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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Anna Pratt, Securing Borders: Detention and Deportation in Canada (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press 2005)
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| IN THE POST-9/11 world the issue of who gains access to a country, under what conditions they might enter, and for what causes they might be held and/or deported has risen in prominence. But in fact this issue has been an issue of concern to western states, Canada specifically, for a century. Security Borders briefly surveys the historical development of procedures for detention and deportation of non-Canadians who are deemed to be unwelcome, but pays special attention to the post-World War II era, and, more particularly, to the situation today. |
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The subtitle promises somewhat more than the book delivers. Securing Borders does not address any of the significant issues of detention of non-immigrants in Canada. But when it comes to the detention of potential immigrants and refugee claimants, or other visitors deemed to be "fraudulent claimants," the book is a comprehensive examination of a system about which too few Canadians are aware. |
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Indeed, the book opens on and takes as its case study not a "prison" per se, but a motel in suburban Toronto, the spectacularly misnamed Celebrity Inn. In residence there are not celebrities in any popular sense; their names might not be known to more than a handful of Canadian officials in Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Only in rare cases do the people held there become "celebrities," and often when they do their celebrity status is tragic. One such "celebrity" was Michael Akhimien, a refugee claimant from Nigeria who had been in Canada less than two months in 1995 when he died, unattended, of complications from diabetes. "Michael Akhimien," Pratt concludes, "died in the zone of exclusion that is immigration detention," a "kind of liminal space" (25–26) in which the usual laws, regulations, and norms about incarceration do not prevail. |
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Increasingly, Pratt points out, liberal standards of justice and rights are being excluded from the actual practice of dealing with refugee claimants who are considered to be criminal or security (or both) risks. Pratt argues that "[u]nder a liberal regime of government, the application of coercive powers against autonomous and free subjects, even noncitizens subjects, must be carefully justified and administered." (221) But today, she contends, the reigning ideological outlook is neo-liberalism, which "has a distinctly punitive edge." (216) Although it urges a smaller role for formal institutions of government, neo-liberalism does still embrace the need for government to maintain law and order. Indeed, in the post-9/11 world, this coercive function has been stepped up. Hence she observes a "trend toward governing through crime," (220) one aspect of which is the criminalization of those deemed to be fraudulent refugee claimants. |
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While Pratt's book has its strengths in setting out the punitive handling of refugee claimants, its main argument, that neo-liberalism represents a qualitative new turn, might be questioned. In fact, Chapter 4, which is a useful survey of post-World War II Canadian immigration policy, lays out a trend toward seeing crime and security as intimately connected that began at least in 1945. In fact it is evident in internal policing practice and outlook beginning from World War I. |
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If this is the case, one might ask if Canada was ever "liberal" in the classic sense she suggests. Plenty of evidence exists to show that in both internal security policy and immigration policy, Canada has always had some elements of "racist, moral [and] ideological" bias that Pratt contends "are clearly antithetical to liberal ideals of natural justice and formal equality." (221) One might ask whether Canada has ever been "liberal." |
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Aside from this apparent philosophical contradiction, Security Borders contains important case studies of the contemporary demonization of "risky refugees" (for example, its brief but telling assessment of the media and state campaign against Somali immigrants and refugees) that make it an invaluable inquiry into an ongoing conflict within Canadian society. |
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Larry Hannant
University of Victoria and Camosun College |
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