Fast Refugee Protection: Temporality and Migration Control
| Author | Azar Masoumi |
| Date | 01 April 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639211015340 |
| Published date | 01 April 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Fast Refugee Protection:
Temporality and
Migration Control
Azar Masoumi
Carleton University, Canada
Abstract
This article explores the temporality of migration control through an analysis of refugee
claim processing in Canada. I draw on organizational reports, commissioned studies,
media reports, interviews and archival data to argue that time is a key technology of
state-controlled migration regulation. I show that temporal technologies have long been
used to both control the access of migrants and the labour of civil servants. Further-
more, I show that procedural temporalities have been consistently manipulated to
reflect and facilitate growing restrictionism in Canadian migration regulation. In short, I
suggest that migration regulation regimes devise and use temporal technologies to block,
deter or delay access to rights to unwanted and unauthorized migrants, and to reduce
the cost of doing so where possible.
Keywords
Space, state-controlled migration regulation, technologies of migration control,
temporality
There are hundreds of thousands of people who patiently wait to come to Canada through
legal means, and it’s just not fair. It’s not right for people to jump on a plane, come here to
make a refugee application, even if they don’t meet the definition of refugee.
Minister Jason Kenney (CBC News, 2009)
Corresponding author:
Azar Masoumi, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada ON K1S
5B6.
Email: azar.masoumi@carleton.ca
Social & Legal Studies
ªThe Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09646639211015340
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
2022, Vol. 31(2) 197–215
Introduction
Migration regulation is, of course, a spatial political project: it is one that aims to
regulate, control, and restrict access to national territories and the civil and citizenship
rights that are associated with them. But territories do not exist outside of time and,
hence, their spatiality is always already temporal(ized). Take, for example, the Desig-
nated Countries of Origin (DCO) policy, introduced in 2012 by the then Conservative
government of Canada (2006–2016). The DCO was part of a repertoire of restrictive
policies implemented in (and at times imposed on) the Canadian refugee protection
regime to, purportedly, ‘deter abuse of the refugee system’ (Government of Canada,
2019). The logic of the policy was simple and quite clearly spatialized: the DCO pro-
vided a list of ‘places in the world where it is less likely for a person to be persecuted
compared to other areas’ (Government of Canada, 2019, emphasis mine). Places that, in
the estimation of the Canadian government and by the Immigration Minister’s decree,
were ‘generally considered safe’ and free from abuses of human rights. Refugee claims
from these places, which were supposedly plentiful, were believed to be largely
unfounded (and a drag on limited time and resources). Thus, these claims were scheduled
to be ‘processed faster’ (emphasis mine), a temporal manipulation of normal processing
times that was meant to ‘make sure that people in need get protection fast, while those
with unfounded claims are sent home quickly’ (Government of Canada, 2019, emphasis
mine).
The DCO soon became highly controversial because, among other things, it included
countries that, as it happened, could not be considered ‘safe’ by impartial third-party
observers. For example, both Hungaryand Mexico were placed on the list of ‘safeplaces’
while neither, according to well-documented accounts produced by international human
rights organizations, could be considered safe for certain minorities (such as Roma in the
case of Hungary
1
) or due to rampantstate and extra-state violence(such as that transpiring
during drug wars in Mexico
2
). A few unresolved legal challenges
3
and several hundred
deportations later, the DCO was eventuallylaid to rest in the archives of Canadian migra-
tion regulation history in 2019, when the Liberal government removed all countries from
the list and de facto annulled the policy (Government of Canada, 2019).
In addition to representing a troubling moment in the evolution of restrictionist
migration control, the DCO is a clear example of the intertwined spatial and temporal
technologies of migration regulation. In the regulatory logic of the DCO, spatial con-
siderations (i.e. people from which places are likely to gain/not gain access to here)areat
once enmeshed with temporal ones (i.e. people from which places are to be processed at
which pace): the access of people from ‘safe’ places (spatial) to here/Canada (spatial) is,
in part, regulated and restricted by processing their refugee claims faster (temporal) and
sending them home (spatial) quickly (temporal). Spatial regulation of migrants is at once
temporal(ized).
4
This paper explores the temporality of state-controlled migration regulation through
an analysis of in-land refugee claim processing in Canada. In the Canadian system,
claims made from inside national territories (i.e. in-lan d) are processed by different
bodies and hence are subject to different sets of protoco ls compared to those made
abroad, for example at Canadian visa offices or through international agencies. In the
198 Social & Legal Studies 31(2)
To continue reading
Request your trial