Book Review: Enforcing Exclusion: Precarious migrants and the law in Canada

Review by Celine Hocquet. Celine is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Birmingham (UK). Primarily specialised in law, her research focuses on analysing the use of non-entry policies by the European Union. Celine is on Twitter @celine_hocquet

Review of Enforcing Exclusion: Precarious migrants and the law in Canada by Sarah Grace Marsden (UBC Press 2018).

Enforcing Exclusion is a thorough insight into the reality of living with a precarious immigration status. Based on interviews with precarious migrants in Canada, Enforcing Exclusion explores how laws and policies are implicated in exclusionary outcomes. It aims at offering a concrete meaning of immigration status by developing an analysis based on an ethnographic approach centred upon migrant perspectives, rather than merely a reading of normative laws and policies. 

Immigration status is a powerful legal construct determined by states. However, what this book shows is that migration status, as well as the risk of removal associated with precarious status, plays a significant role in most aspects of migrants’ lives. Indeed, status does not simply affect migrants when dealing with Canadian immigration authorities at the federal level. Rather, as interviewed migrants reveal in this book, it invades their daily lives, impacting their working and living conditions, as well as their sense of belonging. These ideas touched upon in the second chapter, which addresses notions of precarity and illegal migration, take shape and become much more concrete in the following chapters where the author expands in-depth analysis of interviews with precarious migrants about different aspects of their day-to-day lives.

In the third chapter, Marsden explores how living with a precarious status impacts migrants’ working conditions. Interviews with precarious migrants show how the threat of deportation results in lower salaries, longer working hours, and poorer working conditions, as well as uncertainty due to the informal character of most work carried out by migrants lacking permanent status. Testimonies of live-in caregivers are the most striking ones in my opinion. Interviewed migrants tell stories of constant unpaid overtime, the most extreme example being a live-in caregiver working at least 98h a week without receiving any overtime pay. From other interviews cited in this chapter, it seems that this is not an unusual situation for live-in caregivers in Canada. In fact, the current immigration and employment laws make such exploitation possible, allowing employers to ‘practically enslave’ migrant workers. As Marsden rightly argues, the deportability of migrants has become valuable in itself within the informal economies of developed countries as it compels migrants with precarious status to accept poor working conditions and to refrain from reporting infringements of employment standards, as well as workplace health and safety issues.

The fourth chapter provides an account of migrant exclusion from the social state. Analysing how living with a precarious immigration status affects the health, education and income security of migrants, Marsden shows the deep consequences of the hostile environment towards them. Indeed, it is not only the lack of a permanent status or the lack of rights to certain benefits that prevents migrants from accessing social assistance. Rather, it is fear that discourages most migrants from it. As such, the book refers to varied accounts of migrant workers who do not apply for employment insurance even though they are entitled to it and have paid into it, due to the fear that this may prejudice their chances for obtaining a permanent immigration status. It is appalling to see that hostile immigration law and policies are so embedded in migrant mentalities that even migrants view themselves as undeserving of rights which they are legally entitled to.

In the fifth chapter entitled ‘Multi-sited enforcement’, the book develops the idea that direct immigration enforcement by federal immigration authorities, often seen as the biggest risk faced by precarious migrants, is rare in practice. Most sites of migration enforcement are actually where migrants interact with non-immigration enforcement state authorities - local government authorities -  or even non-state actors such as employers and community members. Marsden reveals how school registration, for instance, may contribute to the process of immigration enforcement, as migrants are often required to provide immigration documents to school administrators when enrolling their children. Another striking testimony shows how even social acquaintances of migrants such as friends or housemates can eventually act as informants to immigration authorities, thus creating a home environment saturated with constant fear. This chapter shows the extent to which precarious immigration status is not only impacting migrants with precarious status themselves but their relatives as well, and as a result, many immigrants limit their social activities to avoid risks of being reported to immigration enforcement authorities. 

The final chapter develops a broader reflection on the rights and membership of migrants, based on the conclusions drawn from the interviews. Marsden argues that analysing precarious migrant living conditions from a purely human rights perspective is too limited as national states disregard most of these rights on the basis that these states have the sovereign power to determine access to national membership. Marsden rightly points out the need to address the question of membership and to develop alternatives to national membership. She considers the interesting example of urban citizenship, which might not be the solution to exclusion from the nation state itself but resonates with different formulations of belonging and addresses everyday situations in which status is relevant.

Although this book takes an anthropological approach and focuses on precarious migrants in Canada, its interdisciplinarity makes it relevant to a broader audience. Through testimonies and life stories, it provides a much-needed account of how immigration laws and policies foster the exclusion of migrants in their daily lives. It will be enriching for anyone researching immigration law and policy from a legal or political perspective, as well as for anyone studying the anthropology and sociology of migration. Exclusion faced by precarious migrants is a constant issue in most Global North countries. Here, the situation of precarious migrants in Canada governed by Canadian laws and policies provide a single case study that invites readers to rethink and question the development and enforcement of immigration rules more broadly.

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Hocquet, C. (2020). Book Review: Enforcing Exclusion: Precarious migrants and the law in Canada. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2020/03/book-review [date])