Thursday, July 13, 2017
WMP Yudowitz Seminar Room 1 (University of Glasgow)
This paper examines the role played by high-level bureaucrats in constructing “illegal” immigrants in 1950s and 1960s Canada. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of archival records from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, I analyze the boundary work conducted by high-level bureaucrats around the (in)admissibility of one immigrant group caught in the “migration-asylum nexus” at the time: Chinese immigrants. The boundary work framework draws attention to the concrete terms in which Chinese immigrants were classified and categorized (e.g. socioeconomic, moral, racial, ethnic) in the course of policymaking, so as to make them admissible or not to the Canadian national collective. Preliminary findings suggest that while bureaucrats constructed large numbers of this (historically racialized and inadmissible) group as “illegal”, due to evidence of identity fraud, this “illegality” was not automatically equated with inadmissibility. By exploring this disconnect between illegality and inadmissibility in the formative period of modern migration management, this paper seeks to counteract what Nicolas De Genova has called the “methodological presentism” of this area of study. It thereby provides a foil against which to interpret contemporary state constructions of migrant illegality in Canada and elsewhere.
