About the Book
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 is a close study of the discursive formations, transformations, and technologies of power that have surrounded the laws, policies, and practices of detention and deportation in Canada since the Second World War. During this period, crime categories have proliferated and merged with a reconfigured and expanded understanding of national security.
Securing Borders traces the connections between what might appear to be rather disparate concerns - detention and deportation, criminal justice, welfare, refugees, law, discretion, security, and risk - and considers these in relation to more general transitions from welfare to neoliberal modes of rule. Securing. Borders explores, in the context of immigration penality, a number of themes which cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, including: administrative 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 a heterogeneous 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.
Table of Contents:
1 Overview and Orientations
2 Detention at the Celebrity Inn
3 Reframing Discretion
4 From Purity to Security
5 Floods and Frauds
6 Risky Refugees
7 Discretion, Dangerousness, and National Security
8 Criminals First
9 Risk-Smart Borders
10 Conclusion
Appendix:
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Anna Pratt teaches in the criminology program for the Department of Sociology and the Division of Social Sciences at York University.
Review :
Ultimately, Pratt writes convincingly of how (specific groups of) humans have become the object of management. This book also urges for research on a number of immigration management-related issues (e.g. discretion on the part of immigration officials). What I also consider a strength of the book is that it brings abundant light onto these minority ethnic groups in Canada that are relatively neglected by research … it will be invaluable for the researcher of immigration and ethnicity as well as to public official working with migrants and NGO workers. - Georgios A. Antonopoulos, University of Durham (British Journal of Criminology Advance Access) Pratt's book provides a complete and lucid analysis of the darker side of immigration policies in Canada. It maintains balance between a theoretical framework, historical backgrounders and practical illustrations, as well as between law and social science insights which will make reading accessible to a larger audience…It is, arguably the most complete and up-to-date Canadian book on detention and deportation. - Sophie Dorais, McGill University (Canadian Journal of Law and Society, vol. 21, no. 1, 2006) This book goes a long way to render visible the material conditions and tangible practices of the detention and deportation of undeserving and undesirable non-citizens, who are essentially being criminalized for the mere act of migration. - Harsha Walia (The Rain Review of Books, Issue 4:1, Winter 2006) Anna Pratt, a sociologist who teaches criminology, examines an important aspect of Canada's refugee policy – detention and deportation – from the perspective of human rights and social justice. She sees larger a pattern in connections between the federal government's immigration and refugee policies, public concerns about crime and welfare fraud, media reporting on immigrant communities such as Toronto's Somalis, and the trend towards neo-liberalism. - Greg Marquis, University of New Brunswick (Law and Politics Review, Vol. 16, No.3)
