Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T01:28:56.144Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Refugee Interdiction Before Heaven's Gate1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Gerald Kernerman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Despite their stated commitment to the 1951 Refugee Convention, liberal democratic states routinely interdict refugees, such as through the use of visa requirements, effectively blocking them from reaching their borders. How do liberal democratic states navigate this contradictory terrain? To answer this question, this article explores situations where normally routine and often invisible interdiction practices break down. Canada's approach to Roma arriving from the Czech Republic and Hungary between 1997 and 2001 is an illuminating example of such breakdown and repair, providing a rare glimpse into how one liberal democratic state manages its own interdiction contradictions.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , 2008 , pp. 230 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2008.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

For helpful comments on earlier versions, I would like to thank: Barbara Falk, James Hampshire, Jef Huysmans, Jennifer Hyndman, Alison Mountz, Peter Nyers, Judith Okely, Dagmar Soennecken, Paul St Clair and the anonymous reviewers. I am especially grateful for the comments and support of Matthew Gibney, Eva-Lotta Hedman and Leah Vosko. The research was generously supported by York University through an Atkinson Research Fellowship, Junior Faculty Fund Award and a SSHRC Small Grant.

References

2 Public statement by Canadian Minister of Citizenship and Migration Lucienne Robillard, 22 August 1997.Google Scholar

3 Matthew J. Gibney, ‘ “A Thousand Little Guantanamos”: Western States and Measures to Prevent the Arrival of Refugees’, in Kate E. Tunstall (ed.), Displacement, Asylum, Migration: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2004, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 152.Google Scholar

4 European Council on Refugees and Exiles, ‘Statement to the Round Table on Illegal Immigration’, Brussels, 30 November 2001.Google Scholar

5 Matthew J. Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 2.Google Scholar

6 While the term ‘interdiction’ is sometimes used narrowly, to describe the interception of refugees at sea, I employ it more broadly, much like ‘non-entrée’ or ‘non-arrival’ practices, which James Hathaway defines as ‘the array of legalized policies adopted by states to stymie access by refugees to their territories’, The Rights of Refugees Under International Law, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 291.Google Scholar

7 Davidson, Robert A., ‘Spaces of Immigration “Prevention”: Interdiction and the Non-Place’, Diacritics, 33: 3–4 (2003), pp. 205–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Research on visa practices has grown considerably in recent years, especially with the development of the Schengen visa in Europe. For example, see Walters, William, ‘Mapping Schengenland: Denaturalizing the Border’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20 (2002), pp. 561–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Beyond Europe, far less research has been undertaken. Key exceptions include Mark B. Salter, ‘The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31: 2 (2006), pp. 167–89; Eric Neumayer, ‘Unequal Access to Foreign Spaces: How States Use Visa Restrictions to Regulate Mobility in a Globalized World’, Transactions of the Institute for British Geography, 31 (2006), pp. 72–84; and Horng-Iuen Wang, ‘Regulating Transnational Flows of People: An Institutional Analysis of Passports and Visas as a Regime of Mobility’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 11 (2004), pp. 351–76.

9 Gerald Kernerman, Multicultural Nationalism: Civilizing Difference, Constituting Community, Vancouver, UBC Press, 2005.Google Scholar

10 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951; Liisa Malkki, ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees,’ in Geof Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds), Becoming National: A Reader, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 435–55; Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998.Google Scholar

11 Indeed, as Gibney and others have pointed out, Guantánamo was first used by the Americans to house interdicted Haitian refugees, ‘ “A Thousand Little Guantanamos” ’, p. 324.Google Scholar

12 Didier Bigo, ‘Frontier Controls in the European Union: Who is in Control?’, in Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild (eds), Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement into and Within Europe, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005, pp. 49–99; Jef Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU, London, Routledge, 2006; Walters, ‘Mapping Schengenland’.Google Scholar

13 Bigo, Didier, ‘Globalized-in-Security: The Field and the Ban-opticon’, Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory, 4 (2005), p. 36.Google Scholar

14 Agamben, Homo Sacer, part II, ch. 6.Google Scholar

15 Bigo, ‘Frontier Controls’, p. 86.Google Scholar

16 A large body of literature explores whether interdiction contravenes the UN Refugee Convention, given that its purpose is to shield states from the principle of non-refoulement so central to the Convention. For a good survey of this literature, see Ataner, Atilla, ‘Refugee Interdiction and the Outer Limits of Sovereignty,’ Journal of Law and Equity, 3: 1 (2004), pp. 7–29.Google Scholar

17 Copeland, Emily A., ‘Reshaping the International Refugee Regime: Industrialized States’ Responses to Post-Cold War Refugee Flows’, International Politics, 35 (1998), pp. 425–45;Google Scholar

18 Levy, Carl, ‘The European Union after 9/11: The Demise of a Liberal Democratic Asylum Regime?’, Government and Opposition, 40: 1 (2005), pp. 26–59;CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 James Hathaway, ‘Can International Refugee Law be Made relevant Again?’, US Committee for Refugees, World Refugee Survey 1996, Washington, DC, USCR, 1997.Google Scholar

20 Anthony Richmond, Global Apartheid: Refugees, Racism, and the New World Order, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1994; Richmond, Anthony, ‘Global Apartheid: A Postscript’, Refuge, 19: 3 (2001), pp. 8–13.Google Scholar

21 Neumayer, ‘Unequal Access to Foreign Spaces’.Google Scholar

22 Matthew J. Gibney and Randall Hansen, Asylum Policy in the West: Past Trends, Future Possibilities, World Institute for Development Economics Research Discussion Paper 2003/68, Helsinki, United Nations University, 2003; see also John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 163.Google Scholar

23 Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum.Google Scholar

24 Here, I follow Bigo's suggestion that ‘… researchers tend to underestimate the role of the professionals of politics in the construction of migration as a problem. They address logical flaws of the argument put forward as if they had discovered something the politicians did not know where, in fact, politicians know perfectly well but nevertheless choose a different agenda’, Bigo, ‘Frontier Controls’, p. 60.Google Scholar

25 Zetter, Roger, ‘Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 4.1 (1991), pp. 39–62;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Roger Zetter, ‘More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 20: 2 (2007), pp. 172–92

26 Audrey Macklin, ‘Borderline Security’, in R. Daniels, P. Macklem and K. Roach (eds), The Security of Freedom: Essays on Canada's Anti-Terrorist Bill, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001, pp. 384–401.Google Scholar

27 In making this move, I have been especially influenced by Huysmans and Bigo in their approach to the relationship between the symbolic level of discourse and governmentality. Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity; Bigo, ‘Frontier Controls’.Google Scholar

28 In Britain, the government response to the arrival of Czech Roma resembled the Canadian response in a number of respects – and there were also similarities in the media depiction. But while Canada accepted approximately 90 per cent of the refugee claims made by the Czech Roma arriving in 1997, not a single Czech Roma asylum seeker arriving in the UK was granted refugee status in this same period.Google Scholar

29 Will Guy argues that the immediate increase in the number of Roma leaving the Czech Republic after the video aired demonstrates that the videos ‘were not the prime cause of the sudden departure of Czech Roma, but merely the trigger precipitating what was already a premeditated course of action’, in ‘ “No Soft Touch”: Romani Migration to the U.K. at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century’, Nationalities Papers, 31: 1 (2003), pp. 64–5.Google Scholar

30 Canada, Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration, ‘Czech Republic: Minister Robillard Announces Reimposition of Visitor Visa Requirement’, press release, Ottawa, 7 October 1997, italics added.Google Scholar

31 ‘Attack of the Migration Integrity Specialists! Interdiction and the Threat to Asylum’, Refugee Update, May 2003.Google Scholar

32 Allan Thompson, ‘Asylum Not Assured, Czech Gypsies Warned: Many Reported Booking Flights to Canada’, Toronto Star, 14 August 1997, A10.Google Scholar

33 Globe and Mail, 20 August 1997, A6.Google Scholar

34 Laurie Monsebraaten, ‘Gypsies Here to Escape Persecution, Family Says’, Toronto Star, 22 August 1997, A28.Google Scholar

35 Allan Thompson, ‘Immigration Stalls Gypsy Refugee Bids: Canada Checks for Criminal Records’, Toronto Star, 22 August 1997, A1, A28.Google Scholar

36 One front-page article began with the statement, ‘Homeless shelters in Metro Toronto are days away from having to refuse families who turn up at their doors after Gypsies from the Czech Republic flooding in the city have grabbed the hostel system's few remaining empty beds’, Margaret Philip, ‘Gypsy Influx Floods Shelters’, Globe and Mail, 21 August 1997, A1.Google Scholar

37 Canada, Immigration and Refugee Board, Digest, 9 March 1998.Google Scholar

38 Some of the claims were rejected because they were put forward by claimants found not to be Roma at all. For this reason, as Ronald Lee has argued, the actual rate of success for Czech Roma refugee claimants was probably well over 90 per cent. ‘Post-Communism Romani Migration to Canada’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 13: 2 (SpringSummer 2000), pp. 51–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Since 2004, the EU has been demanding that Canada (as well as the USA and Australia) remove its visa requirements on all the EU accession countries or face a reciprocal visa requirement for Europe as a whole.Google Scholar

40 P.C. 2007-1652 29 October 2007.Google Scholar

41 Canada, Immigration Act, Regulations Amending the Immigration Regulations, 1978, P.C. 2001-2217 29 November 2001 SOR/2001-525 29.Google Scholar

42 Division 5, Section 190:1. Currently, 145 countries are omitted from the list, meaning that their citizens require a visa to enter Canada.Google Scholar

43 Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Standing Committee on Public Accounts, Minutes of Proceedings. 36th Parl., 1st sess., 5 February 1998: 1615.Google Scholar

44 Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. Minutes of Proceedings. 36th Parl., 2nd sess., 2 December 1998: 1620.Google Scholar

45 Ibid., 1725.Google Scholar

46 Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. Minutes of Proceedings, 37th Parl., 1st sess., 27 November 2001: 1020.Google Scholar

47 Cited in Kesby, Alison, ‘The Shifting and Multiple Border and International Law’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 14 (2006), pp. 101–19,Google Scholar 114.

48 Personal correspondence with Paul St. Clair, executive director, Toronto Roma Community Centre.Google Scholar

49 Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. Minutes of Proceedings. 37th Parl., 1st sess., 27 November 2001: 29.Google Scholar

50 Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. Minutes of Proceedings. 36th Parl., 1st sess., 11 February 1999: 1025–30.Google Scholar

51 Lee, Ronald, ‘Canada Holds Unusual Hearing on Romani Refugees from Hungary’, Roma Rights, 1 (1999)Google Scholar; Arthur C. Helton, ‘Roma and Forced Migration: Lessons of Recent Canadian Cases’, European Roma Rights Centre, 2003, available at http://www.errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=537&archiv=1.

52 Geza v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2006 FCA 124: 65.Google Scholar