After a spike in irregular border crossings in early 2018, asylum seekers arriving by foot in Canada suddenly found the legality of their status as asylum seekers questioned. While crossing an international border to seek asylum is not illegal, the fact that these migrants did not arrive in Canada through the “proper” channel framed this specific group of migrants as inherently suspicious. As a result, their legal status as asylum seekers remained uncertain, and that uncertainty was reproduced across multiple sites, including—but not limited to—encounters with neighbourhood surveillance groups, local law enforcement and immigration officers. These happenings disrupt the legal/illegal migrant binary by illustrating how migrants who are technically “legal” can be simultaneously marked as “illegal” and how an individual's movement between these two statuses is often in flux and context specific.
The inherent complexity of migration status informs Sarah Grayce Marsden's Enforcing Exclusion: Precarious Migrants and the Law in Canada. Marsden starts from the assumption that precariousness is not a natural phenomenon; rather, it is a legal construct that is consistently (re-)produced through multiple legal and institutional sites. Moreover, a migrant's precarious status often intersects with their gender, race, class and nationality in ways that challenge the long-standing belief that the provision or refusal of status is a universal experience. Marsden grounds her analysis in the lived experiences of migrants by complementing her thorough examination of policy and court documents with a rich set of interviews with migrants who identify as having a variety of “uncertain” migration statuses, including temporary foreign work permits, visitor visas and refugee claimants. This multifaceted approach allows Marsden to explore both the formal and relational aspects of status by raising the poignant (and timely) question: At what point does a migrant become part of the “everyone”?
It is no secret that Canada has relied, and continues to rely, on migration as a source of economic growth and social reproduction. This narrative of migration encouragement, however, runs parallel to narratives that frame migrants as inherently foreign and potentially threatening to both the integrity of the immigration system and to Canadian society at large. While the need for migrants has and continues to be recognized, the fear remains that under the current system, certain migrants—specifically those perceived as temporary—could become “too Canadian.” As a result, federal and provincial governments have introduced legislation that is accessible to migrants with legal, quasi-legal, and sometimes non-legal status but made the parameters of access unclear and inconsistent. Federal statutes such as the Employment Insurance Act and provincial statutes (Marsden focuses on British Columbia) such as the Medicare Protection Act, the School Act and the Employment and Assistance Act include provisions for those with uncertain migration status; however, as Marsden's interviews with migrants demonstrate, these provisions often also function as sites of status surveillance.
In Enforcing Exclusion, Marsden contends that the policing of migrant status is not exclusive to immigration-focused legislation; rather, interviewees recounted experiences where their status was called into question while they were attempting to access health services, education for their children (who are often citizens) and social assistance. Marsden goes further by exploring how certain migrants have their status policed in unlikely public spaces such as public transit, where riders without proper identification are often reported to police and/or immigration authorities. While Marsden, in her introduction, recognizes the importance of an intersectional approach to understanding status, she opted not to flesh out the ways in which systems of oppression such as racism, classism and sexism have an impact on a migrant's ability to “pass” as legal. Her examination of informal sites of migrant status surveillance, for example, suggests that commonly perceived markers of foreignness (skin colour, language proficiency, accent, and so forth) are used to identify those who might be precarious; simply put, there are those with uncertain status who might come across as less foreign, and thus less policed, than others. This would add another level of complexity to Marsden's analysis, as it speaks to the realities of foreignness that continue to play out, despite immigration accommodation being touted as an integral part of Canada's national imaginary.
Marsden unpacks the socio-legal construction of migrant status in six substantive chapters, including an insightful overview of the legal structure of migration status and the lived implications this presents for those who identify as precarious. Using her rich array of empirical data, Marsden dedicates three chapters to exploring the formal and informal barriers precarious migrants encounter that affect their realization of becoming Canadian. Marsden considers how legislative mechanisms in temporary migrant worker programs, such as live-in requirements or limitations on employee mobility, foster potentially oppressive working conditions for these workers. She further explores how those with legal status continued to be marked as illegal when accessing health, education and income security. Finally, Marsden analyzes the multifariousness of membership enforcement and surveillance, drawing attention to the national, subnational and local sites where migrant status is policed and which often lead to migrant self-regulation in an attempt to evade these informal mechanisms of migration control.
In the last chapter, Marsden proposes that the Canadian state adopt a more robust conceptualization of citizenship, one capable of symbolizing a genuine commitment to protecting the rights of precarious migrants. While this could be legislatively realized through the federal government signing the Migrant Worker Convention or provincial governments recognizing migration status as a protected right in their human rights codes, Enforcing Exclusion aptly demonstrates that the work of migrant protection goes beyond formal protections and requires a richer understanding of what it means to belong. Considering the current climate surrounding immigration politics both in Canada and abroad, Enforcing Exclusion is a welcome and important piece of scholarship.
