Securing Borders—Detention And Deportation in Canada

Detention and deportation are the two most extreme sanctions of an "immigration penality" that enforces borders, polices non-citizens, identifies those who are dangerous, diseased, deceitful, or destitute, and refuses them entry or casts them out. As such, they are constitutive practices that work to "make-up" and regulate national borders, citizens, and populations. In addition, they play a key role in the reconfiguration of citizenship and sovereignties in the global context. Despite popular and political exclamations, it is not a brand new world. The denigration of refugee claimants, heightened and intersecting anxieties about crime, security, and fraud, and efforts to fortify the border against risky outsiders have been prominent features of Canadian immigration penality since well before September 11th, 2001.

Securing Borders explores, in the context of immigration penality, a number of themes which cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, including: adminstrative discretion, law, and liberalism; transitions from welfare to neoliberal regimes of rule; intersections of sovereign and governmental, risk-based, governing strategies; "governing through crime" as central to contemporary public policy; and the border as heterogenous and artful accomplishment that constitutes citizens and national identities, and regulates populations. This work is thus a rich interdisciplinary study which promises to be of interest to scholars in a range of disciplines including criminology, socio-legal studies, law, history, sociology, political science, international relations, and public administration. It will also be of interest to non-governmental advocates as well as to government representatives who work in the areas of immigration, refugee determination, and related fields.

Anna Pratt teaches in the criminology program for the Department of Sociology and the Division of Social Sciences at York University.