The Symbiotic Harms of Immigration Detention and Deportation as Experienced by Families in Canada
CINETS-Border Criminologies Crimmigration Control Conference
Submission by Brianna Garneau (she/her), PhD Candidate, York University
Canadian immigration detention is used to control migration and to facilitate the removal, deportation and exclusion of unwanted and illegalized migrants[1]. While the Canadian government has advanced efforts to create alternatives to immigration detention, it is also building new detention centers, maintaining the use of provincial prisons, and continuing to sanction migrants to indefinite detention. These practices, as outlined in a rare joint report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, inflict serious human rights violations and have devastating impacts on the physical and mental health of detainees and their families, both during and after their incarceration.[2]
Given the erasure of considerations of race, and (settler)colonialism in the securitization of migration literature[3], I am particularly devoted to understanding how crimmigration processes are predicated on the racialization and gendering of certain immigrants, so that Black, Brown and racialized migrants, families and communities are increasingly surveilled, imprisoned, deported and otherwise subjected to forcible displacement at the hands of the Canadian state. While existing research has begun to scrutinized the pains of migration control as experienced by migrants directly subjected to the carceral power of the state[4], scholars have also begun to recognize the need to investigate the harmful effects of carceral power as experienced by those who are not officially targeted by them – that is, family members[5].This working paper theoretically and methodologically considers how we might explore the link between the macro-spaces of the nation to the micro-spaces of the home by empirically investigating the symbiotic harms of immigration detention and deportation as experienced by families in Canada. This paper attends to the extension of carceral power to family members and the loved ones of migrants, the ways in which it shapes social life and ultimately reproduces racialized and gendered inequality. Arguably, these processes contribute to what Anthony Richmond has called the “global apartheid” -- a trend towards a racialized world, segregated geographically in ways that immobilize people from the Global South and exacerbates their position among the overpoliced and overimprisoned in the global North.[6] My aim is to demonstrate that a study of migration is necessarily a study of carcerality.
[1] Anna Pratt, Securing borders: Detention and deportation in Canada (2005). UBC Press
[2] Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International Report , “I didn't feel like a human in there”: Immigration Detention in Canada and its Impact on Mental Health (2021), https://www.amnesty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/canada0621_web.pdf
[3] Ida Danewid, “Policing the (migrant) crisis: Stuart Hall and the defence of whiteness” (2021) Sec Dialogue.
[4] Mary Bosworth, Inside immigration detention (2014) OUP Oxford.
[5] Cara Jardine “Families, imprisonment and legitimacy: The cost of custodial penalties” (2019) Routledge.
[6] Kajita Franko Aas and Mary Bosworth, “The borders of punishment: migration, citizenship and social exclusion” (2013) Oxford Scholarship.