Rather than making way for an expansion of the terrain of permanence and its associated rights and privileges, he supports a confrontation between the notion, on the one hand, that

26  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

there are certain situations in which the horizon is left undetermined within the context of individual and collective social fields, with continuity assumed and the idea, on the other hand, that there is a determined horizon, a defined end point. Latham explores what it would mean for migrants and indigenous peoples to radically respond to “the temporal claims and the colonization of the sovereignty of presence” by states, referring implicitly to those in the Global North in particular. He contends that positions that open ground include a rejection of the authority enacted in temporal claims-making. Following this path would mean, for example, questioning the legitimacy of the right of states to designate the duration of presence and the right to establish/decide upon whom permanence and a sense of being settled are to be bestowed. His call is for a temporal inversion, not in the sense of turning temporal structures over so the decomposed elements settle into another arrangement, but in the sense of remaining unsettled, that is, rejecting practices in which states hold the exclusive power over temporal claims-making. The chapter is a call for re-collectivization in response to this question: Are the claims to permanent presence and settlement (as presently defined) among migrants and the indigenous just? Through this bookend, the volume concludes with an impassioned plea for liberating temporariness, beginning in our minds and our imaginings. concluding remarks

When we initiated this volume, we were motivated to find ways to confront the rising tide of temporariness and to enhance the lives of those rendered temporary. This project is incomplete. The contributions in the following pages illuminate the myriad ways that temporariness is constructed. Some also show how it is contested. Collectively, the chapters point to the productive possibilities that arise when we move beyond the dominant permanent/temporary binary that values permanent status over temporary status. Although pathways to permanence would certainly enhance the lives of some temporary migrants, time and time again they have proven elusive and they entrench the current valuation of permanent over temporary status. Contributors to this volume identify various means for mitigating some of the exclusion currently associated with temporary status, such as expanding the funding for settlement services, recognizing the multifarious linguistic reality of ­Canada in



Introduction 27

language training available to all migrants, providing open work visas to the partners of all temporary migrants, and permitting the dependents of temporary migrants to migrate with them. Although enhancing the lives of individual migrants who are currently temporary, each small improvement in rights has the potential to reinforce the fixed binaries that underpin the disadvantages faced by temporary migrants and that have proved unproductive in conceptual and practical terms. None of these proposals ensures that all migrants secure the full benefits of permanence. Although we welcome the adjustments to the conditions of temporariness that have been proposed by several authors in this and other volumes (Lenard and Straehle 2012; Goldring and Landolt 2013), we also seek changes that will overturn the binary between temporariness and permanence and its naturalization. By examining how transnational practices, specific artifacts such as security certificates, and processes of racialization construct and reinforce imaginaries of permanence and temporariness as straightforward opposites, fundamental questions surrounding the existence of this binary and its perpetuation, as well as its effects, surface. Furthermore, performances of temporariness and permanence reveal themselves to be more complicated than this binary suggests (Larsen, De Lange and van Walsum, Marchand, Rajkumar, chapters 3, 5, 11, and 12 in this volume). These effects and outcomes of the temporary/permanent divide point to the necessity of undertaking the difficult intellectual task of reconceptualizing temporariness and permanence so as to liberate both of them. This task requires challenging work on the ground, especially as it entails the risky move of liberating permanence (as opposed to temporariness) as the sole basis of justice, rights, and security (broadly defined) (Latham, chapter 13 in this volume).

notes

1 All authors have contributed equally. 2 In chapter 9 in this volume, Goldring argues that insecure migratory status can be understood as precariousness with implications for all citizenship claims. For further elaboration, see Goldring and Landolt (2013). We are concerned with temporariness as a distinct, focused lens for understanding citizenship claims related to migration and as they are addressed in the preceding discussion and the chapters herein.

28  Robert Latham, Leah F. Vosko, and Melisa Bréton

3 Groups such as live-in caregivers in Canada are a prime example: they have long employed the slogan “good enough to work, good enough to stay” and, as we write this chapter, are lobbying for open work permits while remaining cognizant of reproducing the dangers of temporary status (including that involving closed work permits) for other migrants facing similar insecurities (Arat-Koc 1992; Stasiulus and Bakan 2005, etc.). 4 Similarly, one might distinguish between weaponry and weapon systems (artifact/object) and the defence and international security policies and practices (production) associated with them (and thereby study these in different albeit allied ways). 5 This book is the culmination of a series of activities that included a yearlong seminar with Toronto-based participants, an international workshop, and a resulting article (Rajkumar, Berkowitz et al. 2012), all framed by our interest in policies affecting the three domains of security, work, and settlement in Canada. references

Alboim, N. 2009. Adjusting the Balance: Fixing Canada’s Economic Immigration Policies. Toronto: Maytree. http://www.maytree.com/wpcontent/uploads/2009/07/adjustingthebalance-final.pdf [accessed 10 September 2010]. Arat-Koc, S. 1992. Immigration Policies, Migrant Domestic Workers and the Definition of Citizenship in Canada. In Deconstructing a Nation: Immigration, Multiculturalism and Racism in 90’s Canada, ed. ­ V. Satzewich, 229–42. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Balibar, E. 2002. Politics and the Other Scene, trans C. Jones, J. Swenson, and C. Turner. London: Verso. – 2004. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bosniak, L. 2002. The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. Princeton: Princeton University Press. CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). 2013. Dual Citizenship and the Concerns over Terrorism. 11 February 2013. http://www.cbc.ca/ thecurrent/episode/2013/02/11/dual-citizenship-and-the-conerns-overterrorism Carens, J. 1987. Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders. Review of Politics 49(2):251–73. De Genova, N. 2002. Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:419–47.



Introduction 29

Fudge, J., and F. MacPhail. 2009. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program in Canada: Low-skilled Workers as an Extreme Form of Flexible Labor. Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal 31(1):101–41. Fuller, S., and L. Vosko. 2008. Temporary Employment and Social Inequality in Canada: Exploring Intersections of Gender, Race, and Migration. Social Indicators Research 88(1):31–50. Goldring, L., and P. Landolt. 2013. Producing and Negotiating NonCitizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Goldring, L., C. Berinstein, and J. Bernhard. 2009. Institutionalizing ­Precarious Migratory Status in Canada. Citizenship Studies ­13(3):239–65. Hammer, T. 1990. Democracy and the Nation-State: Aliens, Denizens and Citizens in Contemporary Europe. Aldershot, UK: Avebury. Hennebry, J. 2012. Permanently Temporary? Agricultural Migrant Workers and their Integration in Canada. Institute for Research on Public Policy 26:1–41. http://www.irpp.org/en/research/diversity-immigrationand-integration/permanently-temporary/ Hilpinen, R. 2011. Artifact. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E.N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/ ­artifact/ [accessed 1 April 2012]. Joppke, C. 2007. Transformation of Citizenship: Status, Rights, Identity. Citizenship Studies 11(1):37–48. Latham, R. 2010. Border Formations: Security and Subjectivity at the Borders. Citizenship Studies 14(2):185–201. Leitner, H., and V. Preston. 2012. Going Local: Canadian and Us Immigration Policy. In New Century in Immigration and North American Cities, ed. W. Li and C. Teixeira. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lenard, T.P., and C. Straehle. 2012. Legislated Inequality: Temporary Labour Migration in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. MacDonald, M. 2009. Income Security for Women: What about Employment Insurance? In Public Policy for Women in Canada: The State, Income Security and Labour Market Issues, ed. M.G. Cohen and J. Pulkingham, 251–70. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Macklin, A. 2007. Who is the Citizen’s Other? Considering the Heft of Citizenship. Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8(2):467–508. Mathiesen, T. 1974. The Politics of Abolition. London: Martin Robertson. Mundlak, G. 2009. De-territorializing Labor Law. Law & Ethics of Human Rights 3(2):1–34.

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Neocleous, M. 2008. Critique of Security. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Nyers, P. 2006. Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency. London: Routledge. Nyers, P. 2010. No One is Illegal between City and Nation. Studies in Social Justice 4(2):127–43. Pellerin, H. 2004. Economic Integration and Security: New Key Factors in Managing International Migration. Vol. 10 No. 6 of Choices (Institute for Research in Public Policy). Montreal: Institute for Research in Public Policy. Prier, N. 2009. Where We Fight: Descaling Citizenship through Anarchistic Urbanism. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Las Vegas, NV, 22–27 March 2009. Rajkumar, D., L. Berkowitz, L. Vosko, V. Preston, and R. Latham. 2012. At the Temporary-Permanent Divide: How Canada Produces Temporariness and Makes Citizens through its Security, Work, and Settlement Policies. Citizenship Studies 16(3–4): 483–510. Ruhs, M. 2006. The Potential of Temporary Migration Programmes in Future International Migration Policy. International Labour Review 145(1–2):7–36. Searle, J. 2006. Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles. Anthropological Theory 6(1): 12–29. Sharma, N. 2002. Open the Borders! Fireweed. [Special issue: Women, Race, War and Resistance.] No. 77. – 2005. Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of “Migrant Workers” in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sonn, C.C., and R. Lewis, 2009. Immigration and Identity: The Ongoing Struggle for Liberation. In The Psychology of Liberation: Theory, Research and Applications, ed. M. Montero and C.C. Sonn, 115–34. New York: Springer. Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. 2009. Temporary Foreign Workers and Non-Status Workers. Report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. Ottawa: Parliament of Canada. Stasiulis, D. 2008. Revisiting the Permanent-Temporary Labour Migration Dichotomy. In Governing International Labour Migration: Current Issues, Challenges and Dilemmas, ed. A. Gabriel and H. Pellerin, 95–111. London: Routledge. Stasiulis, D., and A. Bakan. 2005. Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.



Introduction 31

Surin, K. 2009. Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vosko, L. 2000. Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of a Precarious Employment Relationship. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Vosko, L. 2010. Managing the Margins: Gender, Citizenship, and the ­Regulation of Precarious Employment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

pa r t o n e

Security, Temporary Status, and Rights

1 Rethinking Canadian Citizenship: The Politics of Social Exclusion in the Age of Security and Suppression ya s m e e n a b u - l a b a n

Bill Reid’s well-known sculpture Spirit of Haida Gwaii stands on prominent display in the Canadian Museum of History, among other locales.1 Spirit of Haida Gwaii strikingly depicts an assortment of mythological creatures and human figures fated to share the same boat, which both moves on and remains stationary. Reflecting on this work meant to represent all living beings – some of whom may be in tension with others – Reid rhetorically observed: “There is certainly no lack of activity in our little boat, but is there any purpose? Is the tall figure who may or may not be the Spirit of Haida Gwaii leading us, for we are all in the same boat, to a sheltered beach beyond the rim of the world as he seems to be or is he lost in a dream of his own dreaming? The boat moves on, forever anchored in the same place” (Canadian Museum of Civilization 1996). In its depiction of conflict and interdependence, and mostly in its ongoing uncertainty (or, put differently, in the only certainty, which is that activity will never end), Spirit of Haida Gwaii captures some of the complexity that attends any consideration of what it means to liberate temporariness. Permanence/temporariness stand as a binary construction (see the introduction to this volume by Latham, Vosko, Preston, and Bretón), and as such the very categories of “temporary” and “permanent” contradict and yet depend on one another. Yet, humans (however in conflict or interdependent with each other they may be) may never reach an end point, some sheltered beach, free of the kind of social differentiation and inequality implied by the ideal of ­ liberating

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t­emporariness. Perhaps, then, the best we can do is to address the implications of different activities at particular points in time. To capture the challenge in more concrete terms in the context of Canada, in this chapter I seek to think (or rethink) about citizenship in a way that considers the possibility of acquiring formal-legal citizenship alongside a consideration of the rights and participation of citizens born into, or naturalized into, citizenship. By combining a focus on the forms of citizenship inclusion and exclusion spawned by migration with the long-standing interest of citizenship theorists in issues around the participation as well as rights (and responsibilities) of citizens (Abu-Laban 2000), one can approach temporariness in a more nuanced and less absolutist way. Indeed, absolutist categorization is unlikely to capture complexity. Canada’s contemporary complexity and attendant contradictions stem (in part) from the government’s promotion of immigration as a path to citizenship at the same time as it encourages Canadian businesses to employ temporary migrant workers, from its promotion of human rights and freedom at the same time as it supports exception and security, and from its promotion of welfarism, multiculturalism, and recognition at the same time as it fosters neoliberalism, racialization, and differential treatment (see also Abu-Laban and Nath 2007). In what follows I address developments from the 1960s and argue that since the 1990s not only has Canada embraced neoliberalism and a new post-September 11 security framework, but increasingly, under the initially minority, now majority, Conservative government of Stephen Harper, the space for democratic protest, dissent, and debate among citizens has diminished. In this context, there has been a synchronic shift in both formal-legal Canadian citizenship and in substantive Canadian citizenship that is striking. What characterizes the contemporary moment is how the formal-legal status of citizenship, the rights associated with citizenship, and the participatory elements associated with citizenship may be differentiated not only for non-citizens but also among Canadian citizens. Viewed in this light, then, the condition of temporariness versus permanence is not a static binary but rather variable, dynamic, and relative. In contemporary Canada, the contestations of state and social actors create this ongoing dynamism (just as the machinations of the paddlers and passengers do in Spirit of Haida Gwaii). To illustrate this argument, the chapter employs a three-fold approach. First, I provide an overview of recent migration trends



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to illuminate the tension between equality/inequality inherent in citizenship and its significance for considerations of temporariness and permanence. Second, I highlight key changes wrought by neoliberalism in relation to both formal-legal and substantive citizenship. Finally, I consider the experience of the post-September 11 security turn for one particular category of Canadians – Arab-Canadians – in light of larger patterns. I will show that rather than being merely ethnic history, the experience of Arab-Canadians (a heterogeneous and internally diverse collectivity to begin with) is emblematic of broader changes relating to surveillance as well as democratic protest, dissent, and debate that have implications for all Canadian citizens and residents of Canada. citizenship inclusion and exclusion and conceptualizing permanence and temporariness

It is useful to pay attention to the dynamics raised by global migration when thinking about citizenship, as well as temporariness and permanence. Despite recent calls from some xenophobic politicians, particularly in Europe, for “zero immigration,” migration is a structural feature of the international political economy. Nonetheless, scholars have identified different state responses. Stephen Castles, in particular, distinguishes between a settler model (whereby immigrants, sometimes over many generations, integrate into a new state) and a temporary migration model (whereby migrants stay in a new country for a limited period) (Castles 2002). The idea of temporariness is a potentially fruitful entry point into some of the realities of contemporary global migration, most obviously temporary migration. In particular, the concept of temporariness can attune analysts from the outset to the variety of ways sojourners may cross borders and be received by states. The official statistics for countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and attendant discussions, are riddled with the term “temporary labour migrants” (OECD 2006, 2008, 2009). For OECD states, the temporary migrant of choice is one who is “highly skilled,” even if the skills terminology belies a set of gendered and socially constructed meanings (Stasiulis 2008). But the relevance of temporary migration is not confined to OECD states because today the model of temporary migration has taken on global dimensions. In the words of Nicola

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Piper: ­“Temporary contract migration has become a significant phenomenon in many parts of the world, having experienced a revival in Europe after the official ‘zero migration’ policies following the early 1970s, a new birth in traditional settler countries such as North America and Australia, and continuation in Asia (including the Gulf countries). In this regard, the re-emergence of temporary and seasonal migration can arguably be described as a converging policy of almost global outreach” (2010, 110). Along with the growing number of temporary labour migration programs in countries of the Global North, there has been a growing heterogeneity in the rights accorded to temporary migrant workers (Stasiulis 2008, 111; Rajkumar, Berkowitz et al. 2012). Such developments underscore the potential value of a broader analysis of the concept of temporariness and the plurality of ways that temporariness is framed by states and experienced by non-citizen migrants. Global migration and these contemporary trends also raise important questions about the nature of political community because, to put it simply, not everyone who gets in gets citizenship. In the Canadian context, the focus of this chapter, this is also evident in the parlance used in immigration legislation. To use the lexicon of the Canadian state, it is permanent residents who have the possibility of Canadian citizenship. However, the citizenship story, even in an immigrant-­receiving settler colony like Canada, is not simply about whether “the foreign-­born” acquire citizenship or not, or the variable conditions governing those labelled temporary. An equally compelling question is what happens to citizens, and their rights, under different conditions. Put differently, is permanence a static condition for citizens? The Canadian media debate that accompanied a 2011 report of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and its call to “reframe the idea of Canadians abroad as a key part of the Canadian polity worthy of serious policy attention” (Woo 2011) suggests that the idea of temporariness may benefit by attending to citizens as well. Although very little scholarly work has investigated the experiences of Canadian citizens who migrate and reside in other locales, the study commissioned by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada (2011, 3) used census data from 1996, 2001, and 2006 to show a sizable number of Canadian citizens (2.8 million) lived abroad in 2006 (about 9 per cent of the population). Although some 1 million



Rethinking Canadian Citizenship  39

of the Canadians abroad live in the United States, Canadians can be found in almost every country, with the majority (58 per cent) being Canadian born (Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada 2011, 4). It is particularly interesting to note that the report raises as problematic the fact that Canadian citizens living abroad lose their right to vote after 5 years, and that the Citizenship Act restricts citizenship by descent to only one generation – that is, while the child born abroad to a Canadian would be a citizen, any children in the following generation who were also born abroad would not be considered citizens (Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada 2011, 5–6). Restricted access to Canadian citizenship for those born abroad, to only one generation, stems from an amendment to the Citizenship Act in 2009 (Macklin and Crépeau 2010, 26). Between 1977 and 2009, Canada’s Citizenship Act provided for the possibility of citizenship being granted to a child born abroad to a parent also born abroad to a Canadian citizen (Macklin and Crépeau 2010, 26). The case of Canadians abroad suggests that these citizens may experience differential rights (in passing on citizenship to progeny, or in voting) and therefore a form of temporariness, stemming from the “choice” to live outside Canada. It also illustrates how permanence – as defined by citizenship – can morph. The 2009 change, and the contestation around it as registered by the Asia Pacific Foundation, suggests the dynamism of “permanence” in relation to the actions of state and non-state actors. In contrast to the dearth of literature on Canadian citizens living outside of Canada, comparative research on issues relating to immigration to Canada has steadily increased since the 1990s. As a result, more attention has been paid to the experiences of Canada, and Canada has typically emerged in a growing cross-national comparative literature as a “traditional” country of immigration, with a strong tradition of jus soli citizenship, more recently backed by a commitment to multiculturalism (Abu-Laban 2007). While this portrayal may aid in contrasting the experience of Canada with the experience of certain European countries that made heavy use of guest worker schemas in the period after the Second World War, alone it is misleading. Today, as in much of the twentieth century, chronic labour shortages in Canada have been resolved by importing temporary migrants who are denied legal-formal citizenship. It is, significantly,

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the ­continuing popular myth that Canada imports only permanent workers that may provide justification for ignoring the ­implications of the growing number of temporary programs (­ Stasiulis 2008, 104). Indeed, the (re)turn toward temporary migration in the twentyfirst century raises profound ethical considerations in light of what Lenard and Straehle call Canada’s legislated inequality (2012, 12). The implications of temporary migration are also related to how we theorize citizenship. For example, while migration specialists have for many years drawn attention to the fact that in Europe migrants encountered an array of citizenship statuses (from citizens of European Union countries living in another state and accorded rights under union law, to ex-colonial peoples, to recruited workers) (Pettigrew 1998), in fact this reality did not find its way into much theorizing of citizenship in the 1990s. Instead, in the 1990s the reemergence of citizenship theory tended to implicitly assume that in liberal democracies at least formal-legal equality had been achieved through citizenship. This assumption ran through much work dealing with citizenship in relation to rights and conflict in the tradition of T.H. Marshall, as well as work dealing with citizenship in relation to political participation, community, and belonging in the tradition of Aristotle (Abu-Laban 2000, 516). Yet, treating citizenship as static and settled – even in relation to formal-legal equality – has proven misleading. Indeed, in contrast to the assumption of citizenship producing formal-­legal equality, the findings from work on migration  – in revealing the variety of different statuses migrants could hold in relation to citizenship – instead highlighted something quite different. The findings suggested that citizenship also produces inequality (Abu-Laban 2000, 515). If citizenship operates simultaneously as a site of social inclusion and social exclusion, it suggests the need to be attuned to both dimensions of citizenship, and by extension, to approach both “permanence” and “temporariness” in relation to points of inclusion and exclusion. Just as temporary and seasonal migration can be understood as a converging global policy, so too can neoliberalism and the turn toward security in the post-September 11 period. Neoliberalism has had implications for who gets in and who gets considered for formal citizenship, as well as the nature of rights. It has fed changes in citizenship that confirm the dynamic nature of the categories of “permanent” and “temporary.”



Rethinking Canadian Citizenship  41

neoliberalism, citizenship, and

(in)equality:

the

dynamic of temporariness and permanence revisited

Both the citizenship rights accorded to Canadians and the participatory promise of citizenship (substantive citizenship) as well as the possibilities of non-citizens acquiring Canadian citizenship (formal citizenship) have undergone shifts over time. The past 50 years of Canadian history suggest that both substantive and formal citizenship today are characterized by certain enhanced forms of exclusion, as compared to the period of the 1960s to 1980s. This is a consequence of neoliberalism as well as new constructions of legitimacy and threat that work in tandem with neoliberalism to foster exclusionary impulses. The impetus for greater inclusion that characterized the 1960s contradicted much of Canada’s post-Confederation history as a white settler colony of Britain. The modelling of Canada after Britain politically, economically, culturally, socially, and demographically involved explicitly assimilationist and discriminatory policies. Until very recently, the pressures of “anglo-conformity” were felt by all minoritized groups, including French-Canadians. However, the linguistic diversity of the French in Canada, buoyed by their geographic concentration in Quebec, marked Canada as a distinct ­immigrant-receiving settler colony with two European-origin groups. The points of conflict and cooperation/recognition surrounding this relationship created distinct opportunities for other minoritized groups to articulate claims. The dynamics of federalism, which overlap with a linguistic division around French and English (and to some degree French-origin and British-origin Canadians), make for a distinct playing out of issues for other groups, be it indigenous peoples, immigrants of non-French origin and non-British origin and their descendants, and religious groups (such as Muslims). The 1960s were a decade in which there was a diminishment of anglo-conformity, as a result of changing attitudes, changes in the role of the national state, and civil society mobilization. Developments in this decade, as a totality, may be seen to have created a shift evident through the 1980s in which both substantive and formal citizenship were characterized by more inclusive impulses than historically, even though there remained points of exclusion. Turning first to formal citizenship, by the 1960s, as in other countries, attitudes had begun to change among both policy-makers

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and the public in Canada. In particular, in the context of growing international emphasis on human rights and criticism of race-based exclusions following the Second World War, Canada’s explicitly racist immigration policy was overthrown in 1967. Although this happened elsewhere (e.g., the United States) in the same period, a particular feature of Canada’s officially non-discriminatory policy (at least with respect to race and ethnicity) was the simultaneous adoption of the point system of selection. The point system, still in effect today, works to favour highly skilled immigrants with a great deal of education and thus introduces a class bias (as well as gender bias) into selection (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002). In addition to simultaneously serving to include and exclude, the point system is also significant because it has ensured that there is not necessarily a correlation between racialized/immigrant status and low socioeconomic status. This in turn may influence expressions of, and struggles against, racism in contemporary Canadian society. J­ effrey Reitz (1988) noted this many years ago when he observed of Britain and Canada that although it may appear that there is less overt “race” conflict in Canada it does not necessarily mean there is less racism. The hostility directed at wealthy immigrants from Hong Kong in Vancouver through the 1990s (especially for their purported “monster houses”) is an example of how racialized discrimination may exist (Abu-Laban 1997) but not lead to street riots like those in Britain in 2001 and 2011 or in France in 2005 that generated national and international media attention. Although both historically and contemporaneously Canada has made use of temporary migration, landed immigrants and refugees to Canada obtain citizenship relatively quickly, unlike the situation in countries that relied more extensively on guest-worker schemes (Germany, France, Switzerland, Kuwait, and Japan, to name a few). Additionally, Canada’s particular geography has made so-called illegal immigration a relative non-issue, and therefore immigration itself has not been a feature of negative partisan politicization as it has been in the United States and many European countries (AbuLaban 2007). Canada therefore boasts a world image as a place that is accepting of immigrants. Indeed, a 2003 Statistics Canada survey of recent immigrants to Canada found 98 per cent had no other country in mind when they applied to immigrate to Canada (cited in Statistics Canada 2007, 8).



Rethinking Canadian Citizenship  43

In addition to changing attitudes and policies around immigration and the extension of formal citizenship, the 1960s marks a turning point in the role of the national (or federal) state and its relationship to Canadian citizens. As in other industrialized countries, the period after the Second World War saw the emergence of the welfare state designed to ensure that the risks and economic inequities associated with a competitive market economy were minimized. In the Canadian context, by the 1960s and 1970s the social rights associated with the welfare state created a new and distinct understanding of citizenship that stressed themes of fairness and equity for Canadians not only as individuals but also as groups (on the basis of gender, ethnic, and linguistic differences) (Jenson and Phillips 1996). The federal state played an active role in fostering new policies that explicitly reflected on these elements of Canada’s diversity. This included the 1969 Official Languages Act, which declared English and French to be official languages of Canada (and gave rise to the idea of official language minorities in the form of English speakers in Quebec and French speakers outside of Quebec). It also included the 1971 policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework and the 1988 Canadian Multiculturalism Act. The federal state also passed the 1986 Employment Equity Act and related policies that focused on increasing the numeric representation of women, Aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities, and “visible minorities” (defined as “non-white” by the Canadian government) in federally regulated corporations (such as banks, broadcasting, and airlines) as well as in the public service and institutions doing business with the federal government (companies, as well as universities). Related to these changes, the federal state also gave funding  – including core funding – to minoritized groups like women, Aboriginal peoples, linguistic minorities, and ethnocultural minorities. Although there are many reasons for which the state funded specific groups, in the Canadian case, fostering equity in relation to disadvantaged collectivities was seen as legitimate, and the groups that were seeking recognition and equity were also considered legitimate (Jenson and Phillips 1996, 118–19). As such, the state was active in sustaining and supporting the presence of these groups. Besides being the first Western country to adopt an explicit national policy of multiculturalism, Canada continues to stand among only a handful of Western countries (including Australia and Sweden) that have

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done so. As a result, ethnicity (rather than religion, for example) became a major marker of difference in the state’s relationship with, and response to, social groups. Another feature of the 1960s was the re-mobilization of the Canadian population into identity-based political movements and organizations seeking recognition and/or equity. Reflecting on the numeric significance of French speakers, in response to the mobilization of French speakers in and outside Quebec (many inspired by anti-­colonial movements and the American civil rights movement), the federal government formed a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1963. This commission in turn created an opportunity for non-British, non-French, and non-Aboriginal groups to challenge the idea of two cultures, leading to official multiculturalism and creating a platform for the pursuit of other demands (like employment equity). Corresponding with state funding patterns that favoured nationally representative ethnic organizations, the literature in the field of ethnic studies, which also grew after the passage of the multiculturalism policy in 1971, did not take religion to be a dominant point of differentiation (notwithstanding the understanding that historically the division between Catholics and Protestants was relevant, particularly in relation to education in Canada). Instead, the main distinction, reflecting specific policy and constitutional provisions, was more between what Kymlicka (2007) calls historic national minorities (including French-speaking Québecois and Aboriginal peoples) and minorities stemming from more recent immigration (including non-French, non-British, and non-Aboriginal refugees, immigrants, and racialized minorities and their descendants). In contrast to the inclusionary impulses that characterized developments in substantive and formal citizenship during the 1960s and reverberated through the 1980s, the contemporary period is one in which the conditions of substantive citizenship are increasingly exclusionary. For example, the mobilization of minorities and their ability to make claims have been reduced since the 1990s, when the federal government rescinded core funding for many minority advocacy groups, constraining their ability to participate as effectively as they once did. This development may be part of a broader shift away from a Keynesian welfare state model emphasizing redistribution and equity, in favour of a neoliberal state model emphasizing competition and self-sufficiency (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002, 11–30).



Rethinking Canadian Citizenship  45

In this new context, the retraction of funding to groups advocating on behalf of women and ethnocultural minorities was supported by a discourse negatively portraying these groups as special interests out of step with ordinary Canadians (Jenson and Phillips 1996, 125). The consequences of neoliberalism heighten economic inequalities along class, gender, and racialized lines and thereby weaken the inclusionary potential of substantive citizenship. This dramatic change in citizens’ experiences with the neoliberal state finds a starker parallel in relation to legal formal citizenship, particularly for immigrants and refugees who have been affected by neoliberalism itself and the peculiar ways it intersects with security rationales. For instance, as Anna Pratt dramatically shows in her examination of immigration and refugee practices, since the late 1980s, and escalating since September 11, 2001, concerns over security, crime, and welfare fraud have increased, causing immigrants and refugees to be cast as “actually or potentially ‘risky’ individuals” (Pratt 2005, 18). Pratt also shows that the use of detention and deportation practices by the Canadian state increased significantly from the 1990s through the 2000s (Pratt 2005, 18). This has spawned new questions about the appropriateness of borders (Sharma 2012) and new forms of organizing across Canadian cities, as seen in the rise of No One is Illegal groups in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver (Fortier 2013, 278–80). Temporary migration also grew significantly over the 2000s (Stasiulis 2008; Goldring and Landolt 2013, 7–8; see also Gabriel, chapter 4 in this volume), suggesting that forms of temporariness are amplifying. In relation to permanent immigrants, a neoliberal logic is evident in major policy changes that were introduced in the 1990s and remain today – especially those aimed at attracting self-sufficient immigrants who can pay the costs of their own “integration” in Canadian society (Abu-Laban 1998, 205). The neoliberal emphasis on self-­sufficiency was evident in the reordering of the relative mix of immigrants toward the economic class (independent immigrants) and away from the humanitarian/refugee class and family class that had dominated in the 1980s. Independent immigrants are implicitly assumed to be male economic actors who contribute, whereas family class immigrants (“wives and children”) are treated as non-contributory drains on Canada’s social services. It can also be noted in this regard that in actual practice the preference for economic immigrants effectively favours male applicants, since proportionately there are more

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women than men in the family class and more men than women in the economic class (Citizenship and Immigration 2005, 48). A second way in which neoliberalism has affected immigration and formal citizenship is seen in the Right of Landing Fee introduced in 1995. As originally conceived, the Right of Landing Fee was a $975 fee levied on all adult immigrants, including refugees, entering Canada. In 2000, the federal government repealed this fee for refugees only. In the 2006 budget the Conservative government of Prime Minister Harper halved the Right of Landing Fee and injected an additional 307 million dollars into settlement services. Nonetheless, the fact that the Right of Landing Fee was retained at all speaks to the continued emphasis on attracting self-sufficient immigrants. While the ideal of the self-sufficient immigrant who will not make use of the welfare state has been favoured in policy and policy discourse, the immigrant has also been treated as a threat to the national community in legislation, exacerbating the exclusionary character of formal citizenship. The construction of the immigrant as a threat may be seen in a number of pieces of legislation including the 2001 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the 2001 CanadaUS Smart Border Accord, the 2004 Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement, and in June 2011, Bill C-4: Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System Act. Introduced as a response to the 2010 arrival of a boat of Sri Lankan refugee claimants, Bill C-4 is seen by critics, such as the Canadian Council for Refugees (n.d.), as unfairly punishing and harming refugees as well as undermining Canada’s obligations under international law to protect refugees. In addition, since September 11, 2011, the “new normal” (a series of policy changes including new and revamped anti-terrorist legislation in many polities) reinforces the current obsession with security (see Zedner 2009) with surveillance consequences for everyone. The multiplying array of surveillance technologies also serves to differentially target specific collectivities like Arabs and Muslims – what Lyon (2003) aptly dubs social sorting. These developments in the post-September 11 period added another twist to the experience of Canadian citizenship, especially for Muslim-Canadians and/or Arab-Canadians. Since September 11, 2001, Islam has come to stand as a new threat to the values and institutions associated with liberal democracy that renders national institutions, laws, and norms under imminent threat (see, e.g., Razack 2008).



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At the same time, the security obsession itself may threaten the values and institutions of liberal democracies because some policies and responses bypass civil and human rights in the name of exception (Agamben 2005). These actions may even be justified by media and political elites and/or members of the general public. Since the neoliberal turn has led to withdrawal of federal support to ethnocultural organizations, the anti-racist agenda that had strengthened in the late 1980s has been severely weakened (Kobayashi 2008). As such, strong national mobilization across minority groups to contest either the profoundly unequal effects of neoliberalism or the surveillance and social sorting policies instituted since September 11, 2011, has not been forthcoming. In today’s climate, “clash of civilizations” discourses (the late Samuel Huntington’s idea of an inevitable confrontation between “Christian” countries of the West and “Muslim” countries of the non-West) remain vibrant (Abu-Laban 2002). Cultural and value differences are purported to hold explanatory power  – sometimes even more so than attempts to address history, society, economics, and the like. This struggle is exemplified by ongoing debates over the root causes of terrorism versus the discussion of “values” first evident in the Canadian House of Commons in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 (Abu-Laban 2002). A host of post-September 11 policy responses  – from the rapid passage of anti-terrorism legislation, to the signing of smart border accords between Canada and the United States, and to profiling – have served to further cement the idea that the threat of terrorism is contained in relation to Islam and/or Islamic fundamentalism. An almost inevitable by-product of this focus has been that the threat of terrorism is seen to be contained in relation to certain diasporic communities, especially those that are Arab and/or Muslim. This is similar to post-September 11 framings in the United States, where Arabs and Arab-Americans have been subjected to Orientalized and racialized stereotypes (see chapter 2 by Bakan in this volume). Although not all those of Arab descent are Muslim, in the Canadian context there is frequently a conflation of these two categories. As well, it should be noted that members of both of these groupings not only hold Canadian citizenship but in some instances come from families that immigrated as far back as the late 1800s. Given that legal-formal citizenship holds the promise of equality of treatment and due process of the law, it is understandable that

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national organizations such as CAIR-CAN (the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations Canada), which is an offshoot of the Council on American-­Islamic Relations formed in the United States in 1994), as well as the Canadian Arab Federation (formed in 1967) focus first and foremost on civil and human rights and equity. Ironically, however, Muslim-Canadians and/or Arab-Canadians today are in a paradoxical situation where they are regularly presented as both illiberal and violent – a theme that is strongly evident in print media coverage (Karim 2003; Abu-Laban and Trimble 2009). In being associated with violence, Muslim-Canadians and/or Arab-Canadians are particularly vulnerable to being “evicted” from the norms of Canadian law and politics and treated in exceptional ways (Razack 2008; Agamben 2005). Such policy by exception was poignantly evident in the well-­ publicized case of Maher Arar, a dual citizen of Canada and Syria. In 2002, while travelling through the United States on his Canadian passport, Arar was accused by American officials of being a member of Al Qaeda and deported to Jordan and ultimately Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured (see Commission of Inquiry into the Acts of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar 2006). What is unusual about this post-September 11 exception – in the form of rendition to torture – was that after Arar’s return to Canada in 2003, a fact-finding commission was eventually formed. The Arar commission decisively rejected the accusation of illegal or terrorist activity on the part of Arar and criticized how the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had operated in the post-September 11 environment. After Arar was cleared of charges, the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, publicly apologized to Arar in 2007 and extended 10.5 million dollars in compensation. However, rather than merely being a case about an innocent man who was wrongfully accused, the Arar example is deeply implicated in questions of citizenship and temporariness. An analysis of parliamentary debates and media coverage about Arar from the period of his deportation until the apology issued by Prime Minister Harper reveal that his perceived status as a “Syrian” (a foreigner) versus “Canadian” (a member of “our” political community) also conditioned whether he was seen as deserving of repression and torture (Abu-Laban and Nath 2007). “Canadians” are seen to be deserving of the full protection of human rights. This is a very chilling conclusion because the number of dual citizens in Canada as in many



Rethinking Canadian Citizenship  49

other polities has increased (Macklin and Crépeau 2010) and there is unlikely to be a return to mono citizenship because dual citizenship has benefits for individual citizens and states, alike. The case of Arar highlights the negative aspects of dual citizenship in the context of the current war on terror. Indeed, as Stasiulis and Ross (2006) observe, in a securitized environment, dual nationality (depending on the second country) may hold very grave perils for Arab-Canadians. As a dual Canadian citizen, Arar’s Canadian citizenship was variably rejected or embraced not only in the media and by the general public, but by state officials themselves. Thus, formal citizenship status (and rights protection) is highly contingent on the interpretations of state officials, a feature of what I have called elsewhere “segmented Canadian citizenship” (Abu-Laban 2004). Segmented Canadian citizenship matters because one’s perceived (or actual) race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality may condition the experience of rights and therefore the nature of permanence versus temporariness. Segmented Canadian citizenship can inspire forms of temporariness. The neoliberal decline of a national voice for ethnocultural groups at the federal level, as well as the decline of an anti-racist agenda, makes it much more difficult to challenge the issues that Arar’s case – and segmented citizenship more generally – raise for ArabCanadians and Muslim-Canadians. However, it is worth considering more closely the larger significance of the Arar case for Canadian citizenship by addressing the recent experiences of Arab-Canadians in particular. This grouping is emblematic and becoming a harbinger for changes that affect all Canadians. a r a b c a n a d i a n s a s e m b l e m at i c a n d a h a r b i n g e r

From the outset it needs to be stressed that Arab-Canadians are not a homogeneous category because they differ by religion, country of origin, class, gender, generational status, and age, among other factors. However, Arab-Canadians variously experience a form of temporariness because they hold a “liminal” (Abu-Laban 2013) relationship to citizenship when it comes to being consistently perceived and treated as full members of the Canadian political community. The liminality of Arab-Canadians underscores how citizens may also experience temporariness. The temporariness of Arab-­ Canadians in relation to citizenship has been further exacerbated

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by the discussions emanating from the September 11, 2001, attacks, which raise new issues about so-called homegrown terrorists (that is, Canadian-born terrorists) and invite criticism of multiculturalism for “not working,” putting supporters of the policy and ideal on the defensive (Beyer 2006). The particular liminality or temporariness experienced by ArabCanadians today, as a racialized category, is not unique in Canadian history. For example, Japanese-Canadians during World War Two, French-Canadians during the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) crisis in the 1970s, and the Mohawk during the Oka crisis in the 1990s were treated as “dangerous foreigners” (Dhamoon and AbuLaban 2009). Put differently, the history of Canada as a settler colony has been one in which many collectivities have been constructed as less than full citizens in particular periods (producing a form of temporariness). However, the case of Arab-Canadians sheds light on contemporary dynamics of temporariness, especially stemming from the cumulative impact of changes in citizenship, the welfare state, and security since the 1960s. As noted, the combination of an embrace of human rights and removal of explicit racism from immigration policy, as well as the 1971 adoption of a federal policy of multiculturalism within a framework of English and French bilingualism, created new kinds of inclusions in Canada’s formal and substantive citizenship. In particular, it opened up an entirely new space for minorities – specifically non-British, non-French, and non-Aboriginal immigrants and their descendants  – to pursue symbolic recognition and identitybased claims and counter elements of exclusion and temporariness. The important role of Arab-Canadians in this process was symbolized by the partnership between the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) and the federal government. CAF formed in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and also in the wake of Canada’s stronger embrace of welfarism and human rights. Since its inception in 1967, the organization has drawn attention to stereotypes in the portrayal of Arab-Canadians, biases in media reporting about Arabs and the Middle East, and violations of human rights. These activities are indicative of how Arab-Canadians are not politically passive and have contested and continue to contest negative and racist portrayals and inequalities. In concrete terms, CAF is not saying or doing anything distinctively different today from what it said or did in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s when, as the main national organization



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representing Canadians of Arab origin, it served as a key interlocutor between the federal government and Arab-Canadians. However, the organization’s ability to retain legitimacy (in the eyes of the Conservative government of Stephen Harper) by doing or saying what it might have in the past has been severely constricted. The government’s current views of CAF may be tied to the Harper Conservatives’ ideological commitment to a pro-Israel position that is qualitatively distinct from the positions of earlier post-Second World War Canadian governments and Canadian public opinion (Walkom 2010) as well as the current approaches of the United States and countries of the European Union (Comerford 2011). The extent to which the discursive space in which CAF can articulate its positions has been constricted became very clear in the lead up to and aftermath of Israel’s 22-day war on Gaza (December 2008 to January 2009). In this period, CAF representatives had a verbal confrontation with Jason Kenney, the then federal minister of citizenship, immigration, and multiculturalism, over the Harper government’s support of the war. At the same time, Kenney explicitly failed to renew CAF’s federal grant that had funded immigrant language instruction (Canadian Arab Federation 2009a, Abu-Laban 2013). The full consequences of the removal of federal funding for language and employment training are still unfolding. CAF and its extant leadership, with the support of its member associations throughout Canada, called on Prime Minister Harper to “restrain” his minister of citizenship, immigration, and multiculturalism. CAF and its member associations also highlighted the racism experienced by Arab-­Canadians and stated that “the campaign of intimidation by the Israeli lobby and their supporters is seeking to delegitimize Arab-Canadian institutions, services, access to public funds and to silence all critics of Israel – following its war on Gaza … by equating such criticism with anti-Semitism” (Canadian Arab Federation 2009b). Not least, CAF also launched a lawsuit against Jason Kenney regarding his decision to stop funding language training programs (McGregor 2009). This lawsuit is still ongoing and shows how in being cut off from interfacing with elected government officials, the national organization representing Arab-Canadians has instead turned to the courts. At first glance, this still-unfolding episode in the experience of Arab-Canadians may seem to be about the Israel-Palestine conflict or a specific minority group that is not really paradigmatic of anything

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larger in the story of Canadian citizenship. However, the experiences of Arab-Canadians are emblematic of an ongoing shift regarding the space for democratic protest, dissent, and debate for all Canadian citizens and the normalization of surveillance and exception in the name of security. One of the most dramatic examples of this constriction of space for protest and debate came in the summer of 2010 in Toronto with the massive security presence – costing close to 1 billion dollars – accompanying the G20 summit. The implications for the rights of Canadian protesters and their experience in speaking out are numerous. Indeed, the ombudsman for the Ontario government, André Marin, referred to the arrests and detention of over 1,100 people as a “mass violation of civil rights,” which featured “the granddaddy of all secret manoeuvres, which was the non-publication of a regulation which extended extraordinary, likely illegal, powers to the police during the G20” (Canadian Press 2011). Moreover, since mega events are not held every day, it is worth considering what seems to be happening more generally with the ability of Canadians to disagree, to speak out freely, and to advocate for differing points of view. In a 2010 speech at a conference hosted by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Alex Neve, secretary-general of the Canadian section of Amnesty International, warned of “the big chill,” referring to the shrinking space in Canada for advocacy and dissent since the 1990s, particularly as a result of the climate created by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. According to Alex Neve, a good many groups and individuals are experiencing a pattern of arbitrary funding decisions, cuts to funding, and intimidation for speaking out about a variety of human rights issues at home and abroad when doing so questions the policy of the Harper Conservatives (Neve 2010). Neve highlighted that the targeted groups include the Court Challenges Program, which deals with cases involving the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, Status of Women Canada, which historically was central to providing a voice for Canadian women, the Canadian International Development Agency, and Rights and Democracy (which was dismantled in 2012), as well as the CAF. As Neve noted, the concern about the big chill is not simply about the issues themselves, but about “the common good of having all voices heard on major crucial issues of the day” (Neve 2010). Stated differently, it is about



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the possibility of participation, a key component of substantive citizenship. To the extent that the participatory elements of citizenship may be variable and even differentiated among Canadian citizens and the groups representing them, a form of temporariness may be experienced by Canadian citizens, akin to the ways in which various avenues of political participation are restricted and even denied to non-citizens and temporary workers. Non-citizens, including farm workers (McLaughlin and Hennebry 2013) and refugee claimants (Kisoon 2013), find ways to express agency and are not politically passive. As noted, Arab-Canadians have done the same, and other Canadian citizens do so as well. However, the point is that non-­ citizens and liminal citizens do so from a standpoint of relative vulnerability and have fewer access points than citizens typically have, and that the access points of citizens are not static, but can shift. The case of Arab-Canadians, whose main national organization, the CAF, has been dramatically shut out from interfacing with the federal state, is emblematic of broader changes. These broader changes relate to restrictive measures governing formal citizenship granted to migrants and immigrants, as well as changes in the substantive and participatory aspects of Canadian citizenship. The common pattern that can be traced through all of them is the erosion of human, social, and civil rights by the state, with clear consequences for citizens and non-citizens alike. For both citizens and non-citizens, a turn toward exclusion – spawned by neoliberalism and securitization – creates proliferating forms of temporariness. conclusion

This chapter has addressed the concept of “temporariness” by considering Canadian citizenship and its evolution from the 1960s through to the contemporary period. As suggested in this chapter, there is a dynamic quality to permanence and temporariness that becomes evident when adopting an approach that simultaneously considers legal-formal citizenship alongside substantive citizenship rights and participation. In discussing the contemporary post-September 11 period, I have paid specific attention to Arab-Canadians in this chapter. Canadians of Arab descent have a long history in Canada and were important actors in shaping the post-1960s vision of Canada as a multicultural society. But in many ways Arab-Canadians stand in a temporary

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relation to Canadian citizenship, a feature which has emerged more sharply since September 11, 2001. In this regard, the analytic relevance of thinking about temporariness should not only be confined to the growing numbers of temporary workers recruited to Canada but should extend to those who hold Canadian citizenship (whether mono, dual, or multiple citizenship). The contemporary embrace of security and suppression that has affected non-citizens and Arab-Canadians most obviously has reverberations for citizens from all backgrounds. The increasing normalization of body scanners in airports is but the tip of the iceberg. The diminishing space for advocacy and dissent raises profound questions about the current federal government’s policies that are of concern for all those residing in Canada, whether permanent, temporary, or citizen. All Canadians, and all residing in Canada, have a stake in considering, envisioning, and advancing alternatives to the forms of temporariness we see today. The process for considering alternatives to temporariness would benefit from dialogue with a wide array of voices, because there is no stable citizenship model. Rather, the ongoing struggles of state and societal actors make and re-make the conditions and terms of formal and substantive citizenship. As such, both permanence and temporariness are dynamic, humanly created, and subject to change in more inclusionary directions than others. The current turn toward temporary migration and shifts in substantive citizenship raises a plethora of issues. Indeed, the dismantling of multiculturalism’s nascent anti-racist and equity agenda, first by neoliberalism and more recently by security and silencing, has coincided with a deepening racialization as well as feminization of inequality in Canada (Wallis and Kwok 2008). There are obstacles to broad dialogue. Neoliberal Canada (evident in the actions of successive federal governments since the 1990s) has demonstrated that minoritized groups (women, racial minorities, Aboriginal peoples, linguistic minorities) do not have as vibrant a national political presence without support from the federal government. The Canada of the Harper Conservatives is one where elected politicians may cease to listen to and engage with those holding views that differ from their own (such as the CAF). However, a hopeful sign for a dialogue on current forms of temporariness and paths toward greater inclusion may be the efforts of Alex Neve of Amnesty International Canada and some 188 other organizations, including the Canadian Centre for Policy ­Alternatives,



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in launching the national “Voices/Voix” Campaign. This campaign aims to promote free expression and the role of civil society organizations in Canada (Neve 2011). As this chapter has shown, formal-legal citizenship may be denied to those immigrating to Canada, including refugees, and to the grandchildren of Canadians living abroad. The rights and participation that are associated with substantive citizenship may be compromised by the variable extension of rights, processes of securitization, and the suppression of democratic dissent. An important starting point for fostering social inclusion in light of these evolving aspects of formal-legal and substantive citizenship would be promoting the conditions under which a variety of voices can actually be heard in the imagining of alternative policies and alternative futures. The symbolism of Spirit of the Haida Gwaii is a reminder that while we may not know exactly where we are going, and we may not reach a point where temporariness has been fully liberated, there are actions that may make the continuing journey better for all who share the boat. In contemporary Canada, citizens, liminal citizens, and non-citizens not only share a geographic space, but the impact of policy choices for one group may have consequences (whether intended on unintended) for others. This kind of interdependence makes a broad dialogue compelling for all who reside in Canada.

note

1 In 2012, the Conservative Government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced a five-year plan to transform the Canadian Museum of Civilization into a new Canadian Museum of History. Spirit of Haida Gwaii is also on display outside the Canadian embassy in Washington, DC, as well as at the Vancouver International Airport, and it may be subject to different interpretations. For an interesting analysis of this work in relation to the ongoing nature of the politics of recognition in Canada and the avoidance of essentialism, see Maclure (2003). references

Abu-Laban, Y. 1997. Ethnic Politics in a Globalizing Metropolis: The Case of Vancouver. In The Politics of the City: A Canadian Perspective, ed. T. Thomas, 77–95. Scarborough, ON: ITP Nelson.

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– 1998. Welcome/STAY OUT: The Contradiction of Canadian Integration and Immigration Policies At The Millennium. Canadian Ethnic Studies 30(3):190–211. – 2000. Reconstructing an Inclusive Citizenship for a New Millennium: Globalization, Migration and Difference. International Politics 37(4):509–26. – 2002. Liberalism, Multiculturalism and the Problem of Essentialism. Citizenship Studies 6(4):459–82. – 2004. The New North America and the Segmentation of Canadian Citizenship. International Journal of Canadian Studies 29: 17–40. – 2007. North American and European Immigration Policies: Divergence or Convergence? European View 5(Spring): 9–16. – 2013. On the Borderlines of Human And Citizen: The liminal State of Arab-Canadians. In Targeted Transnationals: The State, the Media and Arab Canadians, ed. B. Momani and J. Hennebry, 68–85. Vancouver: UBC Press. Abu-Laban, Y., and C. Gabriel. 2002. Selling Diversity: Immigration, Multiculturalism, Employment Equity and Globalization. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Abu-Laban, Y., and N. Nath. 2007. From Deportation to Apology: The Case of Maher Arar and The Canadian State. Canadian Ethnic Studies 39(3):71–97. Abu-Laban, Y., and L. Trimble. 2009. Covering Muslim-Canadians and Plitics in Canada. In Mediating Canadian Politics, ed. S. Sampert and L. Trimble. Scarborough, ON: Pearson Education. Agamben, G. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. 2011. Canadians Abroad: Canada’s Global Asset. Vancouver, BC: Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. Beyer, P. 2006. Multiculturalism Works Fine. Ottawa Citizen, 23 June, A13. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. 2005. Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration. Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada. Commission of Inquiry into the Acts of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar. 2006. Report of the Events Relating to Maher Arar: Analysis and Recommendations. Ottawa: Public Works and Government Services Canada. Canadian Arab Federation. 2009a. Minister Kenney’s History with caf: Fact Sheet. 9 March. http://www.caf.ca [accessed 23 July 2009.]



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Canadian Arab Federation. 2009b. Arab Canadians Call Upon Prime Minister Harper to Restrain Minister Jason Kenney. 2009. March 8. http:// www.caf.ca [accessed 24 July 2009.) Canadian Council for Refugees. n.d. C-4: Anti-smuggling or Anti-refugee? http://ccrweb.ca/en/c4 [accessed 8 July 2011]. Canadian Museum of Civilization. 1996 Grand Hall Tour: The Spirit of the Haida Gwaii. http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/exhibitions/aborig/ grand/gh04eng.shtml [accessed 28 January 2012]. Canadian Press. 2011. Ont. must Show Transparency after G20 Secret law. ctv News, 21 June. http://ottawa.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/ CTVNews/20110621/OTT_Ombuds_110621/20110621/?hub=Ottawa Home [accessed 8 July 2011]. Castles, S. 2002. Migration and Community Formation under Conditions of Globalization. International Migration Review 36(4): 1143–68. Comerford, D. 2011. Canada must Rethink Middle East Policy. Ottawa Citizen, 26 May. http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/Canada+must +rethink+Middle+East+policy/4840881/story.html [accessed 8 July 2011]. Dhamoon, R., and Y. Abu-Laban. 2009. Dangerous (Internal) Foreigners and Nation-Building: The Case of Canada. The International Political Science Review 30(2):163–83. Fortier, C. 2013. No One is Illegal Movements in Canada and the Negotiation of Counter-National and Anti-Colonial Struggles from within the Nation-State. In Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. L. Goldring and P. Landolt, 274–90. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Goldring, L., and P. Landolt. 2013. The Conditionality of Legal Status and Rights: Conceptualizing Precarious Non-Citizenship in Canada. In Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. L. Goldring and P. Landolt, 3–27. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jenson, J. and S.D. Phillips. 1996. Regime Shift: New Citizenship Practices in Canada. The International Journal of Canadian Studies 14(Autumn): 111–35. Karim, K.H. 2003. Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence. Updated ed. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Kisoon, P. 2013. Precarious Immigration Status and Precarious Housing Pathways: Refugee Claimant Homelessness in Toronto and Vancouver. In Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status

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in Canada, ed. L. Goldring and P. Landolt, 195–217. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kobayashi, A. 2008. Ethnocultural Political Mobilization, Multiculturalism and Human Rights in Canada. In Group Politics and Social Movements in Canada, ed. M. Smith, 131–57. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Kymlicka, W. 2007. Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lenard, P.T., and C. Straehle. 2012. Introduction. In Legislated Inequality: Temporary Labour Migration in Canada, ed. P.T. Lennard and C. Straehle, 3–25. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Lyon, D. 2003. Surveillance after September 11. Cambridge: Polity Press. Macklin, A., and F. Crépeau. 2010. Multiple Citizenship, Identity and Entitlement in Canada. irpp Study No. 6, June. Maclure, J. 2003. The Politics of Recognition at an Impasse? Identity Politics and Democratic Citizenship. Canadian Journal of Political Science 36(1):3–21. McGregor, G. 2009. Canadian Arab Federation Taking Jason Kenney to Court. Ottawa Citizen, 26 March. McLaughlin, J., and J. Hennebry. 2013. Pathways to Precarity: Structural Vulnerabilities and Lived Consequences for Migrant Farmworkers in Canada. In Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. L. Goldring and P. Landolt, 175–94. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Neve, A. 2010. The Big Chill: Advocacy and Dissent under Siege in Canada. Remarks delivered at the 30th Anniversary of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 18 November 2010, Ottawa. – 2011. The Big Chill: Basic Freedoms of Speech and Advocacy are Now under Siege. The Monitor, 1 March). http://www.policyalternatives.ca/ publications/monitor/big-chill [accessed 8 July 2011.] OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). 2006. International Migration Outlook: Sopemi 2006. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. – 2008. International Migration Outlook: Annual Report 2008 Edition. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. – 2009. International Migration Outlook: Sopemi 2009. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Pettigrew, T. 1998. Reactions Toward the New Minorities of Western ­Europe. Annual Review of Sociology 24:77–103.



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Piper, N. 2010. Temporary Economic Migration and Rights Activism: An Organizational Perspective. Ethnic and Racial Studies 33(1):108–25. Pratt, A. 2005. Securing Borders: Detention and Deportation In Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Rajkumar, D, L. Berkowitiz, L.F. Vosko, V. Preston, and R. Latham. 2012. At the Temporary-Permanent Divide: How Canada Produces Temporariness and Makes Citizens through its Security, Work and Settlement Policies. Citizenship Studies 16(3–4):483–510. Razack, S. 2008. Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Reitz, J.G. 1988. Less Racial Discrimination in Canada, or Simply Less Racial Conflict? Implications of Comparisons with Britain. Canadian Public Policy 14(4):424–41. Sharma, N. 2012. The “Difference” that Borders Make: “Temporary Foreign Workers” and the Organization of Unfreedom in Canada. In Legislated Inequality: Temporary Labour Migration in Canada, ed. P.T. ­Lennard and C. Straehle, 26–47. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Stasiulis, D. 2008. Revisiting the Permanent-Temporary Labour Migration Dichotomy. In Governing International Labour Migration: Current Issues, Challenges and Dilemmas, ed. C. Gabriel and H. Pellerin, 93–111. London: Routledge. Stasiulis, D., and D. Ross. 2006. Security, Flexible Sovereignty, and the ­Perils of Multiple Citizenship. Citizenship Studies 3(July):329–48. Statistics Canada. 2007. Immigration in Canada: A portrait of the Foreign-Born Population, 2006 Cnsus (Catalogue No. 97-557-XIE). Ottawa: Minister of Industry. Walkom, T. 2010. Canadian Establishment’s Deference to Israel is Out of Date. Toronto Star, 2 June. http://www.thestar.com/opinion/ ­editorialopinion/article/817857--canadian-establishment-s-deference-toisrael-is-out-of-date [accessed June 12, 2010]. Wallis, M.A., and K. Siu-ming Kwok, eds. 2008. Daily Struggles: The Deepening Racialization and Feminization Of Poverty in Canada. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Woo, Y.P. 2011. A dedicated agency for Canadians abroad. Globe and Mail, 30 June. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/ opinion/a-dedicated-agency-for-canadians-abroad/article2080410/ [accessed 4 July 2011]. Zedner, L. 2009. Security. Milton Park, UK: Routledge.

2 Permanent Patriots and Temporary Predators? Post-9/11 Institutionalization of the Arab/Orientalized “Other” in the United States and the Contributions of Arendt and Said abigail b. bakan

i n t r o d u c t i o n : t h e pat r i o t a c t , p e r m a n e n t pat r i o t s , a n d t e m p o r a r y p r e d at o r s

The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (the USA PATRIOT Act) was quickly passed through both houses of the US Congress and widely supported by both the Republican and Democratic parties, in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. The Patriot Act (as it is commonly termed) marked both an institutional and discursive re-framing of American politics that has become hegemonic as it has passed its tenth anniversary. Regarding the institutional framework, the act was written and passed after “only two days of debate and in an atmosphere of national hysteria” (Platt and O’Leary 2003, 8), and signed into law by Republican President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. The aim of the act was “to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes” (USA PATRIOT Act 2001). This chapter addresses the ideological institutionalization of temporariness as predatory – and simultaneously racialized as the Arab/ Orientalized “Other”  – as it has been constructed and counterposed to an idealized permanent “patriotic American” in post-9/11



Permanent Patriots and Temporary Predators?  61

f­ ramings of US hegemony. As US policy, under the administration of George W. Bush, and retained under the administration of Barack Obama, temporariness as the “enemy within” is institutionalized in the 2001 Patriot Act and its subsequent iterations. The perceived imminent, and contingent, condition in the moment of the 9/11 crisis, which provided the impetus for the construction of the Patriot Act as an emergency measure, has been transformed into a constant condition of perceived terrorist threat. The Patriot Act has emerged as an important artifact, an institutionalized object, if also policy, in the construction of the binary of temporariness/permanence. This artifact was constructed, however, at least in part through historic, recognizable political and normative patterns, in both national and international configurations. It has included American state identification with another state, Israel, as a similarly framed victim comprised of resident patriots under threat from  – also similarly framed – regionalized Arab/Orientalized non-resident predators. This reframing of American politics marks a racialized reconfiguration of the permanent patriot and the temporary predator symbolized by the Patriot Act in the post-9/11 era. It suggests an apparent irony, where the sense of threat of terrorism is shaped as a permanent element of American patriotic identity, and where the temporary predator becomes ossified in permanence. To unpack this apparently paradoxical reality, the contributions of Edward Said and Hannah Arendt are helpful. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), the German-Jewish-American scholar who theorized totalitarianism, examined the Eichmann trial, which was another notable turning point in framing the permanent patriot as both Western and Israeli and in framing Israel as a permanently stable new presence in the Middle East. Arendt suggested that the trial was less about justice than performance and that it was significant in developing a particular interpretation of the events of the Second World War with a view to framing the post-war order within a Zionist understanding of the Jewish question. Arendt’s detailed account of the trial in Israel of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1961 provides a window into this historic constructed identification between the US permanent patriot and the Israeli state project, as a moment of simultaneous white colonial settlement and white victimhood. Arendt  – herself a Jewish survivor and refugee from Nazi Germany and an American political philosopher and analytical writer – served on her own initiative as a

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journalist for the New Yorker magazine during the Eichmann trial. Her reportage on the trial was published as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963, the same year as her book titled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was written. Arendt saw the event as less a moment of justice reclaimed than as an assertion of the Israeli state’s performative declaration of constructed Zionist nationalism as the complete and sole redress for anti-Semitism. If we can trace the Eichmann trial as one historic moment that helped to frame the imagined community of the permanent patriot, another essential element is the removal of any claim to permanence of the Arab/Orientalized Other. Here, while Arendt clearly addresses the destructive impact of Zionism (meaning a political, secular movement, and not a religious set of beliefs or practices, where a national state is seen as the only means to redress anti-Semitism) on the lives and territorial claims of Palestinians and the demonization of Arab state leaders in the region, it is in the work of Edward Said that the most detailed explanation of the construction of a temporary Arab/Orientalized predator simultaneously in the Middle East and in the American political imaginary is explained. Edward Said (1935–2003), the Palestinian-American scholar who theorized the entrenchment of Orientalism, also focused on the “question of Palestine.” He identified Palestine as a colonial settler experience that would not speak its name, operating as an elemental issue in the normative acceptance of the Arab/Orientalized terrorist. Said can be understood to suggest a framework that advances the permanently temporary status of the Arab/Orientalized, where the Palestinian national identity is subsumed, blurred, and then universalized as both threatening and stateless. Said’s The Question of Palestine, first published in 1979, provides the second window in this analysis that can help frame the normalization of the institutionalization of the binary of the permanent patriot and temporary predator symbolized in the Patriot Act. Said’s understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict both inspired and is grounded in his original notion of Orientalism, developed in the influential text of the same name, which was first published in 1978 (Said 2003). This analysis is grounded in the history of Western colonialism and imperialism. Said places the deep epistemological divide between Palestinian reality, as an occupied national population struggling for self-determination, and Western perceptions of the Arab/Muslim terrorist in the context of twentieth-century politics.



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While Said’s focus is Palestine, he is sympathetic to and informed by the Jewish European experience of anti-Semitism (here meaning anti-Jewish racism). Said is helpful, therefore, in explaining the historic background to perceptions of the Arab/Muslim Other that prefigure post-9/11 constructions, as symbolized in the Patriot Act. Collectively, Arendt and Said can be read to suggest formative elements in the construction of the American patriot as permanent in both the United States and, although historically traced to European settlement in Palestine, rendered permanent in Israel, while the Arab/ Muslim predator is rendered threatening and, as an emergent refugee population, rendered permanently temporary. Moreover, both Arendt and Said were both diasporic US intellectuals, positioned both inside and outside the American ideological terrain. They were both extremely successful academics and theorists with extensive bodies of work regarding pre- and post-1948 framings of Israel/ Palestine. Additionally, they were both notably influential but also faced unusual and systematic challenges, and ad hominem attacks, for challenging the mainstream (Zionist and Western) view of the state of Israel, de-linking state politics from Jewish identity, rights, and culture. Their writings, individually and collectively, suggest an instructive vantage point from which to explore temporariness/ permanence as predatory/patriotic in the construction of US state ideology. The remainder of this argument proceeds in three parts. First, I address the US Patriot Act as both an institutional and discursive moment in the construction of US post-9/11 hegemony. Second, I discuss Arendt’s contributions drawing from Eichmann in Jerusalem (2006). Third, I consider Said’s contributions in The Question of Palestine (1992). I conclude the argument with a suggestion of both continuity and change under the administration of US President ­Barack Obama. t h e pat r i o t a c t a n d t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n o f p o s t - 9 / 1 1 hegemony

The Patriot Act provides for enhanced authority in the federal government, including available funding and surveillance practices, regarding a wide array of procedures considered essential to US security. The act includes enhanced authority to access suspicious computer communications, foreign intelligence information, ­financial

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t­ ransactions, and immigration procedures and proposes mechanisms for “removing obstacles to investigating terrorism” including capacity to access educational records and DNA identification. The Patriot Act also includes a notable disclaimer. Section 102 is titled “Sense of Congress Condemning Discrimination against Arab and Muslim Americans.” Part A of the section addresses “findings” and part B the Sense of Congress. The findings include notable admirable traits of a collectively described group of “Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and Americans from South Asia” that “play[s] a vital role in our Nation and are entitled to nothing less than the full rights of every American.” The findings further note the experience of Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Americans who have been the targets of “acts of violence” since September 11, 2001. They also indicate that “the acts of violence that have been taken against Arab and Muslim Americans since the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States should be and are condemned by all Americans who value freedom …. Muslim Americans have become so fearful of harassment that many Muslim women are changing the way they dress to avoid becoming targets.” The Patriot Act goes so far as to single out one individual as an example: “Many Arab Americans and Muslim Americans have acted heroically during the attacks on the United States, including Mohammed Salman H ­ amdani, a 23-year-old New Yorker of Pakistani descent, who is believed to have gone to the World Trade Center to offer rescue assistance and is now missing.” The Sense of Congress indicates objection to this targeting and related acts of violence, noting that “the civil rights and civil liberties of all Americans, including Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and Americans from South Asia, must be protected, and that every effort must be taken to preserve their safety.” The provisos were not sufficient, however, to prevent a pattern of notable targeting of those who could be racially profiled, either by official forces or the general public, as dangerous predators, unpatriotic and threatening, on American soil. A dangerous Other has violated the integrity of the borders. The licence of “true Americans” to protect themselves accordingly is symbolized in the Patriot Act. Furthermore, the act symbolized and expressed a “fundamental transformation” in jurisdictional boundaries, including an extension of complex surveillance and reporting techniques designed to i­ dentify and ostensibly halt terrorist activity on the grounds of ­suspicion, rather than reported evidence of criminal activity ­(Murray 2010).



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Although such protocols are not new in the United States, reminiscent for example of the McCarthy era or the period of repression associated with the notorious Counterintelligence Program of the FBI that targeted civil rights and anti-Vietnam war organizations among others, the post-9/11 system is notably expansive in reach and, in practice if not in name, racialized. Moreover, as the Arab/Muslim terrorist Other is also treated as an uninvited immigrant, the temporary status of the unpatriotic predator becomes legitimate grounds for deportation, with the process of forced exit considered as a security measure necessary to the protection of the patriotic, non-Arab/ Muslim permanent resident of the United States. This practice has continued and become increasingly normalized, not least because it exists coterminously with rhetoric that denies criteria of racialization, following the normative framing inherent in the Patriot Act. Nancy Murray summarizes: “In the post-9/11 period, then, hunting down ‘terrorists’ went hand in hand with locating and deporting immigrants from Muslim parts of the world whose legal status in the country could on any grounds be challenged. The fact that an estimated two-thirds of Muslims in the country had been born abroad … and that many maintained ties with their countries of origin made domestic Muslim communities fertile fishing grounds for global information. On 27 January 2003, shortly before the Justice Department declared that ‘racial profiling is wrong and will not be tolerated,’ the Justice Department-based FBI instructed all field supervisors to count the number of mosques and Muslims in their areas, and use the information to establish a yard-stick for the number of terrorism investigations they expected to carry out” (Murray 2010, 13). The Patriot Act was developed in a moment of emergency, under conditions that were anticipated to change. It therefore included a sunset clause (section 224) that would see most of the terms of the act “cease to have effect on December 31, 2005.” Starting in July 2005, the US Senate and the House of Representatives passed two reauthorization bills, which were eventually merged and passed in Congress. These were signed into law, again by President George W. Bush, in March 2006. This iteration was the subject of considerable debate, principally regarding implications for violations of civil ­liberties and parameters of state authority (USA Reauthorization [USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization] Act of 2005, 6). While there were certain amendments regarding reporting procedures to “specified congressional committees annually” from the

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Attorney General, and some restrictions and provisions for durations of some clauses, the Reauthorization Act essentially rendered permanent the basic features of the original Patriot Act. As part of the amended architecture of the US government that also saw the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (in 2002), which marks the “most significant change in the federal bureaucracy since President Truman created the Department of Defense to fight the Cold War in 1947” (Platt and O’Leary 2003, 9), and which has powers parallel to those of the FBI and CIA, the institutional significance of the Patriot Act is dramatic (Saito 2002). The subject of this chapter is the discursive, or normative, significance of the Patriot Act, as symbolic of wider processes in both the state and civil society. These processes assume the institutional realities mentioned above, but also reveal American imperialist state hegemony, both domestically and internationally, regarding the dichotomy suggested between the permanent patriot and temporary predator. While the reality of post-9/11 racialization of the Arab/ Muslim Other is now well documented – variously termed Islamophobia, anti-Muslim racism, or anti-Arab racism  – in the United States and other Western states including Canada (Razack 2008; Salaita 2006; Abu-Laban and Nath 2007), it is the apparent successful generalization of this process that animates this argument. Specifically, what are the normative factors in the framing of the American “patriotic” imaginary that have enabled this profound regression from ostensibly inclusive democratic principles to be so widely accepted? Clearly, the ground was laid well before September 11, 2001, reliant upon an established history of exclusion of racialized others on grounds of security, from colonial settlement and the concomitant demonization of indigenous peoples, to the enslavement of African plantation labourers, to the internment of the Japanese-American population during the Second World War. However, there is another geopolitical element to the post-9/11 binary involving who is permanent and who is temporary. Arguably, the linkage between the United States and Israel is significant. The notion of the Western-style state under threat from Arab terrorists rendered these closely allied polities more intimately linked in the aftermath of the attack on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, marking a certain “Israelization” of Western politics (AbuLaban and Bakan 2011). This has both advanced and built upon a troubling identification with the main Jewish organizations in the



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United States moving to unproblematized Israel advocacy, sufficient to generate a literature and theory associated with the “Israel lobby” (Mearsheimer and Walt 2007), or even, with a left guise, a worrying notion of a “Jewish lobby” (Petras 2006). Notwithstanding considerable vocal opposition among Jewish critics of both Israeli state practices and US state alliances with such practices (Butler 2004, 2008; Boyarin 2004; Finkelstein 2003, 2005; Chomsky 1999), the hegemonic body of ideas has resulted in deteriorating relations between those claiming to represent Jewish and patriotic permanent status in America and those who carry the marker of the apparently non-permanent predator. This divide has been starkly marked in the recent controversy over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, where an Israel advocacy group called the Anti-Defamation League publicly opposed the plan for a proposed Islamic centre in New York City in the summer of 2010. A recent CNN Opinion Research Corporation Poll (6 August 2010) indicated that 68 per cent of Americans oppose the plan of “a group of Muslims in the US … to build a mosque two blocks from the site in New York City where the World Trade Center used to stand.” Favouring the plan was a 29 per cent minority, while 3 per cent offered no opinion (CNN 2010). Certainly, however, this divide is not reducible to an ethnic or religious identity claim but is more pronounced, and the influence of the divide is, arguably, associated with a certain configuration of permanence and patriotism as against temporariness as predator. This brings us to a consideration of the contributions of Arendt and Said. hannah arendt on eichmann in jerusalem

Hannah Arendt’s series in the New Yorker, covering the Eichmann trial, marked a journalistic analysis of a formative event in the Western understanding of Israel’s political positioning between the historic legacy of the Second World War and the establishment of a new post-war state on the land of historic Palestine. Israel, formed in 1948 as a product of the new United Nations process, and in the heat of another regional war, was, at the time of the Eichmann trial, only 13 years past its origins. Its establishment was a time of suffering for the local Palestinian population, who referred to it as the Nakbah, or catastrophe, though at the time the reality of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, now well documented, was publicly denied (Pappe 2007).

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The Israeli state’s identification of the original moment as Israel’s war of independence was a narrative still in the making. Moreover, the trial took place before Israel’s Six Day War of 1967, when the occupation of Palestinian Territories beyond the 1948 borders – an occupation that continues to this day – further changed the parameters of Israeli statehood both in the region and internationally. Arendt framed her analysis of the Eichmann trial as a moment of Israel’s political assertion of its claim to represent the Jewish survivors of the Nazi holocaust, shaping the charges fundamentally as “a crime against the Jewish people” rather than as, following the Nuremburg trials of 1945–46, crimes against humanity. She challenged the event as a show trial, where “David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel … rightly called the ‘architect of the state,’ remains the invisible stage manager of the proceedings” (Arendt 2006, 5). Arendt cited a number of articles written by Ben-Gurion before the trial, and she described the atmosphere of his theatrical announcement that Eichmann had been kidnapped from hiding in Argentina and taken to Israel to meet the justice of a Jewish court in the new state of the Jewish people. She identifies Ben-Gurion’s aim to impart “lessons” through the Eichmann events, to “Jews and Gentiles, to Israelis and Arabs, in short, to the whole world” that an ascribed 4,000-year pattern of hostility to Jews was now to face justice in the Zionist vision of a national state (Arendt 2006, 9–10). Moreover, Ben-Gurion counterposed the meekness of European Jews to Israeli heroism and attempted to draw a connection between the hostility of Arab state leaders to Israeli military occupation and the Nazis, bounded by anti-Semitism (Arendt 2006, 10). Eichmann was kidnapped by the Israeli police secret service (Mossad and Shin Bet agents) while living in hiding in Argentina, having escaped from Germany to avoid facing charges at Nuremburg. He was kidnapped and taken to Israel and tried by the Israeli court, ultimately sentenced to death and hanged in 1962. Arendt objected to the process of kidnap, maintaining that this was “a clear violation of international law” that had been committed “to bring him to justice” (Arendt 2006, 263). While she recognized that the “justification was the unprecedentedness of the crime and the coming into existence of a Jewish State”, she noted that “in this instance, Israel had indeed violated the territorial principle, whose great significance lies in the fact that the earth is inhabited by many peoples and that these peoples are ruled by many different laws, so that every e­ xtension of



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one territory’s law beyond the borders and limitations of its validity will bring it into immediate conflict with the law of another territory” (Arendt 2006, 264). Arendt’s approach to the trial was to examine it as a moment of realpolitik, assessing it with a political philosopher’s eye to human morality and common standards of justice. While she praised the integrity of the judges, her sense of disappointment with the general character of both the prosecution and defence is not hidden in her reporting. Moreover, she maintained that, unexpectedly, Adolf ­Eichmann was neither monstrous nor sinister, but remarkably average, “banal” in his participation in an evil system, and neither empirically nor psychologically the principal architect of the final solution. In fact, she maintained, establishing in great detail the process of the Nazi state moving from deportation to extermination, the network of genocide also included “Jewish Councils” (Judenrate), where cooperation in the machinery pitted some Jews against others. Arendt, a former Zionist in her youth in Germany and a profound analyst of the Jewish question, found in the experience what she termed her own cura posterior, a therapeutic reckoning with her own experience of persecution. Her style of distant coverage was vilified by Zionist opponents, who found her unsympathetic and without empathy. As her biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl summarizes, “[d]eep differences of opinion about the nature of good judgment cut through many facts of the ‘Eichmann Controversy’” (Young-Bruehl 2004, 337). Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem provoked a “controversy” that raged among American and international commentators, analysts, scholars, and, not least, Israeli and Zionist advocates for “nearly three years, and it continues to simmer even now when the book made from the articles is in its twentieth reprinting” (Young-Bruehl 2004, 339). Arendt can be read to have identified clearly a moment in the construction of new post-Second World War hegemony where Israel held a discursive place in American and Western thought as compensation for the Nazi holocaust and as a state-centric redress to artificially close the deeper challenges suggested by the realities of German fascism and anti-Semitism. The victimhood of Jews in the West was transformed by the political acts of the Israeli state – here, consciously expressed in the Eichmann trial, finding justice in the exceptionality of Israeli state actions outside the bounds of international law.

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The links between Israel and the United States were more profoundly forged in the events and aftermath of the 1967 war, where the permanent patriot was associated with the expansion of Israel more deeply into Palestinian territory. The further displacement of thousands of Palestinian refugees, and the ongoing denial by Israel, supported by the United States, of the Palestinian right of return, is indicative of the ongoing entrenchment of the permanent patriot identity. This brings us to the construction of the Arab/Muslim temporary predator and the work of Edward Said. e d w a r d s a i d o n t h e q u e s t i o n o f pa l e s t i n e

Edward Said, writing in 1977–78, directly addresses his study with an aim to making the Palestinian reality knowable to a Western audience. As a Palestinian intellectual living and working in the United States, and as a scholar of cultural studies and literature, he is uniquely situated in the worlds of both the Orient and the Occident. His aim is to put “before the Western reader a broadly representative Palestinian position,” acknowledging that despite a great deal of public discussion of the “Palestinian problem,” there is notably little information or understanding. Moreover, he is sensitive to the need to differentiate the particularities of the Palestinian reality from the more broadly defined realm of Arab history and the activities of Arabs over the twentieth century, principally owing to “the defining characteristic of Palestinian history – its traumatic national encounter with Zionism” (Said 1992, xxv). He is cognizant of the challenge in presenting such a narrative, particularly with the immediate association of “terrorism” with “the Palestinian problem” (Said 1992, xxxv). Said places the political tactics of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the context of the national liberation politics of the region and thereby dissociates specific political tactics from the wider questions at hand. Briefly, he notes the disproportionality of the conflict. “In sheer numerical terms, the brute numbers of bodies and property destroyed, there is absolutely nothing to compare between what Zionism has done to Palestinians and what, in retaliation, Palestinians have done to Zionists. The almost constant Israeli assault on Palestinian civilian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan for the last twenty years is only one index of these completely asymmetrical records of destruction” (Said 1992, xxxvi).



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He begins the narrative with the recognition that even to name the people, place, and history of “Palestine” is contested and marks itself as a political act. To claim the reality of Palestine challenges political efforts to erase, or render permanently temporary to the point of absence, the lived experience and movement of a national people. “In Israel today, it is the custom officially to refer to the Palestinians as the ‘so-called Palestinians,’ which is a somewhat gentler phrase than Golda Meir’s flat assertion in 1969 that Palestinians did not exist. The fact of the matter is that Palestine does not exist, except as a memory or, more importantly, as an idea, a political and human experience, and an act of sustained popular will” (Said 1992, 5). Said proceeds to trace the history of Zionism as an explicitly political project, advanced by Theodor Herzl in the 1890s in Europe, as the response of an Austrian Jewish reporter to the rise of mass antiSemitism associated with the Dreyfus affair in France. A plan to create a “Jewish colony” in the Global South created a close alignment of Western Orientalism, concern to solve the “Jewish question,” and Zionist advocacy in modern political geopolitics and discourse. As Herzl first conceived of it in the nineties, Zionism was a movement to free Jews and solve the problem of anti-Semitism in the West; later elaborations of this idea took Palestine as the place where the conception was to be materially fulfilled (after locations in South America and East Africa had been considered and dropped). In addition to being the place where there exists a spiritual bond in the form of the covenant between God and the Jews, Palestine had further advantage of being a backward province in an even more backward empire. Therefore, the effort … was to lay claim to Palestine both as a … largely uninhabited territory and as a place where the Jews, enjoying historical privilege could reconstitute the land into a Jewish homeland (Said 1992, 24). From the time of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and more dramatically in the aftermath of the Second World War, the constructed understanding of the idea of Palestine meant that “to oppose such an idea in the West was immediately to align oneself with anti-­ Semitism” (Said 1992, 24). However, the rich and complex r­ ealities of Palestinian life before 1948 are absented in this construction. Said proceeds to reconstruct this history, indicating how Zionism

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has been experienced as colonial occupation “from the standpoint of its victims” and placing twentieth-century Palestinian politics in the context of a movement toward national self-determination. From this perspective, Palestinian indigenous society, arguably in fact more accurately considered to be permanent, is rendered temporary and then reimagined in its claim for sovereignty as a dangerous, threatening predator. The post-1948 displacement of Palestinians in their thousands as refugees denied the right of return similarly inverts the obviously temporary status of the refugee, to render the temporary as permanent. This inversion, however, rendered the events of 9/11 less incomprehensible and certainly less complex. An immediate association of the United States as the victim state, a state with a similar geopolitical positioning to Israel, and facing a similar predator in the form of the Arab/Orientalized predator, can be understood in this framework. conclusion: from bush to obama

The events of September 11, 2001, and the responses of the US government also reconfigured the “whiteness” of America, partially superseding the historic white/black divide with the notion of unified American “post-racial” patriots threatened by the Arab/­Muslim Other. The United States maintained and realigned itself with other “white” states similarly threatened, notably Israel. As Sunera ­Thobani notes, The power of the United States was shaken by the 9/11 attacks as was the ground upon which stood the Twin Towers. The attacks demonstrated that the US was not unassailable, and the transformation of the attack into a global media spectacle reiterated this message in no uncertain terms. As the Bush Administration (with the support of its allies, including Canada) launched the War on Terror to reassert its dominance, the battle to control the meaning of the attacks was no less intense than the one waged on the bodies of Muslims named as the enemy. Defining the attacks as an epochal attack on the West and its civilized values, the Bush administration sought to extend its imperial reach (which relies on no small measure on its access to, and potential control of, the vast oil and gas reserves of the Middle East and Central Asia) … even as it popularly presented its action as a



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defense of Western values and their extension into the Islamic world. The War on Terror marks a significant shift in postcolonial articulations of whiteness (Thobani 2007, 169). The transition from the presidency of George W. Bush to that of Barack Hussein Obama marked, at least in part, a symbolic recognition among a part of the American elite that a new post-9/11 configuration of American patriotism was in order. But it also marked the permanence of a tension in the post-9/11 era, indicating the centrality of the artifact of the US Patriot Act as a point of continuity from Bush to Obama. The Economist, that starkly blunt and confident voice of international elite Western politics with a British imperial slant, put the case clearly for endorsing Obama in the last weeks of the US presidential election campaign and suggested a fitting conclusion to this discussion: “Is Mr. Obama any better? Most of the hoopla about him has been about what he is, rather than what he would do. His identity is not as irrelevant as it sounds. Merely by becoming president, he would dispel many of the myths built up about America: it would be far harder for the spreaders of hate in the Islamic world to denounce the Great Satan if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein; and far harder for autocrats around the world to claim that American democracy is a sham” (Economist 2008, 15). Indeed, with the artifact of the Patriot Act securely in place, and the related construction of a binary of the permanent American patriot and the permanently temporary Arab/Other embedded, the change in the office of the president can be seen to have mostly symbolic significance. While symbolism is not unimportant, this reading is suggestive of a less dramatic shift in power than the hopeful optimism of the first election of Obama might have suggested.

references

Abu-Laban, Yasmeen, and Abigail B. Bakan. 2011. The “Israelization” of Social Sorting and the “Palestinianization” of the Racial Contract: Reframing Israel/Palestine and the War on Terror. In Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory, and Power, ed. Elia Zureik, David Lyon, and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, 276–94. London: ­Routledge.

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Abu-Laban, Yasmeen, and Nisha Nath. 2007. From Deportation to Apology: The Case of Maher Arar and the Canadian State. Canadian Ethnic Studies 39(3):71–99. Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books. Boyarin, Daniel. 2004. Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. – 2008. The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique. In Postzionism: A Reader, ed. Laurence Silberman, 369–86. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Chomsky, N. 1999. Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the­ Palestinians. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. CNN. 2010. Interviews with 1,009 Adult Americans, including 935 Registered Voters, Conducted by Telephone by Opinion Research Corporation on August 6–10, 2010. Atlanta, GA: Cable News Network. Economist. 2008. It’s Time: America Should Take a Chance and Make Barack Obama the Next Leader of the Free World [editorial]. Economist, 1 November, 15–16. Finkelstein, Norman. 2003. The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. London: Verso. – 2005. Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of Hstory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mearsheimer, John J., and Stephen M. Walt. 2007. The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Toronto: Viking Canada. Murray, Nancy. 2010. Profiling in the Age of Total Information Awareness. Race and Class 52(3):3–24. Pappe, Ilan. 2007. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. London: Oneworld Publications. Petras, James. 2006. The Power of Israel in the United States. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press. Platt, Tony, and Cecelia O’Leary. 2003. Patriot Acts. Social Justice 30(1):5–21. Razack, Sherene. 2008. Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Said, Edward. 1992. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books. – 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books. Saito, Natsu Taylor. 2002. Whose Liberty? Whose Security? The USA PATRIOT Act in the Context of COINTELPRO and the Unlawful Repression of Political Dissent. Oregon Law Review 82:1052–1132.



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Salaita, Steven George. 2006. Beyond Orientalism and Islamophobia: 9/11, Anti-Arab racism, and the Mythos of National Pride. New Centennial Review 6(2):245–66. Thobani, Sunera. 2007. White Wars: Western Feminisms and the “War on Terror.” Feminist Theory 16(44):169–85. usa patriot Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) of 2001, Public Law 107–56, 107th Cong. http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgibin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=107_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ056.107. pdf [accessed 21 November 2010]. usa Reauthorization (usa patriot Improvement and Reauthorization) Act of 2005, Public Law 109–177. Bill Summary and Status, 109th Cong. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HR03199:@@@D& summ2=m& [accessed 21 November 2010]. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. 2004. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

3 Indefinitely Pending: Security Certificates and Permanent Temporariness mike larsen

This new situation, in which “humanity” has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

i n t r o d u c t i o n : r e s t r i c t i n g t h e r i g h t t o h av e r i g h t s

One of the aims of liberating temporariness is to explore the possibilities for “challeng[ing] permanence as the basis for civil, social, and political rights” (see the Introduction to this volume). Permanence, understood as the constellation of rights and privileges that accrue to the possession of full citizenship status, has traditionally been positioned in contrast to various temporary arrangements that result in persons being in, or passing through, but not being of a particular sovereign state. The binary of permanence and temporariness operates across several registers  – member versus outsider status, inclusion versus exclusion, citizen versus immigrant, core versus periphery, and so on (see Abu-Laban, chapter 1 in this volume). It also defines and shapes a terrain of struggle, such that the pursuit and acquisition of permanence is viewed as a solution to the problem of temporariness. “Liberating temporariness” implies a conscious effort to problematize and move beyond this terrain, and part of this effort involves acknowledging that while the adjective “temporary” signifies something that lasts for a limited time only, ­temporariness



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as a status (or non-status) can be long term, indefinite, and even permanent. The problem, then, is not defined by permanence versus temporariness, but rather by the apparatus or dispositif (see Bigo 2008; Foucault 1977) through which the right to have rights is constructed, asserted, negotiated, and denied in a given socio-political context. While gradations of citizenship form a part of this dispositif, other institutions and processes also play an important role – for example, discourses of (in)security. The mobilization of distinctions between permanence and temporariness is also a central component of the politics of national security, which has traditionally been shaped by the sovereign declaration of exceptional circumstances or conditions that necessitate departures from otherwise acceptable laws and norms (Bigo and Tsoukala 2008; Dyzenhaus 2001). Certainly, there are examples of temporally limited emergency measures being introduced in accordance with this logic – the use of a modified war measures law during the public order policing of the Toronto 2010 G20 meeting is a good example – but many argue that late modernity has come to be characterized by the permanence of temporary measures (Dyzenhaus 2001), a pervasive state of exception ­(Agamben 1998, 2005 1998) or the gradual normalization of emergency powers (Neocleous 2008) or counter-laws (Larsen and Piché 2009; Welch 2009; Ericson 2007). Instead of being suspended, the law is being expanded and reconfigured to accommodate extraordinary security practices and to create an aura of legitimacy around them. It is not unusual for practices that restrict the right to have rights to operate at the intersection of discourses of citizenship and (in)security. The history of national security campaigns is interwoven with the history of efforts to reproduce notions of normative citizenship by invoking the fear of threatening outsiders (Nyers 2006; Bauman 2004; Kinsman, Buse et al. 2000). Individuals and groups caught in this overlap of discourses are subject to a sort of double exclusion, first, through their eviction from the political community defined by legal claims to membership (see Razack 2008) and second, through the mobilization of extraordinary (in)security measures. Historically, these exclusions have reflected and reaffirmed dominant social hierarchies and anxieties about racialized “Others.” This chapter deals with the Canadian security certificate regime, understood as a shifting legal framework and set of institutional practices that exists at the confluence of the politics of security,

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secrecy, and exclusion. Certificates exemplify the aforementioned overlap of discourses. They are “mechanisms of normalized exceptionality that are given form and a semblance of legal legitimacy through counter-law and a political-managerial dialectic of securitization and that operate according to a precautionary and pre-emptive logic” (Larsen and Piché 2009, 210). Certificates are legally operationalized through division 9 (s.77) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), which allows the ministers of public safety and citizenship and immigration – acting on the basis of secret information – to co-sign a document deeming a person without Canadian citizenship status to be “inadmissible” to Canada and authorizing that person’s indefinite detention pending expulsion from the country. Although there are several grounds on which certificates can be based, for the last decade they have primarily been used to detain Muslim men deemed to represent threats to national security, by virtue of an alleged connection – in the past, present, or future – to terrorism. As Razack (2008) has convincingly argued, the public portions of the certificate hearings involving these men have focused on the state’s construction of racialized images of sleeper agents who are threatening not because of their actions but because of their profile. Certificate detainees are constructed not as lawbreakers or deviants but as persons who are incorrigibly, essentially threatening – embodiments of a broader racialized archetype of the “enemy within” (see Bakan, chapter 2 in this volume). It is important to note that the legal proceedings associated with contemporary security certificate cases have been intertwined with the evolution of the security certificate regime, both as a legal framework and as a set of practices. It was on the merits of a challenge brought by then-detainees Adil Charkaoui, Mohamed Harkat, and Mahmoud Jaballah that the Supreme Court of Canada in 2007 found security certificates under the IRPA to be unconstitutional. The effect of this ruling was tempered by the Court’s deferential decision to give the government one year to “fix” the unconstitutional regime, during which time the certificates would remain in force (Macklin 2009; Dyzenhaus 2006). This led to a Kafkaesque situation in which the Secret Trial Five (five Muslim men who have been subject to security certificates in the post-9/11 context) were effectively detained pending law. Since then, they have experienced the introduction of security-cleared special advocates, another Supreme Court challenge, and a growing body of Federal Court jurisprudence



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around the admissibility of intelligence in the court, and contestation over guidelines for conditional release. The objective of this chapter is to explain how security certificates create and sustain permanent temporariness.1 The first section explores three key themes that emerge from backstage texts associated with the governance of security certificates: the rhetorical eviction of certificate subjects as archetypal non-citizen security threats, the framing of certificates as exceptional security measures, and the expanding and networked nature of the certificate regime. This section is informed by the idea that the social organization of national security practices is textually mediated (Kinsman and Gentile 2010). By brokering access to backstage texts and reading them “against the grain,” we can gain insights into the internal dynamics of overtly secretive security practices (Walby and Larsen 2012a; Larsen and Piché 2009). The second section focuses on two practices through which permanent temporariness is operationalized in certificate cases: indefinite detention and perpetual surveillance during conditional release. My primary interest here is to provide an account of how these practices are experienced from the standpoint of certificate subjects and their families. I argue that being subject to a security certificate is characterized temporally by a sense of indefinitely pending – surrounded by a shifting regime of controls and practices in the present while constantly awaiting, dreading, and anticipating an uncertain and open-ended future. The chapter closes with a brief commentary on security certificates from a carceral abolitionist perspective (Piché and Larsen 2010). It is important to mention that security certificates couple the violence of incarceration with the threat of deportation – including the potential for removal to torture – and the circumvention of due process through secret proceedings. The certificate regime is essentially a collection of legal and institutional limitations on the right to have rights. Contesting these limitations involves critiquing and rejecting not only the legitimacy of particular measures but the underlying ideology and logic of security itself. permanence and temporariness in security regime texts

One of the defining features of the certificate regime is the state’s use of its national security confidentiality prerogative to withhold the

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bulk of the intelligence that forms the basis of a case from the individual who is subject to the security certificate. For this reason, certificates have justifiably come to be known as secret trials, although the cloak of secrecy extends beyond the courtroom to encompass the evolving and ad hoc network of surveillance, detention, and security practices that constitute the regime (Larsen and Piché 2009). Indeed, the ability to access, produce, work with, and make claims about secret knowledge is what vitalizes the security certificate regime. The ability of government agencies to put this knowledge to work while simultaneously keeping substantive portions of it secret is based on the status of security certificate cases as administrative immigration proceedings where the normal rules and expectations governing disclosure do not apply. Reference to authoritative but secret (authoritative because it is secret) knowledge shapes the rhetoric of officials for whom certificates represent a potent opportunity to mobilize and re-work perennial narratives about threats to the nation, dichotomies between citizens and suspicious Others, and the need for a strong security state (Kinsman, Buse et al. 2000). For the actors and agencies that become involved in some aspect of the security certificate regime, the ability to work with secret knowledge represents a form of capital and an opportunity for membership in what Bigo (2008) refers to as the transnational field of professionals in the management of unease. “The social construction of national security is also, centrally, that of secrecy” (Kinsman and Gentile 2010, 43), and this means that interrogating and contesting security practices demands an engagement with the secret texts that circulate and are active within security organizations. These texts are created with internal uses in mind. Some constitute what Gary Marx (1984) refers to as dirty data  – information that is deliberately kept secret and whose revelation could be embarrassing, discrediting, or, at the very least, disruptive to the maintenance of official narratives. Gaining access to texts that circulate within the backstage of security organizations can be challenging. I have approached this problem through the systematic use of access to information and freedom of information laws that combines the pursuit of security regime texts with a reflexive analysis of the processes through which access to such material is negotiated and brokered (Walby and Larsen 2012a, 2012b). Once obtained, these texts can be read for what they reveal about the social organization of national security practices.



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Themes of permanence, temporariness, and permanent temporariness are central features of security regime texts. These themes emerge in several ways. First, both backstage texts and public statements (and backstage texts that carefully script public statements) reproduce the classic distinction between rights-bearing citizens and non-citizen Others. Consider the following: “The Security Certificate Initiative’s purpose is to support the Government in achieving what can be termed an essential balance between values of freedom, democracy and respect for human rights and risks presented from inadmissible foreign nationals and permanent residents” (excerpt from Public Safety Canada 2010, 4). The Security Certificate Initiative is the term given to the package of programs and funding put in place following the passage of Bill C-3 and the creation of the special advocate corps. The formal evaluation of this initiative is full of statements like the above, which simultaneously invoke a set of “Canadian values” and articulate the threat to the security of the nation posed by threatening outsiders. The concept of “essential balance,” a familiar trope in (in)security narratives (see Neocleous 2008), is used to imply reasonableness and justice in the face of challenging circumstances. In reality, the certificate regime abrogates and qualifies the rights of those with temporary status and depicts this as being in furtherance of the security of the nation and its permanent members. Other texts, meant to guide and script official discourse, make this point more bluntly. “Only foreign nationals and permanent residents, not Canadian citizens, may be subject to the security certificate process” (excerpt from Approved Media Lines: Harkat Residence Search, 20 May 2009, CBSA ATI 00127-A0041317, 13). And the following: “I would encourage all colleagues to set aside partisanship to realize that the security certificates have been proven not to threaten the individual rights and freedoms of Canadians. As a matter of fact, the security certificate cannot even be applied against a Canadian citizen. It can only be used on foreign nationals or those who are not Canadian citizens” (Stockwell Day, Member of Parliament, addressing the House of Commons, 31 January 2008). Similar statements appear in all approved talking points regarding the certificate regime. These statements emphasize the profound distinction in legal status between citizens and outsiders that is operationalized through the regime – not only are citizens protected by security certificates, they are, simply by virtue of being citizens, protected from s­ ecurity

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certificates. The ideological link between national security and a narrowly conceived notion of membership tied to permanent citizenship status is reproduced through the rhetorical and physical exclusion of others, and inclusion is given meaning by its juxtaposition to exclusion (see Kinsman, Buse et al. 2000). Canadian citizens represent the intended audience for these talking points, and the message is one of reassurance. The second way in which permanence and temporariness emerge in security regime texts related to certificates is through the repetition of statements that emphasize the exceptional nature of the certificate mechanism and the rarity of its use. The security certificate is an almost ideal-type example of the normalization of emergency powers: it allows for the diversion of a given case away from normal rules and procedures and into a zone of exceptionality, and the ability to use this power is not temporally limited or contingent upon the declaration of a general emergency. Many security regime texts refer to certificates as an important permanent fixture of the government’s repertoire of national security measures. At the same time, these texts consistently note that certificates are used sparingly and with care: “The utilization of [sic] National security certificate is not a power the government or CBSA [Canada Border Services Agency] abuse or think of lightly [sic]. We have stats to prove [it]” (excerpt from internal CBSA email “Re: URGENT ASSISTANCE REQUIRED” sent 17 May 2009, CBSA ATI 00067-A0041311, 32). And: “Looking at the number of certificates that have been issued over the years, it is evident that certificates are rarely used as a removal tool. Canada removes approximately 10,000 to 11,000 people per year. In contrast, only 27 security certificates have been issued over the past 14 years – an average of approximately two per year. This means that certificates are employed in less than one-tenth of one percent of all removals.” (excerpt from Approved “Qs&As For Standing Committee and Follow-Up Questions from the Media,” 25 October 2006, CBSA ATI A-2007-01287, 7). The first excerpt is part of one of the many emails and text messages circulated among members of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) following their surprise raid of certificate subject Mohamed Harkat’s home in 2009. The raid, officially described as part of routine compliance monitoring, saw CBSA agents, police, and service dogs converge on the Harkats’ home, search it, and cart away a variety of materials. Intended as a show of force and



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­ emonstration of authority, the exercise quickly proved to be a pubd lic relations fiasco for the CBSA, and agency officials were ordered to appear before the Federal Court and justify the reasonableness of their actions. Preparations for this meeting  – which did not go well for the CBSA  – involved the development of an account that emphasized the extraordinary nature of the certificate mechanism. The second excerpt above conveys a similar message, this time setting certificates apart from ordinary deportation processes. The fact that certificates are seldom issued is implied to mean that their use is necessarily a matter of careful consideration in the face of extraordinary circumstances. Restraint in the use of this power emerges as an indicator of its legitimacy. To paraphrase: “We always have this power, but we seldom have cause to use it. The fact that we are using it now should tell you how serious the threat is.” Despite repeated references to the exceptional nature of certificates, the certificate regime has become interwoven with a range of other institutions and practices. I have previously argued that this is the inevitable result of the normalization of extraordinary measures through counter-law (see Welch 2009; Ericson 2007): the enforcement of such laws “necessarily gives rise to subsequent and ancillary exceptions at the institutional level, like ripples emanating from a stone dropped in a pond. What begins with an obscure provision under immigration law results in special courts, special prisons, special advocates, special conditions of release, and so on, all framed as logical and common-sense extensions of the underlying counter-law” (Larsen and Piché 2009, 225). The certificate regime, in other words, is expansionary. It is characterized by a succession of temporary measures, some of which are discontinued and replaced, and others which are formalized and rendered permanent. Security regime texts reflect this creative process, as professionals discuss the means through which legal authority can be matched with institutional capacity. What begins as an exercise in (in)security problem solving (where, when, and how can government agencies facilitate the indefinite detention of non-citizens?) can, over time, evolve into a set of “best practices,” stable partnerships, and even new institutions. Consider, for example, the special advocate program that was created to plug the constitutional gaps in the certificate regime identified by the Supreme Court in the Charkaoui case (2007 SCC 9). Almost from the start, organizations involved in the security certificate regime began to contemplate the potential utility

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of ­security-cleared lawyers to act as buffers between secret information and open courts in other proceedings, both under the IRPA and beyond: “If asked about the expansion of the special advocate program to other, non-IRPA proceedings: The special advocate process in IRPA must be evaluated and reviewed as a part of a transparent assessment in 2010. This assessment, as well as the recommendations and experiences in other proceedings, will allow the government to assess the demand for expansion of this initiative” (excerpt from Talking Points on “Current Developments: Security Certificates” prepared by counsel to the Criminal Law Policy Section, Department of Justice, 10 July 2008, DOJ ATI A2010-00591, 28). Whether and to what extent the special advocate program will be extended remains an open-ended question, but the above excerpt illustrates a broader trend in the contemplation of permanence and expansion for ancillary exceptions created by changes in the certificate regime. This makes sense when we consider the certificate regime to be a set of institutions and practices that are located within the broader (in)security field (Bigo 2008). The organizations that make up this field are constantly manoeuvering for position, funding, and power relative to the others. In some cases this involves competition, but more often it involves cooperation. As a matter of course, contemporary security agencies engage in formal and informal collaborations, information sharing, joint investigations, intra- and inter-governmental working groups, and one-off service arrangements governed by memoranda of understanding. The ability to exchange authority and capacity in temporary or open-ended arrangements, and in fluid and often opaque networks, is a defining feature of the (in)security field (Larsen and Piché 2009; Roberts 2006). By way of illustration, consider the following excerpts from security regime texts that explain some of the inter-agency relationships associated with the governance of security certificates. “At the working level, main intersections occur between CBSA, CIC [Citizenship and Immigration Canada], and CSIS [Canadian Security Intelligence Service] who use work agreements to delineate information-sharing responsibilities. In terms of cross-­ cutting participation, each department and agency … receives regular advice and direction from DOJ [Department of Justice] lawyers … PS [Public Safety] manages and coordinates relationships as the policy and legislative lead of the horizontal initiative” (excerpt from Public Safety Canada 2010, 10). “The CBSA will refer calls to CSC



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[Correctional Service Canada] as appropriate and as they relate to specific areas of CSC responsibilities, as per the MOU [memorandum of understanding] between the CBSA and CSC. The CBSA will also work in close partnership with the RCMP, PS, CSIS, and PCO [Privy Council Office] as appropriate” (excerpt from Communications MOU, Kingston Immigration Holding Centre, 12 April 2006, RCMP ATI A-2010-00636, 8). The first excerpt refers to the coordination of the Security Certificate Initiative, a component of the broader certificate regime that is concerned with the management of the certificate cases before the Federal Court. The second excerpt refers to the inter-agency management of communications related to the Kingston Immigration Holding Centre (KIHC), a facility purpose built for the detention of security certificate detainees. The KIHC is operated by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), whose services are contracted by the CBSA. Both of these initiatives are products of the permanent temporariness of the certificate regime, in that they both reflect institutional adaptations to accommodate the stretching of temporary measures  – judicial hearings and detention pending deportation – into open-ended or permanent processes. To sum up, permanent temporariness is a prominent theme in backstage security regime texts related to security certificates. It characterizes the way in which certificate subjects are constructed as permanent outsiders before the law and the Canadian political community, as well as the social organization of the certificate regime as an interwoven network of ad-hoc institutions and practices. Indefinitely Pending The Secret Trial Five occupy a legal and experiential zone of ambiguity, simultaneously excluded and deemed inadmissible by an act of sovereign power par excellence, and captured in a multi-layered web of detention, supervision, and control (see Agamben 2005). They are subject to a state of permanent temporariness in which the pursuit of rights-bearing citizenship or refugee status is indefinitely suspended. Originally detained pending deportation, the men have all – at different times, through sustained legal challenges and with the aid of organized support campaigns – managed to convince judges of the Federal Court to grant them conditional release. These arrangements were initially characterized by unprecedentedly restrictive conditions that effectively reconfigured domestic and public spaces according

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to carceral logics. Spouses, parents, and children became live-in jailers, forced to purchase a relative degree of freedom for their loved ones by relinquishing their own freedoms and expectations of privacy (Larsen, Harkat et al. 2008). For the Secret Trial Five and their families, efforts to arrive at a semblance of normalcy are mediated by uncertainty created by pending decisions and changing conditions. During the last six years, I have been involved in campaigns to oppose and abolish security certificates and to support current certificate subjects, particularly Mohamed Harkat. My work with Mr. Harkat, his indefatigable wife and advocate Sophie, and the Justice for Mohamed Harkat Committee has afforded me some insights into what it is like to live every day in the state of permanent temporariness created by a security certificate. One of the defining characteristics of this subjectivity is the experience of being indefinitely pending. What I mean to capture with this term is the sense of being permanently caught in a web of transitory processes and conditions that are ostensibly in furtherance of a future state of total expulsion. This experience of always waiting for, anticipating, and dreading a future is often described by the men and their families as a form of psychological torture. It would be a mistake to dismiss this claim as hyperbole. In the remainder of this section, I focus on two sets of practices that are central to the operation of the security certificate regime and that create and sustain states of permanent temporariness: indefinite detention and release with conditions. I draw a distinction between these practices for heuristic purposes only, as both constitute forms of detention, understood to involve “intentional practices that (i) restrict individuals’ ability to move from one place to another and (ii) impose order of space and time so that individual mobility is highly constrained, if not eliminated” (Martin and Mitchelson 2009, 460). Detention is further distinguished by the imposition or threat of violence and, importantly, by its indeterminacy (Martin and Mitchelson 2009; McCollogh and Scraton 2008). In the security certificate cases, detention practices take place in several settings, chiefly institutions of closed confinement and “everyday” settings, including domestic spaces. Indefinite Detention Until 2006, when Adil Charkaoui became the first of the Secret Trial Five to be granted conditional release, security certificates were



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s­ynonymous with indefinite detention in an institutional setting. Until 2006, this setting was understood to be a provincial prison (i.e., a jail). Security certificates authorize detention pending deportation, as opposed to a term of incarceration. Traditionally, this had been accomplished through contractual arrangements between the federal government and the provinces (Larsen and Piché 2009). The detainees and their families were led to believe that their incarceration was a temporary matter and that removal under the authority of a judicially upheld security certificate was imminent. Reflecting on his first year of imprisonment, Moe Harkat recounts: “At this time, I knew nothing about my case. It was all uncertain and I did not speak English very well. They kept telling me ‘we are holding you until we can send you back to Algeria. We are going to deport you’ and this was terrifying. It was like waiting to be walked to my own execution” (in Larsen, Harkat et al. 2008, 35). This proved not to be the case, thanks in large part to resistance on the part of the detainees and their lawyers and supporters, but Moe Harkat’s account is illustrative of indefinitely pending as a form of subjectivity. His detention became a prolonged and open-ended affair. Moe Harkat spent the better part of a year in solitary confinement in a provincial facility and a total of 43 months in prison generally. Since he had not been sentenced (or charged with a crime, for that matter), he had no release date to anticipate and organize his life around. Additionally, since he was not an “inmate,” neither he nor the other detainees were given access to the programs and services available to sentenced prisoners in a Canadian correctional setting, resulting in indefinite “dead time” spent waiting for a decision in his case (Larsen and Piché 2009). The certificate regime was in “make it up as you go” mode at this point, having never had to accommodate prolonged, indefinite detention of this sort. The detainees resisted this situation through a series of concerted hunger strikes. The status quo was also seen as untenable by the provincial governments, who did not want to be responsible on a long-term basis for the incarceration of complicated and contentious federal cases. From all standpoints, the temporary detention arrangements were seen as problematic, and pressure was put on the federal government to develop an alternative. The government’s solution was to maintain but normalize indefinite security certificate detention by creating a special federal prison exclusively for the certificate detainees. Piché and I have written elsewhere about the emergence and history of this institution, the KIHC

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(Larsen and Piché 2009). It is the archetype of an ancillary exception. In April 2006, the four then-current detainees (Charkaoui had previously been released with conditions) were transferred to the KIHC without announcement or fanfare. Sophie Harkat describes finding out about her husband’s transfer: “I only found out … when one of the other prisoners at the provincial jail panicked and called collect to tell me that Moe had been taken away. Luckily, I was home to receive the call, so I was able to alert the media and the other families. I remember thinking ‘what if they just deport him instead?’” (in Larsen, Harkat et al. 2008, 38). While the opening of the KIHC was portrayed as an improvement in terms of conditions and a more stable setting, it quickly became apparent that the facility was governed by an ambiguous set of rules and regulations, the product of its status as a space of interagency collaboration. KIHC was created with two potential operational statuses in mind. It is considered to be active when it is used to hold one or more security certificate detainees. Personnel from the CSC manage the day-to-day operations of the facility during this time. They are specially cross-trained by CBSA in the procedures for the indeterminate detention of persons who have not been adjudicated guilty and therefore are not targets for correctional programming. When there are no detainees currently being held, the KIHC reverts to dormant status, ready to be reactivated should a new certificate be issued or should one of the detainees subject to conditional release be found to have breached his conditions (Larsen and Piché 2009). The facility will remain either active or dormant until such time as there are no security certificate subjects present in Canada. This arrangement is an excellent illustration of the institutionalization of permanent temporariness. Conditional Release One by one, the Secret Trial Five were allowed to transition from detention in an institutional setting to detention at home under conditional release agreements. Federal Court judges, whose rulings had upheld the certificates declaring the men to be threats to the national security of Canada, were persuaded that indefinite detention in prison was nonetheless unnecessary. The rationale for these decisions is that prolonged detention and pervasive surveillance actually mitigate the risk posed by an individual detainee. For example,



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consider the following excerpt from Noel J.’s 2010 decision in the Harkat case (Harkat 2010 FC 1241 at para 543): “This is now 2010. Mr. Harkat has been in Canada since 1995 and since then has been under surveillance, in jail or released with conditions. This is relevant to the assessment of the risk he poses for the security of Canada. During his first years in Canada up to his arrest in December 2002, the danger associated to him was towards the high end of the spectrum. Now, after having been incarcerated for years, released on conditions which were loosened with the passage of time, the risk he poses to Canada has decreased.“ This decision reflects the imperatives of counter-law, which are concerned with precaution, pre-emption, and the management of uncertainty, as opposed to the determination of legal guilt (Ericson 2007). Having spent years engaged in the social construction of the certificate detainees as threats to Canada’s national security, the courts initially imposed conditions of release that maximized control, supervision, and surveillance. Initial conditions included constant electronic monitoring via a GPS anklet, uniformed CBSA tails during approved outings, house arrest and curfew, the security screening of all visitors and contacts, a range of restrictions on access to various spaces coupled with more general geographic boundaries, the complete prohibition of access to computers, cell phones, or other devices with wireless connectivity, pre-approval of media contacts, the installation of internal and external closed-circuit television cameras in and around domestic spaces, the wiretapping of phone conversations and opening of all mail by CSIS agents, and the requirement that the detainee be constantly supervised by a courtapproved surety (see Larsen, Harkat et al. 2008). Minor breaches of the conditions were pounced upon as grounds for renewed incarceration. CBSA officers reserved the right to monitor compliance with the release conditions through round-the-clock stakeouts and unannounced check-ins (including the afore-mentioned raid). The effect of these conditions is to extend security certificate detention into the domestic setting. Moe Harkat notes that “in some ways, being at home is much more strict and controlled. It is certainly more stressful, which surprised me” (Larsen, Harkat et al. 2008, 41), and Sophie Harkat argues, “Security certificate bail is definitely another form of imprisonment. Moe and I are prisoners in our own home and when we leave on approved outings it is only under a bubble of surveillance” (Larsen, Harkat et al. 2008, 41). She further

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states that “these conditions have come to define and control every aspect of our lives. We live in fear of accidentally breaching a bail condition, which would result in Moe being arrested and detained again. This has happened in the past. This level of surveillance and control is humiliating and degrading, and there is no escaping it … We have no privacy, no potential for spontaneity (Larsen, Harkat et al. 2008, 42). It is important to note that the conditions place an incredible degree of strain on families and sureties, in addition to the individuals subject to security certificates. However, the release orders require that families and sureties voluntarily consent to the conditions, thereby relinquishing certain rights and freedoms. The Canadian government has consistently sought to deport individuals subject to security certificates, and the possibility of that outcome is real and omnipresent. Forestalling or averting this fate requires that the men and their families fight permanent legal campaigns without the benefit of disclosure. Concurrent to this struggle over the future they must fight parallel legal campaigns around their present-day conditions of release, and decisions of this nature involve a Federal Court judge weighing always-dire government threat assessments against promises of obedience and compliance. All conditions that are imposed on them in the present  – arrest, detention, control, surveillance, conditional release, investigation, and assessment – are essentially interim measures in place pending the eventuality of physical expulsion from Canada. The exact combination of conditions that apply in a given case at a given time is shaped by constantly evolving executive and judicial decisions, and so long as a certificate is in effect, further decisions – and hearings in preparation for them – are always pending. This takes place against a backdrop of pervasive surveillance, regular and unannounced check-ins, and scrutiny, where missteps  – arriving home late, failing to properly charge a GPS anklet, or coming into contact with forbidden technology – can lead to re-arrest and imprisonment and negatively affect the legal cases. The net effect is a state of pervasive uncertainty, where temporariness is indefinite, unpredictable, and always subject to change. c o n c l u s i o n s : av o i d i n g p e r m a n e n c e , c r i t i q u i n g s e c u r i t y

This chapter has provided a snapshot of several ways in which the security certificate regime gives rise to permanent temporariness,



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understood as an ambiguous legal status, an open-ended, collaborative organizational dynamic, and a subjectivity that can be described as being indefinitely pending. The certificate regime is an example of a system that operationalizes the logic that permanence is the source of the right to have rights, with temporariness being grounds for differential treatment and, ultimately, legal and physical eviction. In closing, I want to return to the idea of liberating temporariness and briefly consider what this might look like – and what it ought not to look like – in relation to security certificates. Over the last decade, the legal cases and campaigns organized in support of the Secret Trial Five and in opposition to the security certificate regime have sought to attack this logic and to narrow the gap between the standards that apply to citizens and those that apply to persons without Canadian citizenship. The security certificate detainees and their families have been at the heart of these campaigns, and they have consistently resisted both the imposition of the “national security threat” label and the controls imposed by the certificate regime. The campaigns have claimed some qualified victories, not least of which being the Supreme Court’s rulings in the two Charkaoui cases (2007 SCC 9 and 2008 SCC 38), which led to the modification of the certificate regime and a major reformulation of the rules governing the retention and use of intelligence by CSIS. Additionally, the collapse of the security certificates against Charkaoui and Almrei in 2010 has left only three of the Secret Trial Five cases intact and active at this time. One of the persistent features of the campaigns to stop secret trials has been the call to “charge or release” the men currently subject to security certificates. This is generally linked to a more comprehensive abolitionist objective. For example, the current Statement Against Security Certificates – a petition organized by the Justice for Mohamed Harkat Committee (2011) – makes the following demands: Accordingly, we demand that the Security Certificate process be abolished. For those currently detained under security certificates, we demand: • That their certificates be removed, and, if any case against them actually exists, that they be allowed to defend themselves in open, fair and independent trials with full disclosure of the case against them. • That they not be deported.

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A charge under criminal law would bring with it access to the substantive and procedural rights associated with due process and evidentiary disclosure, and the citizenship status of the accused would not be of legal significance in such a proceeding. Abolishing the certificate mechanism and adopting a policy of charge or release could further the goal of liberating temporariness by removing one of the mechanisms through which temporariness is normalized under law. It is important, however, to resist the temptation to uncritically valorize “normal” criminal law and its processes and institutions as desirable alternatives to the exceptionality of the security certificate regime. This would reflect what Neocleous (2008, 73) describes as “legal fetishism, in which Law becomes a mystical answer to the problems posed by power.” Late modern criminal justice systems, with all of their legal trappings, are sites of exclusion, surveillance, confinement, and control, and these practices are guided by institutionalized racism, classism, colonialism, and patriarchy (Piché and Larsen 2010; Welch 2009). Importantly, criminal justice is increasingly guided by the same logics of security and pre-emption that characterize the security certificate regime (Ericson 2007), and those who are processed through the machinery of the carceral are subject to rituals of othering and outcasting that are as meaningful in their effects as the legal eviction associated with security certificates. High incarceration rates and the expansion of the prison industrial complex are indicative of the proliferation and normalization of detention – pre-emptive, pending adjudication, or as a post-sentence disposition – as a disposal or management tactic. Positioning criminal justice as the solution to security certificates is as much of a dead end as the notion that permanence is a panacea to the problem of temporariness. A more fruitful way forward would be to adopt a carceral abolitionist perspective (Piché and Larsen 2010). Carceral abolitionism reflects a recent refinement or broadening of penal abolitionist theory and praxis to recognize the proliferation of spaces of control and incarceration that are peripheral to the traditional criminal justice system, namely immigration and migrant detention, non-status camps, and other sites of administrative detention. It also draws attention to the shift toward exclusionary and “warehousing” forms of incarceration, as opposed to traditional punitive-correctionalist modalities (Piché and Larsen 2010). As with traditional penal abolitionism, carceral abolitionism is attentive to the potential for well-intentioned reformist efforts to be co-opted and



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absorbed, resulting in the adaptation and expansion of carceral settings and practices (Mathiesen 1974). This is certainly applicable to the struggle to oppose security certificates, which has given rise to a range of reforms, ancillary exceptions, and wide-ranging official contemplation regarding “alternatives to removal” (Larsen 2011). Adopting a carceral abolitionist approach to security certificates involves critiquing the underlying logics of (in)security and secrecy that drive the certificate regime as well as the discourses and systems associated with traditional criminal justice. On the one hand, this means moving beyond a critique of the means through which security is pursued and rejecting the very notion that security is a necessary or desirable end (see Neocleous 2008). National security is an ideological construct that is irreconcilably tainted and implicated in practices of domination, exclusion, and repression. Accepting it as a legitimate social good inevitably short-circuits critical politics and leads to debates about how much secret evidence is appropriate, how long it is reasonable to hold people deemed to be categorically suspicious, how likely it is that someone might be disappeared if deported, and how necessary it is to trade in intelligence that is the product of torture. This is not a desirable terrain for debate. On the other hand, since both “normal” criminal justice processes and extraordinary mechanisms of detention and control are essentially components of a universal carceral field (see Piché and Larsen 2010), the end goal of a movement to abolish certificates cannot simply be the substitution of criminal law for counter-law. In his seminal text on penal abolitionism, Thomas Mathiesen (1974) argues for an unfinished politics, and his insights may be fruitful for thinking about liberating temporariness and abolishing security certificates. Mathiesen proposes that the goal of abolitionism is to create and sustain a competing contradiction – something that rejects the dominant logics of the system without presenting concrete alternative structures that could be co-opted and absorbed. Regarding security certificates, this would involve abandoning the dichotomy of permanence and temporariness and deconstructing the logic of security without advancing a reformist vision of a better security certificate. The notion of the unfinished carries with it possibilities for thinking about and enacting liberation precisely because it calls for negative reforms (the abolition of structures and practices of confinement and control) without demanding that the resulting holes in the system be filled with something (see also Neocleous 2008).

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1 The purpose of this chapter is not to present a comprehensive description and critique of the security certificate regime, nor is it to construct security certificates as manifestations of states of exception or producers of bare life. A small but thorough body of literature has taken up these projects (see French 2007; Larsen and Piché 2009; Razack 2008; Diab 2009; Macklin 2009; Nyers 2006; Bell 2006). My goal here is to augment this literature by drawing attention to several key themes related to permanent temporariness. references

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. – 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. [1951] 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. ­Malden, MA: Polity Press. Bell, Colleen. 2006. Subject to Exception: Security Certificates, National Security and Canada’s Role in the “War on Terror.” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 21:63–83. Bigo, Didier. 2008. Globalized (In)Security, the Field and the Ban-Opticon. In Terror, Insecurity and Lberty. Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes after 9/11, pp. 10–48. New York: Routledge. Bigo, Didier., and Anastassia Tsoukala. 2008. “Understanding (In)security.” In Terror, Insecurity And Liberty. illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes after 9/11, 1–9. New York: Routledge. Dyzenhaus, D. 2001. The Permanence of the Temporary: Can Emergency Powers be Normalized? In The Security of Freedom. Essays on Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Bill, ed. William Chambliss, Robert Michalowski, and Ronald Kramer, 21–38. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2006. The Constitution of Law. Legality in a Time of Emergency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ericson, Richard. 2007. Crime in an Insecure World. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books. Harkat (Re) [2010] FC 1241. DES-5-08.



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Justice for Mohamed Harkat Committee. 2011. Statement against Security Certificates. http://www.harkatstatement.com/ [accessed 12 December 2011]. Kinsman, Gary, Dieter Buse, and Mercedes Steedman, eds. 2000. How the Centre Holds – National Security as an Ideological Practice. In Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies, 278–86. Toronto: Between the Lines. Kinsman, Gary, and Patrizia Gentile. 2010. The Canadian War on Queers. National Security as Sexual Regulation. Vancouver: UBC Press. Larsen, Mike. 2011. Documents Reveal Government in Dilemma on Security Certificates. Prism Magazine, 26 January. Larsen, Mike, Mohamed Harkat, and Sophie Harkat. 2008 Justice in Tiers: Security Certificate Detention in Canada. Journal of Prisoners on Prisons 17:231–46. Larsen, Mike, and Justin Piché. 2009. Exceptional State, Pragmatic Bureaucracy, and Indefinite Detention: The Case of the Kingston Immigration Holding Centre. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 24(2):203–29. Macklin, Audrey. 2009. The Canadian Security Certificate Regime: CEPS Special Report. March. Brussels: Centre for European Policy Studies. http://www.ceps.eu/book/canadian-security-certificate-regime Martin, Lauren L., and Mathew Mitchelson. 2009. Geographies of Detention and Imprisonment: Interrogating Spatial Practices of Confinement, Discipline, Law, and State Power. Geography Compass 3(1):459–77. Marx, Gary. 1984. Notes on the Discovery, Collection, and Assessment of Hidden and Dirty Data. In Studies in the Sociology of Social Problems, ed. Joseph Schneider and John Kitsuse, 78–113. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Mathiesen, Thomas. 1974. The Politics of Abolition. London: Martin Robertson. McCollogh, Jude, and Phil Scraton, eds. 2008. The Violence of Incarceration – an Introduction. In The Violence of Incarceration. New York: Routledge. Neocleous, Mark. 2008. Critique of Security. Montreal & Kingston: Mcgill-Queen’s University Press. Nyers, Peter. 2006. Rethinking Refugees. Beyond the Sate of Emergency. New York: Routledge. Piché, Justin, and Mike Larsen. 2010. The Moving Targets of Penal Abolitionism: ICOPA, Past, Present, Future. Contemporary Justice Review 13(4):391–410. Public Safety Canada. 2010. 2009–2010 Evaluation of the Security Certificate Initiative. ATI A-2009-00186. Ottawa: Public Safety Canada.

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Razack, Sherene. 2008. Casting Out. The Eviction of Muslims From Western Law and Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Roberts, Alasdair. 2006. Blacked Out. Government Secrecy in the Internet Age. New York: Cambridge University Press. Walby, Kevin, and Larsen, Mike. 2012a. Access to Information and Freedom of Information Requests: Neglected Means of Data Production in the Social Sciences. Qualitative Inquiry 18(1):31–42. Walby, Kevin, and Larsen, Mike. 2012b. Getting at the Live Archive: On Access to Information Research in Canada. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 26(3):623–33. Welch, M. 2009. Crimes of Power and States of Impunity. The US Response to Terror. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

pa r t t w o

International Organizations and Transnational Dynamics of Temporary Work

4 Managed Migration and the Temporary Labour Fix christina gabriel

Canada’s distinct refugee and immigration system reflects our nation’s commitment to generosity, openness and diversity. It has not only provided us with some of the building blocks of our country, it also continues to sustain and refresh it. There is no doubt our procedures could work better than they do … But the overall direction is right. We must remain confident in this “Canadian way.” Jennifer Welsh, At Home in the World: Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century introduction

Internationalism has provided a handy schema that has guided how Canadians see themselves both at home and in the world. It is often associated with the idea of a distinctive “Canadian way” and “Canadian personality” and with loosely defined liberal values such as respect, openness, tolerance, diversity, respect of law, peace, and good government (Pettigrew 2005, 625; Welsh 2004). During the 1990s this form of internationalism and its attendant values were particularly evident in official Canadian foreign policy discourses (Howell 2005). As such, this narrative can be seen as an instantiation of a “state branding”’ exercise that is often deployed to promote Canada’s economic and political priorities. Such exercises frequently lead to “rhetoric-reality” gaps with impacts on both the national and international scales (Nimijean 2006). It has been suggested that the global “brand Canada” narrative may be much less robust today than it once was as a result of the Harper administration’s recent foreign policy initiatives (see Welsh 2010).1 However, elements of

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the Canadian brand continue to play on the global stage within the emerging policy discourse of managed migration. As the quote from Jennifer Welsh at the start of this chapter illustrates, Canada’s refugee and immigration policies are sometimes seen as part of Canada’s image as a good international citizen. As the twentieth century came to a close, we witnessed a global dialogue on international migration in international fora and through a series of bilateral initiatives promoting a “new deal” on labour migration. The Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) was created in 2003. The High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development was instigated in 2006. Following this meeting, the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) was initiated. On its website, it bills itself as “the largest and most comprehensive global platform for dialogue and cooperation on international migration and development.” Here, the governance of migration is considered at a global scale distinct from national or regional spaces. Within these fora, the interests of the North and South are apparently brought together in the call for “carefully designed temporary migration programmes” (GCIM 2005, 16). The promotion and legitimation of temporary work programs at the global level rest not only on arguments regarding the attractiveness and/or viability of these initiatives for states in both the North and South but also on calls for program reform to address the particularly precarious situation of non-citizen temporary workers. This chapter examines the interplay of the global and national scales in the production and expansion of temporariness. At the global scale a particular understanding of temporary labour mobility is promoted if not valorized. Here, there is some attempt to draw a distinction between current proposals and post-war experiences of guest worker programs by calling for better designed programs. This policy dialogue often invokes Canada’s small-scale Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP)2 as a model of best practice, in an effort to demonstrate the possibility of designing temporary work programs with a human face. This chapter interrogates the global policy discourse of managed migration and the way in which the Canadian program figures within it. In doing so, it examines the policy rhetoric-reality gap by contrasting the global call for better designed programs with Canada’s experience with the SAWP and the more recent expansion of the Temporary Foreign Worker ­Program.



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These programs at the national scale reinforce and entrench the familiar permanent/temporary labour divide rather than troubling it. This chapter proceeds in three sections. Firstly, it examines how “good international citizenship” is an aspect of the Canadian variant of internationalism. Within this normative frame, countries engage in practices of demonstration at the global level. This discussion informs the next sections of the chapter, which map some key elements of the global policy dialogue to demonstrate both how this discourse validates temporary labour migration and the way in which it gestures to the SAWP. To some extent the rhetoric of Canada as a model citizen, I argue, is reinforced by global policy discourses that construct Canada’s SAWP as a best-practice model. While this may play well on the global stage, at home it obfuscates some of the critical weaknesses of the program and the precarious position of SAWP workers in Canada. The chapter concludes by contrasting global policy discourse with the practice of the SAWP. It argues that while the global discourse of managed migration dovetails nicely with Canada’s symbolic image as a good international citizen, more recent developments such as the massive expansion of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program are indicative of a considerable gap between policy discourse and practice. In this respect Canada does not set an example. c a n a d a a s a n i n t e r n at i o n a l m o d e l ?

In Canada, the institutionalization of temporariness through the expansion of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program sits somewhat uneasily within national imaginaries that cast permanent migrants in the role of nation builders and celebrate the values of tolerance and multiculturalism. Consequently, it is somewhat ironic that at the global level the SAWP, one of Canada’s long-standing temporary worker programs, is positioned as a best-practice initiative. This positioning seems to bolster Canada’s image on the world stage. This section contextualizes this national-global paradox by examining the role liberal internationalism plays in Canada’s international image. Until recently, internationalist ideas dominated Canada’s engagement with the international arena. Kim Richard Nossal ­(1998–99, 98) has argued that internationalism embraces “elements of multilateralism…, community, good international citizenship, and ­voluntarism.” While multilateralism is associated with the i­nstitutions related to

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the United Nations (UN), increasingly, new institutions of global governance  – G7, Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)  – have also come to the fore (Kirton 2007). The fora associated with dialogues on migration governance at an international level, such as the GCIM and GFMD, provide additional examples. As scholars have noted, internationalism’s heyday in Canada was in the immediate post-war period but the influence of these ideas remains in Canada’s international politics. This longevity, according to Nossal, Roussel et al. (2011, 153), is related to the affinity of internationalism with dominant Canadian values such as peace, freedom, justice, and democracy. Take, for example, Jennifer Welsh’s book At Home in the World: Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century, in which she argues that Canada’s role on the global stage can be that of a model citizen: “A crucial aspect of Canadian foreign policy today is simply being what we are: a particular, and highly successful, model of liberal democracy. Our model values pluralism … It prizes mixed government … Our model makes risk a collective problem for society … Most of all, our model of democracy is internationalist, in embracing free trade and multilateral co-operation, but is also confident in our ability to sustain a unique national identity” (Welsh 2004, 189). She further contends that Canada can play the role of a model citizen on the international stage: “We are claiming to be not the model, but a model – one that others may find useful and inspiring as they think about how to organize their own societies” (Welsh 2004, 190). This discourse is in harmony with dominant Canadian values and positions Canada as a good international citizen. It promotes the international image that past Canadian administrations have cultivated. But importantly, this type of discourse epitomizes how liberal internationalism has become “a Canadian brand which reflects the best of Canadians to themselves at home at least as much as it promotes an image of Canada abroad … [It] has assumed a central place in the construction of what it is to be a Canadian” ­(Sjolander 2009, 79). The enduring nature of internationalist discourses has prompted scholars to scrutinize the fissures between rhetoric and action. Certainly, feminist scholars have drawn attention to the face Canada projects abroad in relation to violence against women and the state’s actions at home (Baines 2003). Allison Howell’s work examines how the notion of Canada is constituted through discourses of Canadian values, emphasizing the need to consider what is made possible by



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this practice. She writes: “that such discourses obscure histories of marginalization domestically, that they construct a questionable narrative of the goodness of actions abroad, [while] they also enjoin Canadians to take up liberal self-governance or face a variety of consequences” (Howell 2005, 64). From another vantage point, Richard Nimijean (2006) interrogates the actions of the Paul Martin Liberal government and its attempt to restore Canada’s reputation as an engaged international actor and thereby reinforce an important aspect of Canada’s national identity. He asserts that the ideals of Canadian foreign policy exist in tension with the narrower economic priorities that underpin the policy (2006, 70). He argues that the contradictions engendered by this conflict “reinforce ‘brand politics’ in which the political manipulation of Canadian identity benefits the ruling party by framing policy initiatives (whether implemented or not) in terms of ‘Canadian values’ that appeal to the Canadian citizenry’s renewed sense of national pride.” One of the outcomes of this phenomenon, he argues, is the narrowing of public discourse (Nimijean 2006, 68–9). Nossal’s conceptualization of internationalism identifies good international citizenship as a pillar of internationalism. He argues that while the axiom is ambiguous it is commonly associated with an orientation toward addressing the “common weal” by undertaking actions toward this goal. His examples of such actions include contributing to development aid, participating in peacekeeping missions, and initiating support for the global ban on anti-personnel landmines (Nossal 1998–99, 99–100). However, it is the second aspect of his conceptualization that is important to this discussion: “Part of the calculus that underlies ‘good international citizenship,’ like good citizenship more generally, is not simply the hope that one’s actions will change the environment on their own; rather it is to convince others to alter their behaviour and join in what ideally becomes a bandwagon effect” (Nossal 1998–99, 100). In other words, states practising good international c­itizenship engage in practices of demonstration. In her assessment of the Harper Conservative government’s actions in relation to global climate change, Heather Smith draws on Nossal’s conceptualization and argues that “given the fact that climate change is both global and local, Canada could act as a role model for other states taking actions at home that function to provide demonstration effects and signal Canada’s commitment by coming to the international n ­ egotiating

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table having its own house in order” (Smith 2009, 67). Smith concludes that in the area of climate change, Harper’s good international citizenship is “really good enough international citizenship, with Canada contributing less than its fair share” (Smith 2009, 70). The rhetoric/reality gaps discussed above inform the discussion in the next two sections. My concern centres on the tensions and contradictions generated by a global discourse on migration (not necessarily driven by Canadian policy officials) that promotes a “made in Canada” variant of temporary migration with the country’s on-theground experience of temporary migration. In doing so, I consider whether in fact we can claim that Canada is a role model – a good international citizen – in practice. The question is, do recent directions vis-à-vis temporary work programs in Canada function as an example of good practice to be promoted at the global level? s tat e s , t e m p o r a r i n e s s , a n d t h e g l o b a l p o l i c y d i s c o u r s e o f m a n a g e d m i g r at i o n

At the global level, states from both the North and South are engaged in an active dialogue to develop new ways to manage international migration. This is a relatively new development. The consideration given to international migration during the 1990s has been characterized as “sporadic and largely fruitless” (Newland 2010, 331). However, as Newland writes the following decade was marked by a number of initiatives, including the following: The government of Switzerland launched the Berne Initiative in 2001 to bring states together to articulate a set of “common understandings” about international migration. • The ILO [International Labour Organization] made migration the theme of the 2004 International Labour Conference. • The Secretary-General [of the UN] included, in his 2002 proposals for strengthening the UN, the need to “take a more comprehensive look at the various dimensions of the migration issue.” • The UN General Assembly held a high-level dialogue on migration and development in a special session in 2006. • States met outside of the UN system in a Global Forum on Migration and Development for the first time in 2007 and annually there­after. (Newland 2010, 332–3) •



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These multilateral initiatives that embrace different approaches and forms of cooperation stand in contrast to the dominant concerns within international relations that have traditionally focused on trade and military matters. The ongoing global dialogue on migration may be, to use Saskia Sassen’s words, “transformations in the making as we speak” (­ Sassen 2005, 41). Sassen argues that the regulatory role of the state and its capacity to manage migration are in the process of being altered through the changes engendered in the global economic system and other transformations. She highlights how three aspects in particular are increasingly “incompatible” with broader economic changes: the tendency to handle immigration as a policy domain isolated from other processes and domains; the attempt to control immigration as a unilateral sovereign matter; and the tendency to take the state as given, as isolated from domestic and international changes (Sassen 2005, 35). Of particular import for this discussion is her observation that states were active drivers of the new global economic order: “The new geography of global economic processes, the strategic territories for economic globalization, had to be produced, both in terms of the practices of corporate actors and the requisite infrastructure, and in terms of the work of the state in producing or legitimating new legal regimes” (Sassen 2005, 43). She goes on to ask: “Can national states also participate in the implementation of other cross-border frameworks to govern other cross-border dynamics, such as those concerning development and immigration?” This call for greater multilateralism comes up against the dynamics of an unequal state system. As Stephen Castles puts it, “in international legal terms, all nation-states are equal. In reality, however, there is a marked hierarchy, in which power flows from the centre through a number of intermediate level states, to be imposed on the weakest countries of the South” (Castles 2011, 317). Today, as Castles points out, the bulk of the world’s population are “citizens;” however, this construction obscures new hierarchies of citizenship in which citizens of northern states are relatively privileged compared with citizens of the rest of the world (Castles 2011, 317–18). The emergence of global policy fora to manage migration may be, in Sassen’s words, “transformations in the making,” (Sassen 2005, 41) but the extent to which they redefine temporariness – at least in policy terms – is questionable.

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The Global Commission on International Migration and Policy Discourses on Temporary Work New multilateral initiatives associated with international migration embrace a policy discourse of “managed migration”  – a mode of governing that purports to address the differing needs of the Global North and Global South. However, as Martin Geiger and Antoine Pécoud have astutely pointed out, there have been few if any efforts to address what the term “managed migration” denotes. They argue that migration management refers to three tendencies: “First, it is a notion that is mobilized by actors to conceptualize and justify their increasing intervention in the migration field … Second, migration management refers to a range of practices that are now part of migration policies, and that are often performed by the institutions that promote the notion … And third, migration management relies on a set of discourses and on new narratives regarding what migration is and how it should be addressed” (Geiger and Pécoud 2010, 1–2). It is this last insight that particularly informs this section. My concern here is not to examine the efficacy of these fora or to provide an exhaustive review of their deliberations, but rather my intent is to demonstrate the way in which temporary labour migration figures in the discussion on managed migration. To this end, this section uses the GCIM’s 2005 report Migration in an Interconnected World: New Directions for Action as an exemplar of how policy discourse is implicated in the production and legitimation of temporariness. More recent directions in the global policy dialogue, such as reports emanating from the GFMD meetings, also highlight the benefits of temporary labour migration and, in many instances, reference Canada’s SAWP. The discourse generated within such fora has been characterized as “performative” insofar as it “not only describes or analyses reality, but also aims at shaping the way migration is perceived by the actors in charge of managing it” (Geiger and Pécoud 2010, 9). The move to manage migration was prefigured through an early intervention by Bimal Ghosh, who called for “a new multilateral regime for movements of people” that would involve all stakeholders  – sending states, destination countries, transit countries, and migrants themselves  – and would address all types of flows (Ghosh 2000a, 220–4). His intervention was framed by the project he coordinated, New International Regime for Orderly Movements of People, financed by the UN and the Dutch, Swedish, and Swiss



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governments. Critically, this regime is founded on the principle of regulated openness, “a principle which shuns the doctrine of exclusion, but does not advocate free and unfettered movements across sovereign states,” on the basis that this would make a global regime acceptable to all stakeholders (Ghosh 2000b, 25). The origins of migration management can be located within this initiative. Consequently, the new global dialogue on managed migration “emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between development and migration, and the human rights of migrant workers, in addition to the labour market needs of receiving countries” (Gabriel and ­Pellerin 2008, 5). Migration management initiatives can be characterized as a “new deal” insofar as they appear to decentre migration governance from the ambit of individual states by drawing in (some) non-­governmental organizations, and sending and destination countries, and promoting new guiding principles for promoting cooperation (Gabriel and Pellerin 2008, 5–6). While these initiatives are multiplying, they have also been characterized as “overlapping, fragmented and uncoordinated” (Grugel and Piper 2011, 448). In addition, as Castles has observed, “all these meetings have been mere talking shops with no decision-making powers, yet they do represent a significant advance compared with the earlier refusal of powerful states to even discuss the issue” (Castles 2011, 319). A key milestone in the global policy dialogue is the creation of the GCIM, founded in 2003 at the behest of Kofi Annan, UN secretary-­ general. It was established as an independent body and brought together 19 experts. Through its process of consultation it engaged international and non-governmental groups, trade unions, employers, recruitment agents, academics, and individual states. It conducted hearings in the Asia-Pacific region, in the Mediterranean and Middle East, in Europe, in Africa, and in the Americas (GCIM 2005, vii). In 2005 GCIM tabled its report Migration in an Interconnected World: New Directions for Action, which provides an interesting example of the global policy discourse on managing international migration. The GCIM viewed its mandate as providing “the framework for the formulation of a coherent, comprehensive and global response to the issue of international migration” (GCIM 2005, vii). It represents an exemplar of a global policy discourse, and this discourse has been interrogated (cf. Boucher 2008; Geiger and Pécoud 2010; Kalm 2010). A number of critical observations come to the fore.

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Firstly, national states remain key in managed migration as the actors who cooperate, shape, and guide the process (Kalm 2010, 36). Thus, the GCIM report states: “The world would benefit substantially from a well regulated liberalization of the global labour market. Such an approach would contribute to the growth of the global economy and enable the international community to achieve a better match between supply and demand for migrant labour. It would ensure that citizens of countries in the South have better access to the labour markets of the North and enable those people to contribute towards the development of their own countries … A well regulated liberalization of the global labour market would also be preferable to the current situation, in which labour market gaps are filled in part by means of irregular migration and unauthorized employment” (GCIM 2005, 17). Within this discourse, “state authority to control migration is never questioned. Instead the goal is to preserve this authority in a world of mobile people” (Kalm 2010, 36). Secondly, the differences between the Global North and South are captured in the GCIM report through descriptions such as the following: “The globalization process has created enormous wealth and has lifted millions of people out of poverty. But it has not yet narrowed the gap between rich and poor, and in some cases economic disparities are widening … And although more people than ever before are citizens of states with pluralistic political systems, too many people continue to live in countries characterized by poor governance, low levels of human security, corruption, authoritarianism, human rights violations and armed conflict” (GCIM 2005, 6). What is downplayed in such accounts is an understanding of the wider global political economy in terms of power relations ­(Boucher 2008). The call for a cooperative approach to migration management tends to obscure the complex and unequal positioning of individual receiving and sending states within the state system discussed earlier. Promoting Temporariness The GCIM report Migration in an Interconnected World: New Directions for Action (2005) addresses a number of issues, including development, irregular migration, integration, and governance. Of particular concern is chapter 1, entitled “A World of Work: Migrants



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in a Globalizing Labour Market.” A critical contention within the report is that there should be more temporary work programs. This recommendation is framed as a pragmatic win-win for all concerned (Kalm 2010, 37–8). First, it is argued that it may be politically easier for countries in the Global North to generate support for temporary migration than permanent migration. Second, such recruitment can address labour shortages across the skills spectrum. Third, countries in the Global South can benefit from brain circulation and the return of remittances. Fourth, migrant workers are offered a legal channel for labour migration (GCIM 2005, 16–17). Thus, the GCIM recommends that “states and the private sector should consider the option of introducing carefully designed temporary migration programmes as a means of addressing the economic needs of both countries of origin and destination” (GCIM 2005, 16). The GCIM has been characterized as “instrumental in promoting the concept of circular migration in international circles.” Circular migration remains undefined in the report but the term has been used with temporary migration (Wickramasekara 2011, 39). The entrenchment of a form of temporariness within the GCIM is associated with a particular subject  – the temporary worker. What are the meanings attributed by the report to the movement of migrant labour? One of the most prominent schemas that circulate within the report is that of the migrant worker as a self-maximizing actor who can function as an “agent of development” (Piper 2011, 63; Datta 2009, 109). One of the GCIM’s six principles of action is directed at reinforcing economic and development impact: “The role that migrants play in promoting development and poverty reduction in countries of origin, as well as the contribution they make towards the prosperity of destination countries, should be recognized and reinforced. International migration should become an integral part of national, regional, and global strategies for economic growth, in both the developing and developed world” (GCIM 2005, 4). Within the global policy discourse of managed migration, temporary migrants  – through their remittances and transnational connections – are cast as the means to promote development. However, it has been argued that this approach focuses on a relatively small number of international migrants and thrusts them “into an unwarranted instrumental role in development and diverts attention from the much more important obstacles to development located in home-country populations and institutions” (Skeldon 2008, 2).

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Critical to the discursive positioning of migrants as promoters of development is the growing importance of remittances. The GCIM report notes that remittances now outpace official development assistance to low-income countries. It notes: “Remittances help to lift recipients out of poverty, increase and diversify household incomes, provide an insurance against risk, enable family members to benefit from educational and training opportunities and provide a source of capital for the establishment of small businesses” (GCIM 2005, 26). Datta (2009) argues that the focus on remittances within the migration-development nexus is problematic. He points out that comparing remittances to official development assistance places these exchanges on the same plane as state transactions and allows governments to claim credit for them. This comparison effectively sidelines the important question of why remittances have come to stand in for transfers between the Global North and South. “Likened at once to both foreign donations and national resources and associated with discourses such as the duty of migrants to their homelands, such perceptions invisibalise the considerable costs of migration to migrants themselves” (Datta 2009, 117). As noted above, the form of mobility that is emphasized within the narrative of the GCIM report is temporary or circular. The report suggests that permanent migration programs have “limitations” and “countries in the developing world stand to make more gains from temporary and circular migration of their citizens than from their permanent departure” (GCIM 2005, 17). Consequently, managed migration, especially through the establishment of effectively designed temporary programs, has the potential to facilitate the movement of migrant labour. However, this position tends to sideline the ways in which the subject position of “temporary migrant” is differentiated and how this differentiation constrains or facilitates mobility. The report highlights the fact that women constitute almost half of migration flows and their participation in global labour markets is increasing (GCIM 2005, 14). It includes a section on migrant women and children that discusses how migration has the potential to destabilize gender relations and may prove to be empowering for some women while placing others in vulnerable positions. The report states: “The Commission recognizes that all societies are characterized by gender inequalities, and that such inequalities affect



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migrants and non-migrants alike. The Commission underlines the need for migration policies and programmes to be gender-sensitive, and to give special attention to the social situation and inclusion of migrant women, and ensure that women are empowered by the migration experience” (GCIM 2005, 49). Other sections of the report also note that migrant women workers are typically found in female-dominated sectors associated with care work, most notably domestic work, nursing, and personal care work (GCIM 2005, 14). On the one hand, the GCIM report marks a departure from previous reports and commissions that paid no attention to women or women’s work. On the other hand, the report neglects to discuss the ways in which migrant women’s mobility is shaped, in part, by migration policies designed to recruit and/or exclude certain categories of workers. Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program offers a case in point (cf. Stasiulis and Bakan 2003). It is important to highlight the fact that women enter labour markets in destination countries that are already segmented and segregated by gender, race, and class. Similarly, Migration in an Interconnected World does recognize that migrant labour can be differentiated as “skilled” and “unskilled.” For example, the report asserts: “The traditional distinction between skilled and unskilled workers is in certain respects an unhelpful one, as it fails to do justice to the complexity of international migration. For example, many countries are currently eager to recruit migrants who are specialists in information technology and engineering, but they are equally eager to attract migrants who are able to provide high-quality care to elderly people and children. While they may have different levels of educational achievement, all of them could be legitimately described as essential workers” (GCIM 2005, 7). The text is referring to an obvious but unstated gender division between skilled and unskilled migrant labour. This said, while the GCIM does note the demand by states for skilled labour migrants, it does not address the issue any further. But increasingly, modes of entry and access to rights and protection are stratified by a distinction between skilled and unskilled labour (cf. Kofman 2008). In an effort to facilitate the migration of skilled workers, countries often regulate various categories of workers differently. Highly skilled temporary workers, for example, are not always tied to one employer, may enjoy many of the same rights as citizens, may be

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able to bring in family members, and may have access to a route to citizenship. In contrast, those entering a country in low-skilled ­categories may be much more scrutinized and regulated and may not have a path to citizenship. Consequently, while the process of migration creates non-citizen workers, this status varies greatly among different groups of workers and within different contexts, demonstrating the complexity of temporariness itself. In sum, the 2005 GCIM report Migration in an Interconnected World is an exemplar of the global policy discourse on managed migration and the exhortation for better considered temporary programs. Within the representational schemas of the GCIM, the migrant worker is discursively constituted as an agent of development and a particular mobile subject that is welcomed by destination countries, but only on the latter’s terms  – as a non-citizen temporary worker. Here, temporariness is valorized and used as an indicator of a successful program. Central to this understanding is the condition that workers return home. “There is emerging consensus that the temporariness of these programmes must be enforced by targeting employers and recruiters” (Datta 2009, 123–4). Additionally, the GCIM’s call for better designed “effective”’ temporary programs embraces a range of positive measures, including the following: making migrants aware of their rights and working conditions before arrival; not distinguishing between migrants and nationals in terms of wages, working conditions, and benefits; offering transferable work permits; allowing women to participate equally in programs; auditing work permits and contracts; penalizing employers who hire irregular workers; removing workers who overstay; regulating recruiters; and enabling migrants to maintain contacts with sending countries through the use of flexible travel documents(GCIM 2005, 18). This call to construct temporary work programs with a human face should not be dismissed out of hand, as such reforms would go a long way to addressing some of the difficulties associated with temporary labour migration. However, at best, they may only provide a normative benchmark. As Grugel and Piper usefully point out, at the core of cross-border labour migration are not simply issues of state sovereignty per se but asymmetrical relations between and within states and societies: “to uphold the rights of lower skilled migrants would mean interfering centrally with the working of a liberal global economy that is based on corporate power, high profit levels and elite interests” (Grugel and Piper 2011, 445).



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t e m p o r a r y l a b o u r m i g r at i o n s c h e m e s i n p r a c t i c e : the case of canada

Canada’s immigration and refugee policy plays a part in the image Canada projects both abroad and at home. According to Welsh (2004), these policies coupled with the country’s diversity provide an impetus for Canada to assume a more robust role on the world stage. In many ways, temporary migration programs do not fit well with this national narrative (Gabriel 2011). Yet, as discussed below, the global policy discourse on managed migration elevates Canada’s SAWP as a model of best practice. In this case the SAWP program is playing a role in the discourse of how migration should be managed. This role subtly reinforces the rhetoric of Canada as a good international citizen. Temporary Migration with a Human Face? sawp3 The GCIM’s call for “carefully designed temporary migration programs” continues to be salient as indicated by the ongoing dialogue taking place at the GFMD (GCIM 2005). First initiated in Brussels in 2007, the GFMD is now in its seventh year. Its 2011 meetings attracted more than 700 participants from 162 UN member states, 37 GFMD observers, and varied civil society groups. It describes itself on its website as a “living process – searching for better solutions to common challenges, promoting good practices, capacity-­building and knowledge, and urging governments and other stakeholders to forge partnerships and cooperation in the fields of migration and development.” Circular migration was a prominent theme in the 2007 and 2009 meetings (Wickramasekara 2011, 62). The term circular migration has come to the fore within global policy discussions on labour mobility. It has been the focus of the GFMD meetings from their inception despite the fact that its meaning has not been clear (GFMD 2011). It should be noted there is no single accepted definition of circular migration, even though the concept has been in use for some time. As Wickramasekara (2011, 1) states, “the definitions of circular migration have ranged from simple generic definitions to prescriptive ones. Simply defined, circular migration refers to temporary movements of a repetitive character either formally or informally across borders, usually for work … By definition, all circular migration is temporary migration.”

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He goes on to note that what is different in the current conjuncture is the emphasis on managed circular migration programs. Such initiatives are usually administered by the country of origin and/or destination under the terms of a bilateral agreement or memoranda of understanding (MOUs) (Wickramasekara 2011, 11). Civil society advocates question whether circular migration represents a new policy frame with a different understanding of labour mobility. They note that the Canadian SAWP program that was once promoted as a successful temporary worker program is now held up as a successful circular migration model. Further, the supposed gains of circular migration are the same as those associated with temporary worker programs. Not surprisingly, the discursive shift from temporary to circular migration has left worker advocates suspicious of the new policy frame (Avendaño 2009, 2). Canada’s SAWP is often cited as a model initiative within the GFMD policy community. Philip Martin’s (2008) paper for the second meeting of the GFMD suggested that some best practices in the development and implementation of the SAWP program included the active participation of employers in the program’s design and administration, the involvement of the sending states in recruiting workers and monitoring workers in Canada, and the ability of workers to access health benefits (Martin 2008, 17). A “Compendium of Good Practice Policy Elements in Bilateral Temporary Labour Arrangements” was developed by the IOM in advance of the GFMD meetings in 2008. IOM associated the SAWP with the following good practice elements: Share information to better match labour supply and demand. Identify all stakeholders and involve countries of origin, non-­ governmental stakeholders, as well as international organizations in the selection and recruitment of workers. • Enhance and enable specific types of temporary labour migration, including circular and sector-specific migration. • Recognize skills and qualifications to facilitate entry into destination labour market. • Ensure the same health care and social security benefits for migrant workers as for local workers. • Ensure enforcement. • Integrate monitoring and evaluation measures. (IOM 2008) • •



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Others have invoked the SAWP in relation to social protections. ­Robert Holzmann and Yann Pougets’ paper for the Mexico meetings of the GFMD, “Social Protection for Temporary Migrant Workers,” highlighted program design but noted that SAWP provides social protections to migrant workers that are similar to those accorded to Canadian workers. They also acknowledged, however, that SAWP workers have trouble accessing benefits (2010, 44). Similarly, at the 2009 Athens GFMD meetings one background paper argued that the SAWP characterized as a “highly successful (albeit small-scale) circular migration program” played a role in insulating workers from the possibility of exploitation and abuse in the recruitment process because the program is regulated by states in partnership with employers and thereby bypasses recruitment agencies (Lowell and Lezell 2009, 7). The GFMD process is not the only forum where SAWP has been lauded. Other international meetings, most notably a 2000 workshop of the International Organization on Migration for “Best Practices Concerning Migrant Workers and their Families,” have also held up the SAWP as a model (Hennebry and Preibisch 2012, e24). The construction of Canada’s SAWP as a model initiative supports the image of international good citizenship that Canada has historically projected on the international stage, in which this country is seen to lead by example. It is ironic that a small, Canadian temporary work program established more than forty years ago in response to farm employer demand (Basok 2007; Satzewich 2007) is now cast in a leading role to promote the viability of carefully designed programs that ensure a win-win-win scenario in the new millennium. The SAWP dates to 1966, when the Canadian government entered into an agreement with Jamaica to recruit temporary workers that led to the recruitment of 264 workers from Jamaica. Agreements with several other Caribbean countries followed. Mexico joined the program in 1974. In 2010, more than 23,000 workers participated in the program (Alboim and Cohl 2012, 46). The majority of the workers are men and two-thirds of them work in Ontario (Faraday 2012, 14). SAWP workers are in Canada for a limited period  – anywhere between six weeks and eight months. The terms of the program tie workers to a single employer and workers must live on site in employer-­ provided housing. Loss of employment generally means deportation. There is no mechanism for SAWP workers to change their status

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from t­emporary worker to permanent resident, regardless of the number of years they have participated in the program (Gabriel and ­Macdonald 2011). The SAWP is administered under the terms of a bilateral agreement. As Austina Reed has pointed out, “from the Canadian government’s perspective, the country’s dependence on foreign labour is driven by an economic interest to see the FVH [fruits, vegetables, and horticulture] sector remain competitive. From the FVH sectors’ perspective, maintaining this competitive edge is dependent upon a readily available supply of workers to support all stages of the production cycle” (Reed 2008, 479). The immobility of this workforce is precisely what makes it attractive to Canadian employers. In this case, a migrant labour force is assembled not just as low-cost labour “but also [as] a particular type of labour that through the denial of citizenship can be made more ‘reliable’ than even the most socially vulnerable domestic supplies” (Preibisch and Santamaria 2006, 110). Sending states, such as Mexico, also have an interest in the ongoing viability of the program. Firstly, they secure legal access to a labour market that would otherwise be closed to their citizens, and secondly, such an arrangement recognizes the sending state as the representative of its citizens outside its borders (Reed 2008, 482). In the Mexican example, Mexico is responsible for recruiting workers, advising workers of their rights and obligations under the agreement, and monitoring working conditions in Canada. However, these are contradictory and sometimes conflicting roles. Mexico has an interest in maintaining the viability of the program – not only as a valuable source of remittances but as a way to “outsource their employment problems” (Reed 2008, 484), and this may raise questions about the ability of the Mexican state to represent workers’ concerns. Employers are also involved in the administration and workings of this program. They are responsible for the costs of travel including airfare. They are required to provide free housing of an acceptable standard and oversee the enrolment of workers in provincial health plans and workers’ compensation programs (HRSDC 2012). More significantly, employers not only provide an assessment of workers at the end of the season but are also permitted to ask for workers by name in subsequent years. This arrangement fosters “a high degree of worker self-discipline [that] shores up worker loyalty and ultimately reinforces paternalistic labour relations” (Preibisch and Santamaria 2006, 111). Employers’ i­nvolvement in this program enhances their



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a­ bility to control workers who are already constituted as an unfree and immobile workforce (cf. H ­ ennebry and Preibisch 2012; Verma 2007). Not surprisingly, scholars and worker advocates are challenging the construction of SAWP as a best-practice model for the management of temporary migration. In an important critique, Jenna ­Hennebry and Kerry Preibisch, for example, point out that bilateral co-operation between sending and receiving states in managing the SAWP provides benefits to governments and employers but largely sidelines the interests and needs of workers. They acknowledge that SAWP does embrace some positive features including cooperation between countries, transparent admission criteria, and access to some public goods. However, they argue that SAWP falls considerably short of a best practice international standard in many other ways. They emphasize how the program offers no path to permanent migration, fails to recognize migrants’ skills and work experiences, limits worker’s mobility, and renders migrants vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Further, SAWP participants have few avenues to challenge their working and living conditions. Consequently they conclude that “contrary to much of the rhetoric, the reality of the Canadian SAWP falls considerably short of being an inspirational model, and instead provides us with little more than an overstated and often celebrated ideal” (Hennebry and Preibisch 2012, e34). In a similar effort to challenge the rhetoric-reality gap, other civil society actors in the global policy community have challenged the construction of SAWP as a best practice model. A recent International Labour Organization report reiterated that “some of the so-called ‘best practice’ programmes, such as the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (CSAWP), have major problems relating to workers’ rights in the form of poor conditions of work, denial of freedom of association, and absence of pathways to residence rights, even after long years of work. The claimed success in the form of a high return rate of workers to home countries is because workers are virtually held captive, as their continued employment the following season is crucially dependent on recommendations of employers” (Wickramasekara 2011, 2). Within Canada, the Canadian Labour Congress, drawing on the experiences of the labour movement, states flatly that temporary worker programs “operate to serve employers’ interests with little meaningful regard for compliance, monitoring or enforcement of

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national or subnational labour standards.” It argues that the starting point for more effective policy and practice would be an ­“honest examination and critique of the shortcomings” of the current incarnation of the program (Flecker 2011, 53). In a similar vein, civil society groups at the 2010 GFMD meeting issued this statement: “Civil society considers that the GFMD tends to turn a blind eye to the many pitfalls of temporary labour migration programmes and over-estimates their advantages” (CSD GFMD 2010, 2, cited by ­Wickramasekara 2011, 63–64). Temporary Foreign Worker Program for Occupations Requiring Lower Levels of Formal Training Stephen Harper has claimed that “our Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is widely recognized as a model for international labour mobility arrangements” (Harper 2010). However, under his administration it would appear that Canada has retreated from the bilateral features and regulations that govern the SAWP in favour of an even less regulated variant. There has been a massive expansion of the low-skilled pilot project of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program. This development is a marked departure from what is being proposed and discussed in global policy fora. The Low-Skilled Pilot Project was introduced in 2002 and allowed employers to recruit temporary workers for jobs requiring lower skill levels on the proviso that a neutral or positive labour market opinion was obtained. Workers were recruited into a range of occupations in sectors including agriculture, construction, hospitality, oil and gas, cleaning, and tourism (Faraday 2012, 15). In 2002, workers in this stream numbered 1,304. By 2010 this figure had grown to 28,930 – an increase of 2,119 per cent (Alboim and Cohl 2012, 46). In 2011 the federal government introduced a new agricultural stream to the pilot project. Workers in this stream now compete directly with SAWP workers, and employers can recruit from a range of countries (Preibisch 2012, 70). Workers recruited through the low-skilled pilot project were initially limited to 12-month contracts. In 2007 permits were extended to 24 months with an option for a further 24-month renewal. New regulations introduced in April 2011 limit these workers to contracts of a maximum of four years, after which time they must leave the country and wait four years to apply for another



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­ ermit (Faraday 2012, 16). The work permits of SAWP workers are p not similarly restricted (Preibisch 2012, 70). However, workers in both the Low-Skilled Pilot Project and the SAWP program cannot apply for permanent residency status. The Low-Skilled Pilot Project is characterized by a lack of protections. Yessy Byl noted that “the only ‘protections’ that were put in place were that the employer had to provide a contract of employment, whereby he or she agreed to abide by provincial standards, to provide return airfare, to arrange for housing at a ‘reasonable cost’ and to provide health insurance.” No enforcement or policing measures are in place if the employer fails to abide by the terms of the contract (Byl 2010, 97). Further, unlike the SAWP, the Low-Skilled Pilot Project does not embrace bilateral cooperation between sending and receiving states (Preibisch 2012, 70). In this manner there is no means for oversight or protection by home countries. As Fay Faraday puts it, “the supervision of the relationship is increasingly privatized between employer and worker” (2012, 16). As this section has illustrated, the SAWP occupies a prominent place in the promotion of temporary work programs within global policy fora. On this basis the SAWP functions to reinforce Canada’s image on the world stage as a good international citizen. However, the workings of the SAWP in practice and the recent emergence of the even less regulated low-skilled pilot project exemplify a rhetoric-­reality gap. Indeed, the United Food and Commercial Workers union characterizes both SAWP and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program as “Canada’s dirty little secret” (Rural Migration News 2011). c o n c l u d i n g o b s e r v at i o n s

This chapter has attempted to chart how policy discourses on managed migration within multilateral fora such as the GCIM and GFMD work to promote and legitimate temporariness. This process is engendered in three ways. Firstly, temporary labour migration is presented as a triple-win scenario for states in the North and South. Secondly, the call for better designed programs can be read as an attempt to liberate the status of temporariness through a range of positive measures. Thirdly, policy discourses generated at the global level – premised on a form of managerialism – have turned to identifying best-practice models of temporary migration. In doing so,

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they are engaged in a process of shaping temporariness by promoting practices that can be exported. Within this international policy landscape, Canada’s small-scale SAWP has been elevated to an exemplar. The SAWP’s currency in global policy circles has prompted trade union advocates and civil society actors to actively contest its viability as a temporary worker program with a human face. The elevation of the SAWP to a best practice model within multilateral fora resonates with the familiar tropes that have animated Canada’s engagement with the international community – most notably the image of Canada as a good international citizen. However, the practical manifestations of the SAWP within Canada, as this chapter has illustrated, challenge this particular conceptualization. Here, Canada is not leading by example. One effect of the global rhetoric is to limit the avenues to promote other types of policy remedies to address SAWP worker experiences of temporariness. Further, while many constituents within the global policy community may have embraced the Canadian SAWP model, there is very little to suggest that the ideas and discussions taking place within forums such as GFMD have had an impact on the ground within Canada. The massive expansion of the Low-Skilled Pilot Project of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program attests to this. If Canada were to assume the role of model citizen on the international stage, to use Jennifer Welsh’s words, it would at the very least heed the call of many civil society organizations and sign on to the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, which was ratified in 2003. acknowledgments

Thanks to Martin Geiger, Laura Macdonald, Daiva Stasiulis, and William Walters for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

notes

1 For a discussion of internationalism and Canadian foreign policy under Stephen Harper, see Nossal (2013) and Massie and Roussel (2013). 2 In 2010 Canada admitted 282,771 temporary foreign workers; 23,930 of these were SAWP workers (Alboim and Cohl 2012, 46).



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3 Some of the arguments in this section regarding Canada as a best practice model were initially made in Gabriel and Macdonald (2012). references

Alboim, Naomi, and Karen Cohl. 2012. Shaping the Future: Canada’s Rapidly Changing Immigration Policies. Toronto: Maytree. Avendaño, Ana. 2009. Paper – Session 2.2: Reintegration and Circular Migration – Effective for Development? Roundtable 2: Migrant Integration, Reintegration and Circulation for Development. Global Forum on Migration and Development Civil Society Days, Athens, 2–3 November. Baines, Erin K. 2003. The Contradictions of Canadian Commitments to Refugee Women. In Feminist Perspectives on Canadian Foreign Policy, ed. Claire Turenne Sjolander, Heather A. Smith, and Deborah Stienstra. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Basok, Tanya. 2007. Canada’s Temporary Migration Program. A Model Despite Flaws. Migration Information Source. November. http://www. migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=650 Boucher, Gerard. 2008. A Critique of Global Policy Discourses on Managing International Migration. Third World Quarterly 29(7):1461–71. Byl, Yessy. 2010. Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada: A Disposable Workforce? Canadian Issues Spring: 96–8. Castles, Stephen. 2011. Migrations, Crisis, and the Global Labour Market. Globalizations 8(3):311–24. Datta, Kavita. 2009. Transforming South-North Relations? International Migration and Development. Geography Compass 3(1):108–34. Faraday, Fay. 2012. Made in Canada. How the Law Constructs Migrant Workers’ Insecurity. Summary Report. Toronto: Metcalf Foundation. Flecker, Karl. 2011. Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (tfwp). Model Program – or Mistake. Ottawa: Canadian Labour Congress. http://www.canadianlabour.ca/news-room/publications/canada-s­temporary-foreign-worker-program-tfwp-model-program-or-mistake GCIM (Global Commission on International Migration). 2005. Migration in an Interconnected World: New Directions for Action. Geneva: Global Commission on International Migration. Gabriel, Christina. 2011. “Advantage Canada” and the Contradictions Of (Im)migration Control. In Constructing and Imagining Labour Migration: Perspectives of Control From Five Continents, ed. Elspeth Guild and Sandra Mantu. Surrey, UK: Ashgate.

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Gabriel, Christina, and Laura Macdonald. 2011. Citizenship at the Margins: The Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and Civil Society Advocacy. Politics and Policy 39(1):45–68. Gabriel, Christina, and Laura Macdonald. 2012. Debates on Temporary Agricultural Worker Migration in the North American Context. In Legislated Inequality: Temporary Labour Migration in Canada, eds. Patti Tamara Lenard and Christine Straehle. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s. Gabriel, Christina, and Hélène Pellerin. 2008. Introduction. In Governing International Labour Migration: Current Issues, Challenges, and Dilemmas, eds. Christina Gabriel and Hélène Pellerin, 1–10. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Geiger, Martin, and Antoine Pécoud, eds. 2010. The Politics of International Migration Management. In The Politics of International Migration Management, 1–20. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Ghosh, Bimal. 2000a. New International Regime for Orderly Movements of People: What Will It Look Like? In Managing Migration: Time for a New International Regime, ed. Bimal Ghosh, 220–48. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Ghosh, Bimal. 2000b. Towards a New International Regime for Orderly Movements of People. In Managing Migration: Time for a New International Regime, ed. Bimal Ghosh, 6–26. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Grugel, Jean, and Nicola Piper. 2011. Global Governance, Economic Migration and the Difficulties of Social Activism. International Sociology 26(4):435–54. HRSDC (Human Resources and Skills Development Canada). 2012. Temporary Foreign Worker Program: Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. 22 June. http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/workplaceskills/foreign_ workers/sawp.shtml Harper, Stephen. 2010. Statement By the Prime Minister of Canada on the Occasion of Felipe Calderón, President of the United Mexican States, Addressing Parliament. http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2010/05/27/ statement-prime-minister-canada-occasion-felipe-calderon-presidentunited-mexican Hennebry, Jenna L., and Kerry Preibisch. 2012. A Model for Managed Migration? Re-examining Best Practices in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. International Migration, 50(s1):1–33. Howell, Alison. 2005. Peaceful, Tolerant and Orderly? A Feminist Analysis of Discourses of Canadian Values in Canadian Foreign Policy. Canadian Foreign Policy 12(1):49–69.



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Holzmann, Robert, and Yann Pouget. 2010. Social Protection for ­Temporary Migrant Workers: Conceptual Framework, Country Inventory, Assessment and Guidance: A Study Prepared for the GFMD. ­Marseille: World Bank and Marseille Centre for Mediterranean Integration. IOM (International Organization for Migration). 2008. Compendium of Good Practice Policy Elements in Bilateral Temporary Labour Arrangements. Prepared for GFMD Meetings. Manila. 2008. Kalm, Sara. 2010. Liberalizing Movements? The Political Rationality of Global Migration Management. In The Politics of International Migration Management, ed. Martin Geiger and Antoine Pécoud, 21–44. ­Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan. Kirton, John. 2007. Canadian Foreign Policy in a Changing World. Toronto: Nelson. Kofman, Eleonore. 2008. Managing Migration and Citizenship in Europe: Towards an Overarching Framework. In Governing International Labour Migration, eds. Christina Gabriel and Hélène Pellerin. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Lowell, Lindsay, and Stephanie Lezell. 2009. Background Paper – Round­ table 2.1: Inclusion, Protection and Acceptance of Migrants In Society  – Linking Human Rights and Migrant Empowerment for Development. Global Forum on Migration and Development, Athens, 2–3 November. Martin, Philip. 2008. Background Paper – Roundtable 2.1: Fostering More Opportunities for Legal Migration in North America. Global Forum on Migration and Development, Manila, 8–9 October. Massie, Justin, and Stéphane Roussel. 2013. The Twilight of Internationalism? Neocontinentalism as an Emerging Dominant Idea in Canadian Foreign Policy. In Canada in the World. Internationalism in Canadian Foreign Policy, ed. Heather A. Smith and Claire Turenne Sjolander. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Newland, Kathleen. 2010. The Governance of International Migration: Mechanisms, Processes and Institutions. Global Governance 16(3):331– 43. Nimijean, Richard. 2006. The Politics of Branding Canada: The International-­Domestic Nexus and the Rethinking of Canada’s Place in the World. Revista Mexicana de Estudios Canadienses 11:67–85. Nossal, Kim Richard. 1998–99. Pinchpenny Diplomacy: The Decline of “Good International Citizenship” in Canadian Foreign Policy. International Journal 54(1):88–105. – 2013. The Liberal Past in the Conservative Present: Internationalism in the Harper Era. In Canada in the World. Internationalism in Canadian

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Foreign Policy, ed. Heather A. Smith and Claire Turenne Sjolander. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Nossal, Kim Richard, Stéphane Roussel, and Stéphane Paquin. 2011. International Policy and Politics in Canada. Toronto: Pearson. Pettigrew, Pierre S. 2005. Canada’s International Personality. International Journal 60(3):623–34. Piper, Nicola. 2011. Toward a Gendered Political Economy of Migration. In Migration in the Global Political Economy, ed. Nicola Phillips, 61–82. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner. Preibisch, Kerry. 2012. Migrant Workers and Changing Workplace Regimes in Contemporary Agricultural Production in Canada. International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 19(1):62–82. Preibisch, Kerry, and Luz Maria Hermoso Santamaria. 2006. Engendering Labour Migration: The Case of Foreign Workers in Canadian Agriculture. In Women, Migration and Citizenship, ed. Alexandra Dobrowolsky and Evangelia Tastsoglou, 107–30. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Reed, Austina J. 2008. Canada’s Experience with Managed Migration: The Strategic Use of Temporary Worker Programs. International Journal 63(2):469–84. Rural Migration News. 2011. Canada, Australia, Italy. Rural Migration News 17(1) 4 January. http://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/comments. php?id=1591_0_4_0 Sassen, Saskia. 2005. Regulating Immigration in a Global Age: A New Policy Landscape. Parallax 11(1):35–45. Satzewich, Vic. 2007. Business or Bureaucratic Dominance in Immigration Policymaking in Canada: Why was Mexico Included in the Caribbean Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program in 1974? International Migration and Integration 8(3):255–75. Sjolander, Claire Turenne. 2009. A Funny Thing Happened on the Road To Kandahar: The Competing Faces of Canadian Internationalism? Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 15(2):78–98. Skeldon, Ronald. 2008. International Migration as a Tool in Development Policy: A Passing Phase? Population and Development Review 34(1):1–18. Smith, Heather A. 2009. Unwilling Internationalism or Strategic Internationalism? Canadian Climate Policy under the Conservative Government. Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 15(2):57–77. Stasiulis, Daiva, and Abigail Bakan. 2003. Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women In Canada and the Global System. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan.



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Verma, Veena. 2007. The Regulatory and Policy Framework of the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. Ottawa: North South Institute. Welsh, Jennifer. 2004. At Home in the World. Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century. Toronto: Harper-Collins. – 2010. Immature Design. The Walrus (June): 26–31. Wickramasekara, Piyasiri. 2011. Circular Migration: A Triple Win or a Dead End. GURN Discussion Paper 15. Geneva: International Labour Office, Bureau for Workers’ Activities (ACTRAV).

5 Institutionalizing Temporary Labour Migration in Europe: Creating an “In-between” Migration Status t e s s e lt j e d e l a n g e a n d s a r a h va n wa l s u m

In 2008, an association representing Moroccan and Tunisian farm workers heard the decision on their case before the French Haute autorité de lutte contre les discriminations et pour l’égalité (HALDE [High Authority against Discrimination and for Equality] decision No. 2008–283, 15 December). These workers had repeatedly been granted temporary residence permits to work for successive eightmonth periods in the agricultural industry of Bouches-du-Rhône, in the south of France. Many of them had been employed on this basis for two or three decades. While putatively recruiting seasonal workers, the farms that had hired these Moroccan and Tunisian workers actually operated year-round. The temporary residence permits given to their foreign workers simply facilitated repeat engagement on the basis of a temporary employment contract, which was contrary to French labour law and contrary to the purpose of the French seasonal labour migration regime. The HALDE concluded that French immigration authorities, in collaboration with agricultural employers, had thus excluded Moroccan and Tunisian workers from permanent employment and all the rights that this implied: the rights to social security, to permanent residence status, and to respect for family life. Because this form of exclusion could only apply to foreign workers, it amounted to discrimination on grounds of ethnic origin and race. The practices referred to in this decision reflect those reported in the Canadian literature on temporary labour migration, not just in the agricultural industry but in other sectors as well, such as the



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food-processing, service and hospitality, live-in care, and construction sectors (Preibisch 2011; Goldring and Landolt 2012).1 Like the HALDE, this literature expresses concern that migration rules regulating the temporary admission of labour migrants facilitate the creation of a class of precarious workers with no prospect of (family) settlement, steady employment with related benefits and career opportunities, or access to national supports for unemployment, disability, and old age. questioning the permanence-temporariness dichotomy

The editors of this volume acknowledge this dynamic and its negative implications for the workers involved. However, they challenge us to try to think beyond the generally preferred solution, which is to reproduce the dichotomy between permanence and temporariness by simply redefining those who had been defined as temporary as permanent, thus creating a new category of “truly temporary” who in turn may be excluded, thus repeating the dynamic described above. In this chapter, we take up this challenge, taking the situation in the European Union (EU) as our point of departure. Working from two different angles, we try to disrupt the dichotomy between permanence and temporariness, and the assumed link between territory and belonging that it implies. The first perspective is that of emerging EU law that seeks to regulate temporary labour migration in various shades, already indicating that gradations of grey exist between the “white” of permanence and the “black” of temporariness. The second perspective is that of migrants’ lived experiences, which show that modes of belonging are various and complex. While time may be a defining factor, time linked to territory is not. People are involved in various social structures that may, but need not, be linked to a specific place: family relations, religious affiliation, political sympathies, a shared profession, hobby or taste, or cross-­border worker solidarity, to name just a few. Even citizens sharing one nationality, or people linked to each other by place of birth, can in fact live widely dispersed one from the other ­(Geschiere 2009). As we shall argue below, emergent EU migration law actually acknowledges this by (implicitly) taking into account that the fact that internationally mobile intra-company transferees largely depend on their transnationally operative employers for important elements

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of their social protection, and not on any one nation state. Looking at the practices of other migrant workers, particularly those who are undocumented, it is clear that transnational companies are not the only social structures that can regulate belonging and provide for social protection in the “in-between space” of transnational existence. This is not to say that state-regulated processes of inclusion and exclusion, such as the one addressed in the HALDE decision, are of little or no significance to the well-being of international labour migrants. On the contrary, just as the proposed EU directive on intracompany transferees anticipates transnational company support for the migrant workers involved, regimes regulating the unauthorized presence of undocumented labour migrants, or temporary labour migration, can silently accept or explicitly impede those migrants’ access to specific social structures or market-regulated means of support. temporariness and social protection

As labour relations become more flexible and chains of production and services become more complex, distinctions between employers, employees, self-employed individuals, and consumers become more diffuse. Each of these players is caught up in, and trying to cope with, the insecurities of the fragmented, mobile, and volatile markets of today. This suggests that the increase in precarious work may not just be a simple manoeuvre on the part of employers to avoid having to conform to the relatively costly norm of providing full-time and permanent employment but rather may also be an expression of fundamental and structural changes in the way production and services are currently being organized (cf. Knegt 2008; Zimmerman, Heckelei et al. 2006; Fudge and Owens 2006; Conaghan, Fischl et al. 2002). Critics of temporary labour migration regimes base their critique on the fact that these regimes are becoming an integral part of the trend toward precarious work. Their implicit assumption is that this trend is in itself nefarious and must necessarily be reversed. An alternative position could be to take a more neutral stand concerning the trend toward more flexibility, fragmentation, and crossborder mobility in labour relations. Are these trends exploitative in and of themselves, or is it their disjunction with national regimes of social protection still predicated on the permanently employed full-time working breadwinner citizen that now creates scope for



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precariousness and exploitation? Is it possible to reconceive labour migration in terms that include transnational attachments, life strategies, and orientations as being inherent to, instead of antithetical to, systems of social protection? If so, how would such an approach relate to existing regulatory structures of national belonging and support? Currently, the EU is working on a seasonal labour directive. As it stands, it reflects all the problems inherent in temporary labour migration as regulated in the French régime that was denoted as discriminatory by the HALDE. Rather than rejecting such a regulatory move out of hand, we suggest that it could serve as a point of departure for rethinking how labour relations and workers’ rights can best be regulated in a world on the move. We thoroughly agree that temporary residence rights should not preclude inclusion in national social structures, including citizenship. But neither should (partial) national inclusion preclude transnational commitments, strategies, and lifestyles. t r a n s n at i o n a l p e r s p e c t i v e s o n s o c i a l p r o t e c t i o n

In her work, Jennifer Gordon (2009) has looked for ways to conceptualize the “transnational labour citizen” by dismantling “the wall frequently built between … temporary workers … [and] permanent immigrants.” Among other things, she proposes to improve the labour and social rights of “low-skilled” migrant workers through bilateral or regional agreements involving the country of origin, a feature non-governmental organizations have also claimed is missing in the seasonal workers directive. Gordon also pleads for strong cross-border advocacy networks of labour unions and collaboration between governments and civil society organizations to enforce workplace standards (see also Vonk and Van Walsum 2013).2 Although we support Gordon’s proposals, we also believe more is needed. As market and community relations merge and mingle, as a result, for example, of the commoditization of care, shifts are liable to occur within the power relations involved (c.f. Stewart 2011). In thinking through issues of power and exploitation in a transnational labour market, and how to mitigate these, we should not only fix our attention on national state-regulated regimes of social protection but also take into account how migrants’ position within other transnational social structures and market relations might help ­

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mitigate asymmetrical power relations on the transnational labour market. In the first part of this chapter, we shall discuss the emerging EU regulation of migrant labour, elaborating on the “shades of grey” that it deploys in terms of permanence, temporariness, and the accommodation of transnational support structures. In the second part, we will expand on Jennifer Gordon’s idea by exploring three examples of how irregular migrants can develop their own social security arrangements in a cross-border context and how inclusion in or exclusion from state-regulated forms of social protection in their countries of residence may influence those arrangements. This preliminary exploration is based on a small-scale study conducted in 2008 and 2009 among Ghanaian and Filipino migrant domestic workers residing in the Netherlands and their family members in Ghana and the Philippines.3 Although these workers are not temporarily resident in the Netherlands, their position is similar to that of the workers who will be made subject to the seasonal workers directive in the sense that most of the people to whom we spoke are irregular and hence excluded from formally regulated social protection in the Netherlands. Like the workers anticipated by the EU seasonal workers directive, they too must rely on alternative arrangements to provide for their own needs for social protection, and that of their kin. As we shall argue, the issue is not whether a particular state takes part in the social security arrangements of a specific group of persons living and working within its territory, but rather how it does this and, more specifically, how the state’s involvement intersects with that of other social structures, such as extended families or employment relationships, implicated in those arrangements. As we shall show, the transnational social security arrangements taking shape involve networks and institutions in which state actors and concerns of national welfare do play a role, albeit in underexplored ways. But first, let us see how the EU proposes to formally regulate the position, within the EU member states, of different categories of labour migrants coming from outside of the EU. Shades of Grey: European Regulation of Temporary Labour Migration The EU has recently adopted a general framework on labour migration from outside the EU.4 This general directive provides for the



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equal treatment of permanently resident migrant workers and EU workers. Up until now, the only pieces of EU legislation regulating the permanent residence of labour migrants have been a directive adopted in 2005 on the migration of scientific researchers from outside the EU and the blue card directive, adopted in 2009, which regulates the admission of highly qualified migrant workers from outside the EU (see De Lange 2013 on the blue card directive). By excluding all other labour migrants from the right to equal treatment, this framework places the “in-between” status of temporary migrant workers at the core of EU labour migration policy. Two proposed directives on intra-company transferees and seasonal workers from outside the EU form a central part of an emerging labour migration regime that encompasses varying degrees of temporariness and, accordingly, varying degrees of protection for workers’ rights.5 In the following section, we discuss in greater detail the two proposals and the debates surrounding them. propo se d di r e c t i v e o n i nt ra-co m pan y t ran s f e rs 6 literature on the migration of highly skilled workers posits that the nation state “is losing its former monopolist position as a provider of collective goods,” because highly skilled workers may leave their state of origin to take up employment in another state where their skills are in demand and where they receive treatment equal to that of nationals (Kolb 2010, 81). In the case of intra-company transferees, the state has lost its monopolist position vis-à-vis the multinational corporation, a supranational institution taking on responsibilities for its employees similar to those provided by the state to “low-” and “medium-” skilled workers (such as housing provisions or schooling). These migrant workers, often managers or technicians with considerable qualifications (Evers 2007; Koser and Salt 1997), thus rely on both the social arrangements of different nation states and those provided by their multinational employer. The European Commission proposes to institutionalize this transnational condition. The proposed directive on employees of multinationals regulates the transfer of employees from outside the EU to a post within the EU.7 Its aim is to facilitate the cross-border employment of managerial and other qualified employees of multinational companies by setting up transparent and harmonized conditions for their admission to the EU and creating more attractive conditions for their t­ emporary (three years maximum) stay there. A guarantee is required that, at

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the end of the assignment, the worker will be able to transfer to another branch of the same company in a country outside the EU. Consequently, workers’ positions are regulated beyond the period of their temporary stay in the EU – a significant difference from the seasonal workers directive. At the same time, at least some workers have a realistic prospect of achieving permanent residence in the EU on their own merits. Those who are sufficiently qualified, and who find a local employer willing to pay a sufficiently high salary,8 can apply for a so-called blue card, the status reserved for highly skilled workers. Once in possession of such a card, a migrant worker can, in due course, qualify for long-term residence. propose d di r e c t i v e o n se as o n al l abo u r 9 according to the European Commission, a directive on seasonal migrant labour is needed to provide for labour needs and to resolve the problem of irregular migration. The still-ongoing debate surrounding the proposed directive illustrates the issues raised by a temporary labour migration regime. Two main points of controversy are the maximum duration of stay and the level of equal treatment. Some member states, like the Netherlands, want the duration of stay to be less than six month for reasons relating to the national welfare system. If a migrant worker works in the Netherlands less than six months he has to pay premiums into the Dutch unemployment insurance but will not be eligible to receive unemployment insurance as one can only be eligible to receive the insurance after a period of employment of more than six months. The consequence will be that seasonal migrant workers support the Dutch welfare system while being excluded from its benefits. Non-governmental organizations advocating migrants’ rights have claimed that exclusion of temporary workers from full equal treatment also excludes them from the full benefit of “rights and protection granted to all lawfully employed workers, irrespective of their nationality, as provided for by the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, ILO Convention No. 97 (migrant workers’ rights) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights” (Meijers Committee 2011). In fact, however, such international documents are often ambiguous. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, for example, stipulates that “nationals of third countries who are authorised to work in the



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territories of the Member States are entitled to working conditions equivalent to those of citizens of the Union,” which doesn’t mean that they are entitled to identical conditions. Arguably this allows for an in-between status for non-EU nationals. Temporary Labour Migrants and the Welfare State The intra-company transfer and seasonal workers directives demand that the workers covered by the directives receive equal treatment with all nationals of the member states with regard to freedom of association, employment-related social insurance,10 and access to public services (with the exception of public housing and counselling by employment services). Seasonal workers are also to be given the right to statutory pensions on the basis of their previous employment and under the same conditions as nationals of the member state concerned when they move to a third country. Intra-company migrants are to have this right regardless of whether nationals of the member state concerned are entitled to such payments when they move to a third country. The seasonal workers directive requires that seasonal migrant workers be entitled to the working conditions – including pay and dismissal provisions and health and safety requirements – applicable to seasonal work in the member state to which they have been admitted. Similarly, intra-company transferees are entitled to the same working conditions as posted workers in the member state to which they have been admitted.11 In this sense, both groups are excluded from equal treatment as they are excluded from full integration into the social security system offered by the receiving welfare state; thus, both are subject to a central dimension of precarious employment (i.e., limited access to regulatory protection). This situation, however, has little to do with these workers’ position as migrants per se. Although both seasonal and intra-company migrant workers are ineligible for public housing, member states must make sure employers provide adequate housing. It is well documented that information technology workers migrating from India have been forced by their employers to share a flat, whereas seasonal migrant workers are often housed together in a pension or barracks near the fields where they are put to work. Such comparisons suggest that the differences between these two groups may simply be ones of degree. However, we contend that these

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differences are fundamental. For most seasonal migrants, the rights provided by the proposed seasonal workers directive are limited, whereas for most intra-company migrants, the rights in the directive constitute an added bonus to a foundational layer of security already provided by their employers. Most transnational corporations have social and fiscal schemes to support their employees in whatever country they are stationed in, irrespective of the national schemes applicable. Moreover, for these workers the end of their temporary employment in the EU does not spell the end of their employment, as one of the conditions for their temporary admission is the assurance that they will continue to be engaged elsewhere by the same employer. These workers are not primarily dependent on the welfare state in which they are stationed. In this respect, the position of intra-company transferees is fundamentally different from that of migrants who fall under the proposed seasonal workers program. Another difference between these two groups of labour migrants lies in family reunification policies. Although the proposed directive on intra-company transferees, like that on seasonal workers, aims to regulate temporary labour migration, it explicitly foresees the admission of family members. The directive on seasonal workers does not. To sum up, via various directives, the EU is working on a stratified regulation of labour migration from third countries. At the top are the highly skilled migrant workers who can aspire, along with their family members, to permanent residence in the EU with all the claims to social protection that this implies. Next in line are the employees of transnational corporations who, together with their families, are limited to a temporary stay, but with the assurance of job security, family provisions, and other forms of social protection provided by their transnational employer throughout their mobile career. Last in line are the seasonal workers, also admitted on a temporary basis but without the right to bring along their families, with minimal claims to state-regulated social protection that only lasts as long as their stay and does not necessarily cover the needs of their families left behind. In terms of formally regulated social protection, then, their position will be only marginally better than that of irregular migrants currently working in the EU. However, the fact that migrants are excluded from formal social security does not mean they do not take part in other reciprocal ­relations of mutual support. As we shall illustrate in the following



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part of this chapter, irregular migrants in the Netherlands have been able, to a degree at least, to meet their needs despite their increased exclusion from national state-regulated forms of social security, thanks to the web of social relations with which they engage in a transnational context. Our contention is that any regulation of temporary labour migration should at least take such (transnational) support structures into account, not in the sense that these are taken for granted as compensation for lack of state provisions, but in the sense that they are acknowledged, facilitated, and flanked by state provisions. t r a n s n at i o n a l m o d e s o f s o c i a l p r o t e c t i o n

In this section we shall first briefly discuss three examples of how migrants in the Netherlands have mobilized their social relations in a transnational context to meet their needs for social security. Following our description of this empirical material, we shall discuss how the various (transnational) social relations (both formal and informal) that are relevant to the social security of irregular migrants intersect with each other. The three aspects of social protection that we report on relate to covering expenses for urgent health care and other emergencies affecting migrants’ kin in their countries of origin, transnational arrangements for housing and (paid) care, and migrants’ financial provisions for retirement in their countries of origin. With the first example we explore the (possible) cumulative gains that can accrue from including transnational-oriented migrants in formal social security schemes. With the second we explore how regimes of care in migrants’ countries of origin and residence have become entwined with each other, and the normative issues that this raises. With the third we explore how the convergence of restrictive migration policies with other regimes of exclusion can undermine transnational strategies to secure social protection. Transnational Effects of Including Migrants in National Health Care Benefits Until recently, hospitals in Ghana worked on a cash-and-carry basis: patients who were unable to pay did not receive any care. In the event of an emergency, the pressure on migrants living abroad to

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provide their family members in Ghana with the necessary funds to access health care could be considerable (Smith 2007, 181). In the early 1990s, communal health insurance schemes started to be developed in various districts in Ghana. In 2007, these local initiatives were taken over by the Ghanaian government and successfully applied nationwide.12 Although at first sight these developments are only relevant to the social protection of persons in Ghana, and not in the Netherlands, they nevertheless have had important implications for the material security of Ghanaian migrants residing in the Netherlands. These migrants are now better able to manage their savings for their own present and future needs. They no longer have to cover all the medical costs of chronically ill relatives or plunder their savings and/or borrow funds at short notice to cover the costs of a medical emergency in Ghana. It was not self-evident that a national health insurance scheme could be successfully implemented in Ghana. Anthropologists have often made the point that paying insurance contributions is not something people in rural African societies are inclined to do (see, for example, Kabki 2007, 22; Platteau 1991, 112–70). However, in his doctoral research, the human geographer Lothar Smith has reported on extended families that have set up emergency funds, primarily intended to cover funeral costs in Ghana (Smith 2007). What is interesting to us is the initiating role that migrant family members living in more affluent nations have played in setting up these schemes. Our data indicate, moreover, that Ghanaians are not averse to paying for health insurance once they have settled in the Netherlands  – on the contrary, interviewees who were documented and statutorily obliged to pay never complained about that fact, and one woman who was undocumented, and therefore excluded from regular insurance, had taken out tourist insurance so that she would at least be covered in the event of an accident. Smith even reports on a man who, after returning to Ghana, continued to pay premiums in the Netherlands to cover his wife and child who had stayed behind in the Netherlands and for himself as well (Smith 2007, 181). These examples show how the social protection offered to migrants who have been included in the institutional arrangements offered by the Dutch state can reach beyond the borders of the Dutch nation. The indirect positive effects on the social protection of dependent kin in



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migrants’ countries of origin can in turn help to augment the social protection of migrants in the Netherlands. Such forms of cumulative gain are not normally included in the calculations of the costs and benefits of specific social protection regimes made from an institutional perspective. Transnational Arrangements for Housing and (Paid) Care We now consider how social protection regimes in migrants’ countries of origin and in their countries of residence can interact, and we look at the implications of such interactions for migrants who have been excluded from institutional forms of social protection in their countries of residence. The focus here is specifically on migrant domestic workers and their engagement in the construction of homes in their countries of origin, in the maintenance of homes in their countries of residence, and in care arrangements in both localities. Paradoxically, measures designed to exclude irregular migrants from various facets of Dutch society have, in fact, driven many of them into the heartland of that society – its citizens’ private homes. As restrictions on the employment of irregular migrants in other sectors have come to be more vigorously enforced, more and more irregular migrants – both men and women – have responded to the increasing demand for domestic services, where such controls are rare because of privacy considerations. In this context of intimacy, some may succeed in deriving a degree of social protection from their relationship with their employers. Our data show how some Filipino domestic workers, in particular, who counted a relatively large number of professionals among their employers, were able to access medical care via their employers’ networks. All domestic workers, moreover, reported relying on their employers’ networks to find new opportunities for employment. As Dutch immigration policies become more restrictive, irregular domestic workers may come to rely on their employers for shelter as well. One woman reported that she knew of several Filipinas who worked as live-in domestics in an affluent suburb outside Amsterdam, where the houses are roomier than in the city centres and are more conducive to such arrangements. Formerly, according to her, these women would have been eager to leave such a live-in arrangement because of the limits to privacy and personal freedom that it implies. They would have moved into the city, found a place to stay,

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and looked for work on a live-out basis. The women she spoke to more recently, however, seemed reluctant to leave their employers’ homes because of the increased risks involved in illegally subletting an apartment in the city  – one of the few housing arrangements available to irregular migrants. In an effort to gain more control over the low-cost housing sector, Dutch housing associations had become more active in tracking down people who sublet illegally. Rumours circulated of Filipinos being caught during such controls, handed over to the immigration authorities, and deported. In the context of increased controls, it became more attractive to provide domestic services on a live-in basis despite the limits to privacy and the increased dependency on the employer that such a scenario entailed. In migrants’ countries of origin, too, issues of shelter and care are often intertwined. Lothar Smith reports how Ghanaian migrants in the Netherlands have constructed dwellings in their hometowns to express their success as migrants and their commitment to the extended family there, but also to secure shelter for themselves in their own old age, in a place where they expect to be looked after and kept company by their kin (Mazzali, Muliro et al. 2006, 42–3; Smith 2007, 22–3). Our own data confirm Smith’s findings in the Ghanaian case (Van Walsum 2011a, 2011b). Interestingly, the link that he describes between investment in real estate and preparation for future care also emerges in our data concerning Filipino migrants. Financial Provisions for Retirement in the Country of Origin As the populations of the more affluent nations age, their societies are becoming more dependent on care and household services being provided by young adult migrants from Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. To the extent that these migrants are rendered unable – through live-in work arrangements and/or restrictive migration policies  – to engage in close physical contact with their kin, establishing and/or maintaining a family remains problematic for them. Making suitable arrangements for support, care, and company for these and other migrant workers in their old age is arguably one of the most urgent challenges at present in the sphere of social protection and migration. For migrants who are excluded from formal arrangements of social protection in their country of residence and who are unable



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or unwilling to rely solely on the future support of family in their country of origin, commercial insurance or other financial products can provide a solution. Under the auspices of the Filipino Ministry of Labour and of organizations such as UNICEF and Oxfam-Novib, some Filipino non-governmental organizations have set up projects that link (undocumented) migrants in Europe to rural financial institutions in the Philippines. These institutions finance development projects that are screened for their business potential by microfinance experts and are covered, to a degree at least, by insurance funded by COS, a Dutch non-governmental organization active in third-world development (Anonuevo, Dizon-Anonuevo et al. 2008). Although they are not formally involved in this project, Filipino state actors (including the Filipino consulate in the Netherlands) we interviewed revealed that they follow such insurancebacked development projects with interest and sympathy through informal networks. The financial position of returning migrants is a topic of concern for the Filipino Ministry of Labour, the worry being that some may return worse off than when they left. While regular migrants can be approached through consular officials abroad and encouraged to continue contributing to national social insurance schemes, irregular migrants are harder to track down and include in such schemes. Transnationally co-ordinated investment projects, like the one described here, form an alternative strategy for ensuring some financial security for these migrants upon their return to the Philippines. Irregular migrants taking part in insurance-backed development projects are, however, hampered in their participation by the fact that, as irregular migrants, they are excluded from regular banking by Dutch law. In fact, to send their money abroad, they either have to access the bank account of a legally resident countryman or countrywoman, join a collective bank account run by a legally resident member of some form of association, or rely on family in the Philippines to transfer remittances to their account there. Hence, their ability to secure funds for their personal future needs remains dependent on the loyalty and honesty of their kin and/or members of other social networks. State controls of transnational banking, which are closely linked with state controls of migration, thus exacerbate the exclusion of irregular migrants from state-regulated forms of social protection by complicating the realization of alternative arrangements through transnational financial transactions.

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As these three examples show, irregular migrants, who often work in industries and services that are central to the welfare of the citizens of their host countries, also play a key role in initiating and maintaining transnational strategies for achieving social protection in their countries of origin. It is important to realize that although state actors may not play a central role in these arrangements, they will not be entirely absent from them either. The microfinance scheme in the Philippines is being supported informally by highly placed state actors there, but it is also being frustrated to a degree through Dutch state policies that exclude irregular migrants from bank transactions. The collective health insurance schemes in Ghana have by now been taken over by the Ghanaian state  – their initial success may well have been partially due to the fact that regularly resident Ghanaian migrants living in the advanced welfare states of the EU had become familiar with the obligatory health insurance schemes there. States that rely, officially or unofficially, on the labour of migrant domestic workers to resolve care issues in their own societies can compromise those migrants’ own future care needs by restricting their options to engage in family life. The examples show that even when social protection arrangements are not state driven, the context of state regulation remains relevant. It affects the degree to which migrants who have been excluded from state-regulated national forms of social protection can initiate, develop, and profit from alternative transnational forms of social protection, such as those described here. Increasingly, modern communications technology is facilitating long-distance communication, and in doing so it is having an impact on the field of transnational social relations. Since many irregular migrants are unable to travel because of visa restraints and/or the high costs of intercontinental travel, they rely on long-distance communication to maintain their networks, supervise the care of their dependents, convey their emotional involvement, control the distribution and spending of their remittances, and manage any property or business interests they might have in their countries of origin. Digital payment systems that work via mobile phones may, moreover, make it easier for irregular migrants to circumvent restrictions on their use of banking institutions (Van Walsum 2013). But if modern communication technology has done much to facilitate



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international communication, enforced distance can nonetheless weaken claims to future support and care. It makes it impossible, for example, for migrants to attend important ritual celebrations such as funerals, where mutual ties of commitment and solidarity are enacted and confirmed. Similarly, marital bonds must be maintained without physical contact, resulting in forced infertility or – if a child is born from an adulterous relationship – possibly divorce. Certainly in societies where people rely on their children for care and support in their old age, such complications have implications for the social security of the couple involved. As the examples above make clear, irregular migrants, although excluded from national social security regimes, continue to form part of a whole array of social relations that are transnational in scope. Some of these are closely connected to their position in the transnational labour market, and include employers, associations of particular categories of migrant workers (such as migrant domestic workers), and trade unions. Others involve more long-term reciprocal relations, such as those between kin, between persons sharing a common place of origin, or between members of a particular faith association. The possibilities offered through social or employment networks might be supplemented, on the one hand, by commercial alternatives offered by brokers, often via the Internet, and, on the other hand, by Dutch religious institutions and non-governmental organizations, some of which might be (partially) financed or at least condoned by local authorities (Engbersen, van der Leun et al. 2002; van der Leun 2003).13 But if these various networks provide access to financial support and/or care in the absence of state provisions, they also structure power relations. Exclusion from state provision restrained my informants’ autonomy and broadened the possibility and scope for their exploitation and abuse. Employers’ generosity, for example, has its shadow side. A worker whose employer has provided for health care, shelter, or other basic needs will feel indebted and dependent as a result. As Sabrina Marchetti has argued convincingly in her master’s thesis on the position of Filipino domestic workers in Amsterdam and in Rome, the dependency vis-à-vis the employer that results from an irregular status keeps the workers involved, caught up in a dialectic of favours/gifts and expressions of gratitude, making it difficult for them to extricate themselves from a certain degree of servility (Marchetti 2005).14

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In the Netherlands, irregular migrants are not excluded from the protections provided by labour law, even if their employment is unauthorized. These protections include claims relevant to their social protection, such as the right to minimum wage and the right to paid sick leave. Since 2006, migrant domestic workers, including those with irregular status, have been welcome to join the Dutch trade union movement. Through the trade union, they are educated about their rights vis-à-vis their employers and can feel strengthened in their negotiations with their employers. However, as various forms of exclusion from formal social protection accumulate, migrant domestic workers with irregular status can be forced to depend more on their employers, not only for income, but also for access to medical care and shelter, and so risk becoming more vulnerable in their negotiating position. One of the Filipino women we interviewed was an active member of a self-organization of domestic workers and of the Dutch trade union. She worried about Filipino domestic workers who had elected to continue working on a livein basis with a single employer, for fear of the risks of apprehension and deportation that working for multiple employers on a live-out basis implied.15 Whenever she approached such workers to encourage them to organize, they generally refused, saying their employers would not approve. Research indicates that such forms of dependency on an employer make workers vulnerable to exploitation, even when they are legal residents (Pool 2011; Van den Berg-Eldering 2007). Irregular labour migrants who depend on their employers for their salary only and rely on other social relations to meet needs such as housing or health care are often in a better position to negotiate their terms of employment than migrants dependent on their employers to meet such needs (Pool 2011; Van Walsum 2011b). For these reasons, EU policies intended to bring low-skilled labour migration out of the clandestine sphere should take into account the social security arrangements put in place by irregular migrants. Legislation meant to regularize these migrants’ status but that denies, marginalizes, or potentially criminalizes their social security arrangements could place them in a position of increased dependency, increasing rather than reducing the risk of their exploitation. Arguably, the risk of over-dependency also applies to intra-­ company transferees who rely primarily on their multinational employers for various elements of their social security. The fact that



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most of these migrants are highly skilled, however, means they will usually be in a position to negotiate favourable terms of employment as well as social security benefits with their employers directly. r e g u l at i n g t e m p o r a r i n e s s

Current proposals to regulate temporary labour migration reflect contradictory political pressures. On the one hand, these measures open up the EU labour market to migrants from outside of the EU (in response to both the ongoing problems of irregular migration and to those of an aging homegrown labour force); on the other hand, they respond to a growing anti-immigrant sentiment among national electorates. The underlying agenda of such policies is to provide a regulatory framework for migrant labour without having to include all the migrants involved as fully fledged and lifelong participants in the welfare state. While some EU member states, such as France and Spain, have programs for repeated seasonal migration, particularly in the agricultural sector, the Netherlands, to date, has been reluctant to introduce a regime explicitly encouraging repeat or circular migration. Dutch labour migration policies do allow for the admission of seasonal workers but do not yet provide for the kind of multiple entry visa envisioned by the EU directive on seasonal workers. All participants in the ethnographic component of this research were of the opinion that even a circular migration regime would be preferable to the current exclusion of “low-skilled” migrant workers from regularized migration status. Those currently in the country on an irregular basis were anxious to acquire the basic freedoms that regular residence implied: the freedom to walk the streets without fear of the police, open a bank account in their own name, purchase health insurance, rent a flat, take a regular job, and leave the country knowing they could successfully re-apply for an entry visa. The spouses, children, and aging parents left behind by these migrants were also eager for them to return home for visits. One Filipino woman, an irregularly resident domestic worker, spoke of how she had worked in Singapore and Hong Kong as a temporary labour migrant before coming to the Netherlands. In such contexts, she had had to work on a live-in basis, whereas in the Netherlands she had been able to move into a home of her own and work for various employers on a live-out basis. As a worker, she

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had acquired an important degree of freedom. But she was no longer free to travel home to visit her family because of her irregular status. The pain this caused her, along with the indignity of having to live a clandestine existence, were for this migrant the most important reasons to campaign for regularization. If this were to mean that she would have to obtain a succession of temporary permits to stay, that seemed to her an acceptable price to pay for greater freedom. Meanwhile, she and many other Filipino domestic workers in similar situations were working out their own solutions to the insecurity implied by living and working on the margins of Dutch society. Although partial inclusion in the Dutch welfare state, through a regime of circular migration, might (initially) preclude total inclusion, it would at least allow migrants the freedom to further such initiatives. This is not to say that circular migration is ideal from the perspective of the migrants involved and their families or that legislative reforms should stop there. There is no reason to assume temporary labour migrants would not welcome the opportunity to acquire permanent residence status, full inclusion in the social security benefits provided by their state of residence, and the right to family reunification. Moreover, as discussed above, migrants caught in a cycle of temporary labour migration may remain childless and spend their adult lives providing others with care, without the certainty of being cared for themselves in their old age. Nonetheless, the right to stay and work regularly on a (repeatedly) temporary basis would represent an important improvement on the status quo of irregular residence and employment. Moreover, the right to association, as foreseen in the directives, would ensure that temporary labour migrants are entitled to organize for rights that they view as important. Experiences in both Canada and Israel show that legally resident domestic workers, given the opportunity to organize, can and do campaign successfully for better residence rights (Preibisch 2011; Mundlak and Shamir 2011; see also Varia 2011; Hansen 2011). The status of temporary migrants, as foreseen by the seasonal workers directive, is still a far cry from that of the transnational labour citizens imagined by Jennifer Gordon. Nevertheless, such migrants would be in a better position than irregular migrants to struggle for further reforms to secure their own future and that of their families.



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conclusions and reflections

As we have shown, the degrees of temporariness proposed, and the implications for the migrant workers involved, vary from one category to another. The category of migrant workers most attractive for the EU economy – so-called skilled migrants, epitomized by the intra-company transferee – is put on track for permanent residence and full inclusion in the securities offered by the European welfare states. Those who are least attractive are maintained in a position of temporariness, while the degree of social security offered them is tailored to meet the needs of the European common market, not those of their own lives and family commitments. Between these is another group of workers who are temporary in relation to their state of residence but not their employer, who, in their case, figures as the main source of security. The latter group makes clear that modes of temporariness and permanence can co-exist. As we have shown, the least privileged category in the EU scheme of things, the proposed temporary labour migrants, and the currently irregular ones also have ongoing lines of commitment that are based on transnational family ties, friendships, or contract relations. It is important to realize that while state actors do not play a central role in these arrangements, they are not entirely absent either. The microfinance scheme in the Philippines is supported informally by highly placed state actors there, but it is also frustrated to a degree by Dutch state policies that exclude irregular migrants from bank transactions. As for the collective health insurance schemes in Ghana that have been taken over by the Ghanaian state, their initial success may well have been supported by the fact that Ghanaian migrants living in the EU were familiar with the obligatory health insurance schemes there. Migrants seeking to invest in real estate in their countries of origin for personal financial gain or for the benefit of their dependents may have to negotiate laws and policies that privilege the property rights of certain groups there, whereas in the Netherlands irregular migrants are prevented from renting a place of their own. Even where social security arrangements are not state driven, the context of state regulation remains relevant. The extent to which migrants are acknowledged as (potential) citizens in their countries of origin and of residence is relevant to the degree to which they can initiate, develop, and profit from transnational social s­ecurity

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arrangements such as those described above. Moreover, exclusion from certain contractual relations  – those involved in opening a bank account, purchasing insurance, or renting an apartment, for example – can put migrants into such a dependent position relative to their employers or family members that they can barely establish a foundation for their personal life projects. EU member states do not necessarily have to offer labour migrants full inclusion in their welfare systems to enable them to secure their own future and that of their families. An acknowledgement of their right to reside, to earn, to save, to organize themselves, to purchase insurance, and to invest in shelter and (transnational) arrangements of care – not only through remittances but also through travel and face-to-face contact – would be an improvement and could stimulate larger social changes and help migrants avoid situations of extreme dependency and the risk of exploitation that these imply. State policies to actively encourage and support the kinds of initiatives described above, whether developed in the countries of origin, in the countries of residence, or in concert, could amplify these effects, as could the involvement of trade unions, employers’ organizations, and non-governmental organizations. If states were to acknowledge, facilitate, and expand upon initiatives already in place rather than ignore, frustrate, or even criminalize efforts by migrant workers to secure their own futures, Jennifer Gordon’s vision of a “transnational labour citizen” might actually move closer to fulfillment.

notes

1 See also www.ufcw.ca/socialjustice. 2 Within the European regulation of labour migration, the sanctions directive (2009/52) deals with some of these issues. 3 For this research, fifteen Ghanaian and seventeen Filipino domestic workers were interviewed by Sarah van Walsum (Free University, Amsterdam) in Amsterdam. Subsequently, Sarah van Walsum spent three weeks in Ghana and three weeks in the Philippines. During each of these periods, she stayed with and/or interviewed family members of five informants in the Ghanaian and the Filipino segments of the Amsterdam sample. This research was funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as part of the collaborative ESF/EUROCORES project Migration and Networks of Care



4

5

6 7

8 9 10 11

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in Europe. The choice of these two groups was motivated by several considerations. Filipino domestic workers are well organized and hence easily accessible for researchers. Moreover, a certain amount of research had already been done among Filipino domestic workers, making it possible to triangulate data. However, we felt it important to also include another national category of workers to determine the degree to which the experiences of Filipino domestic workers were typical. Ghanaians was motivated by the fact that the available literature and anecdotal evidence indicated that Ghanaians were well represented among migrant domestic workers in Amsterdam, the fact that most Ghanaians speak at least some English, and the fact that Van Walsum had, in the past, spent two years in Ghana and hence had some affiliation with this group and some knowledge of the Twi language. Directive 2011/98/EU of 13 December 2011 addresses a single application procedure for a single permit for third-country nationals to reside and work in the territory of a member state and a common set of rights for single permit holders. In the context of the EU, “third-country nationals” are non-EU nationals. The discussion of these directives is based on drafts of these directives available to us at the time of writing (autumn 2012). Also relevant are the employers’ sanctions directive, also adopted in 2009, which provides illegally employed migrant workers with certain rudimentary rights while imposing sanctions upon their employers (directive 2009/52), and the return directive, which expresses the EU’s intent either to expel all irregularly present migrants or to have their situation regularized. European Commission (2010a). The transfer of employees from one EU member state to another (irrespective of the workers’ nationalities) is regulated by the posting of workers directive (96/71 EC), which is not included in our analysis. In general, this means at least 1.5 times the average gross annual salary in the member state concerned; in the Netherlands, this figure is €60,000. European Commission (2010b). As listed in article 3 of EC regulation 883/2004 on the coordination of social security systems. The terms and conditions of employment of posted workers (employees of service providers, intra-company transferees and temporary agency workers) in the EU are the object of yet another directive, 96/71 EC, which allows for national regulation of, among other things, minimum rates of pay and working conditions. It does not oblige the member states to grant posted workers treatment fully equal to that granted to nationals.

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12 Research on the history of this national health insurance scheme has been done by Professor Irene Agyepong of Legon University, Accra, Ghana. 13 Staring (2001) has described the emergence of financial services and labour and housing brokerage within the Turkish community in the Netherlands. Some of Sarah van Walsum’s Ghanaian and Filipino informants reported finding jobs or homes via Turkish brokers. 14 Staring (2001), 77–84. 15 Besides the risks involved in having to sublet lodgings illegally, there is also the risk of being apprehended while travelling to and from work. In February 2010, thirty irregular domestic workers were apprehended and placed in alien detention following a joint action carried out by the bus company transporting them from their place of residence to the suburb where their employers lived and the local police, who charged them with migration violations (De Telegraaf, 23 February 2011). references

Anonuevo, A.T., E.M. Dizon-Anonuevo, E. Gonzales, Balikabayani Foundation, and Atikha Overseas Workers and Communities Initiative. 2008. Coming Home: Migration and Reintegration Reference Materials. San Pablo City, Philippines: Atikha Overseas Workers and Communities Initiative. Conaghan, J., R.M. Fischl, and K.A. Klare, eds. 2002. Labour Law in an Era of Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Lange, T. 2013. The EU Blue Card Directive: A Low Level of Trust in EU Labour Law Migration. In The Blue Card Drective: Central Themes, Problem Issues, and Implementation in Selected Member States, ed. T. Strik and C. Grütters. Oisterwijk, the Netherlands: Wolf Legal ­Publishers. Engbersen, G.B.M., J.P. van der Leun, J. de Boom, P. van der Heijden, and M. Cruijff. 2002. Illegale vreemdelingen in Nederland. Omvang, overkomst, verblijf en uitzetting. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: RISBO/ Erasmus University. Evers, M.C. 2007. Migrants, Markets and Multinationals: Competition among World Cities for the Highly Skilled. GeoJournal (68):119–30. European Commission. 2010a. European Commission Proposal COM (2010) 378. Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Conditions of Entry and Residence of Third-Country Nationals in the Framework of an Intra-­Corporate Transfer. Brussels:



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European Commission. http://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/news/intro/ docs/com_2010_378_en.pdf European Commission. 2010b. European Commission Proposal COM (2010), 379. Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Conditions of Entry and Residence of ThirdCountry Nationals for the Purposes of Seasonal Employment. Brussels: European Commission. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ. do?uri=COM:2010:0379:FIN:EN:PDF Fudge, J., and R. Owens. 2006. Precarious Work, Women, and the New Economy. Oxford: Hart Publishing. Geschiere, P. 2009. The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldring, L., and P. Landolt. 2012. The Impact of Precarious Legal Status on Immigrants’ Economic Outcomes. IRPP Study No. 35. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Gordon, J. 2009. Towards Transnational Labour Citizenship: Restructuring Labour Migration to Reinforce Workers’ Rights. January 2009. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1348064 Hansen, L.L. 2011. Solidarity and Globalisation: Migrant Care Workers and Trade Union Strategies. Paper presented at Making Connections: Migration, Gender and Care Labour in Transnational Context (a COMPAS conference), Oxford, UK, 14–15 April 2011. Kabki, M. 2007. Transnationalism, Local Development and Social Security: The Functioning of Support Networks in Rural Ghana. Leiden, the Netherlands: African Studies Centre. Knegt, R. 2008. The Employment Contract as an Exclusionary Device: An Analysis on the Basis of 25 Years of Developments in the Netherlands. Antwerp, Belgium: Intersentia. Kolb, H. 2010. Emigration, Immigration, and the Quality of Membership: On the Political Economy of Highly Skilled Immigration Politics. In Labour Migration in Europe, ed. G. Menz and A. Caviedes. ­Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Koser, K. and J. Salt. 1997. The Geography of Highly Skilled International Migration. International Journal of Population Geography 3(4):285–303. Marchetti, S. 2005. “We had Different Fortunes.” Relationships between Filipina Domestic Workers and their Employers in Rome and Amsterdam. Master’s thesis, Women’s Studies, University of Utrecht. Mazzali, A., A. Muliro, A. Zarro, and M. Zupi, 2006. It’s our Problem Too: Views on African Migration and Development: Major Outcomes

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of an International Workshop, a Multidisciplinary Delphi Consultation and Interviews. Rome: Centro Studi di Politica Internazionale. Meijers Committee. 2011. CM1113. Note on the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Conditions of Entry and Residence of Third-Country Nationals for the Purposes of Seasonal Employment (COM(2010)0379), 31 October 2011. Utrecht: Meijers Committee. http://www.commissie-meijers.nl/assets/ ­commissiemeijers/CM1113%20Note%20on%20the%20Proposal%20 for% 20a%20Directive%20on%20the%20conditions%20of%20 entry %20and%20residence%20of%20third-country%20nationals%20for %20 the%20purposes%20of%20seasonal%20employment_LIBE.pdf Mundlak, G., and H. Shamir. 2011. Organizing Migrant Care Workers: The Trade Union Option. Paper presented at Making Connections: Migration, Gender and Care Labour in Transnational Context (a COMPAS conference), 14–15 April 2011, University of Oxford. Platteau, J.P. 1991. Traditional Systems of Social Security and Hunger Insurance: Past Achievements and Modern Challenges. In Social Security in Developing Countries, 112–63. Oxford: Clarendon. Pool, C. 2011. Migratie van Polen naar Nederland in een tijd van versoepeling van migratieregels. The Hague, the Netherlands: Boom Juridische Uitgevers, Centrum voor Migratierecht Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Preibisch, K. 2011. Migrant Workers and Changing Work-Place Regimes in Contemporary Agricultural Production in Canada. International Journal of the Sociology of Agriculture and Food 19(1):62–82. Smith, L. 2007. Tied to Migrants. Transnational Influences on the Economy of Accra, Ghana. Leiden, the Netherlands: African Studies Centre. Staring, R.H.J.M. 2001. Reizen onder regie: Het migratieproces van illegale Turken in Nederland. Dissertation. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Stewart, A. 2011. Gender, Law and Justice in a Global Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van den Berg-Eldering, M. 2007. Huishoudelijk personeel rechteloos? Buitenlands huishoudelijk personeel in dienst van diplomaten: Een overzicht van de rechtsbeschermingperikelen onder het Nederlands recht. Master’s thesis, Legal Faculty, VU University Amsterdam. Van der Leun, J. 2003. Looking for Loopholes. Processes of Incorporation of Illegal Immigrants in the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Van Walsum, S. 2011a. Migration and the Regulation of Care: Notes from a Transnational Field of Enquiry. Paper presented at Making Connec-



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tions: Migration, Gender and Care Labour in Transnational Context (a COMPAS conference), 14–15 April 2011, University of Oxford. – 2011b. Regulating Migrant Domestic Work in the Netherlands: Opportunities and Pitfalls. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 23(1):141–65. Van Walsum, S. 2013. Migranten, banken en veiligheid in tijden van globalisering. Tijdschrift voor Cultuur en Criminaliteit 3(1):32–46. Varia, N. 2011. Sweeping Changes? A Review of Recent Reforms on Protections for Migrant Domestic Workers in Asia and the Middle East. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 23(1): 265–87. Vonk, G., and S. Van Walsum. 2013. Access Denied: Towards a New Approach to Social Protection for Formally Excluded Migrants. European Journal of Social Security 15(2):124–50. Zimmerman, A., T. Heckelei, and I. Pérez. 2006. Working Paper: Literature Review of Approaches to Estimate Structural Change. Report No. 16. Wageningen, the Netherlands: SEAMLESS Association. http://www. seamless-ip.org.

6 The Permanence of Temporary Labour Mobility: Migrant Worker Programs across Australia, Canada, and New Zealand e m i ly g i l b e rt

The Australian Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme (PSWPS) was announced in August 2008. Introduced as a three-year pilot project, the program grants up to 800 temporary visas to Pacific Island workers each year. In 2009, Kiribati, Tonga, and Vanuatu became the first signatories; the following year an agreement was reached with Papua New Guinea. In December 2011, it was announced that the pilot scheme would become permanent, under a slightly revised appellation, the Seasonal Worker Program (SWP), to begin on 1 July 2012. For more than two decades, Pacific Island Forum countries had petitioned the Australian government for this kind of arrangement to provide opportunities for their workers and to help boost their economies. Yet, Prime Minister John Howard had opposed such a scheme, even when it was recommended by the Senate (Australian Senate 2003). It was only with the election of the Labor Party in 2007, under the leadership of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, that a temporary mobility program for low-skilled workers was realized. Rudd presented the initiative as one way his new government would encourage a more open and cooperative approach to the region. The SWP is an agreement about mobility and migration, but it also clearly impinges upon the realms of labour, foreign policy, and development (Gibson and McKenzie 2011). That mobility agreements work across these competing interests points to why these agreements are becoming an increasing source of tension, especially as they proliferate around the world. This chapter will focus upon a



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key aspect of these agreements: their temporariness. I will i­llustrate how temporary labour mobility, even while it opens up some employment opportunities, renders workers precarious because their status is temporary. As Leah Vosko has described, precarious workers are those who have “limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, job insecurity, low wages and high risks of ill-health” (Vosko 2006, 3). These forms of precarity are endemic among temporary workers precisely because their temporariness limits their access to health care, social programs, and labour protections. While creating better working conditions for temporary workers is important and necessary in the short term, these changes do not alter the structural precariousness of temporariness. Only when temporariness is removed will there be some progress toward eliminating vulnerability. This is particularly important to address as temporary work is increasingly being negotiated as part of, or alongside, free trade agreements. To examine these issues, this chapter takes as its starting place the SWP in Australia. The program engendered a considerable debate when it was announced, which provides instructive insights into the politics of temporary labour. In the following section I provide an overview of the SWP and the political changes leading to its implementation. I then consider the ways that temporariness makes workers vulnerable. Comparisons will be drawn with comparable programs in New Zealand and Canada upon which the SWP has been modelled. In the final section, I will turn to a more general consideration of the formalization of labour mobility programs within free trade agreements. While my focus is largely on the Australian initiative, the themes that are raised speak to temporary mobility more broadly. The aim of this chapter is to draw attention to the paradoxical and problematic ways that temporary labour mobility is being made permanent through the structures of a globalized, capitalist economy. the seasonal worker program

Domestic support for the SWP in Australia has hinged upon the anticipated economic benefits of the program. The agricultural sector struggles to find enough workers, especially for seasonal work. A shortfall of 100,000 agricultural workers has been projected over the coming years (Klapdor 2008). The aging of the Australian population means that there are fewer candidates for seasonal work, while

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the traditional reserve of itinerant backpackers, students, and “grey” nomads (retired travellers) is expensive because of the costs of training, high turnover, absenteeism, and abrupt departures. Farms have become more reliant upon undocumented workers, but frequent raids by police make this labour force less stable and constant. The cost of these labour shortages is calculated at up to AUD$700 million a year (World Bank 2006, 105; Mares 2006). The shortfall of workers has brought unions on board with their support for the SWP. Initially apprehensive that the initiative would encourage a “race to the bottom” scenario and erode the rights of workers (Mares 2007), the unions have been assured that migrant labour will be highly regulated and will meet domestic standards. A 2005 report, the Labour Shortage Action Plan, prepared by the National Farmers’ Federation, advocated for the introduction of a pilot project for seasonal workers. A highly regulated migrant labour program, it argued, would help bring much-needed stability to the agricultural sector and contribute to its growth, to the benefit of all workers. Support for the SWP in the Pacific Islands has also hinged upon its economic potential. Temporary labour programs are generally presented as cost-effective mechanisms for providing a modicum of employment opportunities in otherwise closed foreign labour markets. Unemployment levels are high in the Pacific Islands, particularly within the youth bulge; institutions like the World Bank argue that this creates a ticking time bomb that could trigger a failed state scenario (World Bank 2006, 22). The SWP, it is argued, could alleviate these demographic and unemployment concerns by providing skills training and work experience for the unemployed, especially for younger men (Gibson, McKenzie et al. 2008). Remittances from participants would provide benefits to their families, with a trickle-down community effect on schooling opportunities, business development, and home improvement. Many Pacific Island states rely upon remittances, which comprise a significant component of the gross domestic product of these states and now outstrip the income from foreign aid in the region (Australian Senate 2006, 40; AusAID 2008).1 Both domestic and regional economic imperatives have thus propelled the introduction of the SWP, as it has been seen as ushering in a new era of regional economic development (Gibson and McKenzie 2011). With the SWP, Prime Minister Rudd signalled a new regional geopolitics that would be less interventionist and more



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i­nternationalist than that of the previous government. Indeed, the first official act of Prime Minister Rudd was to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which foreshadowed his interest in multilateralism as well as institutionalism. Domestically, Rudd promised a new ethics of government care, one infused by his religious beliefs. To this end, an apology was made to Aboriginal peoples for decades of racist abuse and marginalization, which was understood as both an acknowledgement of collective responsibility and a step toward reconciliation. With respect to regional politics, this ethics of care was manifest in the dismantling of the Howard government’s notorious “Pacific Solution” – the legislation that sought to deter and control asylum seekers arriving by boat off the shores of Australia (Hyndman and Mountz 2007; Perera 2007). Rudd closed the detention centres on Nauru and Papua New Guinea, and the policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers was revoked. The long-term regional vision presented by Rudd was for a new Pacific community: an ambitious new partnership that would encompass economic, political, and security matters. Yet notwithstanding this European Union style vision of cooperation, Rudd retained an ongoing sense of insecurity about his neighbours. The rhetoric of looming failed states persisted and may even have been heightened in the fallout from the “military” and “reactive” politics of Prime Minister Howard, for example, vis-à-vis East Timor and the Solomon Islands (Hameiri 2007, 412; Kabutaulaka 2004). What really differentiated the new government was not how regional threats were perceived  – the threat of failed states permeated the governments of both Howard and Rudd – but the kinds of solutions that were presented to address this perceived problem. Whereas the Howard government had favoured a muscular militarism that hinged upon domination and intervention, Rudd’s approach might be described as a muscular neoliberalism, which prioritizes trade and the implementation of market-driven initiatives across the Pacfic region. Whereas the ­Howard government sought to minimize risk through policies of security “pre-emption” and “containment” – for example, its policies regarding offshore detention of asylum seekers and the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands – the focus of the Rudd government is on free trade, foreign investment, and regional partnerships to build “resilience” and “self-reliance” among its neighbours. Shahar Hameiri characterizes this new attitude as a new form of risk management that targets capacity building in neighbouring

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countries “to prevent the spill-over to Australia of transnational risks” (Hameiri 2008, 257). It reflects a linking of security and development that has been emergent since the mid-1990s. This has included a “growing call to harness developmental resources to change the balance of power between social groups, include the excluded and rebuild crisis-ridden societies anew in the interests of global stability” (Duffield 2005, 142; see also Carroll and Hameiri 2007; Perera 2007). While there can be positive short-term outcomes of these initiatives, there is a clear resonance with standard forms of colonialism and colonial governance that have always been constituted both through military force and economic rule (Duffield 2005). The SWP can be understood as one component of this more muscular neoliberalism, which emphasizes regional trade and marketdriven initiatives, straddling the needs of the domestic agricultural industry with an eye to regional development and diplomacy. Economic rewards were promised for both sending and receiving countries. Yet the number of participants has been well below expectations. In the first year, 2008–09, there were only fifty participants from Tonga and six from Vanuatu (Australian Government 2013). The largest number of participants was in 2011–12, when 1072 workers were involved, mostly from Tonga (834), but with others from Vanuatu, East Timor, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, and Samoa (Australian Government 2013). In 2012–13, however, only thirty-four workers participated in the program (Australian Government 2013). These numbers are not only a significant shortfall from the 800 available visas (except for 2011–12) but many fewer than in the New Zealand scheme, which issues 5,000 to 8,000 visas annually, or the Canadian program, with more than 24,000 annual participants (Gibson and McKenzie 2011, 3). The international financial crisis has no doubt been partially responsible for the slow start, as it has affected supply and demand in the agricultural sector. The program has also been criticized for being bureaucratic and inflexible, which has led to some recent policy changes, including having workers incur more of the costs of domestic and international travel and reducing the minimum terms of employment (Maclellan 2011). Other reasons include lack of labour demand, lack of publicity and affirmative information about the program, and employers’ perceptions of perceived risks and costs (Hay and Howes 2012). The public debates around the program, however, also reveal a strong undercurrent of xenophobic c­ oncerns



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in Australia with respect to opening the doors to more Pacific Islanders. In the following section I turn to analyze some of these debates and, in particular, how they feed into the ways that temporariness is built into the program. I do so by drawing upon the comparable programs in New Zealand and Canada, upon which the SWP has been modelled. As these examples suggest, xenophobia is not isolated to the Australian case, but rather it is endemic in the promotion of temporary labour programs. In fact, the temporariness of these programs needs to be understood as a response to fears about racialized and low-skilled workers. making labour mobility temporary

Despite the considerable support for the SWP in the agricultural sector and the unions, there has also been a good deal of public apprehension in Australia. Concerns have revolved around two fears: (1) that migrants would “steal” Australian jobs and (2) that migrants would overstay their visas and try to settle permanently. Supporters of the SWP have addressed the first fear by stressing that the programs are only for agricultural sectors where it has been demonstrated that domestic labour is not readily available, and which are struggling because of lack of workers. Some have even sought to allay fears by arguing that a temporary scheme would actually help create domestic jobs through expanded economic development in add-on sectors, such as supply and processing (Australian Senate 2006, 7). With regard to the second fear, proponents have insisted that the design of the program makes it unlikely that migrants would overstay their visas. Temporariness is institutionalized in the structure of the SWP. Drawing upon Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), which is described as exemplary in this respect, the SWP embeds circular employment (Mares 2007). In the SAWP, very few migrants overstay the terms of their visa because the possibility of future employment is conditional on their timely departure. Participants in SAWP cannot stay longer than allowed by their eightmonth visa, and attempts to settle permanently are discouraged by forbidding dependents from accompanying workers. There is also no gateway to permanent settlement provided to temporary agricultural workers. Every effort is made not to hire high-skilled workers because it is assumed that such workers might try to move into other market sectors to try to leverage an extended stay.

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The SWP includes these provisions in an attempt to ensure that participants return to their countries of origin. What has been little addressed in these debates, however, is the xenophobia that infuses these fears and that pervades temporary labour agreements more generally. In recent years in Australia, there have been virulent debates around ship-borne asylum seekers, which form a backdrop to the discussions around racialized foreign workers.2 As Anthony Burke has remarked vis-à-vis this debate, “given the lack of concern in the Australian community about the thousands of Europeans who overstay their visas, it was right to assume that the perceived threat of the boat people really lay in their difference – Muslim, Coloured, Oriental – in their status as an unadmissable excess that the pure being of the Australian subject could not abide” (Burke 2008, 213). Following Burke, it is also important to note that the European backpackers that he mentions were overstaying their visas and working underground in the agricultural sector. Their presence was tolerated, whereas an influx of Pacific Islanders was seen to be unbearable. This xenophobia was constituted not only in terms of race but also in terms of class. As World Bank documents reveal, the migration of low-skilled workers is not usually tolerated: “the movement of unskilled labour warrants further policy attention, recognizing the obvious fact that large or permanent movements of unskilled workers would not be acceptable to the citizens of most destination countries” (World Bank 2006, 10; emphasis added). This resonates clearly in Australia, where it is a common perception that only “skill rich and capital-rich migrants” have a positive impact on the nation (Mares 2007, 72). Indeed, while the Howard government refused to consider temporary mobility for low-skilled workers, the numbers of temporary visas for high-skilled, professional workers increased exponentially under his tenure, which will be discussed in more detail below. Zolberg (1988, 31) astutely argues that “the very characteristics that make these human beings suitable as labor renders them undesirable from the perspective of membership in the receiving society” (quoted in Leitner 1995, 262). The hostility toward including these racialized, low-skilled workers in the community propels the temporariness of these programs. As a result, already marginalized populations are made more vulnerable. Temporary migrants have a liminal status in their receiving country, and they have no claims to the formal rights of citizenship, nor to informal modes



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of inclusion, belonging, representation, and participation. Even the World Bank, which by and large does not concern itself with workers’ rights and which fully supports temporary labour migration, has recognized that these migrants are at risk precisely because of their temporariness (World Bank 2006, 132). Examples from the Canadian SAWP and the New Zealand Recognised Seasonal Employer Work Policy (RSE) highlight some of these vulnerabilities. SAWP was introduced in the 1960s with countries of the Caribbean and expanded to include Mexico in 1974. Mexico is now by far the largest partner, with more than 15,000 Mexicans working in Canada annually under this program. SAWP is recognized as highly successful, and it has become the model of agricultural mobility programs around the world, yet numerous studies over the last decade detail the precariousness of workers in the program (e.g., Basok 2002; Binford 2002; Lee 2003; Preibisch 2010). Some of these vulnerabilities are endemic: for example, workers pay into the employment insurance programs but are not eligible to recoup monies if they become unemployed (Basok 2002). Other problems arise because of the unregulated power of the employers, who are not made to adhere to minimal standards. Worker testimonials, for example, detail cases of poor and inadequate housing (Mares 2007). Protocols concerning health and safety are not always adhered to, and there are many instances where workers have had to spray biochemicals on crops without adequate protective gear (United Food and Commercial Workers Union 2011; Lee 2003). As Nandita Sharma argues, it is precisely because of the temporary status of these workers that standard practices can be and are sidestepped (Sharma 2006). Other vulnerabilities arise over the limited forms of appeal available to temporary workers. In SAWP, consular representatives of the sending countries are meant to help mediate worker complaints, but they often try to smooth over difficulties to ensure continuation of the program at the expense of worker interests (Basok 2002). The complaints-based model does not serve workers well. Workers are largely reliant on their employers to supply adequate employment conditions. Many employers do, but in the situations where they do not, recourse is limited. This is especially problematic for SAWP workers as they are effectively bonded to their employers for the duration of their stay in Canada, and they cannot easily seek out other employers if they are being mistreated. The threat of deportation – the costs of which are to be paid by the workers – is

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also always held out as a threat to discipline workers and to prevent them from making complaints, and cases have been recorded of rights-claiming workers not being rehired or being sent home (Lee 2003; United Food and Commercial Workers Union 2011, 3). Nandita Sharma thus describes this situation as a modern form of “indentured labour” (Sharma 2006; see also Depatie-Pelletier 2008). Finally, SAWP workers experience ongoing health concerns that are generated by their living and working conditions, low income levels, lack of social support, and lack of access to health care (McLaughlin 2010; Preibisch and Hennebry 2011). Examples of worker vulnerability in the RSE in New Zealand are not as extensive, but this policy also has a much shorter history than SAWP. The RSE is open to all Pacific Island Forum nations, but in its first years it has focused on workers from Kiribati, Tonga, Vanuatu, Samoa, and Tuvalu, with some countries from Southeast Asia also participating (Maclellan 2008a). About 5,000 (and up to 8,000) visas are issued annually, with more than 100 registered employers. Nic Maclellan, who has written extensively about the scheme, has identified some of the problems faced by the workers, including issues such as inadequate accommodation and unfair pay, as with SAWP (Maclellan 2008b). There have also been examples of extra scrutiny of behaviour off-orchard, such as drinking, which he notes “raises serious questions about the fundamental rights and autonomy of Pacific Island seasonal workers. Workers’ lawful leisure time activities should not be subject to the discretion of employers or immigration authorities” (Maclellan 2008b, 5). The research on the RSE has also been particularly helpful at outlining the impact of the policy on families who are left behind. For economic reasons, there are already a large number of examples of mobile Pacific Islanders – largely men – who have left their home country in search of jobs, such as Fijians in Iraq (Australian Senate 2006). The absence of men and male role models poses challenges to traditional family structures and patterns of family reconciliation (Maclellan and Mares 2006, 145). And there are increased rates of depression for overseas workers and their spouses, as well as increased use of alcohol, which can lead to domestic violence and risky sexual activity that heightens exposure to sexually transmitted diseases (Maclellan and Mares 2006, 146). Research on temporary worker programs is drawing the inherent problems to light. To summarize: working and housing c­ onditions



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are often inadequate; workers are effectively indentured to their employers; processes regarding complaints, appeals, and compensation are limited or non-existent; worker behaviour is highly scrutinized; and the temporary but extended absences from family and community create problems both for those who are migratory and those who are left at home. How these issues are addressed as Australia moves forward with its permanent program, the Seasonal Worker Program, has yet to be seen. Notably, however, there are examples of progressive policy transfer across the various programs. Insights from SAWP and RSE are being gleaned to incorporate more protections for workers in Australia. Maclellan, for example, draws upon the RSE to recommend that the SWP adopt similar recruitment and pre-departure briefings with information on finances, social norms, and health issues, including HIV-AIDS (Maclellan 2008a, 50). The pastoral care that is provided in New Zealand, through church, sports, and other social organizations, has been taken up by the SWP, which now allocates AUD$400,000 a year to community grants, and some local advisory bodies have been formed to address the multiple concerns of local and foreign stakeholders, including employers, unions, and churches (Maclellan 2012). Maclellan has also examined some of the flaws of the RSE to argue that workers need more advance training and information dissemination, particularly with respect to housing, working conditions, and pay (Maclellan 2008b). He also argues for more opportunities to develop people-topeople and community-to-community links across “sister” cities in sending and receiving countries: these would help develop long-term relationships across the communities and might also ensure more opportunities to sustain long-distance family and community relationships (Maclellan 2008a). Research across the programs is thus helping to draw awareness to the issues and to encourage improvements. Increased activism has also been crucial to securing more justice for migrants. In Canada, numerous organizations are involved, including the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the Agriculture Workers Alliance, Justicia for Migrant Workers, the Canadian Labour Congress, and the Federations of Labour in Alberta and British Columbia. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, for example, has launched a case against the province of Ontario for excluding agricultural workers from its provincial Occupational Health and Safety Act and for imposing premiums of up to Can$11 million a year for

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e­ mployment insurance programs for which the workers are ineligible (Metropolis 2008, 14). Moreover, there are increasing opportunities for transnational activism. In the North American context, crossborder organizing has, perhaps ironically, been facilitated through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) side agreement on labour (Gabriel 2007, 141). National and regional groups work with international organizations such as the Global Workers Justice Alliance to hold workshops, issue publications, and initiate joint protests/actions in Canada and sending countries, such as Mexico and Guatemala. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, for example, has also partnered with the Mexican state and workers’ advocacy groups to secure the rights of Mexican workers in Canada, including the right to associate and bargain, develop protocols around safety training, and the develop an appeals protest (United Food and Commercial Workers Union 2011). These examples provide compelling evidence that comparative research and activism have been crucial to building more safeguards and representation for workers. Yet while the results demonstrate clear benefits for sending and receiving countries, employers, and employees, these protections do not remove the fundamental vulnerability of these workers that is attached to their temporariness. As temporary workers, they do not necessarily have any recourse to access human rights protections, which continue to be mediated and meted out by nation-states. Despite any progressive steps that have been made through activism and policy transfer, the status of temporary workers remains temporary, and hence these workers remain vulnerable. As temporary mobility is being expanded and in turn being made permanent, the ways that temporariness reinforces structural inequalities needs to be addressed. It is to this that I turn in the following section. mobility, trade, and labour markets

Temporariness creates vulnerability. This concern is being amplified as temporary worker programs are being negotiated as part of or alongside neoliberal trade agreements. In the Pacific region, the opening up of temporary labour markets is seen, particularly by Australia, as a mechanism for pushing forward the expansion of free trade. The Pacific Island countries already have a free trade agreement among themselves. Australia and New Zealand would



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like to be included. But, as churches and non-governmental organizations such as the Pacific Network on Globalization have identified, the long-term social and economic implications of liberalized trade in the region are problematic (Maclellan and Mares 2006, 140, 145).3 Among some of the broader concerns are the following: (1) the removal of import tariffs on Australian and New Zealand goods, (2) the opening up of island economies to competition from larger markets, (3) allowing larger markets unfettered access to Pacific service markets, and (4) the elimination of regulations on regional foreign investment (Kelsey 2004, 2005). Many countries of the South Pacific (e.g., Samoa, Kiribati, Tonga, and Vanuatu) rely upon tariffs on imports for up to a third of their revenue  – tens of millions of dollars a year (see also Morgan 2010). This revenue is earmarked for public services (health, education, etc.). Cuts to tariffs would thus likely jeopardize access and availability. Furthermore, it is argued that the more competitive business environment would undermine local, protective policies in place and would likely precipitate the closure of local businesses while opening the door to multinationals or international companies. Finally, the push for foreign investment would encourage the development of a private property market that would erode the communal rights to land among indigenous peoples. Temporary labour agreements are being presented as a way to make palatable the expansion of free trade to these countries (Maclellan 2008b, 6). The long-standing interest in and need for Pacific Island governments to create employment is used as leverage to push through problematic free trade agreements. When labour mobility is conjoined with free trade agreements, however, there are reasons to worry. First, as Maclellan notes, negotiations of this kind treat “seasonal workers as commodities to be traded between countries” (Maclellan 2008b, 31). The interests of the market are prioritized, while workers are expected to be flexible and mobile cogs chasing changing spatial fixes of capital. Maclellan argues that if labour mobility is to be negotiated, it should not be just about the employer-employee relationship, but about social, cultural, and economic development that is attuned to worker rights and community success (Maclellan 2008b, 31). This raises a second point: linking labour mobility with trade agreements undermines the development mandate that has been promoted as a central objective of the RSE and SWP (Roth 2009).

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Free trade agreements are driven by competition and profit ­making, whereas a pro-development agenda would focus upon ­“asymmetrical ­obligations” and address inequities (Morgan 2010, 10; emphasis in the original). As noted above, the shift to a free trade agenda is particularly worrisome in the South Pacific, where a Western model of economic development is not appropriate for small island economies, especially when there is no possibility of a level playing field in negotiations (Maclellan and Mares 2006; see also Kelsey 2005). The outcome is more likely a reprise of colonial domination that is manifest through economic rule (Duffield 2005). Thus, linking labour mobility with trade negotiations appears to undermine Rudd’s promise of a more open, cooperative, and constructive relationship with the region: it reflects the interests of a domestic “muscular neoliberalism” rather than a concerted attempt to building a new community. A third concern is that trade agreements tend to focus only on temporary mobility for skilled or professional workers. The North American example is instructive in this respect. NAFTA, signed in 1992, does include labour mobility provisions, but only with respect to “high-skilled,” professional workers (Metropolis 2008; Gabriel 2007). The migration of other workers has proved to be too contentious for inclusion, particularly given the long-standing debates between the United States and Mexico regarding undocumented workers.4 Moreover, while there is no explicit differentiation among the three countries under NAFTA, the flows of professional workers between Canada and the United States are much greater than any of the flows with Mexico. As Christina Gabriel argues, rather than open up opportunities, the NAFTA provisions reinscribe and reinforce “already existing patterns of inclusion and exclusion” (Gabriel 2007, 138). The attention to skilled and professional workers is resurfacing in the ongoing negotiations around the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which draws upon NAFTA as a model (Gabriel 2007, 138). GATS, which is a treaty of the World Trade Organization, seeks to open up international markets in services. Mode 4 of these negotiations addresses the mobility of people. As with NAFTA, the discussions have primarily been about the movement of skilled workers and are geared to an increasingly liberalized economy in the service sector. GATS will thus, like NAFTA, not create opportunities for more vulnerable populations, certainly not initially. Hélène ­Pellerin argues that GATS is indicative of a more wholesale shift from a



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s­ tate-centered migration regime to a trade-oriented regime whereby the mobility of labour is “subordinated to the mobility of goods and services” ­(Pellerin 2008, 31). As she explains, “the focus on temporary migration for enhancing trade tends to reduce the development goals of sending states to mere commercial strategies” (Pellerin 2008, 39). The contradictory interests of sending and receiving countries are hidden. There is limited, if any, discussion of the origins of the uneven development of global capitalism and colonial resource exploitation that underpins global inequities between “developed” and “lesser developed” countries. Moreover, the fundamental temporariness of the workers and the limits that are placed upon their access to citizenship are not up for negotiation when mobility is embedded in a trade negotiation. Temporariness always embeds a notion of disposability, a disposability that is becoming a permanent fixture of the international capitalist landscape. This is also true with respect to skilled workers, as Eve Haque and Parvati Raghuram discuss in their chapters in this volume. Although skilled workers may not be as vulnerable as lowskilled workers in some ways, such as employment status, class, education, and family mobility, they face other challenges arising from their temporariness. In Australia, for example, there has been an exponential increase of migrants on the 457 visa, introduced by the Howard government, which enables employers to bring businessclass workers into the country on four-year contracts. Concerns similar to those facing agricultural workers have arisen: for example, that workers are overworked and underpaid; that unauthorized employer deductions are made; and that the employment is irregular, especially in the hospitality, construction, and meat-processing industries (Australian Senate 2006, viii; Mares 2007, 74). In 2008, an Integrity Review, otherwise known as the Deegan Report, was undertaken to address these allegations, many of which were substantiated.5 Thus, while skilled migrants have more social and economic capital upon which to draw, their temporariness also renders them open to abuse by their employers. As the example of the 457 visa indicates, while the shift from a state-centered migration regime to a trade-oriented regime is happening through trade agreements, it is also advancing independently as well. Employers are being given more decision-making powers and jurisdiction over immigration matters, both for skilled and nonskilled workers. In Canada, for example, there has been a notable

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shift to an employer-driven migration scheme with the i­ntroduction, in 2002, of a new temporary program, the Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) Program for Occupations Requiring Lower Levels of Formal Training. This program extends to all work, not just agricultural, that is considered low skill (i.e., which requires only a high-school diploma or on-the-job training). It does not encompass countryspecific agreements, as with SAWP, and it draws upon foreign nationals from around the world. A report from the auditor general has revealed that there is less protection and employer oversight than under SAWP (United Food and Commercial Workers Union 2011, 10–11). Many more employers are turning to this program to hire foreign workers; there has been a 500% growth in the program since 2006 (United Food and Commercial Workers Union 2011, 11). Although immigration policy has historically been tied to labour demand, there is an increasing tendency to make temporary mobility programs employer driven and directed. In these situations, employers (not states) are entrusted with decision-making regarding migration and act as the guarantors of human rights. While many employers are compassionate, there are fewer safeguards in place and less recourse for employees when things go wrong. Placing immigration decisions in the hands of employers is also problematic. Employers are using this opportunity to determine the social composition of their workers, for example, in terms of nationality and gender, in ways that they deem beneficial to their businesses (Preibisch 2010, 418). This not only has implications for migration policies – which are re-embedding gender, race, and class as criteria for migration – but for domestic labour. Finally, as Kerry Preibisch has noted, temporary labour is being used as a way of institutionalizing labour market flexibility so as to increase the profit margins of employers (Preibisch 2010, 406). As she notes, “there is overwhelming evidence from high income countries that the availability of migrant labor, regardless of the mechanism under which it is made available, has had a negative effect on wage levels and working conditions in agriculture” (Preibisch 2010, 427–8). Thus, temporary labour agreements are being used to reorganize domestic production and the workplace, while also creating a more competitive, international market for labour that can circumvent human rights and regulations. Temporary labour policies are thus enforcing structural adjustments that make temporariness permanent in the global capital economy.



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conclusions

In its report of 2008, the International Organization for Migration observed that “the world appears to be on the threshold of a new era in temporary labour migration programmes” (cited in Preibisch 2010, 405). Yet, temporary labour is not new: there is a legacy of disposable labour, from the Chinese labourers on the Canadian railroads to the thousands of Melanesian labourers who were “stolen” to work in the Queensland sugar cane industry in the late 19th century. In both cases the workers were quickly made unwelcome once their labour was no longer required (Maclellan and Mares 2006; Chand 2006). These labour pressures are equally in evidence today with the proliferation of temporary labour mobility agreements being implemented in permanent or quasi-permanent ways (Castles 2006; Martin 2008, Preibisch 2010). In the United Kingdom, there is a new Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) geared specifically to post-secondary students. In the European Union, there is increasing recourse to seasonal workers, despite the apparent failings of the German Gastarbeiter program. Countries as diverse as Singapore, Kuwait, and Switzerland have all introduced temporary worker initiatives (Ruhs 2003). The United States alone has over 80 different kinds of temporary visas (Hennebry and Preibisch 2010, e20). This diversity also speaks to the ways that temporary workers are getting taken up in other labour sectors, not just agriculture, and are even taken up in “high-skilled” sectors, as noted above. While there are significant differences across the multiple forms of temporary worker programs that are being implemented, a comparative approach draws out some of the structural commonalities. Among these is the tendency to use temporariness as a mechanism to articulate xenophobic fears rooted in classism and racism, while pursuing development and trade objectives at home and abroad. As noted throughout this chapter, the limitations and constraints placed on the racialized bodies of low-skilled workers are much more onerous than those facing other kinds of mobile labour. This points to the ongoing continuities between older forms of colonialism and contemporary articulations of muscular neoliberalism, especially as temporary labour agreements are linked up with regional geopolitical and security concerns. As Hameiri suggests, this is a risk management approach that fuses security and development concerns in that economic initiatives are used to ­contain

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f­oreign domestic problems and their spillover effects (Hameiri 2008, 257). In an era of heightened security post-9/11, when migration is increasingly securitized, we can expect temporary migration programs to expand even further as they are seen as a mechanism to regulate mobility in more highly constrained ways (Bigo 2002). As Hennebry and Preibisch note vis-à-vis temporary worker programs, they “are generally designed to prevent settlement and restrict mobility” (Hennebry and Preibisch 2010: e20). They are about limiting citizenship for these groups of workers (Sharma 2006). The fact that these workers do not have full access to citizenship means that they are generally more open to scrutiny, surveillance, and regulation. Effectively, temporary labour provides expanded rights to employers to monitor their workers, while limiting the rights that those workers have in the workplace and beyond. Thus, as ­Hennebry and Preibish argue, temporary migration policies need also to be understood “as part of efforts to restructure labour-capital relations within their borders” (Hennebry and Preibisch 2010, e21). As Jenna Hennebry writes, “the life of a temporary agricultural migrant, particularly in the SAWP, can be characterized as a state of permanent temporariness – a transnational life of going back and forth, largely beyond the control of the worker, belonging neither here nor there” (Hennebry 2012, 12). An analysis of the proliferation of temporary labour mobility agreements thus needs to focus on the terms of each individual protocol and the implications for its participants but also on the broader trends around mobility and the ways that labour and bodies are being regulated in the global system. As Arturo Escobar has argued, violence is never simply manifest in the muscular armies of conquest, but rather it is perpetuated through economic policy and development (Escobar 2004). Only by addressing structural inequities and their reconstitution in the contemporary moment of securitization will we be able to work toward the liberation of temporariness. acknowledgments

I am grateful to Professor Jo Sharp for organizing sessions on “subaltern geopolitics” at the 2009 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, at which the first iteration of this chapter was presented. Many thanks to the editors for organizing the



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Toronto workshop at which an early version of this chapter was presented and for putting together this edited collection. Comments from the workshop participants and the editors were extremely helpful in revising and honing the arguments of this chapter. The constructive feedback from the two reviewers is also much appreciated.

notes

1 This is not to suggest that remittances aren’t without problems (see Maclellan and Mares 2006). The support that they provide is individualized, rather than structural. The transfers can also be unreliable, especially in the long term if migrants settle overseas and their contributions wane as they set up their own families. Consumption is privileged over investment and thus may not provide long-term benefits to economic development. Finally, there are indications that remittances push up domestic currency values and thus encourage imports (and discourage exports), which can increase the trade gap between countries (Mares 2007, 81). Despite all these problems, however, remittances clearly continue to make an important contribution to the economy for Pacific nations. 2 Concerns about asylum seekers came to a head with the MV Tampa incident in August 2001. The MV Tampa was a Norwegian ship that had rescued over 430 asylum seekers from a sinking boat. Determined to prevent its passengers from seeking asylum on Australian shores, Australian authorities denied the boat permission to land. Troops were sent on board to secure the ship, while the passengers, stuck in limbo, became increasingly sick and hungry. Shortly after the MV Tampa incident, Prime Minister Howard generated even more public panic when he wrongly alleged that asylum seekers on another boat were throwing their children overboard in an attempt to morally blackmail Australia to accept them as refugees (Rajaram 2003, 303). These events led to the creation of Howard’s “Pacific Solution” discussed above. 3 The Pacific Network on Globalization statement is available at http:// www.solomonstarnews.com/news/national/8656--ten-reasons-tochallenge-pacer-plus. 4 Mexico has long pushed for a labour agreement for “low-skilled” workers, especially alongside negotiations for deepening NAFTA (Gabriel 2007). More expanded forms of temporary labour were discussed as part of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) agreement that was negotiated between Canada, the United States, and Mexico (Gilbert 2007). The move

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toward regularizing undocumented workers, however, was highly contested. These proposals have not moved ahead, and as of 2009 the SPP was declared to be no longer an active initiative. 5 A copy of the report is available at the Australian Government Department of Immigration and Citizenship website: http://www.immi.gov.au/ skilled/skilled-workers/_pdf/457-integrity-review.pdf. references

AusAID. 2008. Pacific Economic Survey 2008. Canberra: AusAID. Australian Government. 2013. Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme Data Summary, February 2009 to September 2012. Canberra: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. Australian Senate. 2003. A Pacific Engaged: Australia’s Relations with Papua New Guinea and the Island States of the Southwest Pacific. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. – 2006. Perspectives on the Future of the Harvest Labour Force. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Basok, Tanya. 2002. Tortillas and Tomatoes: Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bigo, Didier. 2002. Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease. Alternatives 27(Feb):63–92. Binford, Leigh. 2002. Social and Economic Contradictions of Rural Migrant Contract Labor between Taxcala, Mexico and Canada. Culture and Agriculture 24(2):1–19. Burke, Anthony. 2008. Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Carroll, Toby, and Shahar Hameiri. 2007. Good Governance and Security: The Limits of Australia’s New Aid Program. Journal of Contemporary Asia 37(4): 410–30. Castles, Stephen. 2006. Guestworkers in Europe: A Resurrection? International Migration Review 40(4):741–6. Chand, Satish. 2006. Viewpoint: Labour Mobility – Not Simple Black and White Issue. Islands Business, November 22. Depatie-Pelletier, Eugenie. 2008. Under Legal Practices Similar to Slavery According to the un Convention: Canada’s “Non White” “Temporary” Foreign Workers in “Low-Skilled” Occupations. Montreal: Hans and Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law, McGill University. http://oppenheimer.mcgill.ca/Under-legal-practices-similar-to



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Duffield, Mark. 2005. Getting Savages to Fight Barbarians: Development, Security and the Colonial Present. Conflict, Security and Development 5(2):141–60. Escobar, Arturo. 2004. Development, Violence and the New Imperial Order. Development 47(1):15–21. Gabriel, Christina. 2007. Governance, Trade and Labour Mobility. In Neo-Liberalism, State Power and Global Governance, ed. Simon Lee and Stephen McBride, 127–43. Dordrecht: Springer. Gibson, John, and David McKenzie. 2011. Australia’s Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme (PSWPS): Development Impacts in the First Two Years. Department of Economics Working Paper in Economics 09/11. Hamilton, New Zealand: University of Waikato. ftp://mngt.waikato. ac.nz/RePec/wai/econwp/1109.pdf Gibson, John, David McKenzie, and Halahingano Rohorua. 2008. How Pro-Poor is the Selection of Seasonal Migrant Workers from Tonga Under New Zealand’s Recognised Seasonal Employer Program? Pacific Economic Bulletin 23(3):187–204. Gilbert, Emily. 2007. Leaky Borders and Solid Citizens: Governing Security, Prosperity and Quality of Life in a North American Partnership. Antipode 39(1):77–98. Hameiri, Shahar. 2007. The Trouble with RAMSI: Reexamining the Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands. Contemporary Pacific 19(2):409–41. – 2008. Risk Management, Neo-Liberalism and the Securitization of the Australian Aid Program. Australian Journal of International Affairs 62(3):357–71. Hay, Danielle, and Stephen Howes. 2012. Australia’s Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme: Why Has Take-Up been So Low? Discussion paper 17. Canberra: Development Policy Centre, Australian National University. Hennebry, Jenna. 2012. Permanently Temporary? Agricultural Migrant Workers and their Integration in Canada. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Hennebry, Jenna, and Kerry Preibisch. 2010. A Model for Managed Migration? Re-examining Best Practices in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. International Migration 50(S1): e19–e40. Hyndman, Jennifer, and Mountz, Alison. 2007. Refuge or Refusal? The Geography of Exclusion. In Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence, ed. Derek Gregory and Allan Pred, 77–92. New York: Routledge. Kabutaulaka, Tarcisius Tara. 2004. “Failed State” and the War on Terror: Intervention in Solomon Islands. Asia Pacific Issues 72:1–8.

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Kelsey, Jane. 2004. Big Brothers Behaving Badly – The Implications for the Pacific Islands of the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations. Suva, Fiji: Pacific Network on Globalization. Kelsey, Jane. 2005. A People’s Guide to the Pacific’s Economic Partnership Agreement. Suva, Fiji: World Council of Churches, Office in the Pacific. http://aftinet.org.au/cms/sites/default/files/APeople’sGuidetoPacific EUEPA.pdf Klapdor, Michael. 2008. Background Note: New Zealand’s Seasonal Guest Worker Scheme. Canberra: Parliament of Australia. http:// www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/ ­Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/0708/NZSeasonalWorker Lee, Min Sook. 2003. El Contrato. Montreal: National Film Board of Canada. Leitner, Helga. 1995. International Migration and the Politics of Admission and Exclusion in Postwar Europe. Political Geography 14(3):259– 78. Maclellan, Nic. 2008a. Seasonal Workers for Australia – Lessons from New Zealand. Farm Policy Journal 5(3):43–53. – 2008b. Workers for All Seasons? Issues from New Zealand’s Recognized Seasonal Employer (rse) Program. Melbourne: Swinburne University of Technology, Institute for Social Research. – 2011. Australia Revamps Troubled Scheme. DevPolicyBlog. Canberra: Development Policy Centre. http://devpolicy.org/australia-revampstroubled-scheme/ – 2012. Australia Extends Seasonal Worker Programme: Now It Also Wants Islanders to Work in Tourism. Islands Business January. http:// www.islandsbusiness.com/2012/1/business/australia-extends-seasonalworker-program/ Maclellan, Nic, and Peter Mares. 2006. Labour Mobility in the Pacific: Creating Seasonal Work Programs in Australia. In Globalisation and Governance in the Pacific Islands, ed. Stewart Firth, 137–71. Canberra: Australian National University E-Press. Mares, Peter. 2006. Labour Shortages in Murray Valley Horticulture: A Survey of Growers’ Needs and Attitudes. Melbourne: Swinburne University of Technology. – 2007. Objections to Pacific Seasonal Work Programs in Rural Australia. Public Policy 2(1):68–87. Martin, Philip. 2008. Low and Semi-Skilled Workers Abroad. In World Migration Report: Managing Labour Mobility in the Evolving Global Economy. Geneva: International Organization for Migration. http://



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publications.iom.int/bookstore/index.php?main_page=product_ info&cPath=37&products_id=62 McLaughlin, Janet. 2010. Spotlight on Research: Determinants of Health and Migrant Farm Workers in Canada. Ottawa: Health Canada. http:// www.hc-sc.gc.ca/sr-sr/pubs/hpr-rpms/bull/2010-health-sante-migr/indexeng.php#a12 Metropolis. 2008. Dialogue on Labour Mobility in North America, Tlatelolco University Centre, Mexico City, 234 June 2008. Ottawa: Carleton University. http://international.metropolis.net/pdf/dialogue_ on_labour_mobility_08.pdf Morgan, Wesley. 2010. Putting Development on the Agenda: Negotiating a Regional Trade Agreement for the Pacific Islands Forum. http:// apsa2010.com.au/full-papers/pdf/APSA2010_0076.pdf Pellerin, Hélène. 2008. Governing Labour Migration in the Era of GATS: The Growing Influence of lex mercatoria. In Governing International Labour Migration: Current Issues, Challenges and Dilemmas, ed. ­Christina Gabriel and Hélène Pellerin, 27–42. London: Routledge. Perera, Suvendrini. 2007. A Pacific Zone? (In)Security, Sovereignty, and Stories of the Pacific Borderscape. In Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, ed. Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Gundy-Warr, 201–27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Preibisch, Kerry. 2010. Pick-your-own-labour: Migrant Workers and Flexibility in Canadian Labour. International Migration Review 44(2):404– 41. Preibisch, Kerry, and Jenna Hennebry. 2011. Temporary Migration, Chronic Effects: The Health of International Migrant Workers in Canada. Canadian Medical Association Journal 183(9):1033–8. Rajaram, Prem Kumar. 2003. “Making Place”: The “Pacific Solution” and Australian Emplacement in the Pacific and on Refugee Bodies. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24(3):290–306. Roth, Paul. 2009. Migrant Labor in New Zealand. Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal 41(1):67–90. Ruhs, Martin. 2003. Temporary Foreign Worker Programmes: Policies, Adverse Consequences, and the Need to Make Them Work. Working Paper No. 56. San Diego: Centre for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California. Sharma, Nandita. 2006. Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of “Migrant Workers” in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. United Food and Commercial Workers Union. 2011. The Status of Migrant Farm Workers in Canada 2010–2011. Toronto: United

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Food and Commercial Workers Union. http://www.ufcw.ca/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2244%3A2010-2011migrant-farm-workers-report-published&catid=6%3Adirectionsnewsletter&Itemid=6&lang=en Vosko, Leah. 2006. Precarious Employment: Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. World Bank. 2006. At Home and Away: Expanding Job Opportunities for Pacific Islanders through Labour Mobility. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

pa r t t h r e e

Temporary Status, Social Welfare, and Marginalization

7 Brain Circulation or Precarious Labour? Conceptualizing Temporariness in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service1 pa rvat i r a g h u r a m

Possession of skills alters the experience and implications of temporariness among migrants. While temporariness is associated with precarity for lesser skilled workers, the idea of precariousness is less readily applied to skilled workers. Rather, as the mobility of skilled workers is treated preferentially within contemporary society, these workers come to be associated with privileged exemptions, rather than exclusion. As a result, temporariness among skilled migrants is often redeemed through notions such as “brain circulation,” which are seen as beneficial to both the migrants and to the societies through which they circulate. Yet the tensions between temporariness and permanence can also stalk skilled migrants. This chapter explores some of these tensions as they were played out among migrant doctors in the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom (UK), where they have played a key role since 1948, when the NHS was established. Migrants have constituted up to a third of all doctors and a quarter of nurses working in the UK, and they have fuelled the growth of a number of specialties such as geriatrics, psychiatry, and general practice (Raghuram, Bornat et al. 2010). However, migrants were often incorporated on a temporary basis, as a result of notions of temporariness embedded in migration regulations, rights to work and various types of jobs, and the nature of training. This chapter explores the factors that led to temporariness and how these uncertainties were affected by enduring institutionalized practices in medicine. Migrant doctors’ temporary status allowed a disavowal of their contributions to the national

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health system. Their experiences exemplify the operation of temporariness and precarity among skilled migrants. Although doctors were categorized as temporary migrants, their migration was underpinned by, and embedded in, long-term labour market relationships that had been built up during the era of empire. Under colonialism, but even through most of the postcolonial era, the UK drew upon a circulating labour market of migrants from different parts of the empire. The UK also remained the main centre of postgraduate medical training for its colonies so that doctors from Australia, New Zealand, India, Egypt, Nigeria, and many other countries of the old and new commonwealth came to the UK to acquire the training and the global branding that postgraduate qualification in the UK offered (Raghuram 2009). Hence, both the labour market and training provision drew on the British Empire as its primary spatial referent. This spatial referent had a lasting quality that enabled varieties of temporariness to proliferate among doctors traversing national boundaries. Such relationships are often ignored in migration research because of the preferred spatial lens through which medical migration is understood – that of the nation-state. In the next section I present the background to temporariness as a concept that applies to skilled migration and the issues that it throws up. The third section outlines the immigration and medical regulations that shaped medical migration and how they produced regimes of temporariness, while the fourth explores the ways in which temporariness was shaped by relationships of continuity. The contradictions posed by these two systems – of temporariness and continuity – are explored in the fifth section, while the final section discusses what this case can tell us about theorizing temporariness spatially, the subjectivities that need to be produced to enable such migration, and how this analysis can inform wider migration research. The chapter ends by querying whether the spatiotemporal frameworks involved in securing permanence in migration are peculiar to skilled migrants and whether, as such, skilled migrants should indeed be treated as privileged exemptions from the broad literature on temporary migration. t e m p o r a r y a n d p e r m a n e n t m i g r at i o n

Seeking permanence has been the Holy Grail for migration theorists of all political persuasions. Pro-migration theorists argue in favour



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of the security that permanent residency, and its associated set of rights, can bring migrants, while for others critical of migration it is precisely by expunging those who are unassimilable that the nation seeks permanence and continuity. Both views are impelled by a teleology of stasis associated with permanence within the dynamic world of migration. The first group seeks the security and right to stasis on behalf of the migrant while the second does so on behalf of the nonmigrants who are seen to make up an unchanging nation. Temporariness becomes the “other” of permanence. In a rare venture, this volume aims to move beyond this teleology by recuperating temporariness in multiple ways. It seeks to “liberate temporariness,” from its binary opposition to permanence, by examining the intrinsically intertwined nature of permanence and temporariness that produces tensions as well as ambiguities, and by examining the possibilities for promoting inclusion that is non-territorialized, at the intersections of security, work, and settlement (see the Introduction to this volume by Latham, Vosko et al.). There are very few precedents for this task, but one such recuperation of a more active version of temporariness is offered by the transnational turn in migration theory. As Khoo, Hugo et al. (2008) argue, until recently notions of permanence, either implicitly or explicitly, underlay most migration theory. Transnationalism offered one of the first set of theoretical insights that went beyond the dichotomy of temporariness and permanence to suggest that people inhabited different spaces simultaneously (Basch, Schiller et al. 1994). Transnationalism has also been adopted as policy, especially in sending countries, which are increasingly recognizing their diasporas as part of a state-led transnationalism (Margheritis 2007). In policy terms this has led a number of sending countries to embrace their diasporic population through awards of a range of rights, including dual citizenship, to their overseas citizens, although this is being enacted in a context where the demands for exclusive attachment and “integration” by receiving countries are intensifying. Nationalism and integration have come back to the fore and receiving countries are seeking permanent and exclusive allegiance from some, if not all, of their migrants. The set of migrants whose allegiance is sought, and who is the desired subject of state transnationalism, is variable, so the conditions under which transnationalism occurs matter. The extensions of multiplicity and simultaneity gestured to by transnational ­thinking

180  Parvati Raghuram

are highly differentiated. Countries of destination, especially, are awarding skilled migrants preferential treatment with regard to mobility. Rafts of migration policies and regulations in a range of countries emphasize skills selectivity. Skills are defined loosely, in this instance, through income, qualifications, requirements of the labour market, and so on. Thus, skilled migrants, who have the ability to circulate, are being offered permanence, while lesser skilled migrants, even where they are welcomed, are increasingly (once again) caught up in transient systems of migration (Castles 2006). As a result, temporariness among lesser skilled workers is associated with precarity and vulnerability,2 while temporariness among skilled migrants can be a matter of choice. At the same time, the rights to mobility have generated a culture of circulation among skilled migrants that has freed some of them from the desire for permanence. As a result, some theorists and policy advocates working on skilled migration have abandoned the aim of permanence (Saxenian 2000; Parreñas 2010). Instead, they are celebrating mobility and temporariness. As Parreñas (2010) shows, circular migrants inhabit and perform a different kind of temporariness marked less by simultaneity of attachments to both places and more by attenuated attachments to place and by a life marked by rituals around mobility rather than permanence. Temporariness and the Mobility of Skilled Workers There are at least two modes in which temporariness among skilled migrants is celebrated. The more recent manifestation, brain circulation, draws especially on the experiences of skilled information communication and technology (ICT) workers and their entrepreneurial counterparts in the business world (Koser and Salt 1997; Xiang 2001). In this analysis, the mobility of skilled people is tied to rapid growth in the movement of goods, services, information, and capital and is theoretically and analytically linked to the large and growing literature on globalization. Migration of skilled workers involves the mobility of people as actors facilitating and regulating flows of money and goods in an increasingly interdependent world (­Beaverstock 1994). It is argued that such movement is not simply unidirectional but multilateral, often involving workers moving back to their source country, frequently as employees of firms in the original destination country (Saxenian 2000). Mobility becomes the vehicle for economic



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growth – for transfer of knowledge as well as for the creation of new knowledge (Faulconbridge 2007). In this analysis, temporariness is not coterminous with vulnerability. It can also provide the basis for enjoyment, excitement, creativity, and circulation.3 The language of circulation represented a shift away from a much older (and the second) way of temporizing skilled worker migration – through regulations facilitating the return of skilled migrants. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the impact of the mobility of highly skilled workers, particularly the movement of scientific personnel, researchers, and physicians from the Global South countries to the North, but also from UK to the United States, was critiqued (Mejía, Pizurki et al. 1979; Bhagwati 1978). Primarily through the critical tone of the language of brain drain, skilled migration came under attack because of its impact on the countries that migrants left behind. Although some positive effects of such migration such as transfer of knowledge and the flow of remittances (Docquier and Rapoport 2004; Lethbridge 2004) were highlighted, their effects were considered to be small compared with the loss that migration represented. Migration becomes an aberration from the ideal, which was considered to be ongoing, permanent attachments to the place of birth, education, or nationality. The dominance of policies of return rather than those of circulation is particularly evident in some of the traditional sectors of the brain drain literature, medicine and nursing. While recruiting mechanisms promote circulation within the medical migrant workforce, the temporariness of medical migrants differs from that experienced by ICT workers and scientists. Medical work requires knowledge of complex health systems and national regulations of welfare provision. As a result, medical workers have considerable difficulty in transferring across to new health systems. For medical workers, adapting to the work environment in a new country involves not only technical skills but also language skills and knowledge of health systems and the relations between different health professionals. Moreover, both state and professional bodies have large investments in enabling and regulating the movement of health workers, unlike in sectors such as ICT (which also have a large migrant population), so that mobility takes much longer to organize and arrange. As a result, the extent and nature of the mobility of medical professionals is different to that of ICT workers. Finally, the effects of the migration of medical workers are also much more asymmetrical (Skeldon

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2009). The negative effects of the migration of nurses and doctors, not only on the skills base of the source country but also on the provision of health care in the source country (Kingma 2006), alongside the fact that much of the movement of professionals is from the South to the North, have meant that such migration raises important ethical questions (Friedman 2004; Chikanda 2004). Hence, brain drain often continues to be the preferred analytical frame for understanding medical migration (Kangasniemi, Winters et al. 2007). Yet certain modes of understanding circulation  – its temporariness and even precarity – might also be applied to medical migration because the principle of return is often seen as one way of addressing the problems of brain drain (Friedman and Ahmed 2008). Return is debated, encouraged, and occasionally enforced (Dinar, Wield et al. 2008)4 through immigration and labour market regulations, as we will see below. However, the temporariness that ensues gains a positive ethical glow, especially in the case of medical migrants. In the rest of this chapter, I draw on the example of medical migrants to the UK to explore how temporariness was “wired” into the NHS. But first, a word about temporariness. Temporariness in this chapter is understood both as a set of temporal relations (past/present/ future) and a condition that provides the basis on which certain temporal conditions are secured. Underlying the critique of temporariness is the notion that imagining futures is only possible where there is some security and surety in the present. Thus, in this chapter, temporariness is not a retrospective understanding of an event, nor a status, but gestures toward the ability to anticipate the future. m e d i c a l m i g r at i o n a n d t h e s t r u c t u r i n g o f temporariness

Medical care is often seen as the key territory for national planning, with provision of medical services being one of the central functions of the welfare state. In the UK the NHS is seen as an exemplary outcome of the welfare state. If the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown was to be believed, the NHS is not simply a medical provider but a very “British institution.” In his speech to the Fabian Society on 14 January 2006, he stated: “A modern view of Britishness founded on responsibility, liberty and fairness” is in many ways embodied by the NHS, “one of the great British institutions – what 90 per cent of British people think portrays a positive symbol of the



Brain Circulation or Precarious Labour?  183

real Britain – founded on the core value of fairness that all should have access to medical care founded on need not ability to pay.” As Kyriakides and Virdee (2003, 283) argue, “the status of the NHS doctor largely reflects the importance of the British medical establishment as a guarantor of the moral order and the ideological resonance which ‘humanitarianism’ affords in the preservation of that order.” The NHS is thus a significant site where the “best of Britishness” is mobilized. It is central to British identity. Yet, there are, and have been, since the inception of the NHS, a large number of doctors who obtained their medical qualification outside the UK (international medical graduates) practising in the country. Medical migration to the UK has had a particularly long history, with significant numbers of doctors entering the UK even in the 1940s. Major increases occurred largely after 1953, when intake of medical posts was expanded but the number of medical students was subsequently cut because of errors in manpower planning. Emigration of doctors trained in the UK also continued, with particular peaks between 1957 and 1960 and again a decade later (Decker 2001). While the number of registered doctors increased by 48 per cent from 1986 to 1995, the proportion who qualified in the UK fell from 61 per cent to 42 per cent in the same period. Between 1995 and 2000, the proportion of doctors who qualified in the European Economic Area (EEA) increased from 3,320 to 3,640, remaining at about 6 per cent of the total hospital medical workforce, but the proportion of “other overseas” doctors increased from 23 to 26 percentage points in the same period.5 Currently, about 30 per cent of doctors practising in England are international medical graduates. South Asians form a very large part of this group. They are subject to different regulatory mechanisms  – immigration regulations as well as medical registration – that individually and together have an influence on access to training as well as career opportunities. Before 2006 temporariness and precarity were embedded in both the immigration and the labour market systems. The rest of this chapter focuses on international medical graduates and how the nexus of these two systems marked their career progression. Immigration Regulations Until the Commonwealth Immigration Act was passed in 1962, migrants from the Commonwealth did not require a visa to enter

184  Parvati Raghuram Table 7.1 Medical graduates taking up practice in the United Kingdom, 1967 Graduate status

Number

Commonwealth vouchers Commonwealth working holidaymakers Non-Commonwealth temporary workers South African Irish Total medical graduates from outside Britain

938 220 710 58 127 2,053

Source: Gish (1969, 11)

the UK. However, through the 1960s a number of changes were instituted that limited entry to those who had employment vouchers, students, Armed Forces personnel, and those of independent means. The vouchers explicitly linked migration to employment: A vouchers were offered to people with specific jobs to go to, B vouchers were offered to those with special skills in shortage areas (these vouchers were widely used by doctors and nurses), and C vouchers were offered to lesser skilled people. These vouchers permitted indefinite stay. In 1965 the number of vouchers offered was reduced to 8,500 and became available only to those with skills. The changes to regulations in 1968 more closely tied migration to labour market needs, enabling employers to effectively choose whom to let in. By removing the requirement that migrants should have two years of work experience before entering the country and emphasizing skills as the key criterion for selectivity, the regulations took into account the great demand for migrant doctors in the NHS at the time. As a result, doctors formed a significant proportion of those applying for vouchers. Doctors also entered the UK through other categories (Commonwealth Medical Advisory Bureau 1969): as students, as visitors, or as holidaymakers (table 7.1). Yet as Gish (1968a) points out, of the 8,500 vouchers issued annually in 1966, only 65 per cent (5,461) were taken up. Similarly, in 1967, although 938 Commonwealth doctors came to the UK with vouchers, this number only represented 46 per cent of the doctors entering the country that year (Gish 1969). In 1968, the B entry vouchers were awarded to 3,000 doctors. The number of medical migrants entering the UK through some of these categories was, however, much larger than the number of migrants who entered medical practice. The mismatch between job availability and migrant entry that underlies this discrepancy is



Brain Circulation or Precarious Labour?  185

Table 7.2 Immigration rules affecting Commonwealth migrant doctors Year

Regulation

1962 1971 1985 1997

Voucher system was introduced. Vouchers were abolished; work permit system was introduced. Four-year permit-free training scheme was introduced. Nature of training available to non-EU migrants was altered. Training takes five years typically but all training posts had shorter stay periods. Non-EU migration was virtually closed.

2006

reflected in medical workforce papers of the time, which indicate that the number of applicants per job opening rose up to 400. There was widespread concern that entry to the country and access to jobs should be coordinated better. The period was also marked by the emigration of some doctors. For instance, between September 1962 and September 1964, about 1,935 doctors born in the Commonwealth entered the UK (primarily with vouchers) while 1,537 left the country. Hence, doctors were not only entering but were also leaving the country. Circulation appeared to have been common even during a period that was dominated by notions of permanence (brain drain), at least with regard to skilled migration. In 1971 the voucher system was abolished and a work-permit system was introduced (see table 7.2). This was the first move to place time limits on the stay of Commonwealth citizens, and temporariness  – the mode of entry for non-Commonwealth citizens  – was extended to those from the Commonwealth. In 1985 a four-year limit to the period of stay was instituted and although initially no provision was made for extensions, over time a number of extensions came to be offered. These visas were offered specifically for training posts, but other work-related visas such as those offered to doctors on specialist schemes (e.g., the Overseas Doctors Training Scheme, introduced in 1984) were also significant in number. Visa nationals, that is, those who required a visa to work in the UK, were advised to enter the country on a visitor visa. Once registered, they could apply for jobs in the UK, which entitled them to switch from a visitor visa to an employment visa – usually the permit-free category. However, the exact type of visa that doctors obtained depended on the nature of the post they occupied.

186  Parvati Raghuram Table 7.3 Immigration regulations and career pathways: 1997 changes Grade Training grade Preregistration house officer House officer Senior house officer

Registrar Non-training grades Subconsultant grade Consultant

Immigration regulation Permit free for twelve months Extension of stay for not more than twelve months Permit free for up to three years Permit free for up to three years Extension of up to three years as long as not more than three years is spent at this or equivalent grade Permit free for three years with extensions, each of up to three years Work permit Work permit

Source: This table was created from information provided in Department of Health’s guide entitled A Guide to Immigration, and Employment of Overseas Medical and Dental Students, Doctors and Dentists in the United Kingdom (1998).

On 1 April 1997, new rules affecting migrant doctors came into effect linking more closely the immigration regulations of those with permit-free status with the nature of training. Those who came in from non-European Economic Area (EEA) countries were placed on an exclusive visitor training path where the content of training, the right to a permanent job, and the right of stay associated with training were all curtailed. On the other hand, those with rights to stay were awarded training places that would lead to career advancement and permanent jobs. As a result of these changes, non-EEA migrants who were on temporary visas for highly skilled workers were placed in second-class training because their immigration status (threeyear entry, as shown in table 7.3) did not allow them to complete the five years of training to reach a consultant grade. Their professional integration was limited by immigration regulations. Finally, in April 2006, partly in response to the increasing circulation of doctors from the EEA, migration from outside the EEA was brought to a virtual standstill. In particular, the entry of migrant doctors for the purpose of training virtually ceased, ending patterns of circulation that were inherent to and constitutive of modern medical provision in both the UK and a range of other countries, especially those of the British Commonwealth.



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In sum, over the years, the right to permanent stay for Commonwealth citizens was gradually restricted. It was suspended in 1971, replaced by similar rights for European citizens. Thus, after 1971, entry of Commonwealth doctors was based on temporariness, although for some, this temporariness was only a phase on the route to permanence. However, the extent to which permanence was sought also depended on each migrant doctor’s career progression. Even where immigration regulations enabled settlement, the structures of the labour market emphasized and encouraged temporariness and associated precarity. Labour Market Regulations: Medical Registration and Career Progression Although the organization of the medical career changed over time, it retained a pyramidal structure. Until 2006 doctors began their training as house-officers, moved through various training posts, such as senior house-officer, registrar, and senior (later specialist) registrar posts, and finally went on to take up a career-grade consultant post. Training was marked by mobility, with doctors moving across hospitals within a region to increase their exposure to different consultant practices, caseloads and subspecialties. Temporariness of employment was, thus, part of the training experience of all doctors (migrants and non-migrants) in the UK. A tiered hierarchy of posts with a pyramidal structure meant that at each stage of the career hierarchy, progression was uncertain. However, the experience of temporariness among migrants had distinct dimensions. First, many doctors initially came to the UK and undertook clinical attachments – unpaid posts that did not involve direct dealings with patients (table 7.4). These attachments did, however, provide entry into the occupational structure for many doctors. Through much of the period until 2006, short-term locum posts (covering for absent doctors) were also plentiful. Some overseas doctors introduced new migrants, often graduates of the same medical college, to their colleagues and seniors and helped migrants to leverage their way into the career hierarchy. The medical labour market, with its abundant availability of short-term, temporary posts, made these networks effective. The labour market was based on having a floating population of workers who could undertake temporary

188  Parvati Raghuram Table 7.4 Forms of temporariness Form

Characteristics

Training grade posts

•

Clinical assistant Locum

Inability to complete training because of immigration regulations • Inability to get jobs in desired specialty • Inability to pass examinations • Unpaid posts largely used by new entrants to the country to leverage entry into the labour market • Paid, short-term posts used to leverage entry into the labour market • Also used to enhance income

work, and this availability of temporary posts allowed doctors to leverage networks of friendship to obtain jobs. Previous experience with graduates of a particular medical school provided employers with assurance about the skills and qualifications of others from that school. It offered some measure of the trust and certainty automatically given to UK-trained graduates, enabling migrants to get a toehold in the labour market. However, migrants themselves were rarely able to dispense jobs to other migrants; rather they were able to help to fill very junior posts by introducing their fellow alumni to their, usually white, consultant ­(Raghuram, Bornat et al. 2010). Nevertheless, migrants were both required to inhabit temporariness (as in clinical attachments) and learned to benefit from temporariness (as locums, for instance). Temporariness was also achieved through tightening medical registration and through blockages in career progression. Medical registration regulations have changed over time but have had some common features: a sharp distinction between other migrants and migrant doctors; and the relations between doctors’ migrant status, their employment status, and training opportunities. To practise in the UK, doctors must register with the General Medical Council. The medical registration system created a series of hurdles that effectively created temporariness among migrant doctors. Although doctors from most Commonwealth countries had their qualifications recognized through reciprocal arrangements between the UK and the countries of origin, most of these arrangements were dismantled in 1985 with the introduction of a limited registration scheme for all



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doctors. This four-year limited registration clearly linked migration status to training so that doctors could only shift to permanent registration on obtaining advanced training. Career blockages, however, prevented doctors from achieving this training. These blockages to career mobility forced migrant doctors to move around. Networks operated to allow some people through to higher posts (Raghuram, Bornat et al. 2010), while others were blocked. This process of selection and weeding out particularly influenced migrants who did not always (or equally) belong to the networks of power within British medicine. Another alternative was to move sideways, into less desirable specialties, as many of the South Asian geriatricians interviewed by Bornat, Henry et al. (2009) had done. Shifting sideways allowed them to eventually obtain adequate training, convert their temporary medical registration to permanent registration, obtain some career progression, and eventually settle in the UK. Their inability to acquire advanced training denied most migrants the opportunity to obtain permanent registration. Doctors who had limited registration were also excluded from many careergrade posts, including entry into general practice. As a result of the limits to permanence set up by the system of medical regulation, it became common for those who faced career blocks to either return to their country of origin or move on to the United States or other countries. Another alternative for migrant doctors was to settle into non-career grade posts that were created to offer a permanent state of suspension within the career hierarchy. Yet, medical migration continued despite the problems that the ensuing temporariness posed for many doctors, raising questions about what qualities made permanence possible. This is an issue that is receiving increasing attention, with variables such as sex, age, marital status, country of citizenship, level of education, job satisfaction, and occupation all analyzed as possible factors influencing the desire to move from temporary to permanent status (Khoo, Hugo et al. 2008; Baláz, Williams et al. 2004). In the next section I take a different line and suggest that it is not enough to explore permanence and temporariness through demographic variables. Instead I argue that there are enduring relationships and structures that underlie practices of temporariness and that it is only by exploring these that we can understand migration systems that were set up to be temporary.

190  Parvati Raghuram m e d i c a l m i g r at i o n : s e e k i n g c o n t i n u i t y

In the previous section we saw a range of techniques (in the Foucauldian sense) whereby migrant doctors became subject to a regime of temporariness, both with regard to migration and employment regulations. Yet, why did doctors come to the UK? What is it that underlay the doctors’ willingness to face the uncertainties and struggles associated with these temporary regimes? Mobilizing Migrants In the post-war period in the UK the formation of the NHS and the internal negotiations required to ensure that doctors who joined the NHS would not suffer unduly from loss of private incomes depended on much stricter medical staff management, as a result of which there would be a chronic underproduction of local doctors. There was a steep pyramidal career hierarchy, with many more doctors at the base of the hierarchy than at the top. This meant that there was always a need for a mobile army of overseas staff who would populate these lower rungs but would never have access to the top rungs. This mobile labour force was made possible by the history of medical mobility to the UK. Doctors, especially those from Commonwealth countries had, for long, come to the UK for postgraduate medical education. Before 1946 there was no postgraduate medical training in any other part of the British Commonwealth. Even when such training became available outside the UK, the history of mobility had been embedded into ways of thinking about medical education. Thus, for example, doctors in South Asia were already part of a social and knowledge community in which participation in the UK labour market was central to career progression. Migration to the UK for the purpose of training was embedded in their professional cultures (Raghuram 2009). Thus, Bornat, Henry et al. (2009) found in their study of South Asian migrant geriatricians that the geriatricians’ lecturers, who had received advanced training in the UK, advised them that they must upgrade and validate skills through training at one of the UK Royal Colleges if they were to be recognized as good, well-trained doctors. At least temporary movement to the UK to gain the clinical experience required to obtain official credentials from the Royal Colleges of medicine and surgery was a valued part of advanced medical training. The Royal Colleges of



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medicine thus acted as transnational institutions (Faist, Pitkanen et al. 2010) that encouraged migration. They acted as “relatively permanent social constructs that influence social behaviour” (Faist, Pitkanen et al. 2010, 10). Mobilizing Professions Not only were migrants imbued with notions of continuity and enduring relationships, these were also central to the making of the medical profession. As Pickard (2010, 3), citing Johnson (1995), argues, “professions are not preconstituted but rather emergent from a competitive political process (Johnson 1995).” Stabilizing and building professions requires work. It requires a set of institutions that embody the power of the profession. It also requires reaching out to sites and spaces beyond those of their direct jurisdiction. “Reach, in this latter sense, is intensive; it is inseparable from the social relationships which comprise it” (Allen and Cochrane 2010, 1074). Reach is therefore constitutive of the profession; the profession is dependent on that reach. In medicine, the power of particular institutions was central to building the profession. One example was the UK’s Royal Colleges (e.g., membership in the Royal College of Physicians), which had a “long reach” (Aluwihare 2002) because of the UK’s imperial legacy. Qualifications obtained from these colleges had both credibility and transferability across different parts of the old empire. Their link to a very recently powerful empire also meant that their reach overstretched the geographical boundaries of the old empire – it had a wider currency and facilitated professional mobility as well as geographical mobility. Thus, doctors who had a qualification from the Royal Colleges were usually offered a higher wage inside and outside the old British Commonwealth. The Royal Colleges thus played a crucial role in shaping migration through their ability to award internationally recognized professional qualifications. Moreover, as all postgraduate medical training in the British Empire was concentrated in the UK, British institutions framed this training of Commonwealth doctors as its responsibility. Thus: “In its brochure on postgraduate training for overseas doctors, the Royal College of Physicians states that ‘our role in training graduates from countries with an historical link with Britain is regarded as a special and rewarding responsibility’” (cited in Richards 1994, 1628).

192  Parvati Raghuram

Through the sentiment of attachment due to connections and by evoking a sense of responsibility, the institutions of empire continued to have a spatial reach that allowed them to survive. contradictions

Hope (2009), drawing on David Harvey (2005), suggests that capitalism has particular temporal and spatial rhythms such as expansionist tendencies (the search for new spaces as well as the ongoing production of space) that contradict the rhythms of other parts of the same system where spatial fixity is embodied through, for instance, physical infrastructures. The medical profession is also marked by similar expansionary tendencies as well as by contradictory spatially exclusive policies. The expansionist spatiotemporal systems on which the profession was based and through which the doctor was produced required circulation of people from different parts of the world. This imperative came up against the logic of the nation-state and of national migration and employment systems, which demanded labour market exclusivity with prioritization of jobs for nationals. The expansionists, among whom were training institutions like the Royal Colleges, depended on the circulation of migrants who would keep coming to the UK for training and examination. Only by drawing in people from around the world could they maintain their status as the premier global organizations for medical training. Their trainees went out and taught in different countries and encouraged their students to come to the UK to obtain training. They held up British training as the gold standard for postgraduate medical education. As a result, the permanence of institutions like the Royal Colleges depended on a circulating temporary population who would come to be trained and be awarded well-paid jobs in other countries because of the global valency and brand of their training. However, the labour market protectionists, such as some of those involved in medical manpower planning, demanded secure jobs for UK-trained doctors. They incrementally secured the labour market from migrants. Their demands also resonated with wider anti-immigrant sentiments among the public. Government migration policy was changed to attune itself to this public pressure to restrict migration. As a result, the enduring international relationships that led to migration and were central to the development of the medical profession and medicine in the UK were occluded by



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the dominant modes of organization and narration of the national health system as national alone. These contradictions are well illustrated by Gish (1968b, 1424), who noted that “[t]he line between a foreign postgraduate medical student and an immigrant doctor is not clear: the profession considers junior hospital grades to be training posts, yet the doctors who occupy a significant proportion of them require Commonwealth Immigrants Act work vouchers to enter Britain and are considered, by the Government, to be immigrants.” As such, trainees were being awarded settlement rights by the government but were held to unstructured and unrewarded service posts by the medical fraternity who used migrant status as a basis for differentiation within the labour market. This anomaly was only removed in 1985 when residence was also made temporary, to coincide with the temporary labour market status of a trainee. Until 1985, migration policy aimed at permanence, while medical training suspended migrants in categories of temporariness, until both were aligned on temporariness. Together they produced conditions of institutionalized uncertainty (Anderson 2010, 301), a state that medical migrants inhabited through most of the second half of the twentieth century. As a result, overseas doctors played a paradoxical role in the maintenance of the NHS: they were integral to its running but were never awarded the status that such a position would seemingly confer (Kyriakides and Virdee 2003). This was, at least in part, an outcome of the temporal contradictions embedded in the relationship between training and service provision and between migration policy and medical manpower planning. Thus, temporariness made possible contradictions between residence and training regulations and between the ongoing requirements for temporary labour and the importance of the NHS as a marker of the enduring qualities of British national identity. discussion

Although temporariness among skilled migrants has sometimes been understood in a celebratory mode, through notions of circulation and flows, it is often structured by uncertainty caused by time-­limited and differentiated access to rights of entry, stay, and employment. This is especially so in the case of health professionals, for whom temporariness has been a necessary part of their professional lives.

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In this chapter, I explored two ways in which temporariness was embedded in medical migrants’ lives, that is, through migration and employment regulations. I then went on to look at vectors of continuity through which both the profession and its subjects, the professionals, were constituted. The contradictions between these two systems have led to a disavowal of the role of migrants in the provision of national health. Through these moves, I raise three issues for consideration in debates on temporariness and permanence. 1 Temporariness as a spatiotemporal conjuncture: Temporality is produced simultaneously with spatiality. Yet temporariness among migrants has been primarily analyzed through its temporal dimension. What are the spatialities that are attached to the analyses of temporariness and what can be gained from laying bare those spatialities? 2 Temporariness as governance: If temporariness is a mode of governance, then what are the governmentalities through which it is secured? What are the structures of power that enable the production of the “temporary migrant” as subject? 3 Temporariness as precarity: Is this a necessary relation and, if not, what does the literature on skilled labour teach us? Temporariness is a temporal, spatial, and, by extension, economic and political phenomenon that limits the rights and entitlements of migrants. However, the socio-economic and temporal elements of temporariness have gained much greater attention than the spatial element. The legal and political entity, usually the nation-state, is posited as the primary and often the only territorial unit of analysis relevant for conceptualizing temporariness. Moreover, the socioeconomic rights of migrants are seen as subservient to and derivative of territory so that claiming rights is often associated with claiming permanent affiliations to territory.6 This chapter shifts attention away from the nation-state as the site for enacting normative permanence toward other formations – empire and professions that have different spatial and temporal rhythms. Focusing on the processes required to maintain the institutions of empire in a postcolonial world highlights the importance of circulatory policies. It also highlights the longer temporalities that underlie and even enable temporariness. It suggests that we need to ask what are the enduring relationships that encourage particular forms of mobility and how



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do they ­permit regimes of temporariness to flourish. Temporariness and permanence are both necessary for sustaining each other but each draws on different spatial referents, systems, and infrastructures and each has different spatiotemporal imperatives and requirements. The lack of congruity between these spatiotemporal rhythms enables, even produces, precarity. It left many doctors in limbo, in jobs with little career mobility, and with insecure futures. These issues became acute at times of regulatory change when regulations were often altered suddenly and arbitrarily so that the migration and labour market journeys that doctors anticipated never came to fruition. It is not just that empire and professions have different spatial reaches; they also require, produce, and secure these spatial connections as a way of reproducing their power. Migration not only confirms but also affirms and helps to reproduce the power of institutions and infrastructures by extending their spatial stretch. Without its spatial stretch, the power of the profession (with its claims to universal knowledge and practices) would be diminished. It is only through circulation of the practices, carried through people, that professional status and power are established. Hence, securing the permanence of professional hierarchies and institutions requires that the worlds of professionals come into contact with, are influenced by, and recognize the importance of professional power hierarchies. Mobility is part of, and necessary to, the constitution of the power of these formations. As a result particular temporal qualities, such as temporariness, may be structurally necessary for producing the permanence and the spatiality of professions. This spatial reach is only made possible by producing subjects who recognize and value mobilities. Theories of brain drain are replete with notions of people who act as autonomous subjects who decide to move after making rational calculations around wages, conditions of work, and training. However, these claims to autonomy rest on thin ground. The desires of skilled migrants are produced in relation to what is required to reproduce their identities as “skilled.” Skills have their own spatial requirements  – in medicine, the acquisition of skills involved moving to particular centres of education and training to obtain accreditation from these centres. If mobility is essential for the definition and development of doctors’ medical skills, then the desire of individual migrants for accreditation of their skills is produced in relation to a set of norms that in many ways precedes them and that are secured through repetition.

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Judith Butler (2009), in an essay on precarity and performativity, explores how precarity (a term replete with structural connotations tied to migration and employment) relates to her theories of performativity as agentic enactment that produces both the subject and the norm. She highlights not only the political possibilities that are opened up through theorizing performativity but also how these enactments are held in tension with existing norms “that govern the intelligibility of the body in space and time” (Butler 2009, 10). She goes on to explain how these norms are made and remade and how they are “vectors of power and of history.” Taking a lead from her analysis, we can see that bodies that move across space have to negotiate demands, norms, preferences, and frameworks, but it is only when bodies affectively inhabit and internalize the norms of mobility that migration is produced. When mobility is produced as a norm in the production of skills, mobility becomes a necessary part of the constitution of a skilled subject. It is only by embedding this norm in the psyche that the vulnerabilities of temporariness are endured. These are the governmentalities that are necessary for producing temporariness as a form of governance. However, if skills are the basis for producing the mobile subject, then how do we understand less skilled migrants and their temporariness? Are the experiences of skilled and lesser skilled migrants really incommensurable? This chapter has shown how the uncertainties of temporariness affected medical migrants in the UK and that precarity and vulnerability, the hallmarks of temporariness, are not limited to the lesser skilled. Yet, this example of skilled migration also emphasizes how investments and attachments to skills and professional development drive migration and foster regimes of temporariness. What are the subjectivities that foster temporariness among the lesser skilled and how are they produced? These are some of the issues that require further research.

notes

1 I thank Joanna Bornat and Leroi Henry, my co-researchers on an ESRCfunded research project entitled Overseas-Trained South Asian doctors and the Development of Geriatric Medicine. The project involved oral history interviews with sxity South Asian overseas-trained geriatricians, and this chapter is, in part, informed by insights from those interviews. The project



2 3 4

5

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primarily focuses on the period between the late 1960s and late 1980s, a period when the issues of the time often resonated with many today: anxieties about an aging population; a highly politicized environment around issues of migration and race, as evidenced by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1968) and the Immigration Act (1972); and concerns over the management and future of the National Health Service (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office 1979). This temporal frame is also reflected in the chapter. Moreover, the presence of a large temporary migrant labour force can also drive down wages for non-migrants (Brownell 2010). It can also form the basis for the creation of radical political subjectivities that are deterritorialized. Other methods, such as networking scientists across the diaspora, are also being explored, although these have less value in medicine where co-­ presence between patient and doctor is required (Ciomasu 2010). After 1979, overseas doctors without a right of residence in the United Kingdom were not allowed to enter general practice. These restrictions were extended to assistant and locum posts in 1985. Furthermore, general practice trainees were not allowed to enter under the permit-free training scheme. Those aspiring to enter general practice had to meet the requirements of other business people wishing to obtain a work permit in the United Kingdom, including evidence of their ability to invest 200,000 pounds into their practice (Department of Health Medical Workforce Advisory Committee 1997). As a result, there was little intake of new migrants into general practice until these regulations were lifted in 2001. Regional labour mobility agreements are splitting the spatiality of labour mobility from that of sovereignty. Migrants can accrue multiple, if differentiated, rights on the basis of such agreements. However, the securitization agenda has meant that, contradictorily, nations are increasingly looking for public expressions of a singular narrative of belonging. Multiple identifications and contested affiliation are being muffled. references

Allen, J., and A. Cochrane. 2010. Assemblages of State Power: Topological Shifts in the Organization of Government and Politics. Antipode 42(5):1071–89. Aluwihare, A. 2002. The Long Arm of the RCS. Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 84(8):288. Anderson, B. 2010. Migration, Immigration Controls and the Fashioning of Precarious Workers. Work, Employment and Society 24(2):300–17.

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Baláz, V., A.M. Williams, and D. Kollár. 2004. Temporary versus Permanent Youth Brain Drain: Economic Implications. International Migration 42(4):3–34. Basch, L., N. Glick Schiller, and C. Szanton Blanc, eds. 1994. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. Lausanne: Gordon and Breach. Beaverstock, J. 1994. Rethinking Skilled International Labor Migration: World Cities and Banking Organizations. Geoforum 25:323–38. Bhagwati, J. 1978. Anatomy and Consequences of Exchange Control Regimes. New York: Balinger Publishing. Bornat, J., L. Henry, and P. Raghuram. 2009. Don’t Mix Race with the Specialty: Interviewing South Asian Overseas-Trained Geriatricians. Oral History 38(1):74–84. Brownell, T. 2010. Wages Differences between Temporary and Permanent Immigrants. International Migration Review 44(3):593–614. Butler, J 2009. Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics. Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 4(3): i–xiii. Castles, S. 2006. Guestworkers in Europe: A Resurrection? International Migration Review 40(4):741–66. Chikanda, A., 2004. Skilled Health Professionals’ Migration and its Impact on Health Delivery in Zimbabwe. COMPAS Working Paper, No. 4, WP-04-04. Oxford: Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford. Ciomasu, I. 2010. Turning Brain Drain into Brain Networking. Science and Public Policy 37(2):135–46. Commonwealth Medical Advisory Bureau 1969. Report by the Medical Director for the Year Ending 31 December 1968. Unpublished mimeo. Decker, K. 2001. Overseas Doctors: Past and Present. In Racism in ­Medicine: an Agenda for Change, ed. N. Coker, 25–47. London: King’s Fund. Department Of Health Medical Workforce Standing Advisory Committee. 1997. Planning the Medical Workforce. Third Report. London, UK: Department of Health. Dinar, K., D. Wield, and J. Chataway. 2008. Diffusion of Knowledge through Migration of Scientific Labour. Science and Public Policy 35(6):417–30. Docquier, F., and H. Rapoport. 2004. Skilled Migration: The Perspective of Developing Countries. Washington, DC: World Bank. Faist, T., P. Pitkanen, J. Gerdes, and E. Reisenauer, eds. 2010. Transnationalisation and Institutional Transformations. COMCAD Working Paper



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No. 87. Centre on Migration, Citizenship and Development. Bielefeld, Germany: University of Beilefeld. Faulconbridge, J.R. 2007. Exploring the Role of Professional Associations in Collective Learning in London and New York’s Advertising and Law Professional Service Firm Clusters. Environment and Planning A 39(4):965–84. Friedman, E. 2004. An Action Plan to Prevent Brain Drain: Building Equitable Health Systems in Africa. Boston, MA: Physicians for Human Rights. Friedman, U., and D.Z. Ahmed. 2008. Ensuring Temporariness: Mechanisms to Incentivise Return Migration in the Context Of Gats Mode 4 and Least Developed Country Interests. Geneva: Quaker United Nations Office. Gish, O. 1968a. Alien, Old Commonwealth and New Commonwealth Workers. Race & Class 9(4):520–2. – 1968b. The Royal Commission and the Immigrant Doctor. The Lancet June 29: 1423–4. – 1969. Medical Education and the “Brain Drain.” British Journal of Medical Education 3:11–14. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. 1979. Royal Commission on the National Health Service. Cmnd 1615, London, UK: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hope, W. 2009. Conflicting Temporalities: State, Nation, Economy and Democracy under Global Capitalism. Time and Society 18(1):62–85. Kangasniemi, M., L.A. Winters, and S. Commander. 2007. Is the Medical Brain Drain Beneficial? Evidence from Overseas Doctors in the UK. Social Science & Medicine 65(5):915–23. Khoo, S., G. Hugo, and G. McDonald. 2008. Which Skilled Temporary Migrants become Permanent Residents and Why? International Migration Review 42(1):193–226. Kingma, M. 2006. Nurses on the Move: Migration and the Global Health Care Economy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Koser, K., and J. Salt. 1997. The Geography of Highly Skilled International Migration. International Journal of Population Geography 3:285–303. Kyriakides, C., and S. Virdee. 2003. Migrant Labour, Racism and the British National Health Service. Ethnicity and Health 8(4):283–305. Lethbridge, J. 2004. Brain Drain: Rethinking Allocation. Bulletin of the World Health Organisation 82(8):623.

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Margheritis, A. 2007. State-led Transnationalism and Migration: Reaching Out to the Argentine Community in Spain. Global Networks 7(1):87– 106. Mejía, A., H. Pizurki, and E. Royston. 1979. Physician Migration and Nurse Migration: Analysis and Policy Implications. Geneva: World Health Organization. Parreñas, R.S. 2010. Homeward Bound: The Circular Migration of Entertainers between Japan and the Philippines. Global Networks 10(3):301– 23. Pickard, S. 2010. The Role of Governmentality in the Establishment, Maintenance and Demise of Professional Jurisdictions: The Case of Geriatric Medicine. Sociology of Health and Illness 32(7):1072–86. Raghuram, P. 2009. Caring about the Brain Drain in a Postcolonial World. Geoforum 40(1):25–33. Raghuramn, P., J. Bornat, and L. Henry. 2010. Difference and Distinction? Non-migrant and Migrant Networks. Sociology 44(4):623–41. Richards, T. 1994. The Overseas Doctors Training Scheme: Failing Expectations. British Medical Journal 308:1627–31. Saxenian A. 2000. Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs. CCIS Working Paper No. 15. San Diego: University of California. Skeldon, R. 2009. Of Skilled Migration, Brain Drains and Policy Responses. International Migration 47(4):3–29. Xiang, B. 2001. Structuration of Indian Information Technology Professionals Migration to Australia: An Ethnographic Story. International Migration 39(5):73–90.

8 Language Training and Labour Market Integration for Newcomers to Canada eve haque

On 20 March 2009, Jason Kenney, minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism, spoke about the importance of official language proficiency for newcomers to Canada at the 11th National Metropolis Conference in Calgary, Alberta. He stated his ministry’s goal as “making sure that people who arrive in Canada are as able as quickly as possible to have competency in at least one of our two official languages as a pathway to socio economic integration … Language gives people the tools they need to further their skills and find their place in the world. The ability to effectively communicate in either English or French is crucial to success in Canada” (Citizen­ ship and Immigration Canada 2009). Kenney’s comments, in the context of the admission of the highest number of what he termed “economic immigrants” in 57 years  – 281,000 in 2010  – underscores the important link being made between immigration, official language proficiency, and labour market needs in Canada: “adjusting Canada’s immigration plan for 2010 to increase economic immigration and help ensure employers have the workers they need to supplement our domestic sources of labour” (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2009). The stated need for immigrants to fill, in particular, specific shortages in “skilled labour” has made the official language proficiency of newcomers an issue of increasing concern and regulation for the federal government. English and French were inaugurated as the official languages of Canada through the Official Languages Act, 1969. Even in the short time since then, the official languages have become a proxy for a host of anxieties about national belonging, an alibi for the socio-

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economic integration of newcomers, as well as a symbol of Canada’s purportedly unique and tolerant white settler identity (Haque 2012). Languages become official through a process of territorialization, that is, through the demarcation of specific languages as official within a bounded territory, usually a national or subnational border. When people cross these borders and move into different territories, their linguistic competence is deemed proficient – or not – in relation to the officially recognized language(s) of the demarcated territory. As the Canadian government increasingly defines newcomer integration in relation to labour market participation and official language proficiency as a key element in socio-economic integration, linguistic competence in English or French has become a measure of how integrated and integrate-able newcomers are. Specifically, the government has turned its attention to improving official language proficiency as the way to address a growing concern with the declining success of labour market integration for newcomers to Canada, and it has substantially increased funding for language training programs that are specifically oriented to the labour market. Since federal  – and most provincial  – language training programs are not open to temporary migrants, this chapter will focus on newcomer immigrants who are the target learner population for federal language training programs. In this chapter, I will examine how the territorial demarcation of Canada as an official English-French bilingual country identifies particular groups as unintegrated, potentially unintegrate-able, and therefore temporary to the nation. Specifically, if official language competence territorializes belonging and becomes the concrete measure of integration, then those who are deemed not adequately proficient remain outside the nation, “not one of us,” that is, temporary in this territory. These temporal and geographical elements that underwrite belonging can be traced in the stated desires of K ­ enney, who wishes that those who arrive in Canada achieve competency in the official languages as quickly as possible, if they are to be socio-economically integrated into Canadian life. The chief vehicle through which the government expects newcomers to gain adequate linguistic competence for socio-economic integration is governmentsponsored immigrant language training programs. Therefore, in this chapter, I will trace the link between linguistic territorialization, official language competency, temporariness, and integration through an examination of these immigrant language training programs.



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l i n g u i s t i c t e r r i t o r i a l i z at i o n

Land that is inhabited and has meaning for a group of people is called a territory (Delaney 2005). With the emergence of the modern nation-state as the dominant form of social organization (­ Anderson 1991), territory has become a fundamental basis for defining group and individual identities (Penrose 2002). Territories are produced under specific historical and social conditions and constituted through social practices and processes such as government policies (Delaney 2005). A critical element in the constitution of territories is the drawing of boundaries, at which point flows of people also become visible (Brighenti 2010). In this way, the boundedness of territories gives physical substance and symbolic meaning to notions of us and them (Penrose 2002). Thus, the emotional power of space is harnessed to create relationships between groups of people and territories resulting in the naturalization of territorial attachment and, conversely, the exclusionary power of territory. In a contemporary era of large-scale displacements of people, the naturalization of this territorial attachment makes it incomprehensible that people would or should want to live “out of place” (Sharma and Wright 2008). As Sharma and Wright (2008, 94) have argued, the naturalization of a connection between a particular group of people and a particular territory as the basis for the principles of justice and allocation of resources produces a spatially fixed distinction between and differential inclusion of natives and non-natives – be it through controlling borders or sorting and maintaining these distinctions within shared spaces. Ultimately, nationalism is a practice of territoriality that satisfies both the material requirements of life and the emotional requirements of belonging – and exclusion – through an ongoing merger of cultural and territorial identities (Penrose 2002). As the modern nation state form has, in almost all cases, meant that the linguistic unit should be congruent with the territorialized national political unit, language is a central aspect of cultural identity that is territorialized in the nation-state form and functions as a technology of differential inclusion. Pujolar (2009, 85) has stated that language can be used to mark territory and “used as a way to index the relevance of particular spaces, typically national territories.” According to De Schutter (2008, 105, 107), this Linguistic Territorial Principle relies on a “Westphalian understanding of the relation between states and languages” and has three defining characteristics:

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1 Languages and territories are co-terminous. 2 Language groups that are territorially based should be self-­ governing regarding language affairs. 3 The heart of democratic life should be relegated to the territorial linguistic unit. As De Schutter (2008, 110–11) explains, this understanding makes monolingualism the standard case, with languages seen to have clear and stable boundaries, all of which presents an unrealistically homogeneous conception of language and culture in which individual linguistic identity and variation is believed to be very low. Indeed there are many nations where monolingualism is not the official policy, such as Canada, which at the federal level promotes a bilingual (English and French) official language policy.1 Specifically, Canada has an official language policy that is based on the personality principle, where linguistic rights are carried within the person, so people can access official language rights no matter where they are located in the nation. However, as De Schutter (2008, 106) clarifies, “even the personality language regime has to be instantiated within a particular territory”; therefore, the linguistic territorial principle is maintained. As well, the specific case of relegating self-government and democratic life to the territorial linguistic unit is exemplified in Kymlicka’s “politics in the vernacular” (2001), which argues that “national”’ minorities  – which in Canada are, according to Kymlicka, only the Quebecois and Indigenous peoples – should be granted self-government rights to enable their members to maintain their own language and culture within their territories. As De Schutter argues, Kymlicka’s model is grounded in an unrealistic homogeneous conception of language and culture that is based on a transparent mosaic of cultural and linguistic blocs with clear and stable boundaries marking off monolingual national groupings (De Schutter 2008, 110). This homogenized and bounded conception of language in no way reflects the daily reality of how people use language in their lives, which is a productive and creative endeavour. People use language and languages in various ways, including switching registers of speaking, enhancing meaning through paralinguistic cues, and mixing languages in multiple ways to suit communicative purposes in specific contexts. Overall, the linguistic territorial principle is based on a conception of languages and culture as congruent, stable, bounded, and homogeneous in a



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way that cannot account for linguistic hybridity, multilingualism, cultural diffusion, and other forms of individual linguistic variation (De Schutter 2008, 111). Ultimately, the linguistic territorial principle that underlies the logic of many nationalist language policies serves to force linguistic convergence. Canada In Canada, state territorialization of language is organized through the federal government’s 1988 amendment of the Official Languages Act, which declares that English and French are the solely recognized official languages of the nation. All other language policies – at myriad levels – emerge in relation to this act, and linguistic convergence for newcomers is organized through the federal adult immigrant language training policies that underwrite the largest language training programs in the country. Lack of official language skills positions all migrants to Canada as temporary, that is, not fully socially and economically integrated into the nation and, increasingly, the concrete measure of integration is through labour market participation. This is exemplified in such statements by the federal government as, “[l]anguage constitutes the most serious barrier newcomers face to furthering their education or training and is among the most serious barriers to finding employment” (Citizenship and Immigration ­Canada 2010, v). Although official language competence presents a barrier to labour market integration and mobility for all types of migrants to Canada, it is important to note the federal government offers no language training for temporary migrants; language training is strictly for newcomer immigrants or permanent residents, who also become disqualified for federal programs once they become Canadian citizens. Although monies transferred from the federal government for immigrant settlement services have been used to offer language training for temporary migrants in Manitoba (Rajkumar, Berkowitz et al. 2012), the federal government will be taking over all responsibilities for federal language training programs in Manitoba and British Columbia by 2014 to bring their language training programs in line with those offered in the rest of the provinces.2 Although provincial governments may decide to offer language training programs to a broader constituency of learners  – for example, the Ontario government’s Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration funds o ­ fficial

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l­anguage training programs for refugees and Canadian citizens who do not have English or French as their first language  – there are no guarantees that any of these programs will be open to temporary migrants and in most cases they are not. This means that consideration of any federally funded language training programs is necessarily about immigrant newcomers to Canada. However, newcomers are positioned as temporary to the labour market in many ways as well. For example, employment policy discourses often promote temporary employment as a path to inclusion for newcomers, or specifically as a way to gain “Canadian experience” (Fuller and Vosko 2008). As well, lack of official language skills is directly tied to higher levels of unemployment, underemployment, and deskilling, as well as lower pay scales (Tufts, Damsbaek et al. 2010). Fuller and Vosko (2008) show how precarious and temporary employment has highly gendered and racialized patterns. This effect is magnified through the immigration system, which has a highly specific set of criteria for selecting immigrants, one of which prioritizes the state’s desire for “skilled” immigrants. The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, 2001, promotes as its ideal candidate a young, educated, and officially bilingual subject. With 25 points available for education and 24 points available for competence in the official languages out of the 100-point system used to select applicants for immigration to Canada, increasingly highly trained and educated newcomers are selected through this critical immigration category. However, research shows that recent and current immigrants are falling behind previous generations of immigrants in terms of labour market outcomes (Nakhaie 2006). They have a persistent earnings disadvantage and higher levels of unemployment. The Longtitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada has shown that over 70 per cent of new immigrants have trouble entering the labour market; the 2001 census shows that newcomers are facing jobless rates that are at least double the national average and at least half of newcomers are employed in low-skilled jobs (Mirchandani 2004). The state has addressed the acknowledged failure of Canada’s immigration policy, specifically the lack of adequate labour market integration for supposedly “ideal” immigrants, mainly by encouraging immigrant adjustment through training programs. Specifically, the federal government has turned its focus to immigrant language training as one of the main funded routes to help newcomers “adjust” to the Canadian labour market. As Mojab and Gorman



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(2003, 234) state, “the rhetoric of learning has become essential for maintaining the appearance of opportunity. The idea that opportunity flows from skill acquisition masks the fact that there is not a skills gap, but a jobs gap.” With the linking of official language skills to putative successful labour market integration, language has also become commodified, objectified, and hierarchicalized, specifically, with the delineation and valuation of low versus high levels of linguistic competence. As well, newcomers are made responsible for their own adjustment to exclusionary and shifting labour market conditions and are forced to style themselves as flexible workers, usually through deskilling. The selection of highly qualified immigrants also means that newcomers arrive with high expectations both for their ability to join the labour market and for their lives in Canada overall. However, more and more there is a mismatch between their expectations and their employment realities. In the extreme case of this mismatch, the increasing phenomenon of transnational “astronaut” families has emerged, where the primary earner will live and work outside of Canada to avoid deskilling, underemployment, or unemployment, while the rest of the family remains here (Kobayashi and Preston 2007). This transnational separation of immigrating families underscores the incomplete and temporary nature of migration in the context of escalating barriers to labour market integration. Immigrant Language Training Programs Before the Second World War, most language training for newcomers was provided at a local level on a relatively ad hoc basis. Changes to the immigration policy in the 1960s ushered in a points system for immigrant selection and produced a distinct shift in source countries  – away from Europe  – for Canadian immigration from the 1970s on. This demographic shift in the backgrounds of immigrants led to the introduction of the federal government’s first national language training program in 1978 through Employment and Immigration Canada. This program provided language training both for adult immigrants and for Canadians who could not find employment because they lacked proficiency in English or French (Fleming 2007). However, the program was abolished because of its restrictive eligibility requirements and was succeeded by a series of settlement language training programs, the most notable of which was

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the Settlement Language Training Program introduced in 1986. This program had a broader community focus, offering on-site child care and transportation reimbursement; nonetheless, it too had serious deficiencies, such as underfunding, inequitable distribution of funding, inferior facilities, poorly trained staff, and inconsistent curricula (Fleming 2007, 192). It was not until the early 1990s that the federal government proposed a detailed and comprehensive national plan for immigrant settlement services and language training. In 1990, the federal government tabled the 1991–95 Immigration Plan to recognize the need to strengthen settlement services to “help immigrants and refugees adapt to the new country and participate fully” (Department of Employment and Immigration 1990). This plan was tabled alongside proposed increased levels of immigration, justified on the grounds of the associated economic benefits for the nation. Two adult immigrant training programs that came out of these proposals were the Labour Market Language Training (LMLT) program and the Language Instruction to Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program. Although LMLT focused on higher levels of English proficiency that were career specific, this program was short lived; on the other hand, LINC, and its various provincial counterparts,3 has become a paradigmatic adult language training program and has been instrumental in the development of myriad national assessment and curriculum projects (Fleming 2007, 193). Like the Settlement Language Training Program, LINC was designed for basic language training, with many programs offering transportation allowances and child-care services. LINC classes are only for permanent residents, and learners cannot be Canadian citizens. Learners are eligible for up to 900 hours of instruction;4 the majority of learners take evening classes after work or day programs depending on family resources (Fleming 2007, 193). LINC differs from the previous Settlement Language Training Program in that it has better and more consistent levels of funding as well as comprehensive assessment and placement procedures. LINC providers apply for yearly funding, hire their own instructors, organize classroom space, and determine curricula and materials, although the federal government has funded the development of teaching materials. A wide range of providers now offer LINC classes, including school boards, colleges, community agencies, and, in some provinces, forprofit businesses (Fleming 2007).



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Alongside the development of a national language training program, the federal government also developed the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB), a 12-level scale of national language proficiency benchmarks designed to standardize language assessment and curriculum development across the country. These benchmarks are described as “a descriptive scale of communicative proficiency” and “a framework of reference for learning, teaching, programming and assessing adults for English as a Second Language in Canada” (Pawlikowska-­Smith 2000, viii). At each LINC level, the CLB levels vary depending on the skill being taught and assessed. However, most LINC programs across the country until recently only offered up to LINC 3 or 4 levels of instruction,5 which, at best, cover basic settlement language skills at the lower benchmark levels. In 2007, Citizenship and Immigration Canada funded the production of curriculum guidelines for LINC levels 5 to 7, which not only provided higher levels of benchmark instruction guidelines but also were oriented to the labour market. The bulk of the units in the LINC 5 to 7 guidelines focus on business skills and work-related topics, such as job searching, résumé writing, workplace interaction and communication, business writing (memos, e-mail), as well as job interviews, phone calls, and other work-related topics. Therefore, in the last decade, there has been a marked shift in the focus of government funding for LINC programming from an emphasis on basic language acquisition for settlement purposes to an emphasis on language acquisition for labour market integration purposes. This shift has been accompanied by an increase in LINC funding overall, with an increase in the annual LINC budget from $94 million in 2004–05 to $173 million in 2008–09; this period saw an increase in student numbers from approximately 52,000 to 55,000 (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2010). The shift has been accompanied by an expansion in the LINC mandate as well. The 1991–95 Immigration Plan emphasized that newcomers were expected to integrate into Canadian life as quickly as possible, and integration required (1) achievement of “basic language competency” and (2) an introduction to “shared Canadian values, rights and responsibilities” (Immigrant Policy and Program Development Branch 1991, 2). By 2001, a report from the Integration Branch of Citizenship and Immigration Canada expanded the definition of integration to include the following as the main elements of integration: (1) the ability of newcomers to communicate

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in one of Canada’s official languages is key to integration, (2) they need to acquire an understanding of “the principles, tradition and values that are inherent in Canadian society,” and (3) newcomers are to become “financially self-sufficient” as soon as possible (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2001, 7–8). The emphasis on self-sufficiency, especially financial self-­sufficiency, underscores the government’s increasing focus on economic integration as a key element of newcomer integration. Labour Market-focused Immigrant Language Training Although the federal government has shifted its focus on integration to include an emphasis on economic integration through increased funding of higher levels of LINC for labour market-focused language training, in 2004, a new work-related language training program, Enhanced Language Training (ELT), was piloted by the Citizenship and Immigration Canada. On the basis of government figures that approximately 45,000 (Integration-Net 2009) adult immigrants require “labour market levels of language training” to achieve their labour market potential, Citizenship and Immigration Canada developed a new “job specific” and “labour market level” language training program for newcomers that ranged on average from CLB levels 7 to 10, or LINC 5 levels and up. In 2008–09, Citizenship and Immigration Canada funded approximately 70 community organizations, colleges, school boards, and other organizations to deliver ELT programs in Ontario. ELT is described as language training to help newcomers more easily and quickly find and keep jobs for which they are qualified; thus, higher levels of language training will be offered (CLB levels 7–10). It will include “bridging to work” elements such as job placement, job shadowing, and mentoring as workplace experience components (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008). Although funding for ELT in 2003–04 was only about $5 million, funding increased to $20 million in 2004 and rose annually after that. Also, the federal government has ELT funding partnership agreements with several provinces, and its agreement for funding with Ontario is one of the largest. Through the Canada Ontario Immigration Agreement (COIA), approximately $920 million over the course of five years (2005 to 2010) was transferred from the federal government to the provincial government of Ontario for



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immigrant settlement and language training programs. A significant portion of this funding was used for ELT programs and other jobrelated training programs. The workplace experience components in ELT are an acknowledgment that newcomers’ exclusion from the job market is more complex than “not enough language.” The inauguration of ELT programs indicated awareness on the part of the government that the perception of low levels of official language competence as a barrier to employment was not necessarily the sole explanation for lack of labour market integration. It was hoped that direct involvement of newcomers with the labour market at the training stage would facilitate their integration. Of course, organizing these “bridging to work” elements of ELT was a challenge for service provider organizations. School boards and colleges running larger programs were much more successful at instituting these activities (mentoring, job placements, job shadowing, etc.) than were smaller, communitybased service provider organizations. Job placements were often volunteer placements rather than paid positions, and where there were paid placements, these were at a wage measurably less than that earned by regular employees (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008). Obtaining a job placement was also no guarantee that a newcomer would obtain the desired job experience, as not all learners had the opportunity to apply their technical expertise; rather, many were relegated to doing menial and repetitive tasks that had little to do with their desired occupational goals (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008). The job placements were in effect part of the deskilling process that produced these participants as not fully integrate-­able into the labour market, thus underscoring their temporariness in the nation. On average, learners in ELT programs came in at CLB levels between 6 and 7 and exited the program with a CLB level of a little over 7 in all four skill areas of reading, speaking, listening, and writing – a small increase in language level (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008). New vocabulary learning focused on that which was specific to the occupation or generic workplace, and language and communication skills were developed through job-related exercises such as practising job interviews and preparing résumés (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008). Thus, classroom-based language learning in ELT programs focused on a very narrow notion of language, that is, language for use in the workplace and language

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for labour market integration. Again, this restricted and instrumental notion of language serves only to emphasize ELT learners as linguistically inadequate, potentially unintegrate-able, and, therefore, never fully Canadian. The biggest barrier for participation in ELT programs was financial, as many participants found it challenging to support themselves and their families without working full-time. As ELT programs required a substantial time commitment, not just to attend classes but also to attend job placements, this meant participants had to give up full-time work (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008). In provinces such as Alberta and Saskatchewan where participants are able to apply for a provincial living allowance, such concerns were less of an issue (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008). Other barriers included lack of child care, long waiting lists, and the distant or inaccessible location of the ELT programs (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008). It was hard to determine whether ELT programs ultimately led to strong labour market outcomes in which program participants were able to secure work that was commensurate with their jobs before immigration (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008). Preliminary studies indicate that strong employment outcomes for participants could be attributed to strong local labour markets or high levels of demand for occupations covered by the project. In this way, ELT programs, with their narrow focus on workplace language and emphasis on job placements (despite the challenges these pose for learners), and the uncertainty about strong labour market outcomes, reinforce the government’s attention on immigrant integration as a process of adjusting, through various training processes, the immigrant for economic or, specifically, labour market integration. Ultimately, the restricted ideas about language competence in ELT programs and the deskilling that ELT job placements often reinforce serve to define these participants as problems of integration, thereby emphasizing their temporariness within the nation. t h e l i m i t s o f i n t e g r at i o n a n d l i n g u i s t i c territoriality

Labour market integration encompasses a range of activities, many of which can be barriers for newcomers. These include finding work, applying and interviewing for jobs, being paid fairly, and getting promoted (Weiner 2008, 5). However, in all the government



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t­ raining programs that have been discussed in this chapter, the focus of remediation is the newcomer: the potential worker. Newcomers rate the requirement for Canadian experience as one of the greatest barriers to employment, whereas Canadian-born individuals and employers cite language as one of the biggest barriers (Weiner 2008, 6). Thus, where newcomers identify a barrier that is systemic in nature, potential employers see the barrier as a lack in the newcomer. To a large extent, government policy has mirrored the idea that there is a deficit in the newcomer that needs to be addressed if there is to be full socio-economic integration and that this lack can be filled through an appropriate language training program. The fact that there are serious systemic barriers to labour market participation for newcomers remains invisible in an analysis that sees the barrier to labour market integration as simply a deficit in the newcomer. This reflects Mojab and Gorman’s (2003, 234) insight that the rhetoric of learning – in this case language learning – maintains the idea of opportunity even as it disguises the fact of a “jobs gap.” The possibility of opportunity is critical as the proliferation of workplace-focused language training programs is embraced not just by government and service providers but also by participants themselves who are desperate for socio-economic security. Moreover, research continues to show that racial discrimination is a significant factor in accessing opportunities in the Canadian labour market ­ (Teelucksingh and Galabuzi 2005) and is particularly pronounced for racialized immigrants (Hum and Simpson 2000; ­Cardozo and Pendakur 2008). As well, by focusing on the remediation of a purported deficit in the newcomer as the main corrective to lack of labour market integration, the onus is shifted onto immigrants and newcomers to continually “improve” themselves to fit into an already exclusionary labour market. This is an increasingly futile exercise as research shows that recent immigrants, despite their educational levels at time of arrival, are falling further behind economically than previous generations of immigrants and, overall, have significantly higher and persistent levels of unemployment and underemployment ­(Teelucksingh and Galabuzi 2005, 5; Picot, Hou et al. 2008, 416). Addressing the under- and un-employment of newcomers through the logic of deficit remediation not only misses structural exclusions but also reinforces an understanding of these immigrants as not integrating fully and therefore as still temporary to the nation.

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The issue is not whether or not adult language training programs are useful for immigrants and newcomers. Almost all immigrants are interested in government-sponsored training programs, particularly language training programs. Rather, the increasingly narrow notion of linguistic competence that these government-sponsored official language training programs promote in turn serves to produce a commodified and hierarchicalized notion of language. Specifically, linguistic competence becomes defined in a limited way as solely a skill to secure employment rather than as a complex and creative human capacity for communication. This, in turn, makes all other linguistic competencies of newcomers, other than that of the official languages, valueless and invisible, and reflects a conception of language as a homogeneous and bounded entity that ignores the hybrid nature of language use and the multilingual capacities that people enjoy and exercise for communication. This narrow idea of linguistic competence and limited understanding of how language is used both serve to reinforce a restricted notion of integration as merely labour market participation, as well as to hide labour market discrimination. In addition, these ideas buttress the principles of linguistic territoriality where only official language competence is acknowledged as having any value and legitimacy. As long as newcomers and immigrants are held to such narrow conceptions of linguistic competence and valued only insofar as they can adjust to an exclusionary labour market, they will continue to be seen as unintegrated and unintegrate-able, and therefore temporary to the nation, a nation that continues to value a limited and territorial conception of language capacity – English and French only – in an increasingly multilingual world.

notes

1 That is, the federal government will provide service to individuals anywhere across Canada in either English or French. 2 Quebec has full control over its own immigrant settlement programs and is not included in this country-wide standardization of adult immigrant language training programs. 3 Such as the English-as-a-second-language program in Ontario, funded by the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration. 4 This is equivalent to nearly one year of full-time classes or two years of part-time classes.



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5 In Ontario, classes up to LINC 5 were being offered. references

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. London: Verso Press. Brighenti, Andrea Mubi. 2010. On Territorology: Towards a General Science of Territory. Theory, Culture and Society 27(1):52–72. Cardozo, Andrew, and Ravi Pendakur. 2008. Canada’s Visible Minority Population: 1967–2017. Working Paper Series 8(5). Vancouver: Metropolis British Columbia. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. 2001. Immigrant integration in Canada: Policy Objectives, Program Delivery and Challenges. Ottawa: Integration Branch, Citizenship and Immigration Canada. http://atwork. settlement.org/downloads/atwork/Immigrant_Integration_in_Canada_ discussion_paper_Hauck_May01.pdf Citizenship and Immigration Canada. 2008. Enhanced Language Training Initiative: Formative Evaluation. Ottawa: Citizenship and Immigration Canada. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/evaluation/elt/index.asp Citizenship and Immigration Canada. 2009. Speaking Notes for the Honourable Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P. Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism at the Eleventh National Metropolis Conference, Calgary, AB, 20 March 2009. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/ media/speeches/2009/2009-03-20.asp Citizenship and Immigration Canada. 2010. Evaluation of the Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (linc) program. Ottawa: Citizenship and Immigration Canada. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/ evaluation/linc/2010/index.asp Delaney, David. 2005. Territory: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Department of Employment and Immigration. 1990. Annual Report to Parliament: Immigration Plan for 1991–1995. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada. De Schutter, Helder. 2008. The Linguistic Territoriality Principle – a Critique. Journal of Applied Philosophy 25(2):105–20. Fleming, Douglas. 2007. Adult ESL Programs In Canada: Emerging Trends in the Contexts of History, Economics, and Identity. In International Handbook of English Language Teaching, ed. Jim Cummins and Chris Davison, vol. 1, 187–98. Norwell, MA: Springer Publishers. Fuller, Sylvia, and Leah Vosko. 2008. Temporary Employment and Social Inequality in Canada: Exploring Intersections of Gender, Race, and Migration. Social Indicators Research 88(1):31–50.

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Haque, Eve. 2012. Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race and Belonging in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hum, Derek, and Wayne Simpson. 2000. Not all Visible Minorities Face Labour Market Discrimination. Policy Options (December):45–8. Immigrant Policy and Program Development Branch. 1991. New Immigrant Language Training Policy (niltp). Ottawa: Employment and Immigration Canada. Integration-Net. 2009. Questions and Answers: Enhanced Language Training. http://integration-net.ca/english/ini/elt-clna/elt-clna-Q&A.htm Kobayashi, Audrey, and Valerie Preston. 2007. Transnationalism through the Life Course: Hong Kong Immigrants in Canada. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 48(2):151–67. Kymlicka, Will. 2001. Politics in the Vernacular. Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mirchandani, Kiran. 2004. Immigrants Matter: Canada’s Social Agenda on Skill and Learning. Convergence 37(1):61–8. Mojab, Shahrzad, and Rachel Gorman. 2003. Women and Consciousness in the “Learning Organization”: Emancipation or Exploitation? Adult Education Quarterly 53(4):228–41. Nakhaie, M. Reza. 2006. A Comparison of the Earnings of the Canadian Native-Born and Immigrants, 2001. Canadian Ethnic Studies ­(2):19–46. Pawlikowska-Smith, Grazyna. 2000. Canadian Language Benchmarks 2000: English as a Second Language – for Adults. Ottawa: Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks. Penrose, Jan. 2002. Nations, States and Homelands: Territory and Territoriality in Nationalist Thought. Nations and Nationalism 8(3):277–97. Picot, Garnett, Feng Hou, and Simon Coulombe. 2008. Chronic Poverty and Poverty Dynamics among Recent Immigrants. International Migration Review 42(2):393–424. Pujolar, Joan. 2009. Immigration in Catalonia: Marking Territory through Language. In Globalization and Language Contact: Spatiotemporal Scales, Migration Flows, and Communicative Practices, ed. James Collins, Stef Slembrouck, and Mike Baynham. New York: Continuum International. Rajkumar, Deepa, Laurel Berkowitz, Leah Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Robert Latham. 2012. At the Temporary-Permanent Divide; How Canada Produces Temporariness and Makes Citizens through its Security, Work, and Settlement Policies. Citizenship Studies 16(3–4):483–510.



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Sharma, Nandita, and Cynthia Wright. 2008. Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States. Social Justice 35(3):93–111. Teelucksingh, Cheryl, and Grace-Edward Galabuzi. 2005. Working Precariously: The Impact of Race and Immigrant Status on Employment Opportunities and Outcomes in Canada. Toronto: Canadian Race Relations Foundation. http://www.socialjustice.org/uploads/pubs/WorkingPrecariously.pdf Tufts, Steven, Nina Damsbaek, Mai Phan, Philip Kelly, Maryse Lemoine, Lucia Lo, John Shields, and Valerie Preston. 2010. Does Self-Reported English and French Speaking Ability Affect Labour Market Outcomes for Immigrants? TIEDI Analytical Report 6. Toronto: ­Canadian Research Data Centre Network. http://www.yorku.ca/tiedi/doc/ ­AnalyticalReport6.pdf Weiner, Nan. 2008. Breaking Down Barriers to Labour Market Integration of Newcomers in Toronto. irpp Choice, 14(10).

9 Resituating Temporariness as the Precarity and Conditionality of Non-citizenship1 luin goldring

In their introduction, the editors of this volume call for scholars to “liberate temporariness.” In this chapter I explore how some of the meanings commonly attributed to temporariness facilitate or complicate this call, and I argue that the problems of temporariness go beyond the temporal and rights deficit critiques presented in existing literature. As the editors note, temporariness is becoming normalized through immigration policies that offer temporary entry through state constructions of temporary entrance and residence categories based on skill classification, intended activities, and ideas about who deserves protection (e.g., workers, students, visitors, and refugee claimants). This is a deeply contradictory process. Permanence and citizenship are desirable to many migrants, and immigrant integration and civic virtue are lauded. Good immigrants integrate permanently and are loyal to their country of settlement. At the same time, selectivity and temporariness have become increasingly common aspects of immigration policies (Sharma 2006). Of concern to critical commentators is that temporariness is associated with social exclusion and inequality because it establishes and legitimates hierarchies of formal, as well as substantive, rights and membership. Citizenship and permanence mean more rights; non-citizenship and temporariness mean few or no rights and protections. In many cases, temporariness becomes a long-term situation, whether people leave the territory on a regular basis or remain in Canada for extended periods of time. In addition to long-term insecurity, temporariness may also be a precursor to illegalization and deportability. However, temporariness is uneven and not ­necessarily precarious. ­Temporariness



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may be an acceptable, even desired, situation for mobile, cosmopolitan professionals, and it can offer a pathway to permanence for some migrants. In calling for critical scholars to “liberate” temporariness, the editors make several important points. First, they highlight the binary, antonymic, yet intertwined relationship between the produc­tion of temporariness and permanence. As they note, this nexus com­­plicates efforts to “liberate temporariness” by reducing temporariness or mitigating its negative effects, one way or another. Second, they note that permanence does not always mitigate insecurity and social exclusion. Third, they underscore the significance of social movements and practices that challenge and resist the normalization of temporariness. Fourth, in questioning the binary opposition between temporariness and permanence, they advocate for non-­territorial bases of inclusion. Contesting the primacy of permanence and citizenship as bases for social inclusion raises significant conceptual and practical challenges. While I support the agenda of working toward broader and perhaps alternative bases for membership that are not based on clear-cut and binary categories or boundaries rooted in territory, ethnicity, or nationalism, there are various ways to contribute to this broad project. My more modest objective in this chapter is to critically examine and resituate temporariness. Temporal limits and rights inequities are clearly important, but other root causes of inequitable incorporation merit consideration. Specifically, I suggest that as we consider larger questions regarding membership and citizenship, we can move away from the temporariness-­permanence dichotomy by de-centering temporariness in the discussion. Temporariness is a key element of (im)migrant vulnerability, but it can be considered one of several dimensions of legal status precarity and broader processes of precarization. Focusing on temporariness is necessary, but not sufficient; this insight is underscored by recognition of the uneven and exclusionary aspects of permanence. Instead, I argue for being attentive to the dynamic and sometimes messy constitution of precarity implicated in the production and navigation of precarious legal status. This framework moves the focus away from temporal aspects of temporariness and toward issues of conditionality, power, and contingency that speak to how precarity is constituted – systemically across a range of categories, and by various actors in particular settings. Approaching the problem of temporariness this way can add to analyses of non-

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citizenship as well as transformations in citizenship. It may also contribute in the long run to debates about the bases of membership and about the connection between legal status and social fault lines in Canada, and proposals for reframing the bases for membership in political communities. I begin with a brief review of critical scholarship on migrant temporariness and the rise of temporary migration in Canada. Next, I use administrative data to consider what temporariness looks like in contemporary Canadian immigration policy and patterns; this supplements conceptual arguments with an empirical rationale thereby expanding ways of approaching the problems of temporariness. Third, I situate temporariness within a wider process of legal status precarization, which contextualizes temporariness in relation to variable, changing, and interconnected forms of precarious status (Goldring, Berinstein et al. 2009; Goldring and Landolt 2011, 2013; Landolt and Goldring 2010, 2013). In the final section, I introduce what I refer to as the conditionality of status as a crosscutting and fundamental aspect of the precarity of legal status and unequal inclusion. a p p r o a c h e s t o t h e p r o b l e m s o f t e m p o r a r y m i g r at i o n

In the context of contemporary immigration policy and legal status, temporariness refers to state authorization to enter and remain in a country for a limited duration. Entry under a particular statedefined temporary category is usually framed in relation to specific policy goals. For example, temporary workers address short-term employer and labour-market needs, student visas offer international students training and education, and refugee and other humanitarian categories offer protection and allow states to fulfill international humanitarian obligations. Temporary residence and work authorization may go hand in hand, or they may be separated as when one has the right to reside but not work, or vice versa.2 Temporary migratory status generally entails limited social, employment, and civil rights and no political rights. Temporariness is typically discussed in relation to temporary workers, although, as noted, students, refugee claimants, and other designated categories may also fall under this rubric. Typically, temporary workers are classified according to skill level and are admitted to work in particular occupations or sectors. Some temporary worker programs



The Precarity of Non-citizenship  221

limit labour market mobility by tying a worker’s visa and work permit to a particular employer and occupation (Basok 1999, 2002; Bakan and Stasiulis 1997). Under most arrangements, temporary work authorization or temporary residence is meant to present a barrier to settlement and citizenship.3 This signals the critical connection between temporariness and non-citizenship (Sharma 2006), and on the other side of the binary, permanence and citizenship. However, as Martin (2001) and others have noted, there is nothing temporary about temporary workers. Temporary workers tend to settle over time, regardless of legal status. Notable examples include Turkish workers in Germany and Mexicans in the United States (Calavita 1992; Oezcan 2004; Faist 1995). This also happens with people in other temporary categories, giving rise to the term “visa over-stayers.” In most situations, living with non-citizenship and temporariness in the face of barriers to permanence and citizenship has long-term negative repercussions for workers, their families, and their descendants who live with the challenges of racialization, racism, unequal rights, differential incorporation, family separation (and perhaps eventual unification), economic marginalization, adverse health effects, precarious employment, potential illegalization and deportability, and other problems associated with subordinate legal status situations. In Castles and Miller’s (2009) terms, lacking a clear pathway to citizenship produces ethnic minorities rather than ethnic communities. In Canada, temporariness in the form of temporary migration categories has also been identified as a key contributor to exclusionary outcomes for (im)migrants (Sharma 2006; Fuller and Vosko 2008; Rajkumar et al. 2012; Fudge and McPhail 2009; Fudge 2012). Scholarship on temporary workers has led the charge in this direction, identifying temporariness, lack of protection, contracts that link permits to employers, and limited rights and entitlements as the root causes of the workers’ vulnerability. This literature shows that temporary workers, particularly those filling so-called low-skilled positions such as agricultural workers and live-in domestic workers, are vulnerable to exploitation, poor labour conditions, substandard housing and living conditions, ill health, and injury (Nakache and Kinoshita 2010; Sargeant and Tucker 2010; Hennebry, Preibisch et al. 2010; Macklin 1994; Silvera 1983; Arat-Koc 1997). This research emphasizes how state regulation and federal and provincial differences determine the formal rights of temporary workers4 and pose

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­ arriers to how workers can exercise their limited rights (Nakache b and Kinoshita 2010). Empirically informed conceptual discussions on this topic have highlighted the differential incorporation of racialized and gendered temporary workers in the nation and its nationalized labour markets (Bakan and Stasiulis 1997; Arat-Koc 1997; Sharma 2006; Stasiulis and Bakan 2003; Valiani 2009), as well as the role of temporary, flexible, and vulnerable labour in contemporary capitalism (Fudge and MacPhail 2009; Preibisch 2010). This body of work contributes a systemic perspective that belies the temporariness implied in the name of the entrance category (Lenard and Straehle 2012). Temporary entrants may (or may not) be temporary at the individual level, but they have clearly become an enduring feature in certain occupations, sectors, labour markets, localities, and regions (Hennebry and Preibisch 2010; Trumper and Wong 2010). The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) and Live-In Caregiver Program (LICP) are among the better known and wellstudied Canadian temporary worker programs. Analysts have repeatedly argued that the terms of employment under these programs are exploitative and constitute migrant workers as “unfree” labour (Basok 2002; Preibisch and Binford 2007; Valiani 2009; Calugay 2001). The LICP is noteworthy because it was one of the few temporary worker categories with a pathway to citizenship, although recent changes have opened others, but mainly for workers classified as highly skilled (Nakache and Kinoshita 2010; Fudge and ­MacPhail 2009). The SAWP and LICP are not the only or even the largest categories of temporary entry: there are 16 subcategories of temporary entries, each with three to four subclassifications (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2011b). Subcategory designations identify skill level, occupational categories, specific occupations (e.g., agriculture, information technology), principal versus secondary applicants, whether the subcategory requires a Labour Market Opinion or not, relevant international agreements (North American Free Trade Agreement, General Agreement on Trade in Services), and so forth (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2011b). Researchers are analyzing newer programs, including the low-skilled pilot project (Hennebry and Preibisch 2010; McLaughlin and Hennebry 2013) and Provincial and Territorial Nominee Programs (Carter, Morrish et al. 2008; Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2011a, 2011b) as well as the growth of existing programs, such as international students (Sinziana 2013) and the expansion of temporary workers in



The Precarity of Non-citizenship  223

the service sector (Polanco and Zell 2012). Yet, the literature is still catching up with the proliferation of temporary worker programs, particularly those for highly skilled workers. This brief overview of research on migration-related temporariness in Canada reveals three main ways that the problem of temporariness has been framed: in terms of insufficient and inequitable rights, blocked membership, and temporality. The bundle of formal and substantive rights of temporary entrants is weaker than that of citizens insofar as it offers little or no protection and recourse; membership is at best partial because of historically rooted intersections of nationalism, racism, and ongoing racialization; and temporal limits generate boundaries intended to block access to recognized permanence and citizenship. Temporariness understood in these terms identifies an important mechanism through which immigration policy contributes to differential inclusion. My concern is that these approaches focus too heavily on specific categories of temporariness and do not adequately address systemic connections between them, or movement across legal status categories  – whether temporary and permanent, or authorized and unauthorized. Moreover, these approaches – particularly the focus on the temporality of temporariness – do not go far enough in theorizing differential inclusion and social exclusion with respect to (im)migrant trajectories over time and across categories.5 Focusing on temporariness and particular temporary categories has yielded three “solutions” that attempt to renegotiate the terms and conditions of temporary workers: (1) changing regulations to reduce exploitation and vulnerability; (2) reducing the amount of time people spend in temporary situations or the number of people in them, or expanding pathways to permanence; and (3) eliminating temporary worker programs. Yet, as the editors note, these initiatives do little to question the conceptualization of the temporarypermanent binary. Put differently, they rest on a particular model of temporariness and legal status categories, one where entry categories provide clear tracks (e.g., short- or long-term temporariness, pathways to citizenship), with movement across the temporary – permanent divide taking place in prescribed and limited ways (e.g., for live-in caregivers, or more recently through the Canadian Experience Class and Provincial and Territorial Nominee Program). To produce a more robust analysis of the problem of temporariness, I suggest reconsidering the precarity of temporariness and legal

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status. This can be accomplished by shifting to a different model of understanding  – one that assesses the relationships among a wide and dynamic array of immigration categories, including migrant “illegality.” To this end I review the concept of precarious status and extend it in two ways. One approaches the terrain of legal status production and negotiation using the model of chutes and ladders rather than different doors and tracks; the other introduces the conditionality of migrant legal status6 as a framework for understanding both the complexity of migrant legal status trajectories and, more generally, the multi-track and multidirectional trajectories that are part of the new terrain of citizenship and non-citizenship. Before this, I take a closer look at administrative data to build the case for developing an alternative model of migrant entry and trajectory. m o d e l s o f l e g a l s tat u s a n d s tat u s t r a j e c t o r i e s

To build the case for an approach to legal status that assesses the institutional production of legal status categories and multidirectional movements across them, whether as a result of policy shifts or the actions of migrants and other non-state actors, one must consider contemporary immigration policy and patterns of temporary and permanent migration to Canada. There has been a trend toward replacing an immigration model based on permanent immigration and settlement with one that increasingly relies on temporary migration (Goldring and Landolt 2012). This is ostensibly justified by the need to fill short-term labour market needs but also represents a deeper institutionalization of temporary labour migration and the introduction of measures to increase control and selection in the process of moving from temporary to permanent status. Academic and non-academic analysts alike have raised concerns about the rise in temporary worker entries in relation to permanent entries (Bouretta 2007; Alboim 2009; Yalnizian 2011; Goldring, Hennebry et al. 2009; Hennebry and Preibisch 2010; Nakache and Kinoshita 2010; Alboim and Cohl 2012; Faraday 2012). Yet, this rise in temporary entries needs to be situated in a wider context. Figure 9.1 presents the total annual permanent and temporary entries from 1983 to 2011 for all subcategories under these two headings. It shows that temporary entries have exceeded permanent entries for most of the last 27 years. In 1983, 89,192 people were admitted as permanent residents, and more than twice that number (201,969)



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were admitted on a temporary basis (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008). In the same year, the number of permanent entries was lower than in 1980 and 1981, when there were 143,140 and 128,642 permanent entries, respectively (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2011a). Between 1983 and 1992, the number of temporary entries remained higher than that of permanent entries, although the former began to drop in 1989 and converged with the number of permanent entries and fell slightly below it in 1993. After a decline in the numbers of permanent and temporary entries, they began to rise again in 1997 and 1998, with the total number of temporary entries rising faster and remaining well above that of permanent entries. Thus, the shift to temporariness is not new but rather has consolidated over several decades (Sharma 2006; Stasiulis and Bakan 1997). The rise in temporary worker entries emerges more sharply when we examine permanent and temporary entries by subcategory. Figure 9.2 presents entry data parsed according to the main subcategories of permanent and temporary entry used by Citizenship and Immigration Canada to summarize immigration data. The solid lines represent permanent entry categories (economic, family, refugee, and other), whereas the broken lines indicate temporary entry categories (foreign worker, student, humanitarian, and other). Since the early 1990s, the numbers of permanent economic migrants and temporary foreign workers have both risen dramatically, while the numbers in the family class have declined. The number of temporary foreign student entries has also risen, remaining well above the number of humanitarian and refugee entries, with the exception of 1989, when the number of humanitarian entries peaked briefly. The number of “other temporary entries,” which includes visitors and others not classified elsewhere, has been relatively high throughout this period. Figure 9.2 confirms the importance of migrant worker entries. A closer look at temporary migrant workers in relation to other temporary and permanent subcategories reveals additional trends that help to resituate ways of understanding temporary workers and the issue of temporariness more generally. One noteworthy trend is that the relative rise in the number of temporary worker entries has occurred in tandem with an increase in the number of economic immigrants. This reflects the importance of economic priorities across both the permanent and temporary doorways. Workers in both of these categories play a role in filling jobs and maintaining

0

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Figure 9.1 Permanent and temporary entries to Canada 1983–2011 (source: Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2012, 2011, 2008)

Number of People

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Figure 9.2 Permanent and temporary entry, by category 1983–2011 (adapted from Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008, 2011)

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conditions favourable for employers, a point that may be missed if one focuses uniquely on temporary worker or economic immigrant entries.7 Temporariness is increasing and complementing the entry of permanent economic immigrants – at least for now. A second trend is that although workers comprise many of the temporary resident entries, there are additional, heterogeneous dimensions within and across temporary entry categories that require analysis. Temporary categories offer entry to students and workers designated as highly skilled, as well as workers who fill low-skilled jobs, refugee claimants, visitors, and others. Some students and humanitarian entrants have work permits; others do not. Most migrant workers entering Canada to work in seasonal or precarious low-skilled jobs, including care work, come from the Global South, but there is a wide range of source countries for many migrant worker categories. There is also variation with respect to rights: some temporary categories include a pathway to citizenship, while others do not. Overall, temporary categories mirror permanent categories insofar as they include clear economic categories as well as humanitarian and “other” subcategories. Thus, temporariness, in light of all its attendant categories and subcategories, remains associated with limited temporal presence, but temporariness is not internally homogenous, and the boundaries surrounding forms of temporariness are not impermeable. As noted, some categories enable a pathway to permanent status; however, many also entail boundary crossing in other directions. The third trend raises questions about what happens to people who enter as temporary residents, over time. How many remain in Canada, and in what legal status situations? Available government data provide indirect evidence that supports qualitative research findings about trajectories leading to a loss of status; these data also clearly reveal movement between temporary categories. The latter constitutes a non-linear trajectory that may lead to permanent status, illegalization, or long-term temporariness and deserves further empirical attention. In any event, it highlights under-discussed patterns of multidirectional boundary crossing that do not fit the prevailing model of two distinct and fairly separate entry tracks – one for permanent settlers and one for short-term residents – which are nevertheless intersected by a conveyor belt system that occasionally moves limited numbers and categories of people from temporary to permanent status. My reading of the empirical data discussed



The Precarity of Non-citizenship  229

below is that the aforementioned model is inadequate, suggesting the need for a new, more dynamic model with the capacity to account for multi-directional boundary-crossing movements and trajectories, over time. Some analysts describe this as a two-step model of immigration (Hennebry 2012; Alboim and Cohl 2012); I argue below that a chutes and ladders model of immigration better captures the complexity of legal status trajectories (cf. Goldring and Landolt 2013). Figure 9.3 focuses on temporary entrants but presents information on entries (flow) as well as those still present (stock). It shows the annual total for each temporary category, broken down by entries and the often-larger number of people “still present” who arrived in an earlier year under that category. For workers, students, and humanitarian entrants, those still present exceed the number of entries. “Other temporary residents” is the only category for which entries exceed those still present. In 2011 the total number of temporary entries across categories came to 398,205 while those still present reached 621,089 (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2012). The data do not tell us when those present entered, nor do they provide information on people’s potential legal status trajectories. What the data do show, however, is that a growing number of people are present in various temporary categories and may remain so for some time before possibly shifting to another status category or out of status. Some data on status transitions have recently been made available by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (2011). Although it is not possible to determine what proportion of people might have been eligible for a particular status transition, the data provide some information on the number of people experiencing various transitions in a given year. Because the data are for single transitions, they do not outline long-term trajectories. Figure 9.4 presents information for overall temporary-to-temporary and temporary-to-­permanent transitions for 2000 to 2010. Transitions from temporary to permanent status outnumber those among temporary categories; however, the latter rise faster, doubling over the time period. Temporary entry can become an avenue to permanent status for people in some categories, including live-in caregivers, international students, provincial nominees, skilled temporary workers, and refugee claimants, as well as people without status who apply on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. Figure 9.5 shows those moving from temporary categories to permanent status. It

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Figure 9.3 Temporary entrants by subcategory, entries and still present 1983–2011 (adapted from Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008, 2012)

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80,000 70,000

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Figure 9.4 Status transitions: all temporary to temporary transitions and temporary to permanent transitions, 2000–11 (source: Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2009 [for 2000–01] and 2012 [for 2002–11])

indicates that former migrant workers account for the fastest growing and now largest number of these transitions, while the number of people moving from the humanitarian category has declined, particularly in the last three years. Foreign student and “other temporary” categories are a smaller and fairly constant component of these transitions. Data on permanent entries by subcategory or program of entry provide further insight on movement across the temporary-­ permanent boundary. In 2011, there were 248,748 permanent entries. The percentages of people in this total who were previously in a temporary category were as follows: 2.0 per cent were livein caregivers and 2.5 per cent were their spouses or dependants; 2.4 per cent entered under the Canadian Experience Class as principal applicants, spouses or dependants; 6.1 per cent were principal applicants through the Provincial and Territorial Nominee Program

232  Luin Goldring 80,000 70,000 From other

60,000

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Figure 9.5 Transition of temporary residents in Canada to permanent resident status, by previous status, 2000–11 (adapted from Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2011, 114, and 2012, 110)

and 9.3 per cent were their spouses and dependants; refugees, their spouses and ­dependants accounted for 11.2 per cent; 1.1 percent were humanitarian and compassionate (H&C) cases;8 and 2.2 per cent were “other” non-family class humanitarian and compassionate cases (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2012, 7). While each share is small, together they add up to 37 per cent of all permanent entries. In 2002, before the Canadian Experience Class was in place, the comparable figure was 14.4 per cent (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2012, 7). Thus, shifts from temporary to permanent status currently represent just over a third of permanent entries compared with other avenues for permanent entry (e.g., family class and skilled workers), and this proportion more than doubled from 2002 to 2011. Temporary entry can also lead to lateral movement among temporary categories. Figure 9.6 presents information on transitions among temporary categories, according to the category a person moves to. Transitions to the foreign worker category are the most important numerically; they also more than triple over the period covered in the figure. Transitions to the other temporary categories are relatively lower in number, yet they offer a way to remain in



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30,000

25,000

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20,000 To foreign worker 15,000

To foreign student

10,000

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5,000

0

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2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Year

Figure 9.6 Transitions among temporary status categories by current status, 2000–11 (elaborated from Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2012, 110 [for 2002–11] and Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2002 [for 2000–01])

Canada for some: transitions to the student category rose to just over 5,000 in 2011, and transitions to the “other temporary” category reached just over 6,000 (after a high of 7,827 in 2003). Although not presented here, the Citizenship and Immigration Canada data show that the transition to the foreign worker category is dominated by people who were previously foreign students or “other temporary” migrants, and the share of students rose considerably over the 11-year period (2012, 110). Foreign workers accounted for a rising share of those shifting into the foreign student category, along with a steady number of humanitarian and “other temporary” entrants. Those transitioning into the humanitarian category came largely from the “other temporary” category, but they also included students and workers. Those shifting into the “other temporary” category were mainly workers and students. These data highlight movement among temporary c­ategories  – in nearly all directions, yet following certain patterns. From 2008 to 2011, the largest number of transitions was of foreign ­students moving into the foreign worker and “other temporary” ­categories.

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Foreign workers moved primarily into the student and “other” categories, with smaller though growing numbers moving to the humanitarian category. Those in the humanitarian category appeared to have the lowest rates of transitions into other categories, except into the “other temporary” category. Those in the “other” category moved into the humanitarian and foreign worker categories, and none became foreign students. As noted, data limitations mean we do not know how many would be eligible to make various kinds of transitions in a given year, nor do we know year of first arrival, cumulative time living in Canada, or whether people experiencing the reported transitions to permanent or temporary status had also experienced earlier status transitions. Although the data do not allow one to analyze trajectories over time or adequately construct a denominator associated with these numbers,9 they do demonstrate that instead of entering through doorways that either send them back home or move them fairly smoothly into permanent status, a certain number of people are moving between temporary categories. In particular, it is clear that a growing number of temporary entrants in other categories are transitioning into the temporary worker category, and temporary workers are more likely to be among those moving from temporary to permanent status. Whether individuals experience trajectories with multiple transitions involving movement between temporary categories before shifting into the worker category and then permanent status is not possible to determine from the available data. This discussion of permanent and temporary entry and recent transition patterns complements qualitative studies that examine status transitions and illegalization among people entering Canada with some form of temporary status (typically as workers, refugees, or visitors) (P. Villegas 2012; Brasch 2013; Saad 2013; Young 2013; McLaughlin and Hennebry 2013; Kissoon 2013; Landolt and Goldring 2013). It also points to the need for an alternative way of conceptualizing patterns of entry and legal status trajectories in Canada, particularly movement, trajectories over time, and boundaries. Such a model would offer a more dynamic approach to movement between temporary and permanent categories, movement among temporary categories, and also trajectories involving loss of authorized status and perhaps subsequent movement into authorized status or deportation.



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p r e c a r i o u s s tat u s

The concept of precarious status offers elements for developing a chutes and ladders model of legal status trajectories.10 Colleagues and I elaborated the concept of precarious status (Goldring, ­Berinstein, et al. 2009) as part of an effort to examine the production of migrant illegality and illegalization in Canada (Bernhard et al. 2007; Bernhard and Young 2009). We conceptualized precarious status as a range of “less than full” non-citizen categories, including forms of temporary authorized status as well as unauthorized status, and argued that these legal status categories, and the production of illegality, needed to be situated in specific national contexts to account for different pathways to loss of status and illegalization. More specifically, we defined precarious status in Canada as marked by “the absence of any of the following elements normally associated with permanent residence (and citizenship11) in Canada: (1) permanent work authorization, (2) the right to remain permanently in the country (residence permit), (3) social citizenship rights available to permanent residents (e.g., public education and public health coverage), (4) not depending on a third party for one’s right to be in Canada (such as a sponsoring spouse or employer), and (5) the right to sponsor family members within the parameters available to citizens and permanent residents, e.g., family reunification” (Goldring, Berinstein, et al. 2009, 2007). The concept of precarious status cuts across the legal-illegalized divide. It currently includes authorized statuses such as (1) temporary workers, particularly those who depend on an employer for authorization to live and work in the country; (2) students, whose right to work has changed with modifications to rules concerning number of hours worked, type of employer, and authorized work and residence period after graduation; (3) refugee claimants; (4) visitors, who do not have work authorization; and (5) others waiting for status determinations (including sponsorship) and appeals. The concept also includes people in two broad categories of unauthorized status: formerly documented people such as visa over-stayers, rejected refugee claimants, or those whose family sponsorship broke down; and people whose initial entry was undetected or undocumented. This definition of precarious status accomplished three conceptual objectives. One was to draw attention to multiple forms of “less

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than full” status non-citizenship, which represented an alternative to binary models of citizenship and legality. A second was to analyze both the construction of legal status boundaries and movement across them. We approached category construction by examining policy shifts that draw or redraw boundaries, and changes in the constitution of categories with attention to access to public services. Categories of legal status are constituted with specific configurations of access to such services (or lack thereof); this has implications for newcomer well-being and social stratification more generally. To capture movement between forms of precarious status, both authorized and unauthorized, we considered three dimensions of movement: directionality, the movement of boundaries, and movement across boundaries. Rather than assuming unidirectional movement toward illegality, we emphasized irregularization and illegalization while also leaving room for movement in other directions, for specific individuals and groups. This would leave room to consider multiple pathways toward loss of status starting from various temporary entrance categories as well as undocumented entrance; the possibility of movement toward greater security; and non-linear movement between various categories. Analyzing the role of policies in generating precarious status shows that movement between categories can take place when boundaries shift because of policy and administrative changes. Such movement can also take place as a result of people’s efforts to change status; via policies or programs that effect such change; and when precarious status migrants are illegalized through the practices of other actors, including employers (McLaughlin and Hennebry 2013). The third objective was to situate the production of precarious status in a specific national landscape, in this case Canadian immigration and refugee policy and temporary worker programs, while being attentive to global processes. This showed that US-based analysis, while important for generating concepts and theoretical debate, did not adequately capture the Canadian context and can thus benefit from comparatively informed dialogue. Seen as a whole, precarious status presents a complex chutes and ladders framework for conceptualizing legal status dynamics (see figure 9.7). There are multiple starting points corresponding to one’s entrance status or mode of entry, and there may be lateral movement (e.g., transition between forms of temporary status without much change in security) and the possibility of becoming stuck over

Figure 9.7 Chutes and ladders of legal status in Canada (based on Goldring and Berinstein 2003, Goldring and Landolt 2013). CEC, Canadian Experience Class; H & C, humanitarian and compassionate; IT, information technology; LSPP, Low-skilled Pilot Program; NAFTA; North American Free Trade Agreement; PNP, Provincial Nominee Program; SAWP, Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program; TFW, temporary foreign worker.

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time (whether in authorized forms of temporariness or illegalized situations). Most – but not all – legal status categories have a “ladder” leading toward greater security. This was illustrated with the data presented earlier on transitions to permanent status, which showed temporary workers, students, refugee claimants, and other temporary entrants moving into permanent status. Similarly, permanent residents may become citizens; refugees may become accepted as permanent residents; and people without status may apply for permanent status on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. While we know that such ladders exist, large-scale information is not available on what proportion of temporary entrants eligible to use them actually do so, or what kinds of help they may receive in using them. Most categories also have a “chute” to greater precarity or loss of status. For example, those granted temporary visas for work, study, or a visit may remain after their visas expire, but without authorized status; denied refugee claimants may follow a similar path. Undocumented and smuggled entrants join the non-status population more directly. Individuals with no authorized status and with a deportation order would have no chute to further precarity, though there might be variation in the groups of people targeted for actual deportation. Social location and the practices of other actors may contribute to variation in how people navigate or are channeled and nudged along the chutes and ladders of legal status. The concept of precarious status and the chutes and ladders framework allow me to resituate temporariness as a dimension of precarious legal status. Identifying temporary work authorization and temporary residence authorization as key features of precarious status brings into relief the temporality of temporariness; it also highlights the link between temporality and notions of membership, social citizenship, and rights (Sharma 2006; Stasiulis and Bakan 2003; Landolt 2011; P. Villegas 2012; F. Villegas 2013; Bhuyan 2013; P. Villegas 2013). The social citizenship dimension of precarious status, indicated most clearly by limited access to public goods and limitations on family sponsorship and co-presence, makes room for considering officially recognized rights together with the practices of substantive citizenship. The chutes and ladders framework imbues precarious status with change and dynamics by focusing on trajectories of legal status. Perhaps the most pertinent contribution to this volume is that precarious status offers a framework for



The Precarity of Non-citizenship  239

analytically integrating disparate state-produced categories of temporariness, looking beyond the boundaries of temporariness, and bridging the authorized-unauthorized divide. At the same time, the initial discussion of precarious status has limitations, some of which are relevant to this chapter.12 First, it does not tackle the precarity of citizenship, only that of non-­citizenship (Sassen 2004; Bosniak 2006; Nyers 2006). Second, in drawing attention to the institutional production of various forms of precarious status, attention focused on policies, and non-state actors received less consideration (Landolt 2011; Landolt and Goldring 2013). Third, it does not adequately theorize the underlying source(s) of precarity. Fourth, the term “precarious status” seems to reify a boundary between forms of status that are precarious and others that are not, reproducing the oft-criticized dichotomization of categories (as between citizenship and non-citizenship; legal and illegal). In the remainder of this chapter, I introduce the concept of conditionality as a way to begin to address these issues. t h e c o n d i t i o n a l i t y o f p r e c a r i o u s s tat u s

Why suggest that precarity was inadequately theorized? I want to redirect attention to what underlies precarity, what generates and cuts across variable forms of precarious status (and sometimes apparently secure status), and how to understand precarity in relation to broader social and institutional processes. Temporariness does not adequately capture the roots or extent of precarity, and the term precarity itself does not convey enough about root causes and how actors and institutions constitute, organize, or negotiate precarious status through the “work” of boundary work (Lamont and Molnár 2002; De Genova 2005; Landolt and Goldring 2013, 2009). In discussions of employment, precarity involves several dimensions including job insecurity, temporariness, lack of social and regulatory protection, and lack of control over the work process (Cranford Vosko and Zukewich 2003; Vosko 2006; Rodgers 1989). That literature was helpful in conceptualizing precarious status, but now I am interested in analyzing how the precarity of legal status is produced and negotiated (cf. Goldring and Landolt 2012, 2013; Landolt and Goldring 2013). I propose using the concept of conditionality to understand how the precarity of legal status is constituted (Goldring 2010), because it

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offers the possibility of bridging the divides of temporary and permanent, authorized and not, and citizenship and non-citizenship. Conditionality is meant to capture the social production, contingency, and potential vulnerability that surround people’s ability to remain present in a jurisdiction or in a legal status category, and their access to public goods, social rights, and protections. It includes formal or official conditions (e.g., policies and regulations) and substantive conditions – the norms and practices that also establish, maintain, or negotiate conditions so that migrants can remain in a legal status category, remain present by moving to another legal situation, and gain access to rights and services associated with social citizenship. Conditionality highlights the role of actors in multiple institutional locations in performing the “work” that goes into constituting legal status categories, navigating across them, or negotiating access to goods or rights available to people in another status category by granting access, or helping people move into another status category (Goldring 2010; Landolt and Goldring 2013; Goldring and Landolt 2013; P. Villegas 2013; F. Villegas 2013; Bhuyan 2011). Conditionality thus responds to questions about the work being done (or not done), and by whom, that facilitates, negotiates, or limits presence and access. Conditionality draws attention to types of conditions, the work of various institutional actors involved in making, breaking, changing, and negotiating conditions, and arenas of conditionality. Types of conditionality can be understood as the formal policies and regulations and the non-formal or substantive practices that together establish the terms that shape presence in legal status categories and access to their associated bundle of rights. Actors include migrants as well as other state and non-state institutional actors implicated in conditionality through boundary work. Arenas of conditionality refers to conditions surrounding presence and access, and the distinct though potentially overlapping institutional contexts in which formal and substantive, and sometimes contingent, conditions shaping presence and access play out, such as legal status transitions, work permits, employment regulations, schooling, health care, law, refugee hearings, and housing. This conceptualization of sources, actors, and arenas of conditionality allows for a richer approach to the production of precarious status and legal status trajectories, one that (1) includes policies, state actors, employers, police, school staff, health workers, co-workers, front-line workers, and migrants with various forms of



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precarious status, and (2) considers how these actors produce, reproduce, challenge, and deal with the conditionality of legal status. This framework brings power relations to the fore and may be used to analyze the conditionality of presumably secure status. State regulations regarding work and residence permits are an example of a source of conditionality. While generally set by state actors, they are interpreted, upheld, violated, and perhaps temporarily breached by a wider range of actors. These actors and arenas may include employers who put temporary workers on closed permits in situations that violate the terms of their permit by “loaning” them to other employers or giving them insufficient hours of work, or who decide to “repatriate” injured workers (Nakache and Kinoshita 2010; Nakache 2013; McLaughlin and Hennebry 2013), and migrants who fail to meet permit renewal or application dates because of high fees or other reasons. Other types, actors, and arenas of conditionality are also important in shaping people’s ability to remain present or in a status category, such as the following: lawyers, refugee board staff, translators, and others involved in the refugee determination process (Saad 2011, 2013); school staff who make decisions about registering or denying admission to students with forms of precarious status (F. Villegas 2013; Sidhu 2008); healthcare workers or violence against women shelter workers applying an organization’s formal rules or informal practices regarding access to care (P. Villegas 2013; Bhuyan 2011); and migrants putting effort into shifting into a more secure status (Landolt and Goldring 2013; Brasch 2013). This approach allows one to consider how conditionality is constituted by and through actors in various institutional locations and arenas and how these processes may change. I want to underscore two points about conditionality. First, the formal terms surrounding the conditionality of legal status categories are generally not established and implemented by migrants themselves. This occurs externally, typically by state actors working at various levels and in the range of institutional settings that comprise the state (e.g., ministries of immigration, health, and labour, and their staff; officials in the Canadian Border Services Agency), and also by other levels of government and non-state actors such as police chiefs, employers, and their organizations, and managers and staff in health units, clinics and hospitals, school boards, and so on. Substantive conditionality, or the boundary work done to i­mplement, maintain, or challenge legal status boundaries and the rights associated with

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them, is more likely to occur via non-state actors, although state actors are also involved. Examples of actors and arenas may overlap with those listed above, as they include federal, provincial, or municipal government ministers and staff establishing enforcement guidelines that may be at odds with official regulations and practices on the ground. Scenarios of substantive conditionality include non-state actors engaged in lobbying and negotiations to grant access or discretionary gate keeping to limit access to services. However, the role of co-workers, friends, landlords, neighbours, and others in reporting or not reporting people suspected of being in violation of a work or residence permit or being present without status should not be understated. Second, the conditionality of legal status is dynamic and political and thus involves power (cf. Stasiulis and Bakan 2003, 1997; Wright 2003). This may involve ongoing or periodic negotiations among variously situated actors to meet and uphold, modify, circumvent, challenge, or temporarily breach the terms of conditionality. Terms are met, dealt with, or challenged through interaction among specific but variable actors and institutions. Moving to a different form of precarious status or out of status (by failing to meet conditions) does not stop negotiations related to status, but it may involve a shift in the constellation of institutional actors, power dynamics, and types of negotiation. Specific gatekeepers may take on greater importance in some of the arenas and social networks where negotiations take place. Used this way, conditionality situates people with precarious status in an asymmetrical, subordinate, and dependent power relationships vis-à-vis most other actors, including other (im)migrants. It locates government staff, employers, front-line service workers, and similarly situated actors in the position of gatekeepers and regulators with the potential to open, selectively open, and close access to services, resources, and information in a discretionary manner. In the process of negotiating presence and access (or temporality and rights), migrants with precarious status and those they encounter engage in boundary work – which may or may not contribute to renegotiating membership. Conditionality creates conceptual room to examine the politics of conditionality in specific sectors, arenas, and organizations. This framework identifies temporariness and conditionality as important dimensions of precarity, while maintaining the distinctiveness of each concept.



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Conditionality reveals how precarity is constituted by a range of actors, complementing and adding theoretical depth to the concept of precarious status. One can use this framework to analyze the conditionality of legal status as it is constituted in variable ways, by multiple actors, over time and across space, and across divides such as permanent and temporary, citizenship and non-citizenship. That is, conditionality is not necessarily limited to precarious status – it may be relevant for analyzing the unevenness of citizenship. Temporariness and constellations of rights are dimensions of legal status precarity, and conditionality crosscuts and constitutes precarity in ways that are patterned by formal conditionality but also somewhat contingent on the basis of substantive conditionality.13 conclusion

Researchers have framed the “problem” of temporariness primarily in terms of temporality and rights. While offering many insights, this often leads to a focus on specific legal status categories and the limited rights associated with them, and viewing temporariness in discrete and bounded terms. This approach is linked to a model of migrant entry and trajectory that compartmentalizes temporary entrance and subsequent paths as distinct from entrance through permanent categories, with movement from temporariness to permanence limited to select bridging pathways (e.g., the Live-in Caregiver Program or the Canadian Experience Class). A focus on temporariness fails to resolve or go beyond the binaries of temporality, rights, legality, and citizenship, focusing instead on one or another side of these divides. Using a review of administrative government data, I presented a more comprehensive picture of im/migrant entry and status boundary crossing in various directions. In spite of the limitations that make it impossible to examine multiple transitions or legal status trajectories with available data, I used this review to argue for broadening the analytical and conceptual lens by using the concept of precarious legal status. Precarious status allows for a more dynamic “chutes and ladders” approach to migration, legal status, and legal status trajectories. I also introduced the concept of the conditionality of legal status to better theorize the precarity of legal status. With this approach, temporariness becomes one dimension of precarious status and an aspect of the conditionality that constitutes legal status, but it is no

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longer the main problem in discussions of bases of membership and inequality. Instead, vulnerability, precarity, and unequal inclusion can be examined by analyzing formal and substantive conditionality and the actors and arenas involved in the boundary work of conditionality. This framework is consistent with intersectional analysis: attention to social location, racism and racialization, and legacies of colonialism can inform the analysis of this boundary work (Thobani 1998; De Genova 2005). Attention to the formal and substantive conditions that are produced and negotiated by actors situated in various institutional arenas offers conceptual tools for analyzing the constitution of precarious status and legal status trajectories. To summarize, resituating temporariness as a dimension of the precarity of legal status along with conditionality can broaden analyses of the problem of stratified rights and membership that generate social exclusion/inclusion for non-citizens. Rather than focusing proposals on achieving permanence or opening pathways to citizenship, understanding temporariness and the conditionality of precarious status in this way can strengthen arguments in favour of expanding the bases of rights and reducing insecurity, which can be consistent with the call to liberate temporariness. These alternatives may include strategies to link rights and membership more equitably to other bases – whether through the language and instruments of human rights, claiming equal rights and membership regardless of legal status, or focusing on employment rights regardless of legal status, for rights based on residence, rights to the city, and so forth (Sassen 2004; Siemiatycki and Isin 1997; Austin and Bauder 2010). Analyzing the conditionality of precarious legal status offers insight into the complexity of non-citizenship. Recognizing the multiactor constitution of legal status precarity and the possibility of movement across categories offers a framework for understanding systemic aspects of what may appear to be ad hoc processes, encounters, and trajectories. It also draws attention to the work that goes into presence and access. People in a particular status situation are not bound by immovable boundaries, but rather, by boundaries constituted or worked on by social actors. Identifying the conditionality of legal status as a challenge is consistent with developing and supporting agendas that involve strengthening security of presence and place for individuals and groups, whether this involves claims to the right not to migrate from one’s country of origin, or to remain present in places of settlement with equal rights and membership –



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regardless of legal status. We can recognize that for some migrants with forms of precarious status, temporariness is a choice that offers flexibility, but for many it is a constraint with an unclear path and end date. Finally, while this chapter has focused on the conditionality of non-citizenship, the approach may have broader relevance.14

notes

1 I originally developed the concept of the conditionality of legal status in the paper prepared for the December 2010 workshop associated with this volume. I am grateful to the editors for organizing this project and to the workshop participants for stimulating discussions. My collaborative work with Patricia Landolt continues to inform the intellectual project of analyzing non-citizenship (cf. Goldring and Landolt 2013). Earlier work with Carolina Berinstein and Judith Bernhard contributed to formulating the concept of precarious status. 2 For example, in Canada, temporary entry includes subcategories such as foreign students and refugee claimants, which in turn include those with work authorization and those without it, and visitors, who do not have work authorization (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2011b). Performers may enter temporarily to work but do not receive residence permits. 3 Two-step and conditional temporary residence categories may provide a narrow and probationary pathway to citizenship (Goldring and Landolt 2012; Alboim and Cohl 2012). 4 This includes work-based civil and social rights – rights to protection and rights to benefits – including the right bargain collectively, worker protections such as coverage under employment wage and safety standards, and federal and provincial “benefits” such as Employment Insurance and health insurance. 5 In the case of the Live-In Caregiver Program, the transition to permanent residence and citizenship has become an advocacy and research issue, and there is growing attention to transitions and trajectories (Valiani 2009; GATES 2012). 6 Judy Fudge (2012) makes a persuasive case for using the term “precarious migrant status” rather than “precarious legal status.” I use the two terms because, while her argument is convincing, legal status captures citizenship as well as non-citizenship under the umbrella of precarity. This draws attention to the unevenness and precarity of citizenship, particularly for

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7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

First Nations and racialized groups, and the potential “unmaking” of citizenship (Nyers 2006). See Picot and Sweetman (2012), who argue that immigration policy took a turn away from efforts to reduce entry levels in response to economic cycles, thus continuing to bring in relatively high numbers of immigrants and temporary residents even during the most recent recession. The numbers of humanitarian and compassionate (H&C) cases illustrate the very small doorway that allows those without status to move to permanent residence, as this is one of the few ways that people without status can make that transition (Goldring, Berinstein et al. 2009). Salimah Valiani (2009, 2010) has calculated rates of transition to permanent residence for live-in caregivers and discusses the methodological challenges of doing so. Chutes and ladders, also known as snakes and ladders, is a popular children’s board game. Players move along the board with the roll of a die. In the process, they may fall on squares with chutes or snakes that send them back to previous positions on the board, or they may fall on squares with ladders that allow them to move up by skipping forward, closer to the finishing mark. Here we noted “the high profile case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was ‘rendered’ to Syria and tortured there [as] a reminder of the potential insecurity of citizenship” (cf. Nyers 2006). Three other limitations are that precarious status does not consider the relationship between transnational spaces of formal or substantive citizenship and what is visible in the space of the nation in question ­(Coutin 1998, 2005; Macklin 1994); it does not explicitly consider statelessness (Macklin 2013); and that it fails to consider Aboriginal status and the legacy of citizenship as an element of settler-colonial nationalism (Sharma 2006; Fortier 2013). The conditionality of permanent residence and citizenship are beyond the scope of this chapter. I note, hover, that in March 2011, the Harper government introduced a proposal to create a two-year conditional permanent resident category to prevent “marriage fraud” (Government of Canada 2011). Critics have raised several concerns, including that the proposal would give sponsoring partners undue power in the relationship (Canadian Council for Refugees 2011). Conditionality would be in the hands of state actors and the sponsoring partner. For example, conditionality may be relevant to analyses of Aboriginal rights, intersectional analyses of gendered and racialized inequality, cultural citizenship, multi-jurisdictional membership, and so forth.



The Precarity of Non-citizenship  247

references

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citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Calavita, Kitty. 1992. Inside the State: the Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S, After the Law. New York: Routledge. Calugay, Evelyn. 2001. Personal email communication. [Pinay, The Filipino women’s Organization in Quebec.] 17 December. Canadian Council for Refugees. 2011. Statement on Proposed “Conditional Permanent Residence” for Sponsored Spouses. Montreal: Canadian Council for Refugees. http://ccrweb.ca/en/statement­proposed-conditional-permanent-residence-sponsored-spouses Carter, Tom, Margot Morrish, and Benjamin Amoyaw. 2008. Attracting Immigrants to Smaller Urban and Rural Communities: Lessons Learned from the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program. Journal of International Migration and Integration 9(2):161–83. Castles, Stephen, and Mark J. Miller. 2009. The Age of Migration. 4th ed. New York: Guilford Press. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. 2002. 2001 Facts and Figures – Immigration Overview: Permanent and Temporary Residents. Ottawa: Citizenship and Immigration Canada. – 2008. 2007 Facts and Figures – Immigration Overview: Permanent and Temporary Residents. Ottawa: Citizenship and Immigration Canada. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/pdf/pub/facts2007.pdf – 2011a. 2010 Facts and Figures– Immigration Overview: Permanent and Temporary Residents. Ottawa: Citizenship and Immigration Canada. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/statistics/facts2010/index.asp – 2011b. Evaluation of the Provincial Nominee Program. Ottawa: Citizenship and Immigration Canada. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/ ­resources/evaluation/pnp/index.asp – 2012. Facts and Figures – Immigration Overview: Permanent and Temporary Residents. Ottawa: Citizenship and Immigration Canada. http:// www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/statistics/facts2011/index.asp Coutin, Susan Bibler. 1998. From Refugees to Immigrants: The Legalization Strategies of Salvadoran Immigrants and Activists. International Migration Review 32(4):901–25. – 2005. Contesting Criminality: Illegal Immigration and the Spatialization of Legality. Theoretical Criminology 9(1):5–29. Cranford, Cynthia, Leah F. Vosko, and Nancy Zukewich. 2003. Precarious Employment in the Canadian Labour Market: a Statistical Portrait. Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society 3:6–23.



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De Genova, Nicholas P. 2005. Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Faist, Thomas. 1995. Social Citizenship for Whom? Young Turks in Germany and Mexican Americans in the United States. Avebury: Aldershot. Faraday, Fay. 2012. Made in Canada: How the Law Constructs Migrant Workers’ Insecurity. Toronto: Metcalf Foundation. Fortier, Craig S. 2013. No One Is Illegal Movements in Canada and the Negotiation of Counter-national and Anti-colonial Struggles from within the Nation-state. In Producing and Negotiating Non-citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. Luin Goldring and Patricia ­Landolt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fudge, Judy. 2012. Precarious Migrant Status and Precarious Employment: The Paradox of International Rights for Migrant Workers. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria. Fudge, Judy, and Fiona MacPhail. 2009. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program in Canada: Low-Skilled Workers as an Extreme Form of Flexible Labor. Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal 31(1):101–41. Fuller, Sylvia, and Leah F. Vosko. 2008. Temporary Employment and Social Inequality in Canada: Exploring Intersections of Gender, Race and Migration. Social Indicators Research 88(1):31–50. GATES (Gabriela Transitions Experiences Survey). 2012. Announcing the Gabriela Transitions Experiences Survey. http://www.gatesurvey. com/2012/12/announcing-the-gabriela-transitions-experiences-survey/ [accessed 7 March 2013] Goldring, Luin. 2010. The Conditionality of Precarious Legal Status. In Workshop on Liberating Temporariness: Imagining Alternatives to Permanence as a Pathway to Social Inclusion. Toronto: York University. Goldring, Luin, Carolina Berinstein, and Judith Bernhard. 2007. Institutionalizing Precarious Immigration Status in Canada. ceris Working Paper Series no. 61, ed. M. Doucette. Toronto: CERIS. Goldring, Luin, Carolina Berinstein, and Judith K. Bernhard. 2009. Institutionalizing Precarious Migratory Status in Canada. Citizenship Studies 13(3):239–65. Goldring, Luin, Jenna Hennebry, and Kerry Preibisch. 2009. Temporary Worker Programs: North America’s Second-Class Citizens. Canada Watch Spring. Goldring, Luin, and Patricia Landolt. 2011. Caught in the Work­ Citizenship Matrix: the Lasting Effects of Precarious Legal Status on Work for Toronto Immigrants. Globalizations 8(3):325–41.

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Goldring, Luin, and Patricia Landolt. 2012. The Impact of Precarious Legal Status on Immigrants’ Economic Outcomes. IRPP Study no. 35. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Goldring, Luin, and Patricia Landolt. 2013. The Conditionality of Legal Status and Rights: Conceptualizing Precarious Non-citizenship in Canada. In Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Government of Canada. 2011. Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Notice requesting comments on a proposal to introduce a conditional permanent residence period of two years or more for sponsored spouses and partners in a relationship of two years or less with their sponsors. Canada Gazette 145(13). Hennebry, Jenna, and Kerry Preibisch. 2010. Permanently Temporary: The Second Generation of Temporary Migration – Canada in the World. In Permanently Temporary: Temporary Foreign Workers and Canada’s Changing Attitude to Citizenship and Immigration. Toronto: Social Planning Toronto, CERIS, OCASI. Hennebry, Jenna, Kerry Preibisch, and Janet McLaughlin. 2010. Health across Borders — Health Status, Risks and Care among Transnational Migrant Farm Workers in Ontario. Toronto: CERIS, Ontario Metropolis Center. Hennebry, Jenna. 2012. Permanently Temporary? Agricultural Migrant Workers and their Integration in Canada. IRPP Study no. 26. Ottawa: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Kissoon, Priya. 2013. Precarious Immigration Status and Precarious Housing Pathways: Refugee Claimant Homelessness in Toronto and Vancouver. In Producing and Negotiating Non-citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. L. Goldring and P. Landolt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lamont, Michèle, and Virág Molnár. 2002. The Study of boundaries in the Social Sciences. Annual Review of Sociology 28:167–95. Landolt, Patricia. 2011. Negotiating Rights or Membership?: Institutional Struggles for Access to Health and Education for Precarious Status Migrants in the GTA. Presentation in CERIS Seminar Series. Toronto: York University. Landolt, Patricia, and Luin Goldring. 2009. Immigrant Political Socialization as Bridging and Boundary Work: Mapping the Multi-Layered Incorporation of Latin American Immigrants in Toronto. Ethnic and Racial Studies 37(7):1226–47.



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Landolt, Patricia, and Luin Goldring. 2010. The Long-Term Impacts of Non-Citizenship on Work: Precarious Legal Status and the Institutional Production of a Migrant Working Poor. In Producing and Negotiating Precarious Status in Canada. Toronto: Research Alliance on Precarious Status, York University, University of Toronto. Landolt, Patricia, and Luin Goldring. 2013. The Social Production of Non-citizenship: The Consequences of Intersecting Trajectories of Precarious Legal Status and Precarious Work. In Producing and Negotiating Non-citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. L. Goldring and P. Landolt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lenard, Patti Tamara, and Christine Straehle (eds.). 2012. Legislated Inequality: Temporary Labour Migration in Canada. McGill-Queens University Press. Macklin, Audrey. 1994. On the Inside Looking In: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada. In Maid in the Market: Women’s Paid Domestic Labour, ed. W. Giles and S. Arat-Koc. Halifax, NS: Fernwood. – 2013. Commentary on Producing and Negotiating Non-citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada. Book launch. May 9. Toronto. Martin, Philip. There is Nothing More Permanent Than Temporary Foreign Workers. Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies. http:// www.cis.org/TemporaryWorkers-Overstays McLaughlin, Janet, and Jenna Hennebry. 2013. Pathways to Precarity: Structural Vulnerabilities and Lived Consequences for Migrant Farmworkers in Canada. In Producing and Negotiating Non-citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. L. Goldring and P. Landolt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nakache, Delphine, and Paula J. Kinoshita. 2010. The Canadian Temporary Foreign Worker Program: Do Short-Term Economic Needs Prevail over Human Rights Concerns? IRPP Study no. 5. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Nakache, Delphine. 2013. The Canadian Temporary Foreign Worker Program: Regulations, Practices, and Protection Gaps. In Producing and Negotiating Non-citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nyers, Peter. 2006. The Accidental Citizen: Acts of Sovereignty and (Un)Making Citizenship. Economy and Society 35(1):22–41. Oezcan, Vysel. 2004. Germany: Immigration in Transition. Migration Policy Institute. http://www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display. cfm?ID=235 [accessed 7 October 2010].

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Picot, Garnett, and Arthur Sweetman. 2012. Making it in Canada: Immigration Outcomes and Policies. IRPP Study no. 29. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Polanco, Geraldina, and Sarah Zell. 2012. Migrant Workers in Labour Markets Gone Global: Language as a Border in Mexican and Filipino Temporary Labour Migration. National Metropolis Conference, Toronto, 29 February – 3 March. Preibisch, Kerry. 2010. Pick-Your-Own Labor: Migrant Workers and Flexibility in Canadian Agriculture. International Migration Review 44(2):404–41. Preibisch, Kerry, and Leigh Binford. 2007. Interrogating Racialized Global Labour Supply: An Exploration of the Racial/National Replacement of Foreign Agricultural Workers in Canada. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 44(1):5–36. Rajkumar, Deepa, Laurel Berkowitz, Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Robert Latham. 2012. At the Temporary-Permanent Divide: How Canada Produces Temporariness and Makes Citizens through its Security, Work, and Settlement Policies. Citizenship Studies 16(3/4). Rodgers, Gerry. 1989. Precarious Employment in Western Europe: The State of the Debate. In Precarious Jobs in Labour Market Regulation: The Growth of Atypical Employment in Western Europe, ed. Gerry Rodgers and Janine Rodgers. Geneva: International Institute for Labour Studies. Saad, Samia. 2013. The cost of Invisibility: The Psychosocial Impact of Falling out of Status. In Producing and Negotiating Non-citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. L. Goldring and P. Landolt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2011. A Secret Life: The Psychosocial Impact of Falling Out Of Status. MA thesis, Interdisciplinary Studies, York University, Toronto. Sargeant, Malcolm, and Eric Tucker. 2010. Layers of Vulnerability in Occupational Safety and Health for Migrant Workers: Case Studies from ­Canada and the UK Policy and Practice in Health and Safety 7(2):51–73. Sassen, Saskia. 2004. The Repositioning of Citizenship. In People Out of Place, ed. Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir. New York and London: Routledge. Sharma, Nandita. 2006. Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sidhu, Navjeet. 2008. The Right to Learn: Access to Public Education for Non-Status Immigrants. Toronto: Community Social Planning Council of Toronto.



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Siemiatycki, Myer, and Engin F. Isin. 1997. Immigration, Diversity and Urban Citizenship in Toronto. Canadian Journal of Regional Science 20(Spring):73–102. Silvera, Makeda. 1983. Silenced: Talks with Working Class Caribbean Women about Their Lives and Struggles as Domestics in Canada. Toronto: Williams Wallace. Sinziana, Chira. 2013. Dreaming Big, Coming Up Short: The Challenging Realities of International Student and Graduates in Atlantic Canada. Working Paper Series no. 44–2013. Halifax: Atlantic Metropolis Centre. Stasiulis, Daiva, and Abigail Bakan. 2003. Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System. Houndmills, Basing­ stoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stasiulis, Daiva, and Abigail Bakan. 1997. Negotiating Citizenship: The Case of Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada. Feminist Review 57(1):112–39. Thobani, Sunera. 1998. Nationalizing Citizens, Bordering Immigrant Women. Globalization and the Racialization of Citizenship in Late 20th Century Canada. PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Fraser University, BC. Trumper, Ricardo, and Lloyd Wong. 2010. Temporary Workers in Canada: A National Perspective. Canadian Issues/Themes canadiens Spring:83–89. Valiani, Salimah. 2009. The Shift in Canadian Immigration Policy and Unheeded Lessons of the Live-in Caregiver Program. http://mrzine. monthlyreview.org/2009/valiani030309.html [accessed 7 December 2010]. – 2010. The Rise of Temporary Migration and Employer-Driven Immigration in Canada: Tracing Policy Shifts of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries. Toronto: Research Alliance on Precarious Status, York University, University of Toronto. Villegas, Francisco. 2013. Getting to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” at the Toronto District School Board: Mapping the Competing Discourses of Rights and Membership. In Producing and Negotiating Non-­citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. L. Goldring and P. Landolt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Villegas, Paloma. 2012. Assembling and Re(Making) Migrant Illegalization: Mexican Migrants with Precarious Status in Canada. PhD dissertation, Sociology and Equity Studies, OISE, University of Toronto. – 2013. Negotiating the boundaries of membership: Health Care Providers, Access to Social Goods and Immigration Status. In Producing and

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Negotiating Non-citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. L. Goldring and P. Landolt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Vosko, Leah F., ed. 2006. Precarious Employment: Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Wright, Cynthia. 2003. Moments of Emergence: Organizing by and with Undocumented and Non-Citizen People in Canada after September 11. Refuge 21(3):5–15. Yalnizian, Armine. 2011. Canada’s Immigration Policy: Who is on the Guest List? Globe and Mail, 18 February. Young, Julie. 2013. “This is my Life:” Youth Negotiating Legality and Belonging in Toronto. In Producing and Negotiating Non-citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. L. Goldring and P. Landolt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

10 Constructing and “Liberating” Temporariness in the Canadian Non-profit Sector: Neoliberalism and Non-profit Service Providers john shields

introduction

An examination of the non-profit sector provides a valuable window on the creation and institutionalization of temporariness in contemporary society. This chapter seeks to outline how temporariness has been produced and reproduced within the non-profit health, social, and human services sector at the organizational, workforce, and community levels in Canada. Examples are drawn from newcomer settlement services to illustrate trends and experiences. Temporariness is expressed through rising levels of job, organizational, and community-based insecurity, vulnerability, precarity, and marginalization. Non-profit service providers, their workforces, and the health, social, and human services that they provide to vulnerable communities have been made more temporary because of the restructuring along neoliberal lines of the relationship between the state and nonprofit service providers. Delivery of public services through statenon-profit “partnering” relationships, as promoted by government funding agencies, has especially fostered temporariness and deepened its challenges. This mechanism of restructuring can be understood as part of a larger process of neoliberal globalization by which the welfare state has been subject to “hollowing out,” making it less comprehensive, subject to continuous erosion, and more market oriented. Within a leaner and less progressively redistributive state, society has come

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to be marked by widening inequality, social exclusion, and growing patterns of contingent employment relations (Lewchuk, Lafleche et al. 2013). Newcomer populations have been particularly negatively impacted by these developments (Law Commision of Ontario 2012, 20–2), and non-profit service providers have been placed at the centre of this process. In addition to examining the three levels in which temporariness is manifest in the political economy of the non-profit sector, this chapter will also consider how some of the most negative effects of temporariness may be “liberated” through the introduction of some basic and practical reforms to the “partnership” relationship between the state and non-profit service providers. By reforming the contract financing system; introducing more stable, longer term, and sustainable financing of programs and non-profit organizations; allowing greater latitude in how public dollars are spent by nonprofit service organizations; and reforming accountability rules, the permanent temporariness produced by neoliberal restructuring of the non-profit sector can be at least partially alleviated. However, the recent turn to public sector austerity in the wake of the 2007–08 financial crisis has seen the state rely on the non-profit sector to take an even greater role in social provision at a time of growing need, without the benefit of additional government support. Such unilateral downloading by the state threatens to create greater stress on an already overstretched sector, embedding the more negative features of temporariness even more deeply into the fabric of the non-profit sector’s political economy. Hence, this chapter will offer an examination of an important sector of society and provide a policy-relevant perspective regarding the dynamics of temporariness in a neoliberal age. positioning the non-profit sector

The non-profit sector has until recently been a neglected as well as under-studied and under-theorized area of examination, especially with respect to critical social science inquiry. Its neglect was such that one analyst referred to it as the invisible sector (Hall 1997, 74). Interest in the sector has grown in response to a number of factors, including the policy influence of Robert Putnam’s work on the link between civil society and social capital and its association with social inclusion (Putnam 1995) as well as the neoliberal ­restructuring of



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the Keynesian welfare state and the use of non-profit service providers to help “shrink the state” to render society more market based (Shields and Evans 1998). In its simplest terms, the non-profit sector can be described as “a sector [that sits] between the state and market, filling both economic and social missions, which pursues a general interest, and whose final objective is not the redistribution of profit” (OECD 2003, 10). Core values embodied in the sector are said to be conveyed by terms such as altruism, reciprocity, the ethic of caring and giving, charity, and philanthropy (Evans and Shields 2010, 305). The sector has been labelled under various titles that capture aspects of its special character, including the voluntary sector (reflecting its extensive use of voluntary labour and the independent voluntary nature of the formation of the organizations within the sector), the third sector (acknowledging its position sandwiched between the state and the market, with distinctive values), the charitable sector (reflecting the fact that many organizations in the sector enjoy tax exemptions to support their work for the public good, although many non-profit bodies do not enjoy special tax-exempt status), and non-profit sector (highlighting the non-profit nature of organizations in this sector that seek broader collective or group goals). The non-profit sector is also important for engaging civil society in debate and dialogue and for offering a voice, especially to those in society who are more marginalized (Westley and Bird 2011, 3–4). The term “non-profit sector” is employed in this chapter. It should also be noted that the non-profit sector is very diverse in terms of the breadth of the areas with which its organizations are involved and the populations they service, stretching from culture and recreation to professional associations, from religious to social services, and covering support for the aged to new immigrant groups. It is also important to break down the sector into core and expanded segments. The broader non-profit sector includes hospitals and colleges and universities, which operate under a non-profit and charitable mandate, but which are also so closely tied to and regulated by the state that they are often characterized as part of the para-public sector. In 2007, using standard economic measures, the core segment was responsible for 2.5 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP), while the expanded sector represented about 7.0 per cent of GDP (Statistics Canada 2007, 5, 13). Moreover, as a whole, the nonprofit sector in Canada is second only to The Netherlands in terms

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of the sector’s share of active paid labour force employment, at 11.1 per cent (Hall, Barr et al. 2005, 9–10). Our interest is with the core segment of the non-profit sector. Here, most organizations are small, with two thirds of them having annual revenue of less than $100,000, as of the late 1990s (Panel on Accountability and Governance in the Voluntary Sector 1998, 4). There are, however, some large multi-million dollar organizations, and there is ongoing pressure toward the consolidation of organizations into bigger entities that are able to take advantage of better economies of scale (Statistics Canada 2004, 10). The core non-profit sector has grown rapidly, outpacing both the private and state sectors, averaging annual increases of 7.1 per cent between 1997 and 2007, and almost doubling its level of economic activity over this time. By 2006 the core non-profit sector was 2.5 times the size of the agricultural sector and six times that of the motor vehicle manufacturing sector (Statistics Canada 2007, 10). The core non-profit sector thus constitutes a significant component of the modern Canadian economy. About half of the organizations in the core nonprofit sector fall within the broad health, social services, and human services fields of activities (Statistics Canada 2007, 13), and most of these organizations are engaged in partnering with government to deliver these services to communities. The non-profit sector has long been part of the mixed social economy in Canada, where public services in the areas of health, social services, and human services are delivered through a combination of public and private non-profit providers (Valverde 1995). Over time, however, the nature of this mix has changed. During the Keynesian era, non-profit providers largely filled gaps in social provision offered by an expanding welfare state. The mandates of non-profit service providers were supported by the Keynesian state through long-term relationships with government that funded the core operations of non-profit service providers. That is to say that the state provided funding that could be used to support both programs directly and the administrative infrastructure of non-profit providers necessary for the ongoing operation of the organization. While to a large degree these partnering relationships were overshadowed and made invisible by the expanding state role in society, the state did not come to displace non-profit activities, as is claimed by neoliberals, but rather non-profit service providers generally forged a mutually beneficial and supportive symbiotic relationship with



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g­ overnment. During this time the core non-profit sector grew alongside the expansion of the state. The role of non-profit providers in this model was to supplement and deepen state social support, not to displace the primary place of the state in its provision (Evans, ­Richmond et al. 2005, 74–6). Moreover, the role of the Keynesian state was directed at building state capacity in the social policy sphere, developing and enhancing at minimum a limited form of broad societal inclusion, and fostering Fordist forms of employment security/permanence to large segments of the working population (Burke, Mooers et al. 2000, 12–13). By the 1970s, the Canadian state, in recognition of the ongoing importance of immigrants to the building of the Canadian economy and society, provided increasing levels of financial support for newcomer settlement and multicultural programs (Vineberg 2012; Richmond and Shields 2005; Shields 2004). The guiding idea in immigrant services was that of a two-way street, where newcomer integration involved mutual obligations on the part of immigrants and Canadian society, including the commitment by the federal government to support an elaborate network of immigrant support programs located in the communities where immigrants settled (Tolley 2011, 29). Under neoliberal governance, the mix of state and non-profit provision of public goods was shuffled again beginning in the 1980s. The Keynesian state came to be viewed as too large and excessively interfering in the economy and society. To free the taxpayers from the restraints of big government, policy goals of societal inclusion came to be abandoned in favour of greater inequality, which was seen as necessary to release “creative” market forces (Burke, ­Mooers et al. 2000, 12–13). Non-profit agencies could be employed as deliverers of many government-funded services, thereby taking up a larger role in a restructured and leaner social sector. New models of business management, in which market-like mechanisms were employed, governed this new government-non-profit relationship. While commonly described as a partnership, this new relationship is in fact a top-down system of financial and administrative accountability controls that moved the relationship away from bonds of trust to contractually driven obligations. It was fundamentally about placing non-profit service organizations on a market-based footing (Richmond and Shields 2004). Additionally, the social and economic “rights” of citizens to publicly supported benefits were also

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i­ncreasingly reduced. The expectation of neoliberal governments was that individuals should be more responsible for their own wellbeing. Likewise, immigrant newcomers were also expected to be more self-reliant upon arrival (Trudeau 2008), freeing the state to cut back on its settlement support obligations. the non-profit sector and the meaning of temporariness

By temporariness we mean that non-profit service providers, their workforce, and the services they provide to communities are all placed in a more insecure, less permanent position because of the more uncertain short-term support that these organizations receive from government to provide services and programming to individuals and communities. Moreover, program financing consistently fails to provide adequate operational support to non-profit organizations themselves, which undermines the long-term sustainability of the organizations (Eakin 2007). A weakened non-profit structure and under-financed programs delivered by overworked non-profit providers weaken the quality and reach of the services provided to the vulnerable communities they serve. The result is a chain of vulnerabilities and enhanced temporariness in the non-profit sector and within the communities that non-profit service providers support. The movement toward ever greater insecurity in the non-profit sector, and hence a form of institutionalized temporariness, has been promoted by the very logic of neoliberal restructuring. neoliberal restructuring and non-profit service d e l i v e r y o r g a n i z at i o n s

Because of the location of the non-profit sector, positioned between the state and the private marketplace, the sector has come to be particularly affected by neoliberal restructuring. As the state has shrunk, it has strategically offloaded responsibilities onto the sector while fundamentally remaking its relationship with non-profit service providers. The sector has been continuously pressed to do more with less, in effect subsidizing publicly supported services to vulnerable populations, with the expectation that the non-profit sector will bind communities together in an era characterized by elevated levels of risk and insecurity (Beck 1992).



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State “partnering” with non-profit service providers has really been a unilateral top-down process whereby the state has increasingly contracted out and off-loaded service delivery of publicly supported services – many previously provided directly by government – to non-profit providers. This has been a central component of the neoliberal hollowing out of the welfare state. The state’s use of competitively tendered, short-term program financing contracts, governed by New Public Management (NPM) directed guidelines, has served to fundamentally reshape the state’s relationship with the non-profit social and human services sector (Evans, Richmond et al. 2005). NPM brought hard-edged business managerialism into public administration, placing emphasis on narrow economic efficiency, business models of governance and a public choice orientation that seeks to marketize all relationships (Shields and Evans 1998, 71–3). NPM is “characterized by punitive and restrictive structures of funding allocation, accountability and control over” non-profit providers (Access Alliance 2011, 75) and has served as the transmission belt that has brought neoliberal values into the non-profit sector. It is through the use of these mechanisms by the state that various forms of temporariness have been fostered in this sector. Government underfunding of programs through its service delivery contracts has been endemic. A 2004 Ontario-based study found that non-profit organizations were delivering $1.14 in services for every $1.00 of grant. This shortfall results from government failure to properly finance start-up, administrative, and organizational infrastructural costs that are more hidden in service delivery (Eakin 2007, 3–4). It is also revealing, because of different levels of government financing, that one government often does not recognize the costs imposed by another government. In the case of Ontario, for example, the federal government has refused to alter its wage calculations for organizations to comply with Ontario pay equity regulations.1 Chronic underfunding and lack of flexibility in how funds and programs are to be administered and used, along with excessively burdensome accountability mechanisms, often referred to as punishment by counting, have imposed enormous strains on non-profit providers. The organizations suffer from the problem of “compassion fatigue” (Access Alliance 2011, 92), which contributes to the organization and its staff continuously being forced into the position of doing more for less. It is a situation that has created a crisis in the sector that threatens the long-term survival of these

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­ rganizations themselves (Clutterbuck and Howarth 2002) and, o in effect, places non-profit service deliverers in a permanent state of temporariness and vulnerability. The much-celebrated Canadian model of newcomer settlement services delivered by community-­ based agencies has likewise been seriously compromised by these developments (Richmond and Shields 2005). The Non-profit Workforce and the Promotion of Temporariness Even though Canada has one of the largest paid non-profit workforces in the world, we knew relatively little about it because of lack of study and good statistical data, until very recently (HR Council for the Voluntary and Non-profit Sector 2008, 13). However, while information gaps still exist, a profile of work in the non-profit sector has begun to emerge. It is clear that the impact of neoliberal restructuring on non-profit service providers, along with the general nature of the organizational structures of these organizations, has had profound effects on the character and makeup of the paid non-profit labour force. Importantly, it is recognized that many nonprofit organizations are “not in a position to independently generate the funds needed to support their work. That [sic] places them in a precarious financial position and means that often pay levels and job security are low” (McMullen and Brisbois 2003, vii). This downward pressure on the conditions and rewards of work has been further reinforced by many years of flatlining contract budgets by government and an increased workload owing to greater needs in a more polarized society.2 A very large proportion of the jobs in the core non-profit sector fall within the so-called caring professions, such as social workers, counsellors, trainers, nurses, childcare workers, and consequently the sector is dominated by women workers (McMullen and Schellenberg 2002, 35). An analysis of 2006 census data revealed that in Toronto 84.4 per cent of non-profit workers were female (Zizys 2011, 10). The attractiveness of the non-profit sector to female workers is often said to rest in the greater employment flexibility it offers. “Of course, flexibility in work schedules can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can offer opportunities for balancing work and family responsibilities. On the other hand … flexibility may work more strongly in favour of the employer if it means shift work, overtime or insufficient hours, being on-call, and working nights and



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weekends” (McMullen and Schellenberg 2002, 44). Moreover, the less financially costly nonstandard work arrangements, such as parttime, temporary, and contract work, are prevalent in the sector and growing (CSPC-T and FSA 2006; Dow 2001). As a caregiving sector with a large female-dominated workforce, the non-profit sector’s basic makeup has been heavily affected by a widespread movement away from permanent full-time work to more temporary, contingent, and “flexible” work arrangements. Further, as a caring sector it has been theorized – the donative-labour hypothesis  – that non-profit employees make a trade-off in lower wages and less secure, more temporary employment for work that is more socially rewarding. It has even been suggested that nonprofit employers purposefully offer lower wages and less advantageous employment conditions as a strategy for attracting staff and managers who are fully committed to the mission of the organization rather than driven by compensation considerations (McMullen and Schellenberg 2003, 15). Two Toronto studies confirm that the average employment income and benefit package in the core nonprofit sector is, in fact, lower than those found in comparable jobs in the other sectors of the economy (CSPC-T and FSA 2006, 6; Zizys 2011, 19). Another study identified a two dollar to four dollar per hour wage gap for managers and those in technical trades between the non-profit and other sectors (McMullen and Schellenberg 2003, 28). The positive benefits of this situation for recruitment, quality of employment experience, and retention, as argued in the donativelabour hypothesis, are, needless to say, highly contentious. In this context it is important to note that the state’s reliance on non-profit alternative service delivery was primarily designed to save money by using a cheaper labour force that was less densely unionized and more disposable or temporary than that found in the public sector proper. Empirical studies show that “project funding contributes to the incidence of contingent staff positions, lack of supervision, low salaries, inadequate resources, uncompensated overtime hours, stress and job insecurity in the sector” (CSPC-T and FSA 2006, 8). Donna Baines’ (2010) detailed study of the effects of neoliberal restructuring of non-profit service delivery work in Canada supports these general observations. Baines notes that the adoption of private sector management models in the non-profit sector was designed to increase efficiencies by standardizing work practices, minimizing

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employee discretion, and increasing workloads through doing more with less. This has had a number of negative impacts. Work intensification and employment insecurity are closely associated with problems of employee demoralization, burnout, workplace injury, and sickness (Baines 2010, 929–30). It also means that deskilling has taken place because learning “on the job by workers who had sufficient time and support to develop a sense of working as an informal team, and to learn from each other, their clients, and their own lived experiences” no longer happens, having been replaced by standardized processes (Baines 2004b). Additionally, neoliberal restructuring has increased the pressure to use volunteer labour to help cover the problem of underfunded program costs. However, underfunding means that volunteers often do not get the supervisory support necessary for their effective deployment (Eliasoph 2011). Moreover, the expectation of doing unpaid work has become ingrained in early career planning and education programs. To get into college and university programs, applicants are very often required to have logged volunteer hours, and to get their feet in the door, graduates are often required to volunteer before getting a paid position. As such, unpaid work becomes part of what social services sector workers are expected to do. Hence, it is considered a norm for even paid non-profit workers to put in many unpaid “volunteer” hours. Because of their commitment to clients, non-profit staff often feel compelled to contribute extra unpaid time (Baines 2004a). Paradoxically, these conditions tend to thwart the development of meaningful relationships with clients. Enhanced negative dimensions of temporariness in the non-profit workforce have made it more difficult to build strong community bonds. The reality is that in spite of the dedication of staff, they burn out and are often driven to move to other sectors for career advancement. Moreover, with funding for services cut to the bone, non-profit agencies are generally left with inadequate resources to maintain the community links that are necessary for responsive and flexible services. The working conditions of contemporary non-profit service delivery speak to its increasingly precarious status. If precariousness embodies four key elements, (1) “the degree of certainty of continuing employment,” (2) “control over the labour process,” (3) regulatory protection through unions and law, and (4) levels of income (Cranford, Vosko et al. 2003, 9), we see evidence of considerable vulnerability at each of these levels for the non-profit workforce.



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The Toronto Dominion Bank has identified many of the workforce challenges confronting the non-profit sector, describing them in these terms: “Jobs are frequently part-time or temporary. Pay for managers, benefits and opportunities for advancement and training are often less than in many other sectors. Workloads have been rising, as increasing demand for charitable services has not been matched by additional staffing … [M]any of these labour issues are related to financing challenges. At the same time, Canadians are working longer hours and tend to commute farther distances than ever before, leaving them with less time for voluntary work” (Toronto Dominion Bank 2004, 3). Finally, as noted, the political economy of contemporary nonprofit service delivery is such that large components of the sector’s workforce are dependent for their employment upon short-term grants, primarily from state funders. This relationship creates the conditions for a liminal existence (see below) for workers whose positions are contingent on the next round of funding. The idea of liminality is closely related to notions of temporariness. Liminality was first described as an anthropological concept by Arnold Van Gennep and later expanded upon by Turner. Turner (1967) used it to explain how boys in an African tribe feel as they go through the rights of passage to become identified as men. They experience liminality as they find themselves in undefined positions (identities) that take a toll on their mental state. This state leaves them in a heightened sense of vulnerability and keeps them at the “border of their original state and their impending state of being.” In the non-profit sector, this liminal state is challenging to define and unpredictable because it changes on the basis of outside forces. A defining characteristic is a feeling of powerlessness, as one’s identity is not clearly defined, and there is a heavy emphasis on the uncertainty about what will come next (Nikoi 2010, 35–6). Ephraim Kotey Nikoi uses this concept of liminality as a lens to view the issues of identity that workers face when in a liminal situation and the effects these issues have on the relationships between grant-funded workers and their organizations. Nikoi argues that these workers are “suspended between multiple identities” because they must comply with the demands and requirements of various stakeholders and contract-based grants. In addition, many positions of grant-funded employees are not clearly defined. Often, organizations will place them in employment categorizations that do not

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offer the full benefits of full-time employment, including access to information and the use of facilities. Such unclearly defined positions contribute to employees’ feelings of liminalality. Nikoi states that “they are neither here, nor there.” The short-term temporal nature of grants can inhibit these employees from “owning” their new position or reverting back to the previous role to which they were accustomed; thus, they are caught between two states, not knowing which one to inhabit (Nikoi 2010, 40–1). Given that grants largely dictate the duration of employment and the role of grant-funded employees, they also contribute to the liminal state of these employees because workers do not know where they stand in the organization: they do not know whether they will be laid off once the grant runs out or be assigned to another position. When they are assigned a new position, they are faced with the same issues again because it is financed by another source of temporary funding. Employees can feel forced to seek out other jobs because of the precariousness of their employment. These cumulative effects of grant-funded employees’ liminal states take a toll on their mental state, their job execution, and their identification within their place of employment. Hence a liminal state is defined by its “lack of clarity … [It is an] ill defined and unpredictable state that could change at any time depending on extenuating circumstances … At the core of the discussion of liminality is the issue of power. Those in liminal positions feel a sense of powerlessness since their identity and roles are not clearly defined” (Nikoi 2010, 36). This constitutes existing in a state of permanent temporariness. Hence, temporariness, and more generally precarity, has become a dominant feature for the core non-profit sector workforce. Community Impacts The impact of neoliberal restructuring at the community level is promoted through its focus on the dominance of markets, social spending cuts, off-loading, and state decentralization. Neoliberalism mandates that the market be “the principal arbiter in the allocation of goods, services, wealth and income in society” (DeFilippis, Fisher et al. 2010, 67). This is a model of community development that is market led. Non-profit service providers guided by NPM and project financing have become a primary way in which market values have been brought to the community domain. The responsibility for



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s­ ervice delivery and care has been largely downloaded to community-­ level agencies. But these agencies have not been given the power to help design the programs or their delivery to suit the needs of local clients, as these elements are tightly controlled by government funders (Access Alliance 2011, 75). Hence, neoliberal restructuring of the social welfare state and its service delivery has been done in a manner “to mirror and support market driven models of efficiency and competitiveness rather than as progressive regulatory instruments to counter and transform unequalizing and damaging consequences of [the] market” (Access Alliance 2011, 75). Strictly enforced eligibility requirements for service and funding streams that deal with clients in isolation (the cookie cutter approach to services), along with the problem of underfunding, have had profoundly negative impacts on integrated models of service design and delivery and have worked against the longer term sustainability of the programs themselves (Access Alliance 2011, 87, 90–1). The irony is that to a significant degree the very conditions of neoliberal funding work in many cases to mitigate against the efficiency that is the professed goal. With a series of funders from different levels and sections of government imposing contradictory but equally stringent and short-term contract obligations, agencies are punished rather than rewarded for coordinating services, for referring clients on to other programs at other agencies, for reviewing programs critically, and for initiating new forms of community engagement. As seen in the settlement sector in Canada and elsewhere, the neoliberal preference for contracting with larger multi-service nonprofit organizations as delivery agents over smaller and ethnospecific agencies can negatively impact vulnerable communities. In fact, recent cuts in Ontario by the federal government to settlement services were primarily focused on these smaller service providers (Keung 2010). Ethno-specific settlement service agencies, however, play a very important role in enhancing a dialogue between immigrant-led organizations, community members, and government officials (Schmidt 2007). They also help to reach vulnerable immigrant groups who are often outside the labour market and isolated in society, such as the elderly, women, and children (Gebre-­Selassie 2008). Ethno-specific agencies often are able to reach the most difficult populations to service; cuts to their funding can be deeply felt within these communities. One of the great values of non-profit

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s­ ector ­services has been their ability to address unmet demands for collective goods that the private marketplace and government do not reach. The non-profit sector has been able to do this because of the great range in types of organizations that deliver services and engage with the community (Salamon 1995, 39). As the state has shrunk, it is the broad social programs, particularly those directed at the most vulnerable in society, that have been most subject to restraint and elimination. The move to have nonprofit organizations deliver even more of these hollowed-out services means that the programs are more distanced from the state funder. This makes these community supports more vulnerable to further cuts as the responsibility and public accountability for these programs become less visible (Richmond and Shields 2004, 59). The use of alternative service delivery and off-loading has the effect of placing social supports on a more temporary footing, increasingly susceptible to cutbacks and termination, which further marginalizes vulnerable communities. Additionally, neoliberal accountability is top-down. Under NPM, the primary relationship is based on non-profit accountability and reporting to government funders. In this situation non-profits that receive significant government funding are compelled to direct their accountability efforts and concerns upward to the state over downward forms of accountability to their clients and the communities in which they live (Christensen and Ebrahim 2006, 198–9). In this model, community accountability comes to be completely subordinated. “The community organization is now seen in a more segmented fashion as playing a ‘project management’ role rather than a holistic entity operating within a locality or with a community identity” (Burkett 2011, 118). As Burkett observes: “neoliberal policies have resulted in a double bind for community organizations – on the one hand, increased pressure to develop a level of economic self-reliance, and on the other, increased managerial pressure through monitoring and accountability that takes time away from service delivery. Further increased focus on binding service agreements has resulted in strict controls on project budgets, which limit the abilities of organizations to build up reserves or savings, which over time could help them to build a measure of independence” (Burkett 2011, 118). A further consequence of short-term contract financing of nonprofits is that their role in advocacy for the communities they serve has been negatively affected. Because these organizations are reliant on state funding in a more politically charged environment of neo-



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liberal governance, there is a greater reluctance to criticize policies of government agencies for fear that it will adversely affect funding decisions. Neoliberal governments view progressive organizations that engage in advocacy adversely as special interests and assert that no state-provided funding should be used for such purposes. Aside from the problem of advocacy chill, non-profit service providers are so financially strapped and overextended in applying for grants and adhering to the burdens of accountability rules, there is simply little time for direct engagement in advocacy. Hence, the important role of non-profit organizations in giving voice in policy circles to vulnerable communities has in large measure been neutralized (Evans and Shields 2010, 307; Wayland 2006). Consequently, the ability of nonprofit service-providing organizations to positively influence their external funding and operational and policy environment has come to be greatly compromised. The movement of community-based service delivery toward a market-based model of operation (functioning more like a business) rather than a community-based model represents a profound transformation. Ware’s insights in this regard are significant: “Communities are the place for public moral activity, while markets are the place for private economic activity. Communities, at their best, foster recognition, care and co-operation. Markets foster anonymity, independence and competition. Communities are considered the place for openness, security and trust. Markets are the place for secrecy, insecurity and distrust … Communities look for dignity and equality. Markets look for fitness and success … The problem is that our society is awash with markets but in need of substantive community with public values” ( Ware 1999, 307). The end result is the promotion of forms of temporariness and vulnerability at the community level, as market values displace security, cohesion, and solidarity. The social safety net and social services that have provided important measures of protection to the most vulnerable in our communities have not been made not only leaner but also more temporary and more insecure. t o w a r d t h e l i b e r at i o n o f t e m p o r a r i n e s s i n t h e

­

non-profit service sector: prospects for reform

The relationship framed through NPM and narrow neoliberal thinking between the state and non-profit service providers is one centred on vertical control and accountabilities that extend the ­government

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regulation of the sector (Phillips and Smith 2011, 3) so much so that some have come to refer to these government-funded non-profit agencies as the shadow civil service (Laforest 2011, 37). The use of contract or program financing has created competitive quasi-­ markets for service delivery (Osborne, Mclaughlin et al. 2002). Although this did succeed in rationalizing the non-profit service sector along pseudo-market lines, from a community perspective, it has many negative consequences and produces, even from a neoliberal vantage point, some unintended and undesirable outcomes. Examples include competition that leads to significant fragmentation of services; a lack of sufficient numbers of non-profit providers to promote effective competition (Phillips and Smith 2011, 3); the short-term nature of contracts and their under-financing, which compromises the ongoing viability of delivery organizations (Eakin 2005); and excessive accountability rules that result in more compliant agencies, at the price of excessive administrative costs and the stifling of innovation. All of these seriously compromise optimal service provision. Problems of administrative red tape have been identified as helping to “kill the non-profit golden goose” (Smith and Smyth 2010). Within public administration, the limitations of NPM have spurred the promotion of what has come to be called the New Public Governance (NPG) approach to managing the relationship between the state and non-profits (Osborne 2010). Briefly, this approach identifies the need to shift to horizontal accountability and co-governance while moving away from narrow command and control, rule-­compliant structures. The intended goal is more meaningful collaborative relationships in which power is shared and where the advocacy role of non-profit providers is recognized as an important function in society (Baldwin and Black 2008). NPG includes enhanced and more flexible funding supports that have longer time horizons and that promote networks over cutthroat competition (Phillips and Smith 2011, 4–6). The idea of partnerships within the non-profit sector is founded on mutual trust and power sharing. However, neoliberalism’s contract culture has undermined such mutuality and redistributive power in its relationships between the state and non-profit organizations because of the state’s orientation to a narrow contract culture and accountability for purposes of control, and its fixation on the dominance of market principles and values. The movement toward NPG



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would go some distance in restoring more equitable partnerships and more meaningful and less disruptive accountability measures. At the heart of meaningful reform is the need for a more balanced funding system. It must be made clear that a fundamental issue concerning government financial support is not only the levels of financing but also the character of the financing itself. In other words, the current emphasis on short-term and unstable rather than longer term and more stable funding must be addressed. The emphasis should be not only on the quantity of dollars but the quality and flexibility of allocation; significantly, the Independent Blue Ribbon Panel on Grants and Contributions Programs (2006) raised similar concerns. An important funding reform consistent with NPG approaches is “evergreen” contracts. These are designed to create more flexible funding relationships between government and the non-profit service providers so that tight regulations over how to deliver services and where contracted dollars can be spent are relaxed in meaningful ways. Evergreen contracts can be defined as government-funded service delivery contracts with community-based non-profit organizations that are distinguished and guided by a number of key features. First, they are performance based. This means that the successful fulfillment of the contract is judged on the basis of concrete, meaningful, and measurable outcomes. Second, as long as the contracted nonprofit organization is meeting its results-based performance requirements, the government contract for services is rolled over into the future. Thus evergreen contracts are built on the presumption that the contract will continue (long term) as long as good performance in the context of need is sustained. Third, since the accountability for program funding is centred on program design and results, flexibility is opened up regarding how contracted funds are spent. Spending accountability is not only limited to narrowly cast direct programming costs, but rather funding can more freely be used to also cover the administrative and operating costs involved in sustaining the organization itself. Fourth, if contracts are to be cancelled for poor performance or changing needs, advance warning (usually six months’ notice) should be given. It is very important that non-profit service providers be given lead time regarding change of funding status so that they can plan into the future and manage organizational, staff, and community needs under changing circumstances.3

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Evergreen contracts have a number of advantages for all parties: government, non-profit providers, and communities. Moving away from the short-term horizons of the NPM contract culture empowers non-profit organizations and communities to plan and make investments to enhance capacity. It provides a level of stability and predictability that enables organizations to attract and retain qualified staff, build professional competencies, and address the problem of liminality in the non-profit sector. The community is enabled to establish relationships and bonds of trust with non-profit providers. Service use and effectiveness of service outcomes are enhanced under these circumstances. Additionally, with the establishment of strong trust relationships and deepened awareness of programming that has the promise of a continuing presence in the community, the community itself will invest in the provider organizations not only by using the service to a greater extent but also through more meaningful community-based volunteering to complement the work of the agency. For government, evergreen contracts allow non-profit delivery partners to develop the stability necessary for them to invest in creating the structures and hiring the professionally qualified staff that can improve program delivery and effectiveness.4 The short-term nature of free-market contracting has kept many non-profit providers in a state of permanent funding uncertainty that makes it difficult to sustain effective and professional organizations. This is not a situation that is advantageous in the longer run for either contracting party. Improvement in service delivery by non-profit providers requires a mature professional relationship founded on trust, continuity, and accountability for outcomes between the funder, the service deliverer, and the recipient community, one that is best promoted in a context of funding stability. There is a widespread belief that community-based non-profit agencies are well positioned to do a better job of delivering many government-funded social services than the state itself. However, these agencies have to be equipped with the capacity and longer term planning horizons to do so. Evergreen arrangements are one creative way within a contract culture in which a balance between accountability and non-profit autonomy and stability can be better secured. In this way the temporariness and vulnerability built into contract financing can be altered in a way that promotes greater security, sustainability, and community development.



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In the late 1990s, government employment and training programs were targeted by Ontario for non-profit delivery. However, there was a dearth of non-profit agencies with the size and professional ability to service these needs. It was in this singular context that the Ontario public service was able to successfully put forward to the government the case for the use of evergreen contracts (although this politically sensitive term was avoided by the bureaucrats) as a necessity to build such non-profit capacities in the employment service sector.5 The extension and deepening of evergreen contracting would do much to ease stresses on the non-profit service provider sector and enable more predictable and secure employment and more wellplanned and effective programming. While there has been some recognition of the problems with relationships between governments and non-profit organizations, the emergency of a government austerity agenda has served to set back a meaningful dialogue about reform. In fact, the current economic turmoil has once again prompted neoliberal governments to look to the non-profit sector to provide partial solutions to state fiscal troubles. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s Big Society Program, announced in 2010, is a leading example of this. The Big Society Program calls for the downloading of many social responsibilities to the local and community level and calls for community volunteerism, charitable giving, and private philanthropy to provide for service needs and gaps (United Kingdom Cabinet Office nd). Significantly, the call for greater contributions from the non-profit sector has not been accompanied by government commitment to financial or other support to the sector. Current experiments with funding supports often commercialize non-profit provider financing (Joy and Shields 2013). In fact, the call paralleled announcements of deep cuts to public services, and it is likely that government resources to the most vulnerable in society will face increasing budgetary cutbacks in the future (BBC 2010, July 19). In this formulation, the state is counterposed with the non-profit sector (Hilton and McKay 2011, 25). Hence, as resources for government support for social programs shrink and the societal need for these programs grows, non-profit service providers will be asked once again to do more with less and to fill the social needs gap. Clearly, a greater reliance on private philanthropy to fill these growing gaps is problematic, not only because it involves no broad societal democratic decision making regarding where funds are directed. Private donors will

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choose causes they wish to support, which may not be the areas of greatest need. In addition, and more fundamentally, the reach of private charity is by its nature limited and unable to match the scope and scale of state-supported programming (Harrow and Jung 2011, 1051); this relates to the well-recognized problem of “voluntary sector failure” (­ Salamon 1995). Finally, during times of economic crisis, philanthropic donations typically decline as the economy weakens ­(Harrow and Jung 2011, 1051). A return to greater reliance on charity to address social problems and economic inequalities produced by neoliberal economic policies offers no meaningful solution to deeply imbedded public policy concerns. The Big Society has been constructed as an alternative to the Big State and seeks a return to an anachronistic world in which charity held sway in social relief and the moral regulation of society (Jordan 2010, 13; Hilton and McKay 2011); this historic reversal would be just as thoroughly an inadequate response to the problems of massive inequality and social exclusion today as it was at the turn of the 19th century. The British newspaper The Guardian Weekly satirized the laissezfaire notions of the Big Society in a cartoon that recast Karl Marx’s phrase as: “From each according to their vulnerability, to each according to their greed” (Bell 2011, 21). Proponents of neo­ liberalism have come to see greater inequality and social exclusion as necessary but unavoidable “collateral damage” to achieve economic growth (Bauman 2011), a trade-off that also necessitates balanced state budgets and lean government. Although the Cameron government’s response has been overt and aggressive, more general austerity measures have swept across Western governments’ responses to the economic crisis, including Canada’s, to constitute a form of Big Society by stealth. In the Ontario case, the flatlining of service contracts at the provincial level, the cutting of federal funding, as in the case of settlement services (CIC 2011), rapidly increasing levels of need, and the prospect of broad-based austerity measures have worked against reforms and increased stresses on service provider organizations, their workforces, and the vulnerable communities they serve. The return to austerity has once again led the neo­liberal state in the direction of using and exploiting the non-profit sector rather than truly working and partnering with it. This approach will serve only to entrench much more deeply the negative features of temporariness, precarity, and marginalization now facing society.



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conclusion

The non-profit sector, and in particular deliverers of publicly financed services, provides a window on the phenomenon of temporariness in contemporary Canadian society. The political economy of the nonprofit sector in an era of neoliberalism demonstrates how temporariness and vulnerability come to be produced at the level of the non-profit organization and workforce and at the community scale. It shows how temporariness is closely aligned with the fostering of precariousness and marginalization in society. We can see as well how reforms to non-profit-state funding and public administrative approaches in the form of NPG are capable of restoring a measure of balance between the state and non-profit organizations, freeing these organizations to work more effectively with communities and easing, at various levels, the most negative consequences of temporariness. While such reforms would not fully negate neoliberalism’s disintegrative impacts on public services, community cohesion, employment relationships, and non-market organizational forms, they can offer a moderating effect. The turn to broad public austerity, however, undermines the prospects of liberating temporariness in the non-profit sector. acknowledgments

I thank Jessica Bihari, Ryan Kassian, and David Stephen for their contributions as research assistants to this chapter. Ted Richmond and Hawley Shields also closely read an earlier draft of this chapter and made numerous helpful suggestions regarding editing and content. I thank them for this valuable input. I also am grateful to the editors of this volume for their helpful suggestions in making this a better chapter. As always, the remaining shortcomings of this chapter are the responsibility of the author alone. Preparation of this chapter was supported by a CURA SSHRC grant for the project Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario. I am grateful to Massey College at the University of Toronto, which provided office space and a nurturing environment for doing the revisions during the 2013–14 academic year in which I was the Ryerson Fellow.

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1 Author interview with an anonymous non-profit executive director in the settlement sector, 2011. 2 Author interview with an anonymous non-profit executive director in the settlement sector, 2011. 3 Author interview with an anonymous senior civil servant in the Ontario Public Service, 2011. 4 Author interview with anonymous senior civil servant, 2011. 5 Author interview with an anonymous senior civil servant in the Ontario Public Service, 2011. references

Access Alliance. 2011. Working Rough, Living Poor. Toronto: Access Alliance. http://accessalliance.ca/sites/accessalliance/files/documents/ Access%20Alliance_Working%20Rough%20Living%20Poor%20Final %20Report%20June%202011.pdf BBC. 2010. David Cameron Launches Tories’ “Big Society” Plan. BBC News, 19 July. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10680062 Baines, Donna. 2004a. Caring for Nothing Work Organization and Unwaged Labour in Social Services. Work Employment and Society 18(2):267–95. – 2004b. Losing the “Eyes in the Back of our Heads”: Social Service Skills, Lean Caring, and Violence. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 31(3):31–50. – 2010. If We Don’t Get Back to Where We were Before: Working in the Restructured Non-Profit Social Services. British Journal of Social Work 40:928–45. Baldwin, Robert, and Julia Black. 2008. Really Responsive Regulation. Modern Law Review 71(1):59–94. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2011. Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications Ltd. Bell, Steve. 2011. Bell cartoon. The Guardian Weekly, 28 January, 21. Burke, Mike, Colin Mooers, and John Shields. 2000. Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Canadian Public Policy. In Restructuring and Resistance: Canadian Public Policy in an Age of Global Capitalism, ed. Mike Burke, Colin Mooers, and John Shields, 11–23. Halifax: Fernwood.



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Laforest, Rachel. 2011. Voluntary Sector Organizations and the State: Building New Relations. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Law Commission of Ontario. 2012. Vulnerable Workers and Precarious Work. Final Report. Toronto: Law Commission of Ontario. Lewchuk, Wayne, Michelynn Lafleche, Dianne Dyson, Luin Goldring, Alan Meisner, Stephanie Procyk, Dan Rosen, John Shields, and Sam Vrankulj. 2013. It’s More than Poverty: Precarity and Household Well-Being in the gta-Hamilton Region. Toronto/Hamilton: United Way Toronto/Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario (PEPSO/McMaster University). McMullen, Kathryn, and Richard Brisbois. 2003. Coping with Change: Human Resource Management in Canada’s Non-profit Sector. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Policy Research Networks. http://www.cprn.org/ ­documents/25442_en.pdf McMullen, Kathryn, and Grant Schellenberg. 2002. Mapping the Nonprofit Sector. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Policy Research Networks. http:// www.cprn.org/documents/16373_en.PDF McMullen, Kathryn, and Grant Schellenberg. 2003. Job Quality in NonProfit Organizations. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Policy Research Networks. http://www.cprn.org/documents/16694_en.PDF Nikoi, Ephraim Kotey. 2010. Liminal Selves: The Negotiation of Organizational Identification by Grant-Funded Employees in Nonprofit Organizations. PhD dissertation, Scripps College of Communication, Ohio University. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou 1273190914 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). 2003. The Non-Profit Sector in a Changing Economy. Paris: OECD. Osborne, Stephen P., ed. 2010. The New Public Governance: Emerging Perspectives on the Theory and Practice of Public Governance. London: Routledge. Osborne, Stephen P., Kathleen McLaughlin, and Ewan Ferlie, eds. 2002. New Public Management: Current Trends and Future Prospects. London: Routledge. Panel on Accountability and Governance in the Voluntary Sector. 1998. Helping Canadians Help Canadians: Improving Governance and Accountability in the Voluntary Sector, a Discussion Paper. Ottawa, ON: Voluntary Sector Forum. Phillips, Susan D., and Steven Rathgeb Smith. 2011. Between Governance and Regulation: Evolving Government-Third Sector Relationships. In

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pa r t f o u r

(Re)framing Temporariness

11 Mexican Migrant Transnationalism and Imaginaries of Temporary/Permanent Belonging1 marianne h. marchand

Mexican migration to the United States and Canada has taken many forms. Although there has been much circular (or repeated) migration since the nineteenth century  – much of it related to seasonal harvests from California, Texas, and Florida – different migration patterns emerged after the Second World War with the Bracero program for temporary workers in the United States.2 New forms of migration emerged for documented agricultural workers as well as undocumented workers (who were not recruited through the Bracero program), reflecting different points along a spectrum of permanence and temporariness caused by transformations in migratory practices and state policies toward migrants. In particular, measures taken by the US government, such as the Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986), Operation Hold the Line (in El Paso in 1993), and Operation Gatekeeper (in San Diego in 1994), have had a lasting effect on Mexican migration, transforming its seasonality and circularity into relative permanence. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11), these trends were reinforced as border crossings became increasingly costly, dangerous, and difficult. In this chapter, I address contemporary Mexican migrant transnationalism and how it has been transformed since the events of 9/11 and, more recently, by the economic crisis and the War on Organized Crime by the government of Felipe Calderón. In particular, I focus on how transnational practices reflect and (re-)produce a range of imaginaries of permanent and temporary belonging. I ­analyze how Mexican migrants have changed their practices of staying in contact

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with the “home front” and how they are using hometown associations, social3 and economic remittances, and political influence to transform their communities of origin. Many such practices, as the chapter shall show, imply (re-)articulations of space/spatiality, place, time (in particular permanence and temporariness), and belonging, as well as interconnections among these elements. The chapter has three main parts. In the first part, I discuss the dual economic and security crises that currently affect Mexico and, in particular, its states that border the United States. As migrants must traverse the areas where the Mexican War on Organized Crime is at its most severe, the War on Organized Crime has affected their mobility and significantly increased their costs and risks. They are also affected by the securitization of the border since the 1990s, especially after 9/11, and the increased persecution of migrants within the United States (and Canada). The second part of this chapter examines how migrant transnationalism has been transformed in response to the border securitization and the dual economic and security crises, in particular as related to the border between Mexico and the United States, but increasingly in the context of the Mexico-Canada “border.”4 Finally, I focus on how Mexican migrants through their transnational practices have constructed new imaginaries of belonging both in terms of permanence and temporariness. t h e e c o n o m i c c r i s i s a n d t h e wa r o n o r g a n i z e d c r i m e

The financial crisis that started in 2007 with the subprime mortgage debacle in the United States, weakening the US banking system and spreading to the economy as a whole, has seriously affected Mexican migrants and their families. As the crisis extended to an increasing number of economic sectors, it also involved a larger number of migrant workers. For instance, many Mexicans are employed in the construction sector, which felt the impacts early on and continues to feel the effects of the mortgage crisis. Similarly, parts of the service sector, such as restaurants in large cities such as New York, have felt the fallout from the financial crisis on Wall Street. Migrants who work in the kitchens and other areas of the restaurant business have suffered because fewer patrons frequent the establishments where they are (or were) employed. According to information provided by the Mexican Central Bank (Banco de México 2009), in 2008 about 20 per cent of Mexican



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migrants in the United States worked in the construction sector and 57.5 per cent in the service sector. From 2007 to 2008, unemployment among Mexican migrant workers increased from 5.4 per cent to 7.7 per cent. While the increase was greater for men (2.6 percentage points versus 1.6 for women), more women were unemployed (9.4 per cent versus 7 per cent of men). In addition, undocumented migrant workers have been the target of workplace raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, whose activity and authority have increased. As a result of the economic crisis and the raids, fewer migrants are sending remittances and those who continue to do so are sending, on average, smaller amounts. From 2006 to 2007, remittances increased by 2 per cent, but they declined the following year by 3.6 per cent (Banco de México 2009). Remittances decreased more dramatically from 2008 to 2009: they plunged by 15.7 per cent. In the face of such a complicated situation, what kinds of strategies have migrants and their families developed? And to what extent have their transnational practices changed, reflecting the construction of new imageries of temporary or permanent belonging? While some migrants have decided to return home “voluntarily,”5 most have opted to stay. A study by the Pew Hispanic Center (Passel and Cohn 2009) reveals that a dual process is taking place: fewer Mexicans are deciding to migrate to the United States, staying at “home” either permanently or temporarily, and migrants are staying in the United States longer. Between 2006 and 2009, there was an estimated 26 per cent drop in Mexican migration to the United States (Passel and Cohn 2009). At the same time, most migrants already in the United States have decided to ride out the recession: the amount of return migration has been more or less stable since 2006. In other words, they have lengthened their “temporary” stay or turned it into a “permanent belonging.” The year 2012, however, is now being considered a turning point for Mexican migration to the United States. According to a 2012 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, Mexican migration to the United States has come to a standstill and may be turning negative6 (Passel, Cohn et al. 2012). The study suggests that factors contributing to the declining migration include the “weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the g­ rowing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates and broader economic conditions in Mexico” (Passel, Cohn et al. 2012).

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While significant changes in migration flows between Mexico and the United States have taken place in recent years, expectations of a mass exodus expressed by local authorities in different border towns and representatives from non-governmental organizations providing support to returning migrants were mistaken (Frontera ­NorteSur 2008). However, the migrants’ woes are multi-faceted. On top of the severe negative effects of the economic crisis and the securitization of the border between the United States and Mexico, Mexican migrants and their families also face the fallout from President ­Calderón’s War on Organized Crime. President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa introduced the War on Organized Crime in 2007 just after he was sworn into office. Although there are various reasons for the War on Organized Crime, C ­ alderón engaged in it principally to enhance his legitimacy and build support among the military. The election results had been very close between Calderón, who was the candidate for the Partido de Acción Nacional, a party on the right of the political spectrum, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was the candidate for the leftist Partido Revolucionario Democrático.7 In this context, Calderón desperately sought a way to marginalize his opponents from the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and the Partido Revolucionario Democrático. He chose the War on Organized Crime as a way not only to show that he, unlike his predecessors, was serious about limiting the power of the drug cartels, but also to build support among different sectors of society, especially the military. The War on Organized Crime was intended to make Mexicans “rally around the flag” against a common (if internal) enemy. As subsequent events show, the opposite has occurred and Calderón has found himself on the defensive with respect to the War on Organized Crime, which is seen by many Mexicans as exacting too steep a toll in civilian casualties. Estimates of the death toll caused by the War on Organized Crime range between 70,000 and 83,000 for the period between December 2006 and December 2012 (Aristegui Noticias 2012; CNN México 2013). While these figures are very worrisome, and despite suggestions that Mexico is a “failed state,” the War on Organized Crime and its effects are not evenly distributed geographically. The northern border region and the states of Michoacán and Guerrero have been very much affected; in contrast, Puebla and Yucatán are states with very few drug-related killings, although violence also increased in these regions after 2009 (Rios and Shirk 2010).



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The focus of this chapter is not on the War on Organized Crime itself but rather on how it is affecting migrants and their families as well as transnational life (Smith 2006). To date, only anecdotal information is available to track the multi-layered connections between migrants and the War on Organized Crime. For example, some of the states severely affected by the War on Organized Crime, such as Michoacán, Guerrero, and Jalisco, are also important migrant-­sending states. The border states, in particular Chihuahua and Tamaulipas, also serve as transit routes for migrants attempting to cross the border into the United States. With the increased securitization of the border, crossings have become more dangerous, as the number of migrant deaths8 suggests. According to Laura Carlsen (2010), “typically, the organized crime groups not only steal the money that migrants bring with them to pay smugglers to get them across the border, but they also require them [the migrants] to contact their families and have them send more money. Neither the Mexican nor the US government has done much to stop this transnational extortion network, probably because the victims, and often their families, are undocumented, which places them in a category of people who have been illegally deprived of the protection of the State and removed from humanitarian concern” [author’s translation]. One of the most serious examples is the deaths of migrants in Tamaulipas.9 Yet, as I have suggested elsewhere (Marchand 2010, 17), “[t]here are multiple ways in which migrants and their families as well as transnational communities are being connected to the War on Organized Crime and the drug cartels,” ranging from being victims of kidnappings to becoming involved as participants in the trade. Finally, as a consequence of the War on Organized Crime, a growing number of mostly middle-class Mexicans living along the border between the United States and Mexico are applying for asylum in the United States and Canada. Although the numbers are still relatively low in the United States – in 2009, only 200 Mexicans applied for asylum – the situation is different in Canada, where 8,069 refugee applications were made in 2008. As a result, in 2009 the Canadian government suddenly imposed a visa requirement for Mexicans that affected many travellers, as it was implemented during the summer vacation period. The new measures and the way they were implemented were criticized in Mexico, where the middle class was most affected (Becker 2009; Agren 2009; Valpy 2009).

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People are fleeing areas where violence related to the War on Organized Crime is high, such as in Ciudad Juárez, where over 10 per cent of the population has fled the city and around 30,000 people have moved to El Paso since the middle of 2008. It is also estimated that about 25 per cent of the city’s houses are now abandoned (El Sol de México 2010). While Ciudad Juárez may be an extreme case, it clearly illustrates that the War on Organized Crime is also causing internal and cross-border displacement. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre,10 by the end of 2012, 160,000 Mexicans had been displaced because of the War on Organized Crime (IDMC 2012). t r a n s n at i o n a l i s m a n d t r a n s n at i o n a l m i g r a n t communities

In the early 1990s, transnationalism was primarily presented by anthropologists as the human counterpart to the globalizing practices of states, transnational companies, and the international financial sector (Basch 1994; Glick Schiller, Basch et al. 1995; Guarnizo 1994). As Alejandro Portes, Luis Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt explain in their book Globalization from Below, there is still some definitional, conceptual, and methodological confusion about transnationalism, which they suggest we should define as follows: “occupations and activities that require regular and sustained social contacts across national borders for their execution” [author’s translation] (Portes, Guarnizo et al. 2003, 18). This definition is somewhat romantic in that it emphasizes the social nature of transnationalism, thereby overlooking differences and power relations as well as mechanisms of exclusion being reproduced within transnational communities. Subsequent analyses of transnationalism and transnational communities have directed their attention to conceptual problems and to the workings of such communities. For instance, Thomas Faist (2000) identifies three different transnational spaces, each with its own particular set of resources and characteristics, namely transnational kinship groups, circuits, and communities. Other authors have analyzed case studies to understand the multi-dimensionality of transnational activities (see, for example, Kearney 2004; Goldring 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Lanly and Valenzuela 2004; Morán Quiroz 2004; Smith 2006; Smith and Bakker, 2008). Such studies have put migrant communities and their transnational activities into



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a context that reveals the complexities, inequalities, power dimensions, and exclusions they face. For example, focusing on the gendered dimensions of hometown associations, Luin Goldring (2003, 341) observes that “on the whole, hometown organizations represent a privileged arena for men’s homeland-oriented political activity. This masculine gendered project works for several reasons. Mexican men tend to experience a relatively greater loss of gender and social status in the United States. Consequently, Mexico-oriented activities, such as the community-oriented projects carried out through these organizations, provide an important vehicle for gaining status and deploying political power … When hometown associations scale up in the form of umbrella organizations, they offer a context for exercising substantive citizenship that enhances immigrant men’s status and citizenship vis-à-vis the Mexican state while marginalizing women by excluding them from positions of agency and power. Mexican women, however, are far from politically inactive.” Robert Courtney Smith (2006) also situates his work in the second wave of transnational studies, which go beyond the earlier focus on transnationalism and resistance to globalization to incorporate internal debates, conflicts, and power dimensions within hometown associations, as illustrated above. He introduces the term “transnational life,” which includes “those practices and relationships linking migrants and their children with the home country, where such practices have significant meaning and are regularly observed … Transnational life is also embodied in identities and social structures that help form the life world of immigrants and their children and is constructed in relations among people, institutions and places” (Smith 2006, 6). Through transnational activities, migrants have constructed not only a transnational life but also a distinct transnational space, or what I have called elsewhere an “in-between space,” distinct from the national spheres of host and sending states (Marchand 2009). Transnational activities change according to new challenges and needs and also provide a context for the construction or transformation of imaginaries about temporary or permanent belonging. For instance, transnational activities, communities, spaces, and lives are affected by the borders of the states from which migrants originate and in which they reside. As Michael Kearney (2004, 32) suggests, borders are not just a dividing line between two states, but should be understood as an “immense bureaucratic, police, political and socio-

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cultural system, which formally and informally defines it, while at the same time defining the people who are divided by it and who also cross it” [author’s translation]. As Kearney highlights, the border is a geopolitical and a socio-­ cultural construct that is embedded in (geopolitical and sociocultural) inequalities. Crossing the border in one direction is not necessarily the same as crossing it in the opposite direction, as exemplified by the border between Mexico and the United States. He uses the term United States–Mexico border for the border constructed by the United States and the Mexico–United States border for that constructed by Mexico. In response to the dual economic and security crises, migrants have resorted to a variety of strategies to weather the economic storm in the United States, thus extending their temporary belonging or transforming it into a potentially permanent one. Such strategies include tapping into the social capital and networks of migrant communities in the United States. For instance, migrants have resorted to pooling or borrowing money from family members or friends to survive a temporary setback, such as unemployment. Another strategy has been to look for a job within the (migrant) community after having been laid off, or using contacts within the same community to find a new job. Other strategies include the pooling of resources, such as moving in with family members or friends, or preparing food together to reduce costs. There is some evidence that migrants have been dipping into their savings to continue to send remittances to family members, a strategy that initially blunted the negative effects of the crisis of 2008 (Orozco 2009). However, this option has been quickly exhausted as savings of migrants have been depleted in the face of reduced job opportunities. In an unexpected transnational strategy in the face of the economic crisis, family members in Mexico are wiring money back to struggling migrants in the United States. Testimonies reported in an article published by the New York Times (Lacy 2009) suggest that such transfers are increasing: “‘We send something whenever we have a little extra, at least enough so he can eat,’ said Mr. Salcedo, who is from a small village here in the rural state of Oaxaca and works odd jobs to support his wife, his two younger sons and, now, his jobless eldest boy in California.” In another example, “Leonardo Herrera, a rancher from outside Tuxtla Gutiérrez in the southern state of Chiapas, said he recently sold a cow to help raise $1,000 to



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send to his struggling nephew in northern California. ‘We’re poor, but nobody can throw us out of this house,’ Ms. Avendano said, wiping away tears at her kitchen table as she spoke of her sons’ economic travails. ‘They worry about that. What happens if they can’t pay the rent?’ To help make ends meet, she sells chiles rellenos, a popular delicacy, around the neighborhood. ‘We have an obligation to help them,’ said her husband, Javier. ‘They’re our sons. It doesn’t matter if they are here or there.’” It is clear from these vignettes of coping strategies that migrants and their families prefer to weather the economic storm in the United States instead of returning to Mexico. As the securitization of the border between the United States and Mexico has increased both the physical risks and the amount one has to pay to a pollero or coyote,11 migrants and their families in Mexico now opt for the former to stay in the United States rather than face the risks and costs of future crossings into the United States. Although the US War on Terror has led to the securitization of the border between the United States and Mexico, the level of “insecurity” for migrants who wish to cross has been magnified on the Mexican side as a result of the war waged by the Mexican government and struggles over turf by the drug cartels. Together they have created the “unintended consequence” of Mexican migrants preferring to stay in the United States, or, increasingly, Canada, for longer periods of time, thus reversing temporariness and permanence in migrants’ imaginaries of belonging. Transnational practices have been greatly aided by new information and communication technologies such as cell phones and the Internet. As Edmundo Meza Rodriguez (2010) shows in his study of Tierra Caliente,12 websites and Internet-based social networks help foster a transnational identity that he calls a “transnational virtual regionalism.” This study reveals that Mexican migrant communities, possibly more so than other migrant groups from other states, have a strong sense of regional belonging. This is exemplified by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Mexican migrant organizations in the United States are regionally based according to migrants’ region of origin and current location (e.g., the Federación de Clubes Zacatecanos del Sur de California, the Federación de Clubes Michoacanos en Illinois, and the Federación Jalisciense del Medio Oeste de Estados Unidos). In other words, Mexican migrants use their home region as one of the most important identifying markers for the transnational space they inhabit. This imaginary of transnational

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regional belonging is crucial for the articulation of permanence and temporariness in migrants’ experiences. Various measures by the three North American countries have been directed at managing the movement of people (and goods) through their borders. As suggested in the introduction to this volume, these measures are increasingly creating a “permanentization” of temporariness, for instance in terms of legitimizing temporary and precarious forms of employment. Yet, listening to the voices of Mexican migrants and their family members in communities of origin, it becomes clear that they have constructed their own imaginaries of belonging, temporariness, and permanence that sometimes contradict the concept of the “permanentization” of temporariness. changing imaginaries of permanent or temporary belonging

In this section, I consider the construction of imaginaries of permanent or temporary belonging on the basis of a case study and ethnographic material concerning migrants’ transnational life and activities. My case study (Marchand 2006a)13 centres on the nexus between migration and local development in two communities in the state of Tlaxcala, and it yields some interesting findings about the attitudes of migrants and family members toward the process of migration, including its permanence or temporariness. To start, many adults still reject the idea of migrating: 60 per cent of the men and just over 70 per cent of the women we interviewed were against it (Marchand 2006b). The three main reasons men gave for not wishing to migrate were their age (28 per cent), the fact that they already have a job (24 per cent), and danger/insecurity during the journey or discrimination at the destination site (20 per cent). Women, in contrast, were most concerned about danger/insecurity during the journey or discrimination at the destination site (35 per cent), not wanting to leave their family behind (20 per cent), and preferring to stay in their current community (8 per cent). Clearly, for the women interviewed, the notion of belonging was very important, although this was outweighed by the risks of having to face danger and insecurity during the journey or discrimination once they arrived at their destination. The prospect of discrimination discouraged some of those interviewed, as it meant a form of social exclusion (and non-belonging) that they were not willing to risk.



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Interestingly, however, other studies (see, e g., Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994) have revealed that although women may be reluctant to migrate initially, when they do  – and they often do so for family reunification reasons – quite a few change their attitude and then prefer to stay in the United States instead of returning to Mexico. Many women change their attitude about making their stay more permanent because they like the more liberal (that is, less machista) environment in the United States, in which their partners become more willing to help out with daily chores. Men who were interested in migrating cited the following reasons: the desire to earn money (37 per cent), work opportunities (22 per cent), and the prospect of a better life (14 per cent). Interestingly, the male participants differentiated between earning money and working, apparently because employment may be available in Mexico, but earnings are higher in the United States. For the female respondents, the primary reasons for migrating were finding work (25 per cent) and earning money (21 per cent). “Having a better life” and “to know (i.e., experience something new)” [por conocer] were the third and fourth most frequently cited reasons, each scoring 16 per cent of responses. Like their male counterparts, the women distinguished between work and earning money, but obtaining paid work was more important to them, perhaps because many women in their communities of origin do not have jobs outside the home and, therefore, a regular income of their own. In terms of belonging, there are also interesting differences between the male and female respondents. When asked about desired characteristics of their destination if they were to migrate, or where they lived during a previous migration experience, most respondents answered “where there is more work available” (26 per cent of men, 23.5 per cent of women). However, the second and third most common answers among men were “a popular destination among community members” (13.5 per cent) and “close proximity” to home (6 per cent), whereas the women preferred a destination where they “have family members” (18.5 per cent) or a “popular destination among community members” (13 per cent). Again, women were looking for a destination where they would be received by family or community members and where they would feel “at home.” All respondents were keenly aware of the importance of transnational networks. While all indicated that they would choose their destination primarily for reasons of work availability, relying and building

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on existing family and community networks was even more important for women than obtaining work (31.5 per cent in total). Adolescents from local middle schools (secundarias) were also interviewed to find out whether a culture of migration is emerging in Tlaxcala. Although their answers were somewhat similar to those of the adults, some generational and gender differences were apparent. For instance, among the reasons why they would like to migrate, female adolescents said “to know” (36.5 per cent), “to work” (24.5 per cent), “to have a better life/better opportunities” (15.5 per cent), and “to study” (9 per cent). The male respondents gave the following answers: “to earn money” (33.5 per cent), “to know” (25 per cent), “to work” (15 per cent), and “to study” (12.5 per cent). For the female adolescents, “to earn money” was not among the first four answers. Also, both groups viewed the possibility of migration as a way to get to know different places and gain some experience, almost as if they saw migration in terms of travel. In that sense, migrating was viewed as a temporary experience. Some of the students were also interested in continuing their studies and migrating would allow them to do so abroad. Whether this is possible in practice – that is, combining the trials and tribulations of a migrant work experience with studying – is another matter. In his book on the transnational life of Mexican migrants in New York City, Robert Courtney Smith (2006) provides an ethnographic portrait of how first and second generations of migrants from Puebla experience and articulate their sense of belonging, temporariness, and permanence in New York and Ticuani,14 a pseudonym for a small village in the Mixteca Poblana region. According to Smith, much of transnational life revolves around a struggle for respect, recognition and a “sense of place.” In his words: “the committee leaders [of the Ticuani Solidarity Committee] want their efforts on behalf of Ticuani recognized, second-generation girls and boys want their Mexicanness and masculinity or femininity recognized, and gang members want respect from others. People’s attempts to create a place for themselves are simultaneously oriented toward particular geographical spaces, such as Ticuani’s zocalo or schools in New York; to social space, the myriad social locations formed in relation to gender, ethnic, and racial images and hierarchies in Mexico and the United States and social relations among Ticuanenses; and to “emergent” (temporary) spaces (such as Mexican DJ parties in clubs in New York), whereby masculinity, Mexicanness, and that social



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space are jointly constituted. Space is both a geographical place and an existential freedom to feel that one belongs fully amid difference” (Smith 2006, 10). Smith’s account resonates with other ethnographic material on the experiences of Mexican migrants and their transnational lives. In terms of presence and belonging, it is now customary to refer to migrants as “ausentes siempre presentes” (always-present absentees) in their home country. This term not only implies the presence of migrants in the social life of the community and its politics, but also the permanence of their presence. This permanence is articulated through the construction of private family homes; local community development projects initiated by hometown associations in the United States, which are sometimes implemented through the 3x1 co-financing schemes set up by the Mexican State;15 support for the local parish church; and involvement in local politics. During the annual celebration of the town’s patron saint, many local priests are now dedicating a mass to the “paisanos ausentes” (absent conationals) and often a special event is organized for the migrants at the accompanying local fair. Many migrants live with the dream of returning to their villages and retiring comfortably in an environment that they find more hospitable and less stressful than their temporary home in the United States. This dream, however, is not necessarily fulfilled, as many find themselves trapped in a vicious circle of migration  – that is, people tend to return to the United States once their savings have been depleted or when there is a need for additional income. This may happen when such savings have been invested in a microenterprise (small store or restaurant) that is not successful. Other reasons for repeat(ed) migration reported during the author’s visits to towns near Puebla16 include the need or wish to remodel or improve the family house; the need to support additional needs of the family because of family expansion, illness, or children attending school; and not being able to find a job locally. Indeed, in Tlaxcala (Marchand 2006b), some return migrants reported that they were discriminated against when they tried to find a job locally. Some employers were reluctant to employ return migrants as they were perceived as unpredictable, in that they might leave without notice to go back to the United States. This brings another layer of complexity into migrants’ imaginaries of belonging, permanence, and temporariness.

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These examples suggest that migrants feel a sense of permanence in their hometowns; they are also seen to be permanent residents by their family members and others in the community. The question is: how is this imaginary related to the one constructed around permanence and temporariness in the United States? Are migrants seeing their presence in the United States, and increasingly Canada, as temporary or as one of (semi-)permanence? Given the securitization of the border and the economic crisis since 2007, many migrants have decided to stay put in the United States despite increasing antiimmigrant sentiments. It even appears that the economic crisis is strengthening transnational ties and communities by reviving (or constructing) support systems and thereby reaffirming the close-knit nature of transnational kinship groups. However, the lived realities of migrants have always been different from their constructed imaginaries about belonging, temporariness, and permanence. As Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) found, there are significant gendered differences concerning these issues, with men wanting to return to Mexico, while many women see a better future for their family and themselves in the United States and so prefer to stay there permanently. While the recent economic and financial crises as well as anti-­ immigrant sentiments may have changed migrants’ perceptions, the securitization of the border and the insecurity in the Northern Mexican states have dissuaded most migrants from returning, leading them, in practice, to opt for a more permanent settlement in the United States (or Canada), even though this often means facing precariousness in employment, or the “permanentization” of temporariness. As they come to grips with such conditions of work and employment, many migrant groups are becoming increasingly active and vocal about their human rights and employment situations. On 1 May 2010, migrant groups in the United States demonstrated in support of human rights and pointed to the economy’s dependence on their labour power. Similarly, Arizona’s and other anti-­immigrant legislation has mobilized immigrant groups across the country. On the one hand, these activities might be read as attempts to address and fight the “permanentization” of temporariness or precariousness in employment, or, on the other hand, they may embody an imaginary of belonging and (semi-) permanence.



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conclusion

This chapter has addressed the question of how migrant transnational life has been transformed because of the dual security and economic crises in Mexico and the United States. I argue that transnational practices and lives reflect different imaginaries of belonging, temporariness, and permanence, which may be in the process of transforming as a result of the securitization of the border, the insecurity in Mexico’s Northern states, and the economic crisis. Notwithstanding the difficult situation that many migrants are facing as a result of the economic crisis and concomitant anti-immigrant sentiments, their predominant response has been to weather the economic storm and to increasingly stand up for their human rights and for improved employment conditions. This does not mean, however, that migrants have forgotten about their hometowns. Although the economic crisis is not over, migrants are beginning to increase their monetary remittances once again. Hometown associations and other immigrant groups are not only involved in claiming respect and recognition in the United States, they also continue to forge links with their home communities and increase their imaginary presence there. These practices are made more feasible by such channels as websites and social networks, thus creating a virtual transnational regionalism imbued by imaginaries of belonging, permanence, and temporariness.

notes

1 This chapter, drafted in 2010, does not reflect recent changes in migration between the United States and Mexico. 2 The Bracero program was a temporary workers program for Mexican agricultural workers, initiated by the US government in 1942, which lasted until 1964. 3 Social remittances refer to non-monetary remittances and include, for instance, the transferral of new customs, food, and cultural values (such as different views on gender relations). 4 Although there is no contiguous, geographical border between Mexico and Canada, points of entry between Mexico and Canada include airports and maritime ports. The “border” crossings of Mexican and Canadian ­citizens have been influenced by the decision of the Canadian ­government

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5

6 7

8

9

10 11 12 13

14

15

to impose visa requirements for Mexicans in July 2009. The Mexican ­government countered this measure within a few days through the imposition of a visa requirement for Canadian diplomats and government officials. The term “voluntarily” is relative: it does not take into consideration the structural factors that force people to return. However, people who voluntarily return have some power in deciding the timing and way in which they return. Voluntary return should be contrasted with deportation – even so-called “voluntary deportation” is in no way voluntary. These figures are based on estimates of undocumented migration from Mexico to the United States and voluntary returns as well as deportations. After a long period of demonstrations, recriminations, and challenges concerning the validity of the election results, Calderón was finally designated the winner while López Obrador nominated himself the “legitimate president.” There are some discrepancies in the reporting of migrants´ deaths that can be explained by the fact that many migrants die in the Arizona desert, in the mountains, or in the canals, and their remains are never found. According to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union, there is ample evidence that migrant deaths have substantially increased since 1998 (some databases go back as far as 1994)(Jímenez 2009). In 2010 a mass grave of mostly Central American migrants was found at Mexico’s northern border, in Tamaulipas. It was discovered when one migrant managed to escape from the farm where a drug cartel held migrants hostage and, eventually, murdered them (see Carlsen 2010). The IDMC was established by the Norwegian Refugee Council in 1998. Polleros or coyotes are colloquial terms for migrant smugglers. Tierra Caliente is a region situated at the border between the states of Guerrero and Michoacán (and to some extent Estado de México). The study, based on questionnaire and in-depth interview data, analyzed the effects of migration on local communities and households, in economic, social, and cultural terms. It also investigated whether a culture of migration or a disposition to migrate was developing among adolescents (aged 12–16 years). One element that sets this study apart is that it also explored why people decide NOT to migrate. Although Smith never mentions this in his book, Ticuani does not exist and, according to my informants from the region, he uses the name as a pseudonym for the town of Chinantla. The 3x1 program is a co-development scheme set up by the Mexican government: each dollar that a migrant association dedicates to a local



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development project is matched by the three levels of government (federal, state, and local or municipal). 16 During the fall of 2009 and spring of 2010, I visited students in towns in the vicinity of the city of Puebla: Sta. Lucia (presidencia auxiliar del municipio de Atlixco) and the Municipio of Tlapanalá. references

Agren, D. 2009. Mexicans Resentful of Canada’s Sudden Invocation of Visas. Canwest News Service, 19 July. http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/2009/07/19 [accessed 5 June 2012]. Aristegui Noticias. 2012. 83 Mil Muertes en el Sexenio de Calderón: Semanario “Zeta,” 27 November. http://aristeguinoticias.com/2711/ mexico/83-mil-muertes-en-el-sexenio-de-calderon-semanario-zeta/ [accessed 10 June 2012]. Banco de México. 2009. Las Remesas Familiares en 2008. Comunicado de Prensa, 27 January 2009. http://www.banxico.org.mx/ documents/%7BB7CBCFAF-AB7D-BE65-F78F-6827D524C418%7D. pdf [accessed 12 February 2010]. Basch, L. 1994. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicatments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. London: Routledge. Becker, A. 2009. New Migrant Class Flees Mexican Drug War. The Nation, 20 March. http://www.centerforinvestigativereporting.org/ ­articles/newmigrantclassfleesmexicandrugwar [accessed 14 February 2010]. Carlsen, L. 2010. 72 Migrantes Masacrados, las Víctimas Más Recientes de la Guerra Contra las Drogas. Zapateando 2 [blog], 7 September. http://zapateando2.wordpress.com/2010/09/07/72-migrantes­masacrados-las-victimas-recientes-de-la-guerra-contra-las-drogas/ [accessed 30 November 2010]. CNN México. 2013. La Lucha Anticrimen de Calderón Causó 70,000 Muertos, Dijo Osorio Chong, 15 February. http://mexico.cnn.com/ nacional/2013/02/15/la-lucha-anticrimen-de-calderon-dejo-70000muertos-dijo-osorio-chong [accessed 10 June 2013]. El Sol de México. 2010. Unas 200 Mil Personas Han Dejado Ciudad ­Juárez por el Narco, 18 February. http://www.oem.com.mx/ ­elsoldemexico/notas/n1524672.htm [accessed 18 March 2010]. Faist, T. 2000. Transnationalization in international Migration: Implications for the Study of Citizenship and Culture. Ethnic and Racial Studies 23(2):189–222.

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Frontera NorteSur. 2008. A migrant exodus? Albuquerque, NM: New Mexico State University. http://americanpatrol.com/MISCNEWS/2006UP/FRONTERA-NORTESUR/081201-News.html [accessed 5 June 2012]. Glick Schiller, N., L. Basch, and C. Szanton Blanc. 1995. From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration. Anthropological Quarterly 68(1):48–63. Goldring, L 2003. Gender, Status, and the State in Transnational Spaces: The Gendering of Political Participation and Mexican Hometown Associations. In Gender and US Immigration: Contemporary Trends, ed. P. Hondagneu-Sotelo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guarnizo, L. 1994. Los “Dominican Yorkers”: The Making of a Binational Society. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 533:70–86. Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. 1994. Gendered Transitions. Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley: University of California Press. IDMC (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre). 2012. Internal Displacement in the Americas. Geneva: IDMC. http://www.internal­displacement.org/publications/global-overview-2012-americas.pdf [accessed 10 June 2013]. Jímenez, M. 2009. Humanitarian Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S. – Mexico Border. San Diego and Mexico City: ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties and Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights. http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/immigrants/humanitariancrisisreport. pdf [accessed 20 June 2012]. Kearney, M. 2004. Las Funciones de Clasificación y Filtración de Valor de las Fronteras. In Fronteras en América del Norte. Estudios Multidisciplinarios, ed. A. Mercado Celis and E. Gutiérrez Romero. Mexico, D. F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de América del Norte, Centro de Investigación sobre América del Norte. Lacy, M. 2009. Money trickles north as Mexicans help relatives. New York Times, 15 November. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/ americas/16mexico.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&emc=eta1 [accessed 12 February 2010]. Lanly, G., and M. Basilia Valenzuela V., eds. 2004. Clubes de Migrantes Oriundos Mexicanos en Estados Unidos: La política Transnacional de la Nueva Sociedad Civil Migrante. Guadalajara, Mexico: Universidad de Guadalajara. Marchand, M. H. 2006a. Apizaco y Huamantla: Un Estudio Comparativo de Comunidades Expulsoras de Migrantes. Modelo de las Causas



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e Implicaciones de los Flujos Migratorios para Solucionar la Falta de Desarrollo Sustentable en la Región Tlaxcala. Research Project CONACYT-FOMIX 2004–2006. – (coordinator). 2006b. Tlaxcala: ¿Migración o Desarrollo Local? Puebla: Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, Universidad de las Américas Puebla. – 2009. The Future of Gender and Development after 9/11: Insights from Postcolonial Feminism and Transnationalism. Third World Quarterly 30(5):921–35. – 2010. Rebordering Migrants? Mexican Transnational Communities Facing the Dual Economic and Security Crises. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the International Studies Association, Montreal, Canada. Meza Rodríguez, E. 2010. Comunidades de Migrantes y la Construcción de un Regionalismo Transnacional Virtual: La Nueva Utilización de los Medios de Comunicación. Caso de estudio de la Región de Tierra Caliente, México. Master’s thesis, Universidad de las Américas Puebla. Morán Quiroz, L.R. 2004. Las Organizaciones de Migrantes, su Impacto y Evolución en la Recepción de Personas y el Envío de Recursos. In Nuevas Tendencias y Desafíos de la Migración Internacional MéxicoEstados Unidos, ed. R. Delgado Wise and M. Favela. Mexico: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas. Orozco, M. 2009. Migration and Remittances in Times of Recession: Effects on Latin American Economies. Inter-American Dialogue. http:// www.oecd.org/dev/americas/42753222.pdf Passel, J., and D. Cohn. 2009. Recession Slows – but Does Not Reverse – Mexican Immigration. Executive Summary. Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1288/mexican­immigrants-recent-inflows-outflows [accessed 5 June 2012]. Passel, J., D. Cohn, and A. Gonzalez-Barrera. 2012 Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero—and Perhaps Less. Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/23/net-migrationfrom-mexico-falls-to-zero-and-perhaps-less/ [accessed 10 June 2013]. Portes, A., L. Guarnizo, and P. Landolt, eds. 2003. El Estudio del Transnacionalismo: Peligros Latentes y Promesas de un Campo de Investigación Emergente. In La Globalización desde Abajo: Transnacionalismo Inmigrante y Desarrollo: la experiencia de Estados Unidos y América Latina. Mexico: Flacso. Ríos, V., and D.A. Shirk. 2010. Drug Violence In Mexico. Data and Analysis through 2010. Justice in Mexico Project. San Diego: TransBorder Institute, Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San

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Diego. http://justiceinmexico.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/2011-tbi­drugviolence.pdf [accessed 15 November 2011]. Smith, M.P., and M. Bakker. 2008. Citizenship across Borders: The Political Transnationalism of el Migrante. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Smith, R.C. 2006. Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press. Valpy, M. 2009. Visa Controls on Mexico “Humiliating,” Senator Says. Globe and Mail, 24 October. http://www.immigrationwatchcanada. org/2009/10/24 [accessed 5 June 2012].

12 Temporariness: Other than Permanence, and in the Lives of People – Always … d e e pa r a j k u m a r

In this chapter, a new way of writing poses challenges to the linearity of form and content in conventional academic as well as storytelling practices to liberate temporariness, not only as an academic exercise but as a political intervention. With intertwined form and content, in its poetics, and through dialogical, multiple, and fragmented first-person stories of people from (former) Sudan in Canada, the chapter disturbs the very authority that categorically binds people performatively re/produced as refugees, in this instance as Sudanese refugees, into binaries that render the citizen, as a permanent inhabitant of a nation-state, a central agential subject, and the refugee, as a temporary and/or lacking habitant within a nation-state, an othered non-agential object, through everyday, policy, and analytical practices normalized by the state, international refugee regime, academics, society, and individuals – practices that are premised on the salience of particular territorialized discourse(s) of the state, nation, and citizen, and that simultaneously weave through other similarly normalizing and authoritative practices that performatively re/produce dominant binarized categories of gender, race, nationality, religion, tribe, language, sexuality, ability, and so on. The re/production of one category, identity, and discourse as permanent, which in turn permanentizes this categorization, identification, and discursiveness, such as in this instance of the Canadian citizen (at the intersection of all the other re/produced categories), as valoured, favoured, and privileged, including in academics, is what the chapter seeks to displace by centring the polyphonic stories of people who are being refugeeized.

306  Deepa Rajkumar

For nearly two decades, critical scholars1 have repeatedly made theoretical and ethical arguments for centring voices of refugees to disrupt the dominant refugee discourse(s). By privileging the nation, state, and citizen as the norm, the discourse(s) produce(s) the refugee as an abnormal, passive, and threatening figure, as that which is not permanent, which has been driven out of the permanent, and/or which is not able to be made permanent – permanent being defined as belonging to the nation-state, with specified nationality, as citizen. Practices predicated on the dominant refugee discourse(s) severely limit the possibilities of movement, and settlement, of refugees – in their countries, in internally displaced persons camps, in refugee camps, in cities and towns across the world, and in countries of resettlement. It is only by centring the divergent stories of refugees that the confining power of this (these) discourse(s) can be disrupted. In this chapter, this critical challenge is taken up through a radical and provocative synthesis of content and form. It not only centres the multiple voices of people from (former) Sudan in Canada but also fundamentally destabilizes conventional scholarly writing. The stories are personal, poetic, and dialogical, presented in conversation with other stories, without overt analysis by the academic author. As authors of their own multiple stories, which are based on their divergent experiences, in dialogue with others, Southern/Sudanese and non-Southern/Sudanese, and in negotiation with the dominant discourses and practices that seek to, on the basis of borders of all kinds, order and delineate life itself, the storytellers in this chapter render their own analyses and show the impossibility of altering the conditions of precarity embedded in processes of their being re/made continuously as temporary and/or as never totally belonging, even as they are granted permanent residence and citizenship, as in Canada, until the very premise of permanence of the state, nation, citizen, and its production as such, in conventional academics and dominant discourses, is not displaced. Conventional academics and storytelling practices, even if critical, to the extent that they follow a linear form, a given storyline, with beginning/introduction, middle/data analysis, and end/conclusion, and cater to a certain readership, and conventional modes of reading, end up, often, reinforcing the prowess and centrality of the author, even if critical, as knowledge producer, and of a unified story/analysis that does not ultimately shake up the dominant discourses, in academics and the everyday world, but



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works toward carrying forward a tradition, to varying degrees, that mainly leads to permanentizing dominant discourses, identities, and practices, to the exclusion of those who are written about as well as the non-participation of readers, except as receivers of knowledge. Only multiple and authorial voices of people living the violences re/produced in the very processes of binarizations, such as those of permanence and temporariness, can begin to contest the dominance of discourses of permanence so that other ways of living and relating, with differences, can be re/imagined. Not just as a method but as a deconstructive writing process that seeks to centre temporariness, conceptually and in people’s lives, this chapter not only deals with questions of authorship, representation, authority, and agency in a theoretical sense but actually tries to invert them. In the absence of a clear-cut distinction between academic author and object of enquiry, and between academic analysis and anecdotal storytelling, in this writing the re/production of permanence embodied in practices of the state, international refugee regimes, and everyday life is not only exposed, explained, and analyzed but, importantly, also resisted, by the very people who are affected by it. Thus, the chapter embodies a process of liberating temporariness, by centring people’s lives, as contingent and fluid; here unconventional writing foregrounds people’s stories, as an anti- and/or non-authoritarian stance of situated, multiple, and fragmented storytelling, without letting the stories settle into permanence, as solution, or even as a point of critique, overcoming a linear, binary, and statist logic that permanentizes permanence and provides power for discourses and techniques that seek to, exclusively and violently, permanentizingly order human life that actually cannot ever be contained – it is always temporary and transient. Temporariness. Which means there is permanence. Which means that there is temporariness. And what is permanence. A definitive. Forever and forever. Really? Forever? A space, a time?

308  Deepa Rajkumar

An identity, a people. Who. Found in grand narratives, in meta-truths. Minh-ha2 called it regimes of truth. Present Everywhere And nowhere. In academics In policy In everyday understandings. Absent In everyday In stories of everyday In life. Unless in fairy tales or in Hollywood (okay also Bollywood and all the versions) In social science. With power. In the making of the one. Analysis, policy, object. Even subject, the author. Anybody with authority. Through the violence of the one. Its performance, its legitimization, its making Again and again. Denying its temporariness In fear of temporariness. Of gender, race, nation-state, any people. Oh, look at that person. Who is they? They are Man or woman Of this colour or that Of this country or that Of this religion or that Of this tribe or that Of this language or that Of this sexuality or that



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Of this ability or that And what if you get (more) specific. More categories Also permanent The way it is put Till you go deeper and closer Till you get to the person To know them As (you would/could) yourself. Singular But not one. Especially the one. Or within the category of one. Whether you fix yourself as one or not You know you are multiple Not just in intermeshing categories of multiple But in how the categories themselves do not hold What is a man or woman What is a colour What is a country What is a religion What is a tribe What is a language What is a sexuality What is an ability And oh, oh, there’s more, no? Categories. How does one know oneself, honestly. But honestly, if we do then can we be. Isn’t it more convenient to just be the one. Whatever one. Here, now, the author one, and not just any author but the academic author one, doesn’t even have to say author. Is more than any mere author, is the knowledgeable, analytical, author. Has authority of the academic institution, trained there and training there. In the formula, to bring it all together, we teach that, to make others also within us. The one. Exclusive, elusive but there. Constant. Almost.

310  Deepa Rajkumar

Knows Knows the categories Analyses Knows who and what to analyze Argues Knows what and how to argue Concludes Knows how to stick to the point Lasts Knows to deflect criticism. Making the one But then to write, is to do that. Even to think is to do that. Bringing things together, making things one. But then, again, what about other ways to write, and think. Already there as well To give up the one The one, the permanence that is sought. And fixed on land On body. Against movement, into and away from itself, and into and away from its space. Bordered. Bordering. Violent. With blood, through blood. Of purity. Which isn’t, isn’t, isn’t. Then how …? By questioning the border? Everywhere Aha, by not being in or out of it, but at the border. Which then can’t be The border, closed But open A threshold Hospitable But without a host or a guest Neither hostage to the house or the outside



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The house not only a land, a container But also a body, also a container Not to be intruded into But to be moving Also outwards And inwards Reaching, touching, making Able to, just be Sometimes in the future Oh, Derrida.3 Through stories? When permanence is, a condition Also of being Temporariness is, a condition Also of being Beyond time and space And also about time and space Inescapable of time and space And identity. A condition Not one Even if written, thought, practised (upon) as one By those also seeking to make themselves one The author The policy analyst The police, in all its garbs Everyday Even when it is resisted Even by the police Who also isn’t Can’t be Because is not One. So, Stories, not story. Of life Of lives

312  Deepa Rajkumar

Many Singular Plural In oneself In otherselves Separate, together Connections In differences Similar And not. Contingent, negotiated. But more, multiple. Inescapably. Borderless Even if bordered. Uncontainable Even if contained. Spilling. Blood In maintaining In transgression. But really the trangressive is not the transgressing It’s permanent, the temporary The permanent is the deviant Containing life If only to give it a meaning A coherence For the good of all For order Thinking its opposite is chaos Not considering possibilities Also of care, hospitality, gift In relationships of the multiple In letting be. Shhh, stop talking Listen And tell within listening To ourselves



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To others To myself Carefully Stories From within And of others Multiple, fragmented, fluid. Stories Even as one Contesting the one When standing on its own But with others Also standing on their own Contesting the one of itself Like Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky4 Benjamin,5 Minh-ha, King’s.6 Mine, yours, ours. Theirs. Who don’t exist. Even as they do. Lives told And then by who Doesn’t matter If not to make the one To take up the contemporary At the mixing of time And space And identity Past, present, and future. Coming together Outside the one Dispersing together Outside the one So not permanent Even if becoming As unbecoming

314  Deepa Rajkumar

Secure In recognition of the temporary In being transient But, oh so threatening. To being. But a modern being Always colonized. In constraining, restraining the movement The temporary Life How? Writing Saying Here, and now Not a refugee Not a Sudanese refugee Because there is no such thing Even as there is In making it Permanently In explanation, in understanding In categorizing In ordering Manageably The other That identity, that space, that time The other, to who you are The academic The policy analyst The police, in all your garbs. Making and using, also: the ‘refugee,’ the ‘Sudanese,’ the Sudanese ‘man,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘child,’ the Sudanese ‘professional’?, ‘worker,’ ‘student,’ ‘on welfare,’ the Sudanese ‘leader,’ ‘criminal,’ the ‘African,’ the ‘black,’ the ‘third world,’ the ‘developing,’ the ‘underdeveloped,’ the ‘homophobic,’ the ‘patriarch,’ the ‘ill adjusted’/’ill adjustable,’ the ‘non-English speaker,’ the ‘cultural,’ the ‘uncomprehending’/‘incomprehensible,’ the ‘single



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mom’/‘single parent,’ the ‘cheat,’ the ‘misfit,’ the ‘non-­westerner,’ the ‘hyphen,’ the ‘Sudanese Canadian,’ the ‘child abuser,’ the ‘wife beater,’ the ‘drunk,’ the ‘hardworking’/‘lazy’/‘dumb’ Sudanese, the ‘non-assimilable,’ the ‘multicultural,’ the ‘asylum seeker,’ the ‘economic refugee,’ the ‘pitiable,’ the ‘ungrateful,’ the ‘victim’/‘survivor,’ the ‘case,’ the ‘west,’ the ‘citizen,’ the ‘success’ and so the ‘unsuccessful’/‘successful,’ the ‘soldier,’ the ‘rebel,’ the ‘police,’ the ‘child soldier,’ the ‘Lost Boys’/‘Lost Girls’?, the ‘welfare system,’ the ‘refugee regime’ etc., etc. Our story is all the same. We all left for the same reason, the war. Really? Of course. But then I insist each person’s story is different. Each person saw something, did something, undertook internal/external journeys differently, singularly. Do you want to fit into the mould of the refugee? We all told the same story. To me too? I don’t think so, I hope not. We told true stories. And we know what they want to hear. We tell to move. We move and we tell. A true story. An apt story. A pertinent story. An individual story. A story for the occasion. And the occasion, UNHCR, United Nation’s High Commissioner for Refugees, interrogation, and mine, at the embassies. In different countries, with different people. Same different stories. Different same stories. And yes the stories for each other, we who are family, friends, relatives, acquaintances, from same places and different, who knew each other from before, and here, and now for the first time.

316  Deepa Rajkumar

It was so funny, so bad, so good, even all at once. Haha! In Sudan. From Sudan to here. Here. Who are you? I am from India. Yes, Indian Sudanese! Hehe. Not really. And, you know we have Indians who settled long back in Sudan too, like some Greeks, Armenians, and others. Yes. But can I be without any nationalities please, even though I am with you, hmm ... most of you, make that many of you? And I may also be Canadian soon. Then you will be like us. Actually, now I am one. Congrats! To travel, Indian passport doesn’t let you into many places easily. And think of the Sudanese passport. Then, here they say I can’t go back until I am Canadian, get a Canadian passport, because I came here to escape danger there. Before you become a citizen here they can give you travel document to travel to other places. Only not to Sudan. But it’s not easy. Like when my father was coming to US for a conference I wanted the document to go see him there, I didn’t see him for ten years. They said they can give it only if he’s very sick. That day I was so sad. I want to see people when they are alive and well. It’s easy to get the document. I got it. No. Yes ... And it’s okay to go to Sudan. Especially now after the peace between North and South is signed. And now, after the independence of Southern Sudan! Depends.



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In Sudan if you can talk it’s okay too, you can get your way out of many situations. Yes, but not always. Not in Darfur. But there too. And not, like right now, in Nuba Mountains, in Southern Kordofan. And in the East. Actually it’s difficult to just be, all over Sudan. And here too. It’s easier there. Depends. When we went, so many, to the camps, and then even with UNHCR, from Ethiopia to Sudan and then from Sudan to Kenya, we went in other ways too, they accept most people as refugee. When we came to the camp the first time, they don’t ask you much questions. But you have to register to get food and a place to stay. Ya, and we ate only once a day, most of us anyway. In the cities, there they take up your case individually. They question you, they don’t believe you. You have to write your story the way they want it. And you go again and again and again before you are accepted, you keep telling your story. Most people don’t get accepted even then. And if they close your case you can’t do anything. Sometimes they can open your case again but it’s hard. When your case is closed, you don’t even know how you can live, it’s not easy as a foreigner, without papers, to get a job, or you get a very low paying job. UNHCR gives very less money but it helps a bit. To come here, they take so long, with the process. And they don’t give the resettlement form to everyone. It’s like a business. Like discrimination. Then UNHCR, they interview you for resettlement.

318  Deepa Rajkumar

They ask our stories about what happened to us, how we came to the camp, why we can’t go back, our journey. Like you. They were like me? Yes. No. And, I am not judging you, no? You are not going to decide my case. I am not nervous with you. But I told the same story to them too. You have to tell them the story they want to hear. All of us we had the same situation but they want only your individual story. And I am asking you about what you did, are doing, here, in Canada, too. And ya, they also ask about your education. Then, at the embassy they mainly ask you what you will do when you get to Canada, if you will stay there or you want to return. They don’t ask your story too much. You know you are going for education but you have to say you will work, you know you want to come back but you have to say you will stay. We know from other people, they don’t take you otherwise. And they tell you all lies about Canada, it’s not like what they told us there. They tell you Canada is a good place and it’s up to you, if you work hard, you can make it. Sometimes, like in Egypt, in India, the embassies can take you as a convention refugee even if UNHCR rejected your case. Again you have to say the same stories, about yourself. And they ask you more, about your education and what you will do after resettlement, if you will work and stay. It was still a struggle. And after the peace they don’t want to give refugee status to many people in the cities, only to people from Darfur. But, we have to also give individual stories. And in Cairo in December 2005 they killed so many people because of this.



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They were from all over Sudan, on strike for three months outside UNHCR saying they should accept them as refugees and resettle those they accepted, that they couldn’t return to Sudan or stay on in Egypt. Even after peace was signed in Sudan the conditions there hadn’t improved enough for them to be able to live there. UNHCR just called the Egyptian police. Then people died, many were injured, even children. They took many people, especially men, even from Darfur, to jail to deport them to Sudan. And still nothing much is done. We protested, even here in Ottawa. Ya, that day was so cold. One hundred fifty people, they came from all over Ontario, were in a demonstration outside the Egyptian Embassy and UNHCR, and nothing on the TV, anywhere. Shouldn’t they also have protested outside the Sudanese Embassy? So, they resettle a few people. Most people are in camps, waiting for better opportunities. Shh, don’t say that loud, or they will call us economic refugees. Even they are there for economic reasons, not humanitarian reasons. Everybody wants to improve their lives, we also had war. UNHCR, it tries to protect the host state, the country of origin, the country of (first) refuge and the country of resettlement, without whom they can’t operate in any case. The states all don’t want too many foreigners, others, even if the host states need them, even if they can’t really stop their movement. It is too threatening to them, even if only in their imagination, and if only because of their imagination of hordes of people coming or wanting to come, and if only because of their imagination of who these people who are coming are. When I first came we went to the reception house. Me I didn’t go there. For some reason we were put up in a hotel. Maybe because that time there were so many people coming from Kosovo, the reception house was full.

320  Deepa Rajkumar

There, they have orientation sessions. My kids were laughing when they were telling us how to use roll-on deodorant. I was a UN official in Malawi, we were used to more modern things than we got here. And, from the reception house they start sending you to all these programs, especially for LINC, Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada, and ESL, English as Second Language, classes, and to search for a place to stay. In that first year the government supports you, but it’s not enough what they give you. Oh, all didn’t go to the reception house, especially many of us from the North. We came from the US and applied for asylum here in Canada, at the border. And inside here. We stayed with friends and relatives. Then we wait for our hearing, and hope they accept us as refugees here. That we can become permanent residents, that our case will not be denied. That we are not sent back, deported to Sudan. Or to the US. And yes, they sent us to the same programs. These are the only ones available and mostly for free. Nobody, even your friends here, know where else to send you. I came here through WUSC, World University Service of Canada. From Kakuma. WUSC has a Student Refugee Program. There are other organizations like that too, this one is from Canada. If they accept you, then they apply to Canadian universities for you. If a university accepts you then you come here as a permanent resident, like other people who are resettled from the camps, but to study here. They support you for the first year, with everything. After that you are on your own. I came from Dadaab. From Elsewhere.



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Me I was in Nairobi, studying in the university there. When I finished I applied to Canada as a refugee, but I could have also applied directly under the skilled category. Only you need money for that. When we were coming here I opened the IOM, International Organization for Migration, bag, that they give us, in the plane. Ya, they told me not to till I reach Canada. I was a ‘New Worker,’ brought here to work, do the jobs they don’t want to do. Me, I was ‘Stateless,’ I don’t even know why, when I even had my Sudanese passport at the time. If you are below eighteen you are a ‘Student.’ They didn’t know what to do with me. I was in New Brunswick. They gave me the English test, Canadian Language Benchmarks Assessment, and because I did well, they didn’t have anything for me. They couldn’t just send me to ESL. They seemed lost. Me, I went to Winnipeg. Because I knew English well they couldn’t send me to ESL classes. And I was too old to be in high school, but they didn’t know which university or college to direct me to. So I came to Calgary on my own, after figuring out the schools here. I am doing engineering now. Ya, they tried to send me to ESL too. I went for a little while, but it was useless. I had finished high school, and my English wasn’t good even though I studied it before. I looked around and then joined academic English in the university. Later I graduated from Carleton University, here in Ottawa. When they came to the camps, especially the Canadians, they were asking for those who finished high school. They gave the forms to them first and then to the others. And ya, Canada wanted single young men. I didn’t hear this. I know that they were asking for single people for WUSC. They didn’t want to sponsor people with families, not even single parents, unless someone got pregnant after they were selected. We were in a teacher’s training college in Addis Ababa. They gave us the forms first, before going to the camp.

322  Deepa Rajkumar

And here they sent us for ESL. They said I don’t speak Canadian English, I say cinema and not movie. What? I left it. I had to work and look after my family. It’s so tiring, my work. I go to High River to the meat factory, Cargill. You know how fast the meat comes at you? And we get only like 45-minute break. Meet me on Monday or Tuesday, from Wednesday when I get home I sleep immediately. We work on Saturdays too. Some people work at the chicken factory here in Calgary, at Lilydale. It’s a little better, and they don’t have to travel so much. I work at the kill zone. And then the meat goes to the process zone. People have to be so fast. They can get hurt cutting the cows, with the big sharp knives. And it’s so cold, our hands all get locked. But you know this is the only place where they don’t ask you for Canadian English or Canadian experience or Canadian qualification. And the pay is good, fifteen dollars per hour. Hey, thanks for visiting me in Brooks. Thank you for having me over. Let me take you around. But first you eat, I cooked for you. Thank you. You see that place there, it’s the beef plant. Then, we have so many millionaires here, there are so many oil fields around. And we have motorcycle gangs here, they don’t bother with us. Someone told me that when he comes to Brooks he doesn’t breathe, it stinks so bad. Yes, especially in the winter, though I don’t smell anything anymore. They just leave all the liquid wastes, everything out there in the open. The smell is unbearable, and it’s so unhygienic too.



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I am a veterinarian, but our degrees are not really recognized. And then they have a long expensive procedure, to write exams to get qualified again to practise our original professions. And I need some money right now, if I work elsewhere I will get very less money. I work in the cleaning shift, the last one, C. It’s not cold there luckily, but we have to clean properly as per the regulations and very fast. And they don’t really follow any other regulations. We didn’t even have a union before, here in Lakeside Packers, with Tyson Foods. They are an American company, it’s like a special economic zone in Canada. And now the plant is with XL Foods, a Canadian company. Then, the Sudanese fought, went on strike, against the really bad working conditions. We got a union but with very less power. We fought again, and it’s somewhat better now. Still it’s tough. They call it a Sudanese union, but it’s not. It’s for all, we all got it. Most Sudanese and non-whites work in B shift. Shift A works in the morning and after they finish the B shift has to finish the quota for the day, even if they work overtime. Ya, we get paid overtime but we don’t have a choice. We have to do overtime. And then we have very less time to clean before the next shift starts. I got fired, because they started targeting people who were in the strike, they laid us off. I am still struggling to get EI, Employment Insurance. Oh me, I am okay now, I know how to work underground. I will not work a full-time job again. I hate this place. Why am I wearing a Canada t-shirt then? It’s cheap. Let’s go for lunch. No, you will not pay. And say hi to Simon in Toronto for me.

324  Deepa Rajkumar

I was in Medicine Hat before. I am a graduate of Khartoum University, and they sent me to ESL. They don’t teach you anything there. When I kept asking them why they don’t teach anything they finally said yes, we teach you only enough for you to go to supermarket and to get a survival job. Then they get you forms from Tyson Foods to work there at Brooks. They say if you want to work, go there. It’s all business. Me, I left Brooks, you make money and then it all goes. Everything here is so expensive. My hands started getting locked. I was there only for the summer to make money to pay for school in Ottawa, I am doing engineering. I want to be a doctor but the school counsellor in Vancouver keeps telling me that I should become a nurse. I don’t sleep the day I meet my counsellor. I came from Kenya and I knew everything in my grade, English too. But they put me in ESL here, and in a grade according to my age, grade nine. Now I finished high school but I didn’t graduate. I still have to finish my credits because I was in ESL and doing things for lower grades in other subjects. So, for finishing high school, to pay for adult high school, I need to make money first. That’s why I am here. I am going to my cousin’s place in Brooks. I will work there the whole summer and then go back to finish school. But why do they make you do this, go to ESL? I don’t know. That’s how it is when you come here young, from other countries. Mostly, you go to ESL, then adult high school to finish up. If you don’t want that then you start working. Ya, most people don’t go to adult high school. Or they drop out before. They don’t think it helps anyway. When you go there to Brooks don’t use all your force when they give you the test to grip things. Then they give you the hardest jobs, to cut the toughest part of the cow. When I came here, I had to pay the government for my medicals there, my airfare to Canada, for landing fee. Now they don’t have that fee anymore.



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No, you have it but it’s less. It’s not there for people who are accepted as refugees. Then I have to send money home, so many people there, friends too. They supported us, even to get here. And here, if I don’t work who will feed me, my kids. Pay the bills. And, it may seem like luxury like the new TV here but we need to make the house like something we want to live in. We are like that, we always take pride in our house. I am very simple, I don’t need much. Why did you come by British Airways, or was it Lufthansa or KLM? I came by Kuwait Air, actually Cathay Pacific, so much cheaper too than my Sudanese friends who had to come by British Airways from India. The Canadian Embassy told them to, gave them a loan for this and this only. Actually it’s the IOM that does all the process. The Canadian government pays them, and you pay back the government after you get here. They tell you it’s a loan. No they don’t. They don’t even tell you how much. You sign papers. But they don’t really tell you that you have to read it first. Plus you think it’s all good, and that it shouldn’t be difficult to pay back any amount after you get here. And then, they keep calling you, harassing you. They shouldn’t be this way. And, me like I had so much financial problems last year I couldn’t pay at all and they, without my consent or even knowledge, took money from the tax money that the government was giving me back when I filed returns. You know they give you back some money when your income is less. So this year I didn’t file my taxes. Hmm, so then you have to keep working, to keep paying back while you have other things to pay for too. You will maybe never leave the country.

326  Deepa Rajkumar

Like slavery? Bondage? Very humanitarian! I can leave though, if I want, they can’t stop me. When you call me leave me a message, otherwise I don’t pick up the phone. We paid back, only now, thank God. And, they say if you don’t work, if you can’t get work, you can go to the welfare. But the welfare is too bad too. You know when I was with welfare they gave me so less money. I started working part time and then I told them that, most people they don’t tell them. They cut that money from my check, and gave me the rest. So it was the same money that I got, even if I worked. Why should I work some useless job then? Now I am working, as a personal support worker for old people. I am not with welfare anymore, thank God. And I want to go back to school. I was a teacher in Sudan. But here I don’t think I can be a teacher again. I really loved that, I was good too. They sent me to ESL, for my accent. Someone was asking me how my English was so good. I said I learnt it from the airport. Haha. And oh, my friend said I should let it be known that you are a woman. It shows how strong you are, as a woman, it changes the sense that the reader gets. Then there was this guy I met walking through the park. He asked me where I was from. Sudan. Oh, the place where you don’t have food, clothes. Yes, we have nothing. How do you eat then? Leaves in the bush. Ya, it was in the news. Yes, it’s in the news. There are real problems, that’s why I am here. Do you have TV there? No, because we have older people who tell us stories about the weather, about harvest, everything. Foolishly he believed me. Hehe.



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But without this imagination, of themselves as a unique people, as separate from the others, as better than others, whatever the criteria, if only knowledge of English, and in Sudan of Arabic, without which you are thought to be stupid, they can’t even be a country, a nation, a state, have borders, be a citizen. Ya. But I don’t think we can let everyone into any country too. Of course, you can, especially if you can think, know, that countries don’t really exist. No, and they do exist. No. Yes ... You know I read about this guy in Australia. The previous, John Howard, government there targeted the Sudanese based on what they call anecdotal stories about their experiences, stories of gangs, etc., and issued statements that they will be stopping or reducing immigration of all Africans because Sudanese had real problems integrating in the society, they were causing problems in the society. Like now too. This guy painted his face white. He said I am trying hard to ­integrate, it doesn’t seem to work so far, am I white enough now? And they are immigrants here too, actually thieves, they took other people’s lands and are now calling it their own. Then they try to keep, make, native people stay in reserves and immigrants in ghettos. You know they blame everything, for us, on the ‘trauma’ of war in Sudan. That it’s unfortunate but real, even though it’s not people’s own fault, and that people need counselling and psychological help and as such are unfit to live in the west. Unfortunate but true? And here is where we get even more trauma, and no counselling can help that if they don’t change conditions in the society here.

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I was a child soldier in Sudan, and one of the so-called lost boys, I got flashbacks only after I came to Canada, I didn’t have them before. The discrimination here, in Canada, is too much. I can’t deal with it. Here, I get a job, I lose it, I get a job, I lose it. I try hard. Then the police always picks me up, I never did anything. They even beat me. I don’t use the back alley anymore after dark, they get me there where nobody’s looking. Just because I am black. Like with our kids. We had guns back there, we never killed our kids. And here they say, when we try to discipline our kids, that we beat them, we will kill them, psychologically harm them. Maybe you do. Maybe. But if we love them so much and if we didn’t already kill them, then why will we do that here and now, after bringing them here. Think. And then the Children’s Aid Society takes away our children and puts them in foster homes and group homes, even jails. That’s not helping, this is worse. They make no real effort to provide them with a caring family or any support. They spoil their lives. And then the kids have nowhere to go. If you really want to help my kids you have to first come and talk to me, explain how you think and listen to what I think, and not simply take away my children. Or even really talk to the kids. And children or young people are not innocent either. When they are angry with us, or get different messages from the schools, they can use Children’s Aid too, to be free or feel freer, from their parents. They don’t always know how dangerous it is for them. And in the courts here, you are guilty before being proven innocent. It’s in the school they keep asking them stupid questions, sorry for my language, about what we do at home and then they take them away. Even with my family they did the same thing.



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Me and my wife were together for thirty-six years. Here they break families. But some men do treat women bad. I don’t think if women go against their husbands or call 911 it’s for no reason. Yes. But that’s not what I am talking about. If she has a problem we have to solve it, maybe she can go away too. But here in the school they keep asking her questions and keep telling her that she is abused. Then they tell her that she can be independent if she leaves her husband, it will be good for her. My wife went away, and they kidnapped my kids. They called them at home and told them to take some clothes to their school. From there they took them away, I didn’t even know till it happened. Then they all stayed with welfare. That’s it, they broke our family and then just left them. My wife is not independent now. My children all came back to me, I take care of them. And their mother is all alone. She came here older, she didn’t know English. She calls me for help with things too, especially with the kids. If they can’t really help then they shouldn’t interfere in things. Hmm, they do think that Africans are fools, and all wife and children beaters. We are not all good but all are not bad. And the Canadians are not good either. Even if they mean good they don’t even know anything. Or even how to live in a family. They have to listen first. And for that they have to stop thinking that their way is the right way to be or the only way to be. They have to stop thinking that they know everything, about everyone. There are so many new things here, not all bad. And not all good. Like this same-sex marriage, we don’t have that in Sudan. We do, not marriage but homosexuality. In the North maybe. No, in the South too. No, that person who told you this about the South is lying.

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I have my own cousin like this, I talked a lot to him about this, I know. In the North it’s like the person who is fucked, sorry I don’t know how else to say it, he is thought to be homosexual, the wife, and not the person who is doing it. Before you could find people like that more openly in Khartoum but now with this government it is difficult for people to do what they want. People here thought I was homophobic, but I really didn’t know anything about this. But now I know better, it took some time. I think it’s okay. Ya, it’s funny, that in weddings, when people give advice to the couple for a happy marriage life, many people talk about not calling 911 and talking to other people in the community first if they have a problem, and then there are a few who warn everyone about same-sex marriage. Yes, they think it’s outside influence that can cause homosexuality. But how can you have punishment for it, even death, if it didn’t exist in your society. And people who are like that are not killed there, like my cousin. I didn’t really see it in the South, but maybe because I didn’t know. But I know in Egypt there was this Sudanese girl, and we all knew about her. She lived with us. And there was a guy in school, we wondered about him. We even have a word for it in Dinka and Nuer, so I think it is there in the South. No, don’t talk about it. Is this part of your research? We don’t have it. Wait, you can’t talk for the whole Sudanese community. I don’t agree with it, but I can talk about it. It’s okay, let’s talk. He can’t tell me what to talk and what not to talk. And it’s up to you what you do with what you hear from me. You can use it anyway you want. Thank you. So, we are here. But we will never ever be a real citizen. Because they don’t really want us to be one, even if they say they do, even if you get the citizenship papers. They want to integrate us, deny us our culture, our ways.



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Ya, they talk of multiculturalism but they don’t really allow us to be as we are or even to mix. Even when you try. Even when you succeed, in their terms. And they try to make us Canadian. Like in settlement organizations. They take us to ESL, to learn Canadian English, to speak with Canadian accent, they teach us how to cook Canadian food, they teach us how to bring up our children. They also tell us about how to get jobs, improve your skills, how to get recognition of your skills from before or how to update them. But they never really recognize your previous qualifications or experience. You have to have Canadian qualifications or experience. Why? When it’s all the same. They even asked me Canadian experience for cleaning. Hehe. You go because you want to do the right things to live here. And because these services are free and you don’t have money. Even because you have to have something to do, only like this you can go out and meet some people. Now, we had our own community centre, in Toronto. We don’t now, since end of 2010. They cut our funding. We are among the few recent immigrants to get our own centre. We had to fight to get this. Even among ourselves. Before there were other settlement organizations, well established and with a good line of credit, who were providing services for the Sudanese. They even employed Sudanese settlement workers. But they got money in our name and used it for other programs and communities. I don’t know about Toronto but I am a settlement worker here in Calgary.

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They employed me only part-time. And they expect me to be available all the time, to translate, to go to the hospital, to help with so many things. How can that be? And I have to also do other jobs because this money is not enough. I really want to help but I can’t always, also my job profile doesn’t allow that. It makes no sense, if they really want to help then they should do more than have programs, they have to address what really is the problem for people. Like me, I am an old man, I have a problem with my leg, it’s broken, I can’t walk much or stand for too long. The welfare people told me that they can’t help me because they don’t know what caused my injury. I tell them my story but they don’t want to hear it, believe it, because I don’t have documentations. And they told us that me or my wife has to work. I don’t know English and I am working as a cleaner at this old age because my husband can’t work, and the welfare won’t support us otherwise. He doesn’t have education or English to get an office job and his leg is too bad for him to do other jobs. What’s the point, that the government of Canada brought us here, where we can come and suffer? It’s better even in our country, there we will suffer like anybody else, because we know the war and we speak the same language, and we could do the things we used to do when we grew up. But here we are just lost. The way it works, the settlement agencies are well established. They have been in this business for more than thirty years, and they are connected to the right people in the government and CIC, Citizenship and Immigration Canada. They are not really held accountable, they are not asked if their services are really for the Sudanese community or even if the services are useful. We started questioning this in Toronto, and at the end of a long struggle we got our own centre. We don’t have the centre anymore now though. You know we are new, only a few of us are doing most of the work, and we had our own people who want to stop our work, we don’t even know why, maybe ego.



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And the way the government sets up these organizations, the CIC funds and allows only certain programs in the centre, they mainly want to integrate newcomers. In our community we don’t have that many newcomers. But people have real problems. They thought the centre can help with that. We are trying to see how we can fit all this, it is difficult. CIC is not totally understanding our community and its needs. To bring everyone together is not easy. I think it’s not necessary too. But that’s how the CIC wants it. I think all this is a part of the multiculturalism of Canada. They get people from other places, even or basically for their own interest, acknowledging that these people had problems in their own countries, even with each other, they were persecuted. And here they try to again get them all together in a common community organization space, even forcing them to do so. Funding is attached to this criteria. It’s not bad to get people together. It’s also good that because we all left the country we can at least now meet and talk to each other. Yes, talking is always good. But how can they really bring people together, that involves a different and long process of interactions and not simply a formal organizational set-up. If they make this a precondition to funding, to solve problems, then it can’t help. It totally denies the context of why people got here in the first place, even as they have narrowly understood this history to be, a conflict between certain peoples, usually two. In fact such a precondition prevents people from accessing the funding since as such it’s almost impossible for people to come together as one organization. But yes, this is another good opportunity for people to be able to talk to one another, really talk. And, it’s not like we never did talk in the past though, in Sudan or in other places. Yes.

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So they try to fit people into neat national boxes. And then they ignore the real concerns and fund only those programs that promote the interests of Canada. To make the newcomers more Canadian while making sure that they can never really become totally Canadian, even if that was ever really the goal. All the time allowing for and even making sure, through the settlement services, that people can be exploited as cheap and flexible labour, when these programs are just basic programs and onesize-fits-all programs, that are set up based on the idea that all immigrants to Canada are the same, not really capable and not significant enough to have more given to them in these programs. That they need to be grateful for what they are provided, didn’t we save you from the horrors of Africa, haven’t you escaped death, life without hope, even the manual labour that you are doing is better than what you had there. Ya, that’s why we need to manipulate the system. Not change it? No. Yes, but not all at once. But how can you really do this within the system? When the system is defined as a system of states, and the states define their national identity by enforcing who can belong in its territory as real citizens and who can never ever really belong, those who are outsiders even if they are recognized as citizens in a legal, technical sense. That Canada has to exist, yes at the level of getting labour to do their jobs, but also and significantly as a nation of similar people who can’t be turned into something else, into whom others have to be integrated but not to the point of polluting them, so that these others can’t and shouldn’t really be integrated. So that segregation, marginalization, and ghettoization works even when it is not stated. It is done. Same as in Sudan. Only that was our land and this isn’t. But they give Canadian citizenship. Same nonsense. Now, you have to do something with our stories. Do justice to us. Hehe!



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But again, hold on. Not an example, this Not again as author versus authored Not again as theory versus empirical But lives Uncontainable And stories Knowledges Also uncontainable Of and by a people, who are not Even as violently formed In generalizations In categoricality On masse Who in multiple In singularity Are not But so threatening, because of this Also of systems, of discourses, of oneness. So to rethink the permanent But actually the temporary That is One is not The self or the other. Stories. acknowledgments

For being able to write and publish this chapter, I thank everyone involved with my doctoral research, and with the seminars and workshop undertaken as part of my postdoctoral fellowship, under the able supervision of Robert Latham, Valerie Preston, and Leah Vosko, that finally culminated in the production of this edited book volume. I am especially thankful for the unstinting support of my doctoral supervisor Gerald Kernerman, and that of the rest of my doctoral supervisory and examination committee, Peter Nyers, Honor Ford-Smith, Maroussia Ahmed, Gamal Abdel-Shehid, and Shannon Bell; for the critical engagement of the “Liberating Temporariness” workshop participants, Joseph C ­ arens, C ­ hristina G ­ abriel,

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Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Marianne M ­ archand, J­ennifer H ­ yndman, Anna ­ Agathangelou, ­ Audrey Macklin, Claudia Aradau, Abigail Bakan, Michael Larsen, Cynthia Cranford, Emily Gilbert, Sarah van Walsum, Parvati Raghuram, Deatra Walsh, Luin Goldring, Silvia D’Addario, Eve Haque, Fuyuki Kurasawa, Cynthia Wright, M ­ arion Werner, Phil Triadafilopoulos, and John Shields, and to M ­ elissa Breton; for the horizon broadening presence in my life of V.Y. ­ ­Mudimbe, as of Ambrose Beny, and to a lesser extent of Gustavo Esteva; for their constant being, as with inputs into this chapter, all my numerous friends, including Alberto Solano Quijada, Angela Greco, Asli ­Zengin, Bikrum Gill, Erick Sarmiento, Gowry Sivapathasundaram, Jabin Jacob, S. Karmegam, Laurel Berkowitz, ­Melanie Richter-­ Montpetit, Mohamed Abdou, Nadia Hasan, ­Nelson Lai, Nishant Upadhay, T. Ramesh, Ravinder Gill, S­ aishree ­Ramasubbu, Salimah Valiani, Sarah Macharia, Sathish Kumar, ­Vivian Ngai, and Zubairu Wai; and for everything my sister, Divya Rajkumar, and my parents, Pramila Rajkumar, and Prabh ­Rabindra Rajkumar. I am equally thankful, and more, to the hundreds of people, including those very close and dear to me, from the Southern/Sudanese communities in Canada, and through them in South/Sudan, who took me into their communities, homes, and lives, and shared their stories with me – so many people that there also arises a dilemma, political and ethical, of how to (not) name at the least some of these people, more so given the very politics of voice, representation, and authorship of this chapter itself. I am also thankful to Sylvia Novac, who meticulously helped fine-tune this chapter.

notes

1 See Mountz (2010, 2004), Kernerman (2008), Butler and Spivak (2007), Nyers (2006, 2003, 1999), Arendt (2004), Rajaram (2002), Hyndman (2000), Mbembe (2000), Lippert (1999), Soguk (1999), Agamben (1998), Malkki (1996, 1995, 1992), and Xenos (1996). 2 See Trinh T., Minh-ha (1989). 3 See Derrida (2000). 4 See Bakhtin (1973). 5 See Benjamin (1969). 6 See King (2003).



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references

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. – 2004. The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, 341–84. New York: Schocken Books. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1973. Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Novel and its Illumination in the Critical Literature. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, transl. R.W. Rotsel, 3–37. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, Walter 1969. The Storyteller, Reflections on the Works of ­Nikolai Leskov. In Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, transl. H. Zohn, 83–111. New York: Schocken Books. Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Spivak. 2007. Who Sings the Nation State: Language, Politics, Belonging. London: Seagull Books. Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Hospitality. Angelaki 5(3):3–18. Hyndman, Jennifer. 2000. Managing Displacement: Refugees and Politics of Humanitarianism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kernerman, Gerald. 2008. Refugee Interdiction before Heaven’s Gate. Government and Opposition 43(2):230–48. King, Thomas. 2003. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Lippert, Randy. 1999. Governing Refugees: The Relevance of Governmentality to Understanding the International Refugee Regime. Alternatives 24:295–328. Malkki, Liisa. 1992. National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7(1):24–44. – 1995. Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of Things. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:495–523. – 1996. Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology 11(3):377–404. Mbembe, Achille. 2000. At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa, transl. Steven Rendall. Public Culture 12(1):259–84. Mountz, Alison. 2004. Embodying the Nation-State: Canada’s Response to Human Smuggling. Political Geography 23:323–45. – 2010. Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press.

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Nyers, Peter. 1999. Emergency or Emerging Identities? Refugees and Transformations in World Order. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 28(1):1–26. – 2003. Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Antideportation Movement. Third World Quarterly 24(6):1069–93. – 2006. Rethinking Refugees: Beyond State of Emergency. New York: Routledge. Rajaram, Prem Kumar. 2002. Humanitarianism and Representations of the Refugee. Journal of Refugee Studies 15(3):247–64. Soguk, Nevzat. 1999. States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacement of Statecraft. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Trinh T., Minh-ha. 1989. Grandma’s Story. In Woman, Native, other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, 119–151. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Xenos, Nicholas. 1996. Refugees: the Modern Political Condition. In Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities, ed. Michael J. Shapiro and Howard R. Alker, 233–46. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

13 Temporal Orders, Re-collective Justice, and the Making of Untimely States r o b e rt l at h a m

Time now passed untrackably, for it was given over to struggle … Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow

This volume sets itself the task of liberating temporariness as a way forward, especially for contending with the exclusions, limits, and insecurities associated with temporary status for those people who stand in contrast to a seemingly – already settled – assured citizenry. But what if we have no way to approach any meaningful liberation of temporariness – from the shackles of exclusion, boundedness, and insecurity  – without really also  – and perhaps first  – liberating permanence from its political aura and standing as the seat of justice, right, and security, above all situated in the concept of the nation-state? To move “beyond” this seat it may not be enough to point to other agencies and other times (those of migrants or the excluded more generally). Are we ready to ask what it might mean to explore political terrains somewhere beyond the temporal difference of permanence and temporariness, knowing full well that we cannot just will ourselves beyond the categories of difference? What lies on the other side of the strict binary? This other side would not just be a matter of locating a continuum of permanence and temporariness (the “temporarily permanent,” the “permanently temporary,” and so on) because these hybridizations only serve to qualify and thereby reinforce the legitimacy of these temporal distinctions in the first place.

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I will argue here that a far more radical approach is required, one that addresses not just the marginal migrant but also the scrutinized peripatetic, the disenfranchised, the displaced, and the poor, as well as First Peoples. This approach starts with the recognition that durational distinctions emerge as temporal claims on the part of state agencies and social groups; that the claim to permanence is the central barrier to liberation; and that claim-making occurs in the context of temporal logics of Western modernity that are tension filled, especially as they relate to social change. My view is that claims to permanence  – however desired on the part of the excluded, marginalized, and temporary  – ultimately ought to be rejected. I suggest that one route to this rejection is through temporal inversion, an effort to overturn the grounds for permanent settlement that lie at the heart of the concept of the modern state and to struggle for what I term re-collective justice1 to open the way for reconstituting collectives such that the history of oppression, restriction, and exclusion is revived, the agency of the oppressed to shape the grounds of collective life is assembled, and the possibility of the re-organization of resources and reparations is on the horizon. fav o u r i n g p e r m a n e n c e

The temporal distinction of permanence and temporariness is one manifestation of a much more general distinction between the enduring and the transient that marks many notable binaries within Western thought, critical and otherwise. These, to illustrate a few across numerous fields, include the following: the nation-state (as a fixed territorial container) versus globalization (understood as provisional flows); • state colonization and territorialization versus rhizomatic mobility and presence; or striated space versus nomadic mobilities in Deleuze and Guattari (1987) • the Dionysian versus Apollonian in Nietzsche (2008) • the enduring horizon of death versus the hermeneutics of life ­(Heidegger 1962) • the structured versus the liminal in Turner (1967) • the longue durée versus events in Braudel (1992); the situation in contrast to the event in Badiou (2005) •



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robust polities versus a more ephemeral private life; and enduring works versus everyday life in Arendt (1958) • the distribution of the sensible versus specific discourse and acts in Ranciere (2004) • the space of places versus the space of flows in Castells (1989) • political institutions (e.g., political parties) versus flash mobs •

While there is no intrinsic (or “natural”) reason to locate the just or the good in one temporal register versus another, it is understandable why history has favoured the enduring. Certainly we can recognize mobility, the nomadic, and agentful rupture as a good. Exploitative structures need to be broken. The possibilities entailed by openness, movement, and refashioning have been well established in modernity as routes toward emancipation (Osborne 1995). But the enduring has been privileged because it is associated with forms of stability, dependability, persistent value, and common good  – and in justice terms, it can mean there is a lasting victory (such as the end of racism, sexism, exclusion, exploitation). Action and reason are to arrive somewhere and remain. An insecure refugee seeks to resolve, to end elsewhere in assured citizenship, or to get out of a transitory circulation that throws her or him from one place to another. A First Peoples community seeks to overcome, finally, profound oppression and dispossession.2 Or consider how average subjects need some sort of sustained presence to be able to visualize the world of power – render it transparent – to critique and challenge it. Temporariness, in this framing, means insecurity, if not also loss or absence. Without a lasting victory over injustice, you risk reducing collective action to a fleeting process. Arendt in The Human Condition (1958, 50–4) explored the value of the enduring for political life, including the notion that our political agency – not just that of tyrants or heroes  – should potentially leave a lasting trace on the world (in classic thought it is slaves who leave no trace) and that newcomers, including migrants and the new-borne, should have an ascertainable world to enter and participate in. Thus, while our postmodern souls may prompt us to question the privileged status accorded to the enduring, it is hard to ignore its benefits. Can we extract the good associated typically with permanence from permanence itself? Can we attach it to different temporal registers of agency, also recognizing that rupture and mobility

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can also produce goods? Is it possible to extricate ourselves from the stark binary of permanence and temporariness that shapes so much of our political life? These are the central questions of this chapter. They are motivated by a concern that the claim to permanence typically rests on fundamental injustices against the mobile and First Peoples. Do those who argue that the route to justice is via pathways to permanence (Valiani 2008) too easily overlook the Faustian bargain with the state within which those who might wish to come after can be excluded and the illegitimacy and undesirability of non-permanence is reinforced, which hardly makes sense when scholars such as Coutin (2007, 10) have shown that much of the pathway of migration is about temporariness? More generally, it has been observed (Adey and Bissell 2010, 8; Bauman 2000) that mobility itself is an important aspect of justice, in that those who do not benefit from “the capacity to escape, to disengage, to ‘be elsewhere’” (Bauman 2000, 120), to move from one place to another, and to return and depart again are greatly disadvantaged, especially in the world of late capitalism. For the most part, we can say that most migrants are mobile in very limited ways, in that they face regimes of rejection, marginalization, and temporization. And these migrants therefore can act on their own behalf and that of others toward a future in very limited ways (Coutin 2007, 114).3 And while the inequality and injustice associated with mobility may seem unconnected, if not antithetical, to the profound injustice to which First Peoples communities have been subjected, I would argue that both groups have suffered under the claims to permanence by Western states, which were imposed on First Peoples by colonial territorializations (Sack 1986, chap. 1),4 and the imposition of temporariness through a constant stream of changing policies, laws, and treaty interpretation (Wilkins and Lomawaima 2001). contexts for the temporary/permanent

To start, it should be obvious that the designation of a social form as the context for the temporary/permanent matters significantly. If it is the state, then we know already the degrees and depth of permanence are quite wide and extensive. We can look back to the work of Ernst Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies (1957/1981) to see the range of acts, practices, and logics laid down that permatized the state (at first borrowing from and in competition with the Church). Will all



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the acts and logics laid down to permatize the state as documented by Kantorowicz only be undone by similar acts to ­de-permatize it? This is certainly a monumental project. Royal power and its organic intellectuals like Bodin acted to make the state permanent. What forms of power do we have working for the alternative: corporations, civil society organizations, publics? Even if we could assume their aim was to contest the “permatizing” state – and we certainly cannot – the question remains, what autonomous political power do they bring for this monumental project?5 If we choose a context other than the state, what does that entail? We know there emerged a concept of society in the early nineteenth century: society was understood as an embedding context for events and peoples’ lives. And cities, of course, have historically been the most likely specific form of social context envisioned. Cities and societies hold attraction for us but they, on their own, leave open the question of what to do with the still-existent state that continues to envelop cities and societies.6 This issue plagues every broader vision of socio-historical context, whether it is post-fordist capitalism or late modernity. The same problem faces any attempt to bracket the broader social formation question and take a more localized approach. We can focus just on the networks of mobility themselves, that is, on the social formations they constitute (e.g., diasporic networks), or limit our purview to local situations.7 A useful lens on the localized approach, the possibilities of contending with state permanency, and liberating temporariness is the politics of Anarchism. Much of Anarchism tries to import elements of permanent justice into the temporary: to find an anchor – even through contingent networks and flash publics – in a sea of injustice, control, repression, discipline, and hyper-security, and to build alterities, moving across temporary to permanent autonomous zones. Anarchism faces the problem that the pursuit of alternatives one might label permanent is really in the end the only way you can entrench justice or just alternatives. Who wants part-time justice or justice with a hard sunset clause? But few want to wait for total permanent social change; they see a need for experiments (even if provisional and temporary). Anarchism is still struggling with getting from temporariness to permanence, and just declaring and establishing permanent autonomous zones is not enough, as the Zapatistas among many others have learned as they face stiff counter-resistance from the Mexican state.8

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So while we might appreciate the attraction of concepts such as critical mass in limited spaces, as recently advocated by Richard Day (2005) and others, the problem is, in the face of forces of oppression and violence, how do you establish alternatives? From the other side, how much establishment should there be? How mistrustful of fixed emplacement or network nodes should Anarchists be? These are, after all, associated with circuits of capital and security. How much does one account the desire of disempowered communities to locate stability and routine in their lives9? We should also not forget that permanence is meant to open the possibility to build a position (in the Gramscian sense) – something that has the aura of permanence offers time to scrutinize conduct and practices against norms of justice and ethics – and to bring in to view thicker textures of lives and places. Anarchism is, of course, most fundamentally put into these temporal predicaments by the state, which forces the question of the temporal status of any social form or action through its juridical and political matrices. But the wider logics of political temporality in Western modernity are also factors (these logics and those of state and non-state forms all intersect and typically reinforce one another). Consider how in the discourse on globalization, local communities can be treated as vulnerable to and therefore in flux because of, for example, trans-territorial forces of financial or ecological upheaval, while circulating norms of global political culture (human rights, justice, or reason) can be taken as more enduringly universal or hegemonic (i.e., as central to modernity). In this framing we have a permanence that is tied to circulating normativities and concepts, and temporariness tied to the situated, susceptible “local.” Concepts like citizenship remain ideational forces across centuries even though their specificity can change sometimes markedly, as we saw in the late eighteenth century. The permanence of the state – as an idea – is reinforced, of course, by this ideational mobility through time. The changeability inherent in ideational mobility implies that some forms of permanence are notably plastic. It is, after all, too easy to associate the permanent with the thick, brittle, and weighty, and the temporary with the thin, flexible, and light. Kantorowicz (1957/1981) juxtaposed the two bodies of the king: one that was eternal (and relatively empty) versus the temporal body of the specific person who wore the crown at any given moment. This sort



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of ­contrast has continually appeared in political thought. MerleauPonty (1962/2005) in his consideration of transcendalism in ­Husserl and Kant contrasted a form of subjectivity that could be seen as empty, thin, free-floating, easily reproduced, or abandoned with what might be taken to be a fuller subjectivity anchored by the thick specifics of the world. Relatedly we have thick versus thin norms and membership as developed by Michael Walzer (1994); John Rawls’ (1971) original position emptied of specificity; and Michael Sandel’s (1982) thick national history and community. We are all familiar with the modernist desire to open the future and liberate subjects from a past. Modernity and post-modernity are often discussed as tending toward presentism. Marshall Berman (1982) reminded us decades ago of Marx’s clever aphorism about the melting of all that is solid. Nietzsche put forward that forgetting is necessary for meaningful, fulsome agency; Renan (1882/1990) asserted that nations need to forget to fashion themselves. Recall, also, the mystic writing pad referred to by Freud (1925/2008) and explored by Derrida (1985, 250–84), associated with fleeting memory and temporary writing (and sitting in contrast to claims to permanence for, say, the archive). We see a related thinking in the attention to contingent publics and flash mobs that come together and fall away. Indeed, the bracketing of the specificity of historical and signifying context allows a great deal of interesting agency and practice. For instance, one can be anachronistic and introduce objects and ideas from out of place; join memories and nostalgias from multiple contexts and histories; and do mash-ups/pastiches. Or turn to the hybrid, flux, or edge as a desired place (recognizing that there are always existing social formations and orders that constitute the places from which mixture can occur). But this approach does not allow a straightforward adaptation in that if Anarchists are worried about establishing sustainable beachheads of alterity, they also have to worry about the inventive temporalities of twenty-first century neoliberal capitalism, which seem to exploit a considerable mix of temporary and permanent articulations of power produced especially by collaborations between states and other capitalist organizations (e.g., from the emptying of the public sector and locking-in new norms around capital circulation to the double edge of property claims comprising practices of exclusive permatizing possession and temporizing dispossession).10

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But from where do all these inventive  – sometimes erasing and extinguishing – temporary or contingent forms emerge and return? This brings us back to the question of context. Our typical inclinations are to view broad historical contexts as thick with structures and significations. However, there is another way to view context, through the concept of empty time, developed (in part as a critique of facile historicism) by Walter Benjamin (1940/1969), and which Benedict Anderson drew on in Imagined Communities (1983). ­ Empty time is fluid, synchronistic, naturalistic, cloud-like historical context that allows rupturing events  – like revolutions and political foundings – to have defining power. For Anderson, empty time allows for the imagined community of the nation to take command of subjectivities. The alternative temporal context is a much fuller version associated with, in historical perspective, Christian time that is full of framings of eternity, sainthood, moral norms. There is the – relatively – empty time and space required by colonization: so that writing space and time is in the hands of the colonizers. I say relatively because in the case of English colonial theorists, they filled America with Aboriginals who were positioned as being permanently mobile nomads and therefore part of nature (Jennings 1975, chap 5). Relatedly, Husserl (1936/1970) pointed to the forgotten origins of European science that lie in what he called the life world. These thicker, situated origins were evacuated from the sciences – as they were from “The New World,” and a new set of origins was substituted. Emptying, as we see, is about erasure, nonpermanence, and removability. The gap that is left in its place is open to the founding of new permanents, be they empires, states, nations, or some combination thereof.11 t o w a r d t e m p o r a l c o n f r o n tat i o n

Ultimately, the complexities of these sorts of temporal logics mean that it is not enough to just trouble and liberate the temporary or even the permanent as a generalizable stance or intellectual position. One alternative to being forced into the temporary/permanent divide is to refuse statist framings and view social life as “constellations of mobility” (Cresswell 2010) and configurations of events, of networks, of objects, of practices. In this case, we are not simply focusing on a network or social formations per se – or on sites like a city – but focusing on the links and relations between formations, places, and



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networks. While I am sympathetic to this approach, I would argue that shifting attention to the relations among social forms and subjectivities only sidesteps the questions I have raised above. I contend that the quandaries of permanence and temporariness need to be confronted directly and the very ground upon which the state establishes temporal distinctions reframed. The remainder of this chapter will explore some potential ways to think about confrontation. I will start, somewhat innocently, by first considering in very basic and general terms how permanence is typically deployed. Permanence, in general terms, does not typically mean something is “forever” or lying out of the range of registered time (as one might regarding “the eternal”), but simply a status or condition where the temporal horizon is assured (by, say, authorities) to go on such that – within the context of individual and collective social fields – continuity is assumed (especially because a termination date is unspecified). The temporary, in contrast, has a horizon that is not assured, because either there is fixed in the future a clearly defined end point or, more abstractly, continuity is not assured and potential end points lie out, at points that will be determined by authorities, in a future horizon. Combining both these registers of the temporary is the situation where end points – or the potential to define an end point – can move through time, through delay, evasion, or the establishment of new end points (e.g., the extension of a contract), thus opening the way for hybrid concepts like “permanently temporary.”12 Notice how agency is easily evoked in that permanence is something that can be asserted, granted, sought, or taken away. The latter possibility is problematic in that one should be able to control forms of ending in a social field; if someone can do it for you, it is not really permanent, because the possibility of nonpermanence troubles permanence as a status. A state can be defeated, a people expulsed or dispossessed, or a permanent residence revoked or not renewed. We might want to be very clear about recognizing temporariness and permanence as claims and therefore as assertions, impositions, and beliefs, and thereby move beyond the ubiquitous temporal reifications we typically take for granted.13 I suggest we can gain by thinking through what to do with the recognition that temporariness and permanence are intensely political claims. Colonizers, imperialists, nationalists, and neoliberals have known what to do with temporal claims.

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Should those who have suffered under those claims seek to advance their own temporal claim making? What strategies and logics should guide it? Is, for instance, making a commitment to temporariness in some register a form of auto-extinguishment or a claim to permanence, a claim of some sort to exclusive sovereignty? But is the alternative to avoid pronouncing on temporal status: why claim either permanence or temporariness? What is gained and risked in that approach? If you do not make claims and attempt to enact them yourself, are you simply allowing others to define temporal status for you and your collective? Even more generally, can less powerful forms of agency – associated with those who do not govern – start to break down distinctions of status across temporal difference that open up new forms that contend with the limits of the temporary/permanent binary? And by this I do not mean just quasi-permanent, permanently temporary, but, say, different forms and registers of temporality that have been suggested by various thinkers from Julia Kristeva (1981) to Judith Halberstam (2005). These can include the ways groups such as diasporas can use distinct narrations about their presence and displacement within a nation and state and connection to homeland temporalities (Laguerre 2003); women approach the temporalities of cycles and familial logics; and gay men define “queer times” that treat constructs such as youth or longevity differently than is typical in mainstream cultures. Barbara Harlow (1987) shows that in resistance there is an effort – through alternative narratives and approaches to development and the future – to free oneself from the imposition of temporalities and spatialities associated with Western power (especially within colonialism and war). Edward Said (1994, 232) sees in this literature people contending with an “instability of time, which has to be made and remade by the people and its leaders.” Clearly, these temporal counter-framings are engaging numerous registers of temporariness.14 But these sorts of resistances and openings either fall into the sidestepping mode associated with Anarchism, as in the case of subgroup alternative times (because they leave the majority state-based temporary/permanent binary intact), or into a reassertion of a postcolonial liberated permanence realized in a new state and nation that looks remarkably like the temporal framing of colonial states critiqued by Franz Fanon (1963, 148–205).



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Although as Homi Bhabha (1990, 303) emphasizes, in the (post) colonial context, there can be different times of the “modern, colonial, postcolonial, ‘native.’” Indeed, when migrants encounter a national society they are not encountering a unified “nation” and time, but a diversity of times across classes, races, and spaces (Latham 2007/08). However, we know that the state creates a dominant framing and colonizes presence against these other, differential, marginal times (Poulantzas 1978, 112).15 A striking example is explored by Landes (1983, 39) in the effort of the Chinese imperial state to develop an annual calendar that was a “symbol and expression of Chinese sovereignty and dominion” over space and time. It is hardly a stretch to view efforts by Western states underway since the early twentieth century to impose time frames regarding presence on or off – within or without – territory through its policies bearing on temporariness and permanence (Rajkumar, Berkowitz et al. 2012) as a similar expression applied in the biopolitical realm. What is in play is the state concentrating and folding multiplicities of time into itself. Statist temporality in this respect then operates as a way to organize subjectivities into a singularity, as so many beams of light refracting through a prism, and thus the permanent/temporary duality operates on those subjectivities as a temporal structure the way the “present” operates on the past and future. Derrida (1982, 38) writes of the “extraordinary right of the present,” anchoring the good and right, in the Western philosophical tradition. Analogously, the state’s permanence claim can also be seen as asserting an extraordinary right over space, physical presence, access, and the distribution of justice. Thus, the absence of an end point in permanence does not imply temporal openness per se – because the permanence claim is predicated on exclusion, it is a sort of defensive move against other claims on time and presence. By temporal openness I mean here the ever-present possibility of constitutive, rupturing practices, events, meanings, and framings that remake not only “the times” but also temporality itself. But the permanence of the state is not a frozen time. It is a dynamic one and, as it has often been observed, it can involve rupturing and be wholly revolutionary.16 The difference is that constant or periodic change occurs within a contained, ontic channel that maintains the basic elements of the state form as a

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v­ essel, object, and sometimes subject of change (most typically with a national hue, e.g., the political history of “France” or “Russia”). Against the substantial capacity of the state to both successfully impose temporalities and absorb forces of historical change, it is difficult to imagine how confrontation can occur while avoiding the traps described above of either sidestepping or reproducing statist permanence, which ultimately intersect with the broader set of complex temporal logics of Western modernity that might trouble any given effort. A productive way forward is confrontation that is radical in that it challenges not just the legitimacy of a state’s permanence – and, therefore, temporariness – claim as a political condition shaping the present and future, but also as an interpretation and framing of the past (a past, history, and narration that is a basis, when joined to organizational control and violence, of the claim in the first place). This framing obviously raises the stakes of temporal confrontation very high, as it calls for a radical challenge to the very existence of any given state.17 It is necessary because a given state’s imposition and maintenance of a temporal order over bodies, spaces, and lives – even if the structure of that order is invented elsewhere (as is the case with modern territoriality)  – is a central problem. Another, perhaps more fundamental, problem is the originating founding and settling of state that emanates across political spheres at various scales from local to global (as realized, for example, in municipal jurisdictional power on one end of the scale and internationally recognized juridical sovereignty on the other) and which produces a nearly unquestioned claim over the sovereignty of presence in a national space (the only real questioners being First Peoples)18 – and thus a capacity of states to allocate various temporal strata such as permanent status in social artifacts from citizenship and residence cards to property rights.19 A key here is the recognition that the relationship between permanence and the past is not only associated with a powerfully emanating originating history that sanctions statist permanence and sovereignty over presence. In the other direction, (in a basically reinforcing, autopoetic fashion) the founding makes a particular version of the past permanent.20 That version, we know well now, is the very limited, typically national, narration mentioned above that usurps the relationship of a space to an official past and forgets the colonial histories and histories of enclosure, exclusion, and violence.21 It is a contained, permanent past that is only reinforced by



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the persistent succession of migrations, settlements, and births on pathways to permanence. Walter Benjamin (1940/1969) famously called it victor’s history, wherein the oppressed are crushed twice, first in history then in the present. For Benjamin to move beyond this historical closure would mean to open history, and thus we might add temporality, so that the elements of victim history can be brought in to shape the present, future, and past differently.22 Benjamin acknowledged that this was no simple matter. Against such opening stands the weight not only of states and corporations but also the whole deeply entrenched – and long criticized – framing of modernity and progress. Nietzsche, for example, was pessimistic about any overcoming or emancipation being granted, but not to the point where he thought struggle was futile. Instead, recognizing that confrontation can never be simple, Benjamin held that it would always require more work and effort no matter what point of development was reached.23 Benjamin offers a way to confront the state’s claim to permanence and sovereignty over presence. The challenge becomes one of reframing political temporality based on forgotten injustices and usurpations  – wresting the permanently forgotten out from official oblivion, unfreezing history from the contained singular versions associated with a given state and nation. Doing so k ­ nowing full well that any attempt to overturn histories and temporal claims cannot easily settle somewhere in a new permanence (keeping Fanon’s [1963] warnings referred to above in mind) because such settlement will be based on new exclusions, violence, and usurpations. ­Benjamin (2002, 941) suggestively puts forward the concept of dialectical reversal, where politics overruns history and there is an irruption of awakened consciousness.24 There is a clear affinity here with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) discussions of rupture and lines of flight – where breaks from the frames of control, power, and signification occur – and to Badiou’s (2005, 2010) concept of event, through which the impossible enters into the possible (historical examples being the French and Chinese revolutions and the atonal music of Schonberg). Events also figure in Deleuze’s thought (Deleuze 1995; Patton 2009, 41–2), and they can be untimely and sublime, in the way Nietzsche understood these terms in his essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1983) involving, in effect, a stepping out of time or into different registers of time.

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Conceived in general terms, there is no reason to assume that these constructs establish the possibility of avoiding the limits of subgroup positionality or reproducing permanence. If anything, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue that all sorts of capture will be attempted (especially by states and capital) in the face of breaks and challenges. This is consistent, of course, with the tempered pessimism of Benjamin. I want to suggest that these limits can be better mounted by focusing explicitly on statist temporal claims around permanence, temporariness, and the sovereignty of presence as the objects of rupture. That is, central elements of temporal logics in Western modernity – central to the production of the complicated dilemmas discussed above – can be disputed directly (thereby troubling the dilemmas themselves). I will now turn to outlining one route toward this. temporal inversions and re-collective justice

What would it mean for migrants, and not just First Peoples, to confront radically the temporal claims and the colonization of the sovereignty of presence? What positions open this ground? To start, I would suggest a temporal inversion is called for: a disposition to reject and turn over the authority enacted in temporal claims. This means repudiating the legitimacy of the right to designate the duration of – and sovereignty over – presence, and the right to presuppose that those who do not have a bestowed permanence and settled presence are subject to interrogation or judgment (as to who shall be present, obtain redress, or have access).25 Temporal inversion is meant to call forth a disarrangement of the temporal ordering by the state that involves a challenge to restricted, exclusive settlement.26 It also involves an attempt to unfound the state as an originary grounding for temporal claims that determine the politics of presence. The point of a temporal inversion is not to turn temporal structures over in order for the discomposed elements to settle again into another stable arrangement, but to have temporal structures remain unsettled. That is, to reject control over the determination of temporal difference, which rests on claims of permanence and temporariness noted above, and instead insist on a condition of indeterminacy, where the existence or not of an end point is unknown or determined by the subject of a temporal horizon. Temporal inversion is meant to open up the possibility of



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appropriating the power of temporal claiming not to lay down an alternative claim of permanence. It makes a claim of indefinite suspension, as in an ever re-shaking snow globe, over the sort of totalizing temporal claiming that was essential to states as they took form by the twentieth century. Once the inverting of temporality is pursued, what should be put in play is a floating, hovering, suspension of questions and assertions about temporal end points. Temporal inversion is an effort to reframe and reformat a history that is refracted across the intersections of the mobile, First Peoples, and the settled, and which might be called to transform from the comforting permanency of the nation-state (and its membership seductions) to a history that underscores the harm that is entailed in totalizing temporal claims and sovereignty of presence. Bhabha (1990, 306) suggests confronting history can be an opportunity to renegotiate pasts, and thereby contemporary meanings, texts, and futures.27 The possibility of throwing open history through efforts at temporal inversion perhaps offers some flickering hope for doing so with the harms rendered by claims around permanence and presence positioned immediately before the mobile, First Peoples, and the settled. The sort of politics that might be unlatched here is expressed provocatively by Balibar (2011, 224): “if we accept Arendt’s idea that the political community lacks pre-established ontological or naturalistic bases but is grounded only on the reciprocity of rights and duties among the participants, this is possibly where a new development of citizenship has to be elaborated: in the form of a reciprocity of rights and duties among sedentaries and migrants or nomads. Implied here is that the people cannot be taken as an already established notion but consist of an act of permanent creation and re-creation.”28 The opportunity to form and re-form a collective lies at the heart of temporal inversion, because the very disposition toward temporal inversion entails re-collectivizing and the ever-ready possibility of re-collectivizing means that a termination or end point is always present and hovering as a potentiality. Rights and duties of the sort Balibar points to will not be granted on the basis of reason but will require struggle and thus relevant understandings of agency on the part of the mobile and First Peoples and an allied framing of justice. A pertinent construct of justice ought to place temporality, history, re-collectivity at its core. We might consider grounding justice in the concept of re-collection,

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but ­understood in a way that situates re-collectivity in a context of agency. What we might call re-collective justice can emphasize an assembling of scattered histories and forgotten fragments; a gathering, and recalling of resources (land, status, rights that have been scattered in forgetful history and social exclusions and that can entail reparations); a rallying of one’s power as a group and community, emphasizing agency on the part of the oppressed, but without forcing forgiveness or reconciliation, as well as the refashioning of a collective mentioned above. Temporal inversion can leave modes of forgiveness, reconciliation, and transition as options for grounding the re-constituting of collectives on more just terms.29 These constructs are meant to haul societies toward a circumscribed end point of achieved good (e.g., reconciliation), which can leave out an extensive range of issues, especially around broader concerns of social justice (Mamdani 2000), and reinscribe permanence claims. ­Re-collective justice, based on temporal inversion, emphasizes repetition and struggle: a never being able to stop holding collectives in judgment regarding claims over the terms of presence. As Jarko Tontti (2004, 124) puts it, the “future is the temporality of justice.” If temporal inversion can be viewed as a portal to pursue re-­ collectivization, then for migrants it can be a way for a common purpose to be more brazenly ascribed to migration. That is, to also make it more difficult for settlers to only view migration as a matter of individuals reaching borders for safety or economic betterment. The border and social space it bounds become political in different ways, as does the very act of migration. Consider that while migrants may have been settled in the places they leave, they complicate this condition by appearing at other borders. Even if they retain citizenship in a home country (which they might return to periodically), they have nonetheless unsettled themselves in spatial terms by migrating. In this way, the meaning of migration changes so that is no longer simply a new claim on permanence.30 What sorts of agency are involved with temporal inversion and the pursuit of re-collective justice? It is one thing to argue for different constructs and framings and quite another to tie these to specific actions. What does it really mean to take a stance around re-­collective justice? Is it limited to just a hollow claim? Does it matter beyond its status as an ethical stance? These are really questions about how to make the pursuit of re-collective justice a political act. Judith Butler (1997) has made clear how important discourse is to



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agency and subjectness. So if migrants were to join First Peoples in a discourse of inversion and re-collection, seeking dialogue with and the participation of assured settlers, they would have already begun to act. Consider that the grounding of re-collection in temporal inversion is a radical position. To question the sedentary, for example, in thought, discussion, or street demonstrations, regarding their claim to permanence and assured settlement is already courageous (and we should not underestimate the possible reactions it could provoke, from border closures to violence). Re-collective acts can take place in narratives, in organizational life, and in collaborations (from community help to social movements). More radical acts include confronting questions at borders such as “Why, how are you here?” with counter-questions such as “Is your claim to permanent presence and settlement just?” In this context, the very claim to enter, stay, or (for First Peoples) retake land and resources can be seen as re-collective acts. Re-collective action possibly can raise the stakes of the temporary/permanent interaction and attempt to invert questions of status, security, and rights. Re-collective justice is hardly a straightforward framing. How do we think of migrants in historical terms? They typically have another place of history (Sharma and Wright 2009) and memory that often is quite distant. There is the history of global injustice and the conditions that brought them to a border. But even in light of such a history, migrants set up a potent duality, as mentioned above: they leave one place and unsettle themselves from that place, and if they go as far as temporal inversion, they would demand that settlers in the new place unsettle themselves. For First Peoples, the request has been there since conquest and settlement. Would it be possible for First Peoples to see migrants not as the agents of new layers of settlement but as allies in confronting settlement?31 conclusion

What lies on the other side of temporal inversion? The possibility of renegotiating the terms of collective life for migrants, First Peoples, and the settled or assured citizenry  – and leaving that possibility open – implies that new forms of state can be initiated (there is after all nothing about temporal inversion and re-collection that necessitates the end of the state form per se).32 These might be what we can call untimely states, not in the sense of time out of joint (or a state

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that disorders all temporal orders), but as states that might reverse and absent themselves from the fundamental temporal claims and sovereignties of presence states typically house. Does my call for temporal inversion undo the grounds for public realms that Arendt argued require a certain permanence? That is, does it lead to a series of negotiated forms of private, nonpublic, or at best tenuously ephemeral forms of publicness?33 Are untimely states unpublic and undemocratic? I would argue only if we hold the state to be the only realm of publicness and democracy. Alternatively, we can view the space and time of re-collection, the gathering, assembling – to use Derrida’s (1999, 30) term – reforming, and constituting as locations of publicness and democracy. By not claiming state, society, nation as permanent, and thus putting in place what we can call a durational abstention, the way might be opened for future negotiation of the terms of collective life – ones that offer other ways to inscribe memories, meanings, and histories. This is not to say the desire for permanently arrived-at justice can be easily forgone. But this chapter has tried to establish that the desire and search for permanent justice is problematic for two reasons. First, for those seeking alternatives, it means accepting permanence claims across political life and all the closures and dilemmas that accompany them. Of course, it is completely understandable that migrants, the poor, and First Peoples would seek as individuals or already recognized groups a permanently arrived-at just settlement. But the arguments above suggest that while these individuals and groups in their current circumstances can seek, pragmatically, the best course for themselves, what matters most is what political project they support and advocate for more broadly. Advocating for and treating the expansion of pathways to permanence as a political project ignores how seeking permanence, especially for those already in a national space and recognized by the state as acceptable, reinforces the legitimacy of the state’s power over political time, and thereby means that others, currently excluded (including future generations) or deemed unacceptable, are left to face the limits and exclusions of that (potentially expanded) power. This condition is well illustrated in the current US legislation (labelled pathways to citizenship), where only select segments of the undocumented in the United States will potentially receive, many years hence, permanent residence, as restrictions and security at border is strengthened and deepened along with temporary work and status programs.34 This



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essay suggests that a broader political project and discourse can be supported, one that contests permanence claims in the name of recollectivity and that can also seek to maximize the rights and wellbeing of migrants, the marginalized, and the dispossessed – whatever the nature of their presence in a social space (as argued for elsewhere via the concept of multiversal citizenship in Latham 2007/08). That groups might distinguish between immediate aims and longer term, larger scale objectives and goals of change is hardly a departure but is rather a well-worn approach marking the long history of activism and social movements from progressive labour unions to environmental organizations. Second, once freed from the desire for permanent justice, permanence and, thereby, temporariness can enter onto pathways of liberation. This entails not only liberation from the blackmail of permanence but, more importantly, from the contained framings associated with temporariness. Liberating temporariness, ultimately, means extinguishing temporariness: liberating it from our political lexicon.

notes

1 I use a hyphen to distinguish my use of the more obscure term, “re-­ collect,” from more typical, everyday use notion of “to recollect” that emphasizes mostly memory or recalling. 2 I am putting aside here the complications of the terms First Peoples, Aboriginal, Indigenous, and Native. See, for example, Mamdani (2001), Waldron (2003), and Wood (2003). I am aware of the temporal claims associated with these terms, but I see the claim to being somewhere before others as different from the claim to permanent political status. 3 Coutin (2007, 116, 118–20) shows in detail how migrants can be positioned “elsewhere,” such as El Salvador, even if they are present in the space and time of the United States, not only when they are unauthorized/ undocumented but also when they have temporary work permits and thus do not fit the model of time-presence with established roots. 4 I will further consider the links between these two groups below. 5 We have to distinguish the involvement of, say, corporations in fashioning sovereign realms around global finance (Latham 2000) from assaults to challenge state permanency. 6 Although we can now see more clearly how social life takes shape in transboundary forms (Urry 2000), the state’s permanent aura continues

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7 8 9

10 11 12

13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20

doing the work of making national spaces and transboundariness possible in the first place. By local, I do not just mean spatial localities but analytical ones, such as events or discrete social forms like networks. And as Judith Hellman (1999) shows, the politics of the state make the positionality of the Zapatistas more complex than popularly portrayed. Ariel Handel (2009) points out the Israeli state is quite adept at co-­ producing relations of both permanence and temporariness, of network and installation. The Israeli state can be seen to be a powerful generator of flux, circulation, rhizomic practices, and flow in the occupied territories (and those who seek stability and permanence are the normative protagonists: the Palestinians). An excellent recent analysis is Thrift (2005). This can be compared to Koselleck’s (1985, 231–66) “new times” as a way to view the political currency of temporality in modernity. Consider how, in the realm of migration, when a temporary migrant (who might have remained present somewhere through a succession of temporary statuses) becomes undocumented, he or she is really becoming permatized in that the undocumented realm has no defined end point or finite horizon, even though that status is very precarious at best. Temporal distinctions are naturalized as objective conditions even though permanence is a function really only of the claim that posits it. What can also be considered is the overt versus covert claim that might exist in the public as opposed to secret realms, as, for example, when a state does not publicly challenge someone’s permanent status but has the intention of doing that, yet this is only part of still secret policy. Differential times have also been ascribed by theorists such as Althusser and Balibar (1970) to capitalism. Althusser (1958/2007, 78) points to the empty time without duration that we might identify as a sort of state time, based on generalized and abstracted categories such as permanent and temporary that receive time stamps. See, for instance, the discussion in Koselleck (1985, 39–54). Without, by necessity, requiring a rejection of the state form per se, as will be discussed below. See especially Corntassel (2006). See the book by Stevens (1999) on the state for an excellent analysis of these capacities. Bhabha (1990, 229) suggests that Poulantzas’ (1978) analysis of state temporality and spatiality posits a self-generating autopoiesis.



Temporal Orders, Re-collective Justice, Untimely States  359

21 An excellent illustration of this process in North America is found in Sack (1986). 22 The literature on Benjamin’s Theses is immense. Some notable explorations include Fritsch (2005) and Lowry (2005). 23 See Rothberg (2009, 80) on this point about Benjamin’s pessimism. While it may be tempting to claim this is a version of permanent ­revolution, I believe we can distinguish the call to move persistently into the future – refraining from making any totalizing (or perhaps better, comprehensive) claim about duration – from an explicit claim of no end point (permanence) made against other claims regarding termination or temporariness. 24 It is not possible in the current context to explore the intriguingly brilliant reflections and insights offered by Benjamin on history and political transformation. See notes above for some excellent starting points. 25 Paulette Regan (2010, 1) writes of the need to unsettle the settlers, especially on the basis of the founding injustice of states like Canada against the lives of First Peoples (and we might add, somewhat contentiously, against those who would seek to live somewhere once a restrictive regime of presence is operative). 26 Operative here is the assumption that command over presence is anchored as a permanent arrangement. 27 See also Grossberg (2000). 28 The use of the word “permanent” here I take to be consistent with my argument for keeping up in the air the elements of temporal determination. Also, I think it is not a far stretch to expand the framing beyond sedentaries and migrants to bring in the Aboriginal. 29 Appropriating forgiveness in the context of temporal inversion radicalizes the former because to forgive would be first to accuse of a wrong – namely, the claim to permanence and sovereignty of presence. 30 This has important implications in my view for the dilemmas of anarchy and the desire to secure alternative spaces discussed above. If we no longer participate in our own seemingly justified claim of permanence, the problem of securing justice gets turned on its head, in that the need to “secure” becomes a central issue – as temporary/permanent claiming is challenged – rather than a condition that holds other issues hostage (and thus the need to permatize justice and spaces is questioned). 31 How this might occur, against the framing of post-coloniality (especially regarding how the difference between migrants and First Peoples can be exaggerated by overlooking the ways migrants are oppressed and might, in the places they leave, count themselves as First Peoples) is explored in Sharma and Wright (2009).

360  Robert Latham

32 A provocative thinking in this spirit through the concept of a post-­ birthright/kinship/nationalistic state is Stevens (2010). 33 I am using public in both senses of the term, public as common spaces, resources, and institutions and public as in a realm of interaction. These are intersecting meanings. See Arendt (1958). 34 See http://www.derechoshumanosaz.net/2013/04/senates-gang-of-8-­ reform-bill-enormous-expenditure-for-walls-drones-surveillance-agentsnational-id-system-guarantees-for-big-business-mass-firings-increases-indepo/ [accessed 23 April 2013]. references

Adey, Peter, and David Bissell. 2010. Mobilities, Meetings, and Futures: An Interview with John Urry. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(1):1–16. Althusser, Louis. 1958/2007. Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, transl. Ben Brewster. London, UK: Verso Books. Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. 1970. Reading Capital, transl. Ben Brewster. New York: NewLeft Books. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, UK: Verso Books. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event, transl. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum. – 2010. The Communist Hypothesis. London, UK: Verso Books. Balibar, Etienne. 2011. Toward a Diasporic Citizen? From Internationalism to Cosmopolitics. In The Creolization of Theory, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, 207–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1940/1969. Illumination. In Theses on the Philosophy of History, transl. Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books. – 2002. The Arcades Project, transl. Howard Eiland and Kevin ­McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That is Solid Melts in Air. New York: Simon and Schuster. Bhabha, Homi K., ed. 1990. DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation. In Nation and Narration, 291–322. London: Routledge.



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Braudel, Fernand. 1992. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech. New York: Routledge. Castells, Manuel. 1989. The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban Regional Process. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Corntassel, Jeff. 2006. To be Ungovernable. New Socialist 58 (September– October):35–7. Coutin, Susan B. 2007. Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States. New York: Cornell University Press. Cresswell, Tim. 2010. Toward a Politics of Mobility. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(1):17–31. Day, Richard. 2005. Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. London: Pluto Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations, transl. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy, transl. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press. – 1985. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge. – 1999. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, transl. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Random House. Freud, Sigmond. 1925/2008. Chapter XIII: A Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad.” In General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, 211–16. New York: Touchstone Books. Fritsch, Matthias. 2005. The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida. New York: State University of New York Press. Grossberg, Lawrence. 2000. History, Imagination, and the Politics of Belonging: Between the Death and the Fear of History. In Without Guarantees: In Honor of Stuart Hall, ed. Paul Gilroy, Lawrence ­Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie, 148–64. New York: Verso. Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender ­Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.

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Handel, Ariel. 2009. Where, Where To, and When in the Occupied Territories: An Introduction to Geography of Disaster. In The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, ed. Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi, 179–222. New York: Zone Books. Harlow, Barbara. 1987. Resistance Literature. New York: Methuen Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time, transl. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM Press. Hellman, Judith. 1999. Real and Virtual Chiapas: Magic Realism and the Left. In Socialist Register, 2000, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, 156– 80. London: Merlin Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1936/1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenology, transl. Walter Biemel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Jennings, Francis. 1975. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957/1981. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Koselleck, R. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. Keith Tribe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1981. Women’s time. Signs 7(1):13–35. Laguerre, Michel S. 2003. Urban Multiculturalism and Globalization in New York City: An Analysis of Diasporic Temporalities. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Press. Landes, David S. 1983. Revolution in Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latham, Robert. 2000. Social Sovereignty Theory. Culture & Society 17(4):1–18. – 2007/08. What are We? From a Multicultural to a Multiversal Canada. International Journal 63(1):23–41. Lowry, Michael. 2005. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” London, UK: Verso Books. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2000. The Truth According to the TRC. In The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing and Social Justice, ed. Ifi Amadiume and Abdullahi An Na’im, 176–83. London: Zed Books. – 2001. Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43(4):651–64.



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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962/2005. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1983. On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. In Untimely Meditations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 2008. The Birth of Tragedy, transl. Douglas Smith. New York: Oxford University Press. Osborne, Peter. 1995. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London, UK: Verso Books. Patton, Paul. 2009. Events, Becoming and History. In Deleuze and History, ed. Jeffrey A. Bell and Claire Colebrook, 33–53. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1978. State, Power, Socialism. New York: Verso Books. Rajkumar, Deepa, Laurel Berkowitz, Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Robert Latham. 2012. At the Temporary-Permanent Divide: How Canada Produces Temporariness and Makes Citizens through its Security, Work, and Settlement Policies. Citizenship Studies 16(3/4):483–510. Ranciere, Jacques. 2004. The politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, transl. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Regan, Paulette. 2010. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Renan, Ernest. 1882/1900. What is a Nation? In Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bahabha, 8–22. London: Routledge. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Sack, R. David. 1986. Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Sandel, Michael. 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sharma, Nandita, and Cynthia Wright. 2009. Decolonizing Resistance: Challenging Colonial States. Social Justice 35(3):120–38. Stevens, Jacqueline. 1999. Reproducing the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. – 2010. States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals. New York: Columbia University Press. Thrift, Nigel. 2005. Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage.

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Tontti, Jarkko. 2004. Rights and Prejudice: Prolegomena to a Hermeneutical Philosophy of Law. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Urry, John. 2000. Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the TwentyFirst Century. London: Routledge. Valiani, S. 2008. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program and its Intersection with Canadian Immigration Policy. Ottawa: Canadian Labour Congress. Waldron Jeremy. 2003. Indigeneity: First Peoples and Last Occupancy. New Zealand Journal of Public and International Law 1:55–83. Walzer, Michael. 1994. Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Wilkins, David Eugene, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima. 2001. Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Wood, Patricia K. 2003. Aboriginal/Indigenous Citizenship: An Introduction. Citizenship Studies 7(4):371–8.

Contributors

Yas m e e n A b u - L a ba n is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. She has published widely on issues relating to the Canadian and comparative dimensions of gender, ethnicity and racialization processes, border and migration policies, and citizenship theory. She is the co-editor of Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory, and Power (with Elia Zureik and David Lyon); co-editor of Politics in North America: Redefining Continental Relations (with Radha Jhappan and François Rocher); and editor of Gendering the Nation-State: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives (2008). She is also the coauthor (with Christina Gabriel) of Selling Diversity: Immigration, Multiculturalism, Employment Equity and Globalization.

Abi g a il B . B a k a n is chair of the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and a professor of political science, University of Toronto. Her publications include Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories (co-edited with Enakshi Dua) (forthcoming, University of Toronto Press); Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System (with Daiva Stasiulis); Critical Political Studies: Debates and Dialogues from the Left (co-edited with Eleanor MacDonald); and Employment Equity Policy in Canada: An Interprovincial Comparison (with Audrey Kobayashi). Her current research (with ­Yasmeen Abu-Laban) addresses the United Nations World Conferences against Racism and is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

366 Contributors

Melisa Bretón is a doctoral candidate in the graduate program in political science at York University, where she is specializing in women and politics. Her main areas of interest encompass broadly critical migration studies, feminist international political economy, and critical race/postcolonial theory. She is currently working on female migration from the Dominican Republic to Spain in the context of new European Union migration policies (directives) and security concerns.

T e s s e lt j e d e L a n g e is an assistant professor in migration law in the Law Faculty of the University of Amsterdam and a researcher in the social law department of Tilburg University. Previously she worked as an immigration lawyer and honorary district judge in immigration cases. She has published widely on the regulation of labour migration in the Netherlands and Europe. She cooperates in several European Union wide studies on labour migration, employer sanctions, and return policies. In 2012 the Dutch government appointed her a member of the national Advisory Committee on Migration Affairs. She currently leads, together with Conny Rijken, a research project funded by the Instituut Gak on the vulnerable legal position of migrant workers.

C h r i s t i n a G a b r i e l is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University. Her main research interests address international migration, citizenship, and regional integration. She is the co-author of Selling Diversity, Immigration, Multiculturalism, Employment Equity and Globalization (2002) and co-editor of Governing International Labour Migration (2008). She has contributed chapters to various edited collections on issues such as temporary migration, border control, transnational care labour, and North American regional migration. E mi ly G il b e rt is director of the Canadian studies program at the University of Toronto. Her research addresses citizenship, mobility, borders, security, and militaries. She is particularly interested in the changing politics of the Canada-US border and the ways that border risks – economic and social – are being used to discipline behaviour and promote new forms of citizenship practice. She is the co-editor of Nation-States: The Past, Present, and Future of National Currency (with Eric Helleiner; Routledge) and War, Citizenship, Territory (with Deborah Cowen; Routledge).



Contributors 367

L u i n G o l d r in g is an associate professor of sociology at York University, a fellow at the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, and a past director of CERIS – The Ontario Metropolis Centre. Her current research analyzes immigration status as a fault line of social inequality. She is involved in several collaborative projects that address this issue from various angles: “Immigrants and Precarious Employment” (with P. Landolt), “Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario” (directed by W. Lewchuck), “Agency Data on Migration” (directed by A. Kim), and “Negotiating the Boundaries of Rights and Membership” (directed by P. Landolt). Earlier research examined Mexico-US migration, transnational political engagement, and Latin American community organizing in Canada and led to publications in English and Spanish. Recent publications include Producing and Negotiating Non-­Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada (co-edited with P. Landolt), “Unpacking Refugee Community Transnational Organizing: The Challenges and Diverse Experiences of Colombians in Canada” (forthcoming, with P. Riaño), an Institute for Research on Public Policy report on “The Impact of Precarious Legal Status on Immigrants’ Economic Outcomes” (with P. Landolt), and “Institutionalizing Precarious Immigration Status in Canada” (with C. Berinstein and J. Bernhard). E ve H aq u e is an associate professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at York University. Her research and teaching interests include multiculturalism, white settler nationalism, and language policy, with a focus on the regulation and representation of racialized im/migrants in white settler societies. She has published in such journals as Social Identities, the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and Pedagogy, Culture and Society, among others. She is also the author of Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race, and Belonging in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2012). M i k e L a rs e n teaches in the Department of Criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and is co-managing editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, a prisoner-authored, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to experiential narratives and analysis related to spaces and practices of incarceration. His research draws on case study analysis of the Canadian security certificate regime and explores issues at the intersection of national security politics and contestations around access to information and secrecy. He has

368 Contributors

recently compiled an edited volume (with Kevin Walby) entitled Brokering Access: Politics, Power, and Freedom of Information Process in Canada (UBC Press).

R o b e rt L at h a m teaches in the Department of Political Science and in the Program in Communications and Culture at York University. He has published widely on topics such as sovereignty, borders, information technology, political economic justice, security, violence, and liberalism. In addition to numerous articles and reports, some of his publications include Digital Formations: it and New Architectures in the Global Realm (co-edited); Bombs and Bandwidth: The Emerging Relationship between Information Technology and Security (edited); Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa: Global-Local Networks of Power (edited); and The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order.

Mari a n n e H . M a rc h a n d holds a chair in international relations at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico, where she directs the Canadian Studies Program. She was promoted to the highest level of the National System of Researchers (SNI-level 3) in January 2013. Before she came to Mexico she taught in the United States and the Netherlands. Among her many publications are Feminism/Postmodernism/Development (with Jane L. Parpart, Routledge, 1995) and Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances (with Anne Sisson Runyan, Routledge, 2000) of which the second, fully revised edition was released in 2011. Her most recent publication is Feminist (Im)mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America Rights, Citizenships, and Identities in Transnational Perspectives (with Anne Sisson Runyan, Amy Lind, and Patricia McDermott, Ashgate, 2013). With Rahel Kunz she is currently finishing a book for Palgrave Macmillan entitled Gendering the Global Political Economy. Her research interests focus on the migrationdevelopment-gender nexus and she recently received funding for a three-year research project entitled Unpacking the Borders: North American Stories of Ordinary Crossings and State Practices (with Claude Denis, University of Ottawa, and Cynthia Weber, New School (New York) and Sussex University). She was vice-president of the International Studies Association in 2007–08.



Contributors 369

Val e r ie P r e s to n is a professor of geography at York University, and was a director for CERIS – The Ontario Metropolis Centre. A social geographer, her research examines migration trends and policies with particular attention to questions of exclusion and inclusion for immigrant men and women. She has worked closely with community and government partners on research about immigrant integration in Canadian housing and labour markets. With Mary Romero and Wenona Giles she recently co-edited a volume entitled When Care Work Goes Global (Ashgate).

P arvat i R ag h u r a m is a reader in geography at the Open University in the United Kingdom. She has published widely on gender, migration, and development. She has also been exploring the use of “care” as a concept in social policy, postcolonial theory, and feminist ethics. She has co-authored The Practice of Cultural Studies (Sage) and Gender and International Migration in Europe (Routledge) and co-edited South Asian Women in the Diaspora (Berg) and Tracing an Indian Diaspora: Contexts, Memories, Representations (Sage). She co-edits the journal South Asian Diaspora with the Centre for Study of Diaspora, Hyderabad.

De e pa R aj k u m a r is an independent researcher based in Chennai and Toronto. Her articles have been published in Citizenship Studies, Tlaxcala, Kafila, Al Jazeera English, and New Sudan Vision. She was a postdoctoral fellow in immigration and social exclusion, Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, at York University, Toronto, from December 2008 to December 2010, working on the Liberating Temporariness project. She defended her PhD in political science from York University in June 2009. From September 2011, along with an international group of friends, she worked on an alternative community project in Oaxaca, Mexico, a project that they are now extending in Tamil Nadu, India. From May 2013 she has also been acting with an experimental contemporary Tamil theatre group that espouses transformative politics based on suppressed local histories and practices. Her primary areas of interest are politics of knowledge production and projects of autonomia. J ohn S h ie l d s is a professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University, where he has taught

370 Contributors

for the last 25 years. He is a past director of CERIS – The Ontario Metropolis Centre (a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Centre of Excellence on immigration, settlement, and diversity) and holds the rank of CERIS senior scholar. He has just completed a term as managing editor of the Journal of International Migration and Integration published by Springer in the Netherlands. Currently he is Ryerson Fellow at Massey College (2013–14) at the University of Toronto. He has published five books, including Dismantling a Nation: The Transition to Corporate Rule (co-authored with Stephen McBride, Fernwood, 1997) and Shrinking the State: Globalization and the “Reform” of Public Administration (co-authored with Bryan Evans, Fernwood, 1998), and some 90 articles, chapters, and research papers. The focus of his recent work has been on nonprofit sector studies, immigration and settlement studies, neoliberal restructuring, and labour market change and precarity.

S arah va n W a l s u m is a professor in migration law at the VU University, Amsterdam. She has published widely on transnational family relations, family migration law and women and immigration law. Her most recent book is The Family and the Nation: Dutch Family Migration Policies in the Context of Changing Family Norms (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). Together with Thomas Spijkerboer she edited Women and Immigration Law: New Variations on Classical Feminist Themes (Routledge-Cavendish, 2007). She has been conducting research on the position of migrant domestic workers in the Netherlands, as part of an ESF-EUROCORES funded project entitled “Migration and Networks of Care in Europe,” and on social security perspectives for excluded migrants as part of the cross-border welfare state research program funded by the Instituut Gak. She currently leads a research program financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO): “Migration Law as a Family Matter.” L e a h F . V o s ko is a professor of political science and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in the Political Economy of Gender and Work at York University. Her latest book, Managing the Margins: Gender, Citizenship and the International Regulation of Precarious Employment (2010), is published with Oxford University Press. Her current research on migration analyzes the role of sending and receiving states in the provision of labour rights and protections for



Contributors 371

temporary migrant workers. She is also principal investigator of “Closing the Enforcement Gap: Improving Protections for People in Precarious Jobs,” a partnership grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada concerned with employment standards enforcement, and the Gender and Work-­ Comparative Perspectives Database (GWD-CPD), funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, which includes a research and teaching module on migration.

Index

Aboriginal Healing Foundation (Canada), 52 activism: and advocacy groups, 44–5; and Secret Trial Five, 91; surrounding temporary status, 3–4; transnational, 162. See also advocacy groups; resistance advocacy: and Live-In Caregiver program, 245n5; and migrant workers’ rights, 117–19, 129, 132, 139, 161–2; and nonprofit organizations, 268–9, 270; reduction of funding for, 44–5, 52, 268–9; suppression of, 54. See also activism; names of specific advocacy groups; ­resistance agricultural sector, 153–4, 156–9, 166. See also migrant workers: agricultural Agriculture Workers Alliance ­(Canada), 161 Agyepong, Irene, 148n12 alternatives to temporariness, 3–4, 13–17, 54, 244; and claims to permanence, 16, 340, 343–4, 348, 356; and financial systems,

15; and labour migration, 128–9. See also “liberating temporariness”; resistance Althusser, Louis, 358n14, 358n15 Amnesty International Canada, 52, 54 anarchism, 343–4, 345, 348, 359n30 Anderson, Benedict: Imagined Communities, 346 Annan, Kofi, 107 Anti-Defamation League, 67 Arab-Americans: as Orientalized “other,” 10–11, 17, 20, 47, 60–1, 62–6, 73; perceived as being predatory, 20, 63, 65, 70, 72; status as permanently temporary, 20, 63, 73; violence against, 64. See also Orientalization; racialization Arab-Canadians: discriminatory treatment of, 17, 37, 46–7; and dual citizenship, 48–9; issues of, 48–54; as “liminal” group, 49–50, 53, 55; removal of language instruction funds, 51 Arar, Maher: case of, 48–9, 246n11

374 Index

Arendt, Hannah, 61–3, 341, 353, 356; Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 62, 63, 69; The Human Condition, 341; The Origins of Totalitarianism, 76; reportage on ­Eichmann trial, 61–2, 63, 67–9 Aristotle, 40 artifacts: of temporariness, 8–9, 11–13, 15, 20–1, 27, 61. See also security certificates Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), 102 Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada: report on Canadians abroad, 38–9 asylum-seekers: in Australia, 12, 155, 158, 169n2; in Canada, 320; Mexican, 289. See also refugees At Home in the World: Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century (Welsh), 99, 102 Australia: Howard government, 12, 152, 155, 158, 165, 169n2, 327; Rudd government, 10, 152, 154–5, 164 Australian programs for migrant workers: and neoliberalism, 10, 22, 155–6, 164; Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme (PSWPS), 10, 152, 156; Seasonal Worker Program (SWP), 152–8, 161, 163; and xenophobia, 156–7, 158 Badiou, Alain, 340, 351 Baines, Donna, 263–4 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 313 Balfour Declaration (1917), 71 Balibar, Étienne, 353, 358n14

Ben-Gurion, David, 68 Benjamin, Walter, 313, 346, 351–2, 359n22, 359n23, 359n24 Berman, Marshall, 345 Berne Initiative (2001), 104 Bhabha, Homi, 349, 353, 358n20 Bigo, Didier, 80 Big Society Program (UK), 273–4 Bill C-4 (Preventing Human ­Smugglers from Abusing ­Canada’s Immigration System Act). See under Canadian legislation borders, 354; channels of passage, 7; constructedness of, 291–2, 294; and language, 201–2; ­Mexican-Canadian “border,” 286, 299n4; and national boundaries, 14; paper, 7; security of, 7, 46–7, 286–8, 298, 299; and temporal inversion, 354; and the “territorial principle,” 68–9; theorization of, 291–2, 310–11, 312; US–Mexican, 24–5, 285, 286–90, 292, 293, 298, 299 Bracero Program (US). See under temporary migrant work ­programs brain drain, 180–2, 185, 195 Braudel, Fernand, 340 Brown, Gordon, 182 Burke, Anthony, 158 Bush, George W., 60, 61, 65, 73 Butler, Judith, 196, 354–5 Byl, Yessy, 119 Calderón, Felipe, 285, 288, 300n7. See also Mexico: War on Organized Crime Cameron, David, 273, 274



Canada: Conservative government of Stephen Harper, 36, 46, 51–2, 54, 55n1, 99, 103–4, 120n1, 246n13; Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), 50; G20 Summit (2010), 52, 77; indigenous population, 41, 44, 52, 54, 204; Liberal government of Paul ­Martin, 103; and Mexican migration, 285, 289, 293, 298, 299n4; and Muslim population, 41, 46–9, 78; number of permanent/temporary entries, 224–34; Oka crisis, 50; racism in, 42, 50, 51, 54, 66, 213, 223; religious differences in, 44; and Sudanese population, 305, 318–34; and violence against women, 102. See also Arab-Canadians; Canada’s official languages; Canadian agreements and accords; Canadian legislation; Canadian nonprofit sector; Canadian policies; Canadian programs for migrant workers Canada’s official languages: bilingualism, 43, 44, 50, 202, 204, 206; Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB), 209, 210, 211, 321; language training for newcomers, 9–10, 19, 23, 26–7, 51, 201–2, 205–14, 320, 321–2, 324, 326, 331; Enhanced Language Training (ELT), 210–12; exclusion of temporary migrants from language training, 205–6; and French-Canadian inclusion, 41, 44; Labour Market Language Training (LMLT), 208; Language Instruction to Newcomers to

Index 375

Canada (LINC), 208–9, 210, 215n5, 320; Official Languages Act (1969), 43, 201, 205; and Quebec, 41, 43, 44, 214n2; Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963), 44; Settlement Language Training Program, 208–9. See also language Canada Ontario Immigration Agreement (COIA). See under Canadian agreements and accords Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement (2004). See under Canadian agreements and accords Canada-US Smart Border Accord (2001). See under Canadian agreements and accords Canadian agreements and accords: Canada Ontario Immigration Agreement (COIA), 210–11; Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement (2004), 46; CanadaUS Smart Border Accord (2001), 46, 47 Canadian Arab Federation (CAF), 19, 48, 50–1, 53 Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA). See under Canadian governmental bodies Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 52, 54–5 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom. See under Canadian legislation Canadian Citizenship Act. See under Canadian legislation Canadian Council for Refugees, 46

376 Index

Canadian Experience Class and Provincial and Territorial Nominee Program. See under Canadian programs for migrant workers Canadian governmental bodies: Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), 82–3, 84–5, 88, 89; Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), 52; Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), 84, 85, 89, 91; Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), 84, 209–10, 225, 229, 332–3; Correctional Service Canada (CSC), 84–5, 88; Department of Justice (DOJ), 84; Employment and Immigration Canada, 207; federalism, 41; Integration Branch of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 209–10; Privy Council Office (PCO), 85; Public Safety Canada (PSC), 84; Rights and Democracy Canada, 52; Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), 48; Status of Women Canada, 52 Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). See under Canadian governmental bodies Canadian Labour Congress, ­117–18, 161 Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB). See under Canada’s official languages Canadian legislation: Charter of Rights and Freedom, 52; Citizenship Act, 39; Employment Equity Act (1986), 43; Immigration and Refugee Protec-

tion Act (IRPA) (2001), 46, 78, 84, 206; Multiculturalism Act (1988), 43; Occupational Health and Safety Act (Ontario), 161–2; Official Languages Act (1969), 43, 201, 205; Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System Act (Bill C-4) (2011), 46 Canadian Museum of Civilization, 55n1 Canadian Museum of History, 35, 55n1 Canadian non-profit sector 24; core segment, 258; evergreen contracts, 273; government underfunding of, 261–2, 263–4, 267; growth of, 258; and liminality, 265–6, 272; and neoliberalism, 19, 259–62, 263–4, 266–9, 274, 275; paid employment, 257–8, 262–6; and temporariness, 255, 260, 262, 266, 269, 274; and welfare state, 258. See also New Public Governance (NPG); New Public Management (NPM); nonprofit sector Canadian policies: and anglo-­ conformity, 41; of bilingualism, 43, 44, 50, 202, 204; detention and deportation, 4, 45, 115; exclusionary, 41–2, 44, 46; fostering equity, 43–4; of immigration and citizenship, 9, 36, 38–47, 100, 113, 206–7; and internationalism, 99, 100–4, 120n1; and language instruction for Arab-Canadians, 51; and multiculturalism, 36, 39, 43–4, 50, 54, 101, 331, 333;



and neoliberalism, 36, 41, 54, 255–6, 259–62; point system of immigrant selection, 42; and precarious migratory status, 24, 40; Right of Landing Fee, 46, 324–5; security certificates, 11–12, 16, 20–1, 77–94; and settlement services, 46, 205–6, 208, 255, 259, 262, 267, 274; and suppression of advocacy and dissent, 44, 52–4; and surveillance, 37, 46, 52, 88–90. See also Canada’s official languages; Canadian agreements and accords; Canadian governmental bodies; Canadian legislation; Canadian programs for migrant workers Canadian programs for migrant workers, 39–40: Canadian Experience Class, 231, 232, 243; as exemplary, 100, 102–4, 113, 117–20, 153, 157; Live-in Caregiver Program (LICP), 28n3, 111, 222, 231, 243, 245n5; LowSkilled Pilot Project, 118–20, 222, 237; Provincial and Territorial Nominee Programs, 222, 223, 231, 237; Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), 9, 10, 19, 21, 100–1, 106, 113–20, 157, 159–61, 166, 168, 222, 237; Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFW), 21, 100, 101, 118–20, 166, 237 Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). See under Canadian governmental bodies carceral abolition, 16, 79, 91–93 Carlsen, Laura, 289 Castells, Manuel, 341

Index 377

Castles, Stephen, 37, 105, 107, 221 Charkaoui, Adil: case of, 78, 83–4, 86–7, 88, 91. See also Secret Trial Five; security certificates chutes and ladders immigration model, 24, 224, 229, 235–8, 243, 246n10 citizenship: categories of, 36, 40; and conditionality, 24, 219–20, 239–40, 243–4; dual, 48–9; in European Union, 40; formallegal, 36, 37, 40, 41–2, 45, 46, 49, 55; hierarchies of, 105; and inclusion/exclusion, 36, 40–2, 44, 46, 77, 81–2; and inequality, 40; liminal, 49–50, 55; precarity of, 245n6, 246n11; restrictions on, 4, 39, 53–4; rights, 4, 7, 38, 39, 43, 48–9, 81–2, 218; single, 3; theorizing of, 40, 54; circular migration, 9, 109, 110, 113–4, 115, 143–4, 181, 192 Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC). See under Canadian governmental bodies “clash of civilizations,” 47 Commission of Inquiry into the Acts of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar (2006), 48 Commonwealth Immigration Act (1962, UK), 183–7 “Compendium of Good Practice Policy Elements in Bilateral Temporary Labour Arrangements” (IOM report), 114 Correctional Service Canada (CSC). See under Canadian governmental bodies

378 Index

Council on American-Islamic Relations, 48 Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada, 48 Counterintelligence Program (US), 65 Court Challenges Program ­(Canada), 52 Coutin, Susan B., 342, 357n3 Datta, Kavita, 110 Day, Richard, 344 Deegan Report, 165 Deleuze, Gilles, 340, 351–2 denizenship. See permanent resident status Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (US). See under United States Department of Justice (DOJ) (Canada). See under Canadian governmental bodies deportation. See under enforcement Derrida, Jacques, 311, 345, 349, 356 De Schutter, Helder, 203–4 de-skilling, 206, 207, 211, 212, 264 detention. see under enforcement. See also carceral abolition discrimination, 42, 64, 126, 133, 213, 294, 297, 328; influence of “anglo-conformity” in Canada, 41. See also Canada: racism in; racialization; xenophobia Dreyfus affair (France), 71 Eichmann, Adolf: trial of, 61–2; 67–70 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Arendt), 62, 63, 69

employment: circular, 157; demand in Global North, 111; high skill, 21, 37, 111–2, 131–2, 157, 165, 180, 181–96, 206, 207; low skill, 8–9, 21–2, 112, 143, 157, 165, 166, 180, 196, 206, 221; precarious, 8, 10, 100, 127–8, 133, 153, 159, 196, 206, 239, 264–6, 294, 298. See also migrant ­workers Employment and Immigration Canada. See under Canadian governmental bodies Employment Equity Act (1986, Canada). See under Canadian legislation enforcement: deportation, 4, 11, 22, 45, 48, 65, 79, 83, 87, 90, 115, 138, 142, 159–60, 234, 300n5; detention, 11–12, 45, 78–9, 80, 85, 86–90, 92; G20 Summit (2010), 52, 77; “indefinitely pending” status, 85–7; raids, 14, 82, 154, 287; surveillance and reporting, 37, 46, 47, 52, 63, 64, 88–90, 168. See also Kingston Immigration Holding Centre; state security Enhanced Language Training (ELT) (Canada). See under Canada’s official languages entry categories, 7–8, 220, 222–39 Escobar, Arturo, 168 European Economic Area (EEA), 183, 186 European Union: Charter of Fundamental Rights, 132–3; directives on temporary labour migration, 21, 129–34, 142



exclusion (social), 66, 158, 203, 221; categories of, 7; and citizenship, 36, 40–2, 44, 46; doctrine of, 107; double exclusion, 77; enhanced forms of, 41–6; exclusionary policies, 36, 41–2, 44–5, 53, 127–8, 130, 132; and mitigating strategies, 26–7, 50; and residency status, 22–3, 26; and state security, 77–8, 82, 92–3; and territory, 203. See also discrimination; racialization; xenophobia failed states, 154–5, 288 Faist, Thomas, 290 Fanon, Franz, 348, 351 Faraday, Fay, 119 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (US). See under United States Federation of Labour (Alberta, Canada), 161 Federation of Labour (British Columbia, Canada), 161 Filipino Ministry of Labour, 139 financial crisis of 2007–08: effects on Mexican migrants, 14, 285–8, 292–3, 298, 299; effects on the non-profit sector, 256, 274 First Peoples. See indigenous peoples France: seasonal work regime, 126; labour law, 126 French Canadians, 41, 50 Freud, Sigmund, 345 Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), 50 Fuller, Sylvia, 206 G7, 102

Index 379

G20 Summit (2010), 52, 77 Gabriel, Christina, 164 Gastarbeiter program (Germany), 167 Geiger, Martin, 106 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), 164–5, 222 General Medical Council (UK), 188 Ghosh, Bimal, 106–7. See also New International Regime for Orderly Movements of People Gish, Oscar, 193 Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM). See under international fora Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). See under international fora Globalization from Below (Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt), 290 Global Workers Justice Alliance, 162 Goldring, Luin, 291 Gordon, Jennifer, 129–30, 144, 146 Gorman, Rachel, 206–7, 213 Ground Zero Mosque controversy, 67 Grugel, Jean, 112 Guarnizo, Luis, 290 Guattari, Felix, 340, 351–2 guest worker programs, 39, 42, 100 Guide to Immigration, and Employment of Overseas Medical and Dental Students, Doctors and Dentists in the United Kingdom, A (Department of Health, UK), 186 Halberstam, Judith, 348 Hameiri, Shahar, 155–6, 167

380 Index

Handel, Ariel, 358n9 Haque, Eve, 165 Harkat, Mohamed, case of, 78, 82–3, 86–91. See also Justice for Mohamed Harkat Committee; Secret Trial Five; security certificates Harkat, Sophie, 86, 88, 89–90 Harlow, Barbara, 348 Harper, Stephen, 36, 46, 48, 51, 52, 55n1, 104, 118, 120n1. See also Canada: Conservative government of Stephen Harper Harvey, David, 192 Hennebry, Jenna, 117, 168 Herzl, Theodor, 71 High Authority against Discrimination and for Equality (HALDE) (Haute autorité de lutte contre les discriminations et pour l’égalité), 126, 129 High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, 100 high-skill work. See employment Holzmann, Robert: “Social Protection for Temporary Migrant Workers,” 115 Hope, Wayne, 192 Howard, John, 12, 152, 155, 169n2. See also Australia: ­Howard government Howell, Allison, 102–3 Human Condition, The (Arendt), 341 Huntington, Samuel, 47 Husserl, Edmund, 345, 346 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 346

Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) (2001, Canada). See under Canadian legislation inclusion (social), 130, 256, 259; and citizenship, 36, 39, 40, 45, 219; inclusionary policies, 41, 43–44, 50, 129–30, 144, 146; limits to, 22; and territory, 203, 219; and transnational activities, 15, 25. See also Canadian policies: multiculturalism; integration Independent Blue Ribbon Panel on Grants and Contributions Programs (2006), 271 indigenous peoples: in Australia, 155; in Canada, 41, 44, 52, 54, 204; land rights, 163; and re-­collective justice, 25–6, 340, 341–2, 353, 355, 356, 357n2; terminology, 357n2; in United States, 66, 346 integration (socio-economic), 7, 12, 45, 179, 201; and language training, 201–14. See also inclusion Integration Branch of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. See under Canadian governmental bodies International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, 120 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 132 international fora, 11: Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM), 100, 102, 106–113, 119; Global Forum on Migration



and Development (GFMD), 21, 100, 102, 104, 106, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119–20; International Labour Conference (2004), 104; International Labour Organization, 104, 117; International Organization for Migration (IOM), 114, 167, 321, 325; and migration, 100, 102, 104–7, 119–20. See also “Compendium of Good Practice Policy Elements in Bilateral Temporary Labour Arrangements” (IOM report); International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families; International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; Migration in an Interconnected World: New Directions for Action (2005 GCIM report) internationalism: and Canada, 99, 100–4, 120n1 International Labour Conference (2004). See under international fora International Labour Organization (ILO). See under international fora International Organization for Migration (IOM). See under international fora Islam: seen as threat to security, 46, 47, 48, 66 Israel: and Canada, 51; conflict with Palestine, 51, 62–3, 68, 70–2; and Eichmann trial, 61–2, 67, 68–9; establishment of, 67; and Nuremberg trials, 68, 69;

Index 381

and patriot identity, 63; and permanence, 358n9; Six Day War (1967), 50, 68, 70; ties to US, 20, 61, 66–7, 70, 72; war on Gaza (2008–09), 51 Jaballah, Mahmoud: case of, 78. See also Secret Trial Five; security certificates Japanese-American internment, 66 Japanese-Canadians, 50 Justice for Mohamed Harkat Committee, 85: Statement Against Security Certificates, 91–2 Justicia for Migrant Workers (Canada), 3, 161 Kantorowicz, Ernst: The King’s Two Bodies, 342–3, 344–5 Kearney, Michael, 291–2 Kenney, Jason, 51, 201, 202 King, Thomas, 313 Kingston Immigration Holding Centre (KIHC), 85, 87–8 King’s Two Bodies, The ­(Kantorowicz), 342–3, 344–5 Koselleck, Reinhart, 358n11, 358n16 Kristeva, Julia, 348 Kymlicka, Will, 44, 204 Kyriakides, Christopher, 183 Labour Market Language Training (LMLT) (Canada); see under Canada’s official languages Labour Shortage Action Plan (National Farmers’ Federation report), 154 Landolt, Patricia, 290

382 Index

language: competence and integration, 10, 12, 23, 201, 202, ­212–14; and identity, 202–4; linguistic territorial principle, ­203–5, 214; training, 8, 9–10, 12, 18, 23, 26–7, 51, 202, ­207–14, 320, 324. See also ­Canada’s official languages Language Instruction to Newcomers to Canada (LINC) (Canada). See under Canada’s official languages Lenard, Patti Tamara, 40 “liberating temporariness”: aims of, 5–6, 25, 76, 179, 357; and claims to permanence, 16, 340, 348, 352, 354; definitions of, 4–6; ideal of, 35–6; and “liberating permanence,” 339; and non-profit sector, 275; in relation to security certificates, 91–3; through writing, 305 liminality: and Arab-Canadians, 49–51, 53, 54; and citizenship 49–50, 55; and non-profit sector, 24, 265–6, 272; as status, 158 Live-In Caregiver Program (LICP) (Canada). See under Canadian programs for migrant workers Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, 206 López Obrador, Andrés Manuel, 288, 300n7 Low Skilled Pilot Program (Canada). See under Canadian programs for migrant workers low-skill work. See employment Lyon, David, 46 Maclellan, Nic, 160, 161, 163

Marchetti, Sabrina, 141 Marin, André, 52 Marshall, T.H., 40 Martin, Paul, 103 Martin, Philip, 114 Marx, Gary, 80 Massie, Justin, 120n1 Mathiesen, Thomas, 93 McCarthy period (US), 65 medical worker migration, 12, 22–3, 177–8, 181–96. See also physician training Meir, Golda, 71 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 345 Mexican-US migration: and adolescents, 296; and belonging, 286, 287, 291–7, 298; deaths recorded as a result of, 300n8, 300n9; Federación de Clubes Michoacanos en Illinois, 293; Federación de Clubes Zacatecanos del Sur de California, 293; Federación Jalisciense del Medio Oeste de Estados Unidos, 293; and financial crisis of 2007–2008, 14, 285–8, 292–3, 298, 299; forms of, 285; and gender, 294–6, 298; reasons for migration, 294–6, 297; and regional identities, 293–4; and remittances, 286–7, 292, 299; Tlaxcala case study, 294–6, 297, 300n13; and War on Organized Crime, 14, 25, 285–6, 288–90, 293 Mexico: as sending state, 116; War on Organized Crime, 14, 25, 285–6, 288–90, 293. See also Mexican-US migration Meza Rodriguez, Edmundo, 293



migrant workers: agricultural, 9, 19, 22, 25, 115–117, 126, 153–4, 168; business class of, 6, 20, 165; coping strategies of, 14, 15, ­292–3; domestic, 15, 22, 130, 137–9, 141–4, 221, 246n9; experiences of, 6, 18, 115–117, 127, 133–144, 305, 315–334; exploitation of, 22, 128–9, ­141–2, 159–60; Filipino migrants, 15, 130, 137–39, 141–4, 146n3; in France, 126–7; Ghanaian migrants, 15, 130, 135–6, 138, 140, 145, 146n3; health workers, 22–3, 177–8, 181–96; increasing numbers, 37–8; and intra-company transfers, 21, 127–8, 131–2, 133, 134, 142–3, 145, 147n11; irregular migrants, 21–2, 112, 134–5, ­137–8, 139–42, 143–4, 145, 147n5, 148n15; Mexican migrants, 9, 14, 25, 285–301; Moroccan and Tunisian migrants, 126; in the Netherlands, 130, 132, 135–42, 143–4, 145; Pacific Islander migrants, 10, 156–7, 160; rights of, 8, 10, 21, 127–34, 142; and skill type, 6, 8, 9–10, 21, 37, 111–12, 129, 132, 134, 158, 165, 166, 169n4, 177, ­180–96, 206; social protection of, 128–30, 134–46; and vulnerability, 10, 153, 158–68, 180, 221–2; women, 110–12, 295–6. See also Canadian programs for migrant workers; Mexican-US migration; temporary migrant work programs; temporary workers; transnational activities

Index 383

migration: as affirmative, 5; management of, 106–7, 113, 114; settler model of, 37; temporary migration model of, 37; trends, 36–7 Migration in an Interconnected World: New Directions for Action (2005 GCIM report), 106, 107–12 Miller, Mark J., 221 Mojab, Shahrzad, 206–7, 213 Murray, Nancy, 65 Nakbah, 67 National Farmers’ Federation (Australia): Labour Shortage Action Plan, 154 National Health Service (NHS) (UK), 177; and British identity, 182–3; formation of, 190; and medical migrants, 22–3, 177, 182–4, 190, 193 Neocleous, Mark, 92 neoliberalism: and citizenship, 36, 40, 45; effects on advocacy groups, 44–5; effects on nonprofit service agencies, 18, 19, 24, 255–6, 258–62, 263–4, 266–9, 274, 275; focus on selfsufficiency, 9–10, 20, 23–4, 44–6, 210, 260; General ­Agreement on Trade in ­Services (GATS), 164–5; liberation from, 5–6; and ­migration, 9–10, 22; muscular neoliberalism, 10, ­155–6, 164, 167; and nonprofit sector, 24, 255–7, 259–62, 266–70, 273, 274. See also New Public ­Management (NPM)

384 Index

Netherlands: provisions for migrant workers in, 19, 130, 132, ­135–42, 143–4, 145 Neve, Alex, 52, 54–5 New International Regime for Orderly Movements of People, 106–7 New Public Governance (NPG), 270–1, 275 New Public Management (NPM), 261, 266, 268, 269, 270, 272 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 340, 345, 351; “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” 351 Nikoi, Ephraim Kotey, 265–6 Nimijean, Richard, 103 non-profit sector: definition of, 257; evergreen contracts, 271–2; and private donations, 273–4; scope of, 257–8; as shadow civil service, 270; state partnering, 261. See also Canadian nonprofit sector; neoliberalism: and non-profit sector; New Public Governance (NPG); New Public Management (NPM) No One Is Illegal, 3, 45 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 6, 162, 164, 169n4, 222 Nossal, Kim Richard, 101–2, 103, 120n1 Obama, Barack, 63, 73. See also United States: Democrat government of Barack Obama Occupational Health and Safety Act (Ontario, Canada). See under Canadian legislation

Official Languages Act (1969, Canada). See under Canadian legislation Oka crisis (Canada), 50 “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (Nietzsche), 351 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 37–8 Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), 102 Orientalization: of Arab-Americans, 10–11, 17, 20, 47, 60–1, 62–6, 73; theory of, 62. See also discrimination; racialization; xenophobia Origins of Totalitarianism, The, (Arendt), 76 Overseas Doctors Training Scheme (UK). See under United Kingdom policies Oxfam-Novib, 139 Pacific Network on Globalization, 163 Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme (PSWPS) (Australia). See under Australian programs for migrant workers Palestine, 62–3, 67, 71; conflict with Israel, 51, 62–3, 68, 70–2 Palestinian identity: seen as predatory, 72 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), 70 Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar, 180 patriot: as “permanent,” 10, 20, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 70, 73



Patriot Act (2001, US), 10–11; 60–6, 73; as artifact of temporariness, 61; continuity of, 73; and disclaimer regarding Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Americans, 64; and enhanced state security, 17, 63–4, 66; sunset clause in, 65–6; and surveillance, 63–4 Pécoud, Antoine, 106 Pellerin, Hélène , 164–5 permanence: claims to, 3, 16, 26, 39, 340, 342, 345, 347–57; as full citizenship, 38, 76; idealization of, 19, 20, 76, 341–2; notions of, 4, 19, 25–7, 344–5; paths to, 3–6, 8, 26–7; and patriotism, 20, 60–1, 63; and presentism, 345; and security, 6; as static condition, 38, 40, 179; theorization of, 347. See also temporary-permanent divide physician training: and immigration status, 12 , 178, 183, 185, 187–90, 192–3, 195, 197n5; medical licensing, 188–9; Royal Colleges, 190–1, 192; in United Kingdom, 12, 22, 178, 183, 185, 187–90, 192–3, 195, 197n5. See also medical worker migration Piper, Nicola, 37–8, 112 Portes, Alejandro, 290 Pouget, Yann: “Social Protection for Temporary Migrant ­Workers,” 115 Pratt, Anna, 45 precarious status: categories of, 235–6; and conditionality, 24, 224, 239–44; and migrant

Index 385

illegalization, 220, 224, 235, 238–42, 243–5; and non-profit sector, 264; and power dynamics, 242. See also chutes and ladders immigration model; temporary status Preibisch, Kerry, 117, 166, 168 Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System Act (Bill C-4) (2011, Canada). See under Canadian legislation Privy Council Office (PCO) (Canada). See under Canadian governmental bodies Provincial and Territorial Nominee Programs (Canada). See under Canadian programs for migrant workers Public Safety Canada (PS). See under Canadian governmental bodies Pujolar, Joan, 203 Putnam, Robert, 256 Question of Palestine, The (Said), 62, 63 racialization, 27, 72; of Arabs and Muslims, 20, 60–1, 64, 66, 78; and language, 23; Nazi holocaust, 68–9. See also Canada: racism in; discrimination; Orientalization; xenophbia Ranciere, Jacques, 341 Rawls, John, 345 Razack, Sherene, 78 Reauthorization Act (2005, US). see Patriot Act (2001, US)

386 Index

Recognised Seasonal Employer Work Policy (RSE) (New Zealand). See under temporary migrant work programs Reed, Austina, 116 refugees: Canada’s stance on, 20, 45–6, 55, 99, 113; Canadian numbers of, 225–9, 232, 236, 238, 245n2, 289; experiences of, 305, 315–34; insecurity of, 341; Palestinian, 70, 72; Sudanese, 305, 314–34; theorizations of, 306, 314. See also asylum-­ seekers; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Regan, Paulette, 359n25 Reid, Bill, 35. See also Spirit of Haida Gwaii Reitz, Jeffrey, 42 remittances, 14, 109–10, 116, 139, 140, 154, 169n1, 181, 286–7, 292–3, 299; as resistance to temporariness, 15; social remittances, 299n3 Renan, Ernest, 345 resistance: by Arab-Canadians, 50–2; to academic discourse, 306–7, 309–10; by detainees, 87; by domestic workers, 28n3; through freedom of information laws, 80; and knowledge production, 14–15; in life story narratives, 25, 315–334; by Mexican migrants, 25; and re-collective justice, 340, 354–357; to singular identity, 308–9, 310–12, 313–5, 335; suppression of, 36; by temporal inversion of state

authority, 26, 352–6, 359n29; through writing, 305–35. See also activism; advocacy; “liberating temporariness” Right of Landing Fee (Canada). See under Canadian policies Rights and Democracy (Canada). See under Canadian governmental bodies Ross, Darryl, 49 Roussel, Stéphane, 102, 120n1 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). See under Canadian governmental bodies Royal Colleges of medicine (UK), 190–1, 192 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963, Canada). See under Canada’s official languages Rudd, Kevin, 10, 152, 154–5, 164; see also Australia: Rudd government Said, Edward, 62; Israel/Palestine conflict, 62, 70–2; on Orientalism, 62, 71; The Question of ­Palestine, 62; on temporality, 348; on Zionism, 71–2 Sandel, Michael, 345 Sassen, Saski, 105 Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) (Canada); see under Canadian programs for migrant workers Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) (UK). See under temporary migrant work programs



Seasonal Worker Program (SWP) (Australia). See under Australian programs for migrant workers Secret Trial Five, 78, 85–6, 88, 91 Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), 169n4 Security Certificate Initiative, 81, 85. See also security certificates security certificates: as artifacts of temporariness, 11–12; in Canada, 11–12, 16, 20–1, 77–94; experiences of certificate subjects, 85–90; justified as extraordinary measure, 77, 83, 93; and production of permanent temporariness, 79, 85–7, 92; and secret trials, 79–80, 85–91; and security regime texts, 80–3, 84; and surveillance, 88–90; unconstitutional, 78. See also enforcement; Justice for Mohamed Harkat Committee; Secret Trial Five; Statement Against Security Certificates; state security September 11, 2001: American aftermath, 10, 20, 60–1, 63, 65, 66, 72–3, 168; Canadian aftermath, 19, 36, 46–7, 78; effects on Mexican-US border, 285–6, 293; effects on ­Mexican-Canadian “border,” 286, 299n4. See also Arar, Maher: case of; Patriot Act (2001, US); state security Settlement Language Training Program (Canada). See under Canada’s official languages Sharma, Nandita, 159, 160, 203 Smith, Heather, 103 Smith, Lothar, 136, 138

Index 387

Smith, Robert Courtney, 291, 296, 300n14 “Social Protection for Temporary Migrant Workers” (Holzmann and Pouget), 115 Spirit of Haida Gwaii: as metaphor for temporariness, 20, 35, 36, 55 Stasiulis, Daiva, 49 Statement Against Security Certificates, 91–2 state security, 77, 93; Canadian, 46; cross-agency co-operation, 84–5; and exclusionary policies, 93; as ideology, 93; McCarthy period, 65; and perceived threats, 4, 7, 46, 61, 72, 77–8, 81; and secrecy, 79–80; surveillance, 46, 52, 63–4, 88–90. See also Department of Homeland Security (US); enforcement; Federal Bureau of Investigation (US); G20 Summit (2010); Patriot Act (2001, US); Secret Trial Five; security certificates; War on Terror state sovereignty: and boundaries, 18, 112; and determining permanence, 26, 348, 351–3; Palestinian claim to, 72 Status of Women Canada. See under Canadian governmental bodies Straehle, Christine, 40 Sudanese population of Canada, 305; and assimilation, 331; and Children’s Aid, 328; and citizenship, 330–1, 334; and employment, 322–4, 326, 332; and homosexuality, 329–30; and landing fees, 324–5; and

388 Index

r­ ecognition of qualifications, 323, 331; and stereotyping, 326–7 temporality: and colonization, ­346–9; and the state, 349–52; theories of, 346, 348 temporariness, 220–1; artifacts of, 11–13, 61; categories of, 3–4; degrees of, 145; expansion of, 3, 22; experienced by citizens, 53; as inferior status, 4, 7, 22, 23–4; and liberation, 5, 76–7; meanings of, 11, 220–1; as “other”, 10; as political claim, 347–8; as “predatory” status, 20, 60–1, 66; production/construction of, 4, 7, 8–9, 11–13, 61; as spatial, 22, 178, 192, 194–5. See also alternatives to temporariness; “liberating temporariness”; resistance to temporariness; ­temporary/permanent divide; temporary status. Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFW) (Canada). See under Canadian programs for migrant workers temporary migrant work programs, 100; Bracero program (US), 285, 299n2; as circular migration, 113–14, 157; in France, 126; Gastarbeiter program (Germany), 167; good practice in, 112, 114–15; New Zealand Recognised Seasonal Employer Work Policy (RSE), 159, 160, 163; proliferation of, 167–8; reform of, 223; Seasonal ­Agricultural Workers Scheme

(SAWS) (UK), 167. See also Australian programs for migrant workers; Canadian programs for migrant workers; guest worker programs temporary-permanent divide: alternate views of, 3, 13, 15–16, 26, 346–52; as binary, 5, 6, 16, 19–20, 27, 73, 76, 219, 348; dimensions of, 8–9; in EU, 127, 129; movement across, 231, 245n3, 246n8, 246n9; production/construction of, 7, 20–1; rejection of, 16, 27, 93, 127, 219, 223–4, 312; theorization of, 339–42 temporary status: activism surrounding, 3–4; consequences of, 8, 10, 12, 22, 220–1; experiences of, 12; and labour programs, 37–8; legal status transitions, 228–34; temporary entry categories, 222–39. See also citizenship: single temporary workers: exclusion from language training programs, 205–6; rights of, 127–8; rise in number, 9, 18, 37–8, 165–6, 224–7, 230–1 terrorism. See state security Thobani, Sunera, 72 training. See language: training; physician training transnational activities: activism, 162; banking, 139–40; free trade, 10, 162; healthcare, 135–6, 140; hometown associations, 25, 286, 291, 297, 299; housing and care, 137–8; retirement, 138–9; for social security, 15, 18, 21,



25, 129–1, 134–41, 145–6, 286, 290–3, 296, 300n15. See also migrant workers transnationalism, 179–80, 290–1 Trinh T. Minh-ha, 308, 313 Turner, Victor, 265, 340 undocumented workers, 18, 128, 136, 139, 154, 164, 169n4, ­235–8, 285, 287, 289, 356, 358n12. See also migrant workers: irregular migrants United Food and Commercial Workers Union (Canada), 119, 161–2 United Kingdom: David Cameron government of, 273–4 United Kingdom policies: Commonwealth Immigration Act (1962), 183–7; A Guide to Immigration, and Employment of Overseas Medical and Dental Students, Doctors and Dentists in the United Kingdom (Department of Health), 186; immigration, 183–4, 193; and medical migrants, 182–4, 185–96; Overseas Doctors Training Scheme, 185; work permit system, 185. See also National Health Service (NHS) (UK) United Kingdom National Health Service. See National Health Service (NHS) (UK) United Nations (UN), 102, 104 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 139 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 315, 317, 318, 319

Index 389

United States: Arab population, 60, 63, 64, 65; Democrat government of Barack Obama, 61, 63, 73; Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 66; Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 65; and Israel, 20, 61, 66–7, 70, 72; Justice Department, 65; McCarthy period, 65; racial divisions, 72; security policies, 10; US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 287. See also Patriot Act (2001, US); War on Terror United States initiatives on migration: Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986), 285; Operation Gatekeeper (1994), 285; Operation Hold the Line (1993), 285 Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. see Patriot Act (2001, US) Van Gennep, Arnold, 265 Van Walsum, Sarah, 146n3 Virdee, Satnam, 183 Vosko, Leah, 153, 206 Walzer, Michael, 345 War on Organized Crime. See under Mexico War on Terror, 14, 72–3, 293 welfare state: in Canada, 43, 44–5, 258, 326; and charity, 274; and citizenship, 43; eligibility for entitlements, 8, 18, 130, 132, 133, 144; and medical care,

390 Index

182–3; New Public Governance, 261, 266, 268–71; non-profit sector restructuring, 24, 255–7, 258–9, 261, 267, 273–4; reform of government funding model, 256, 271–2; social service agencies, 24, 256, 259, 264, 267–70; social service workers, 262–6. See also transnational activities: for social security Welsh, Jennifer, 113: At Home in the World: Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century, 99, 102 World Bank, 154, 158, 159

World University Service of Canada (WUSC): Student Refugee Program, 320, 321 Wright, Cynthia, 203 xenophobia, 156–7, 158, 167–8. See also discrimination; racialization Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, 69 Zapatistas, 343, 358n8 Zionism, 68, 69, 70–72; impact of, 62; and Palestinian history, 70–2