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The present study proposes a detailed examination of the Irish migration to Montreal between 1847 and 1867, that is to say between the Famine and Confederation. For vast numbers of Irish, Quebec and Montreal were of course merely staging-points in a weary journey whose end lay in Upper Canada or, more often, in the United States of America. [...]

The history of Canada's policies in the matter of Chinese immigration from 1870 to the present time may be divided into four distinct periods: The period of unrestricted immigration ending 1885; the period of the head-tax system from 1885 to 1923; the period of the exclusion of Chinese immigrants ending in 1947 and the period of limited admission of Chinese immigrants under the rules applicable to Asians in general. [...]

The social organization of Canada's inland refugee determination system is explored in this institutional ethnographic study. First listening to refugee claimants' experience from their vantagepoint on the margins of society, the research then explicates the complementary social relations of the refugee determination system in order to examine the contributing social organization and underlying ideology of the politico-administrative system. Three adult, English-speaking single Nigerian men, seeking Convention refugee status or permanent resident status, were interviewed. Phenomenological methods were utilized to analyze the data. An initial explication of the social relations of the system was conducted through the observation of refugee determination hearings and interviews with knowledgeable informants. Through these interviews and textual analysis, ideology at the politico-administrative level was explored. The findings reveal a contradiction between refugees' expectations based on Canada's international reputation in refugee protection and support of democratic rights, and their reception in Canada. Refugee claimants spoke of their dual experience as characterized by exclusion and marginalization from Canadian society at the very time that they needed to reconstruct their sense of self and adapt; of being held suspect as 'criminals' and 'illegals' by the refugee determination system until proven 'genuine'. Inclusion depended on success in the socially, culturally, and politically constructed Canadian refugee determination system; a process that was foreign to them. Comprehension and successful participation in this process depended in part on the support, resources, and information they accessed during their initial settlement period. The organization of the refugee determination system with a focus on the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) revealed complex independent decision-making in a highly decentralized, but hierarchical and non-transparent administrative system. Inconsistencies in decision making and in the degree to which refugees had the opportunity to relate their experience in refugee determination hearings were articulated and observed. Aspects of the system such as selection of members, institutional culture, independence of the IRB, and discourse on refugees in the Canadian media and society were indicators of how the social relations of the system were organized by an underlying ideology. Implications for the profession of social work and for social change were examined.

In October 1875 the Canadian government reserved a tract of land along the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg for the exclusive use of Icelandic immigrants. This was part of a larger policy of reserving land for colonization projects involving European immigrants with a common ethno-religious background. The purpose of this policy was to promote the rapid resettlement and agricultural development of Aboriginal territory in the Canadian Northwest. The case of the Icelandic reserve, or Nýja Ísland (New Iceland), provides a revealing window into this policy, and the ways in which it intersected with the larger processes of colonization in the region during the late nineteenth century. The central problem that this study addresses is the uneasy fit between "colonization reserves" such as New Iceland and the political, economic and cultural logic of nineteenth-century liberalism. Earlier studies have interpreted group settlements as either aberrations from the "normal" pattern of pioneer individualism or communitarian alternatives to it. This study, by contrast, argues that colonization reserves were part of a spatial regime that reflected liberal categories of difference that were integral to the extension of a new liberal colonial order in the region. Using official documents, immigrant letters and contemporary newspapers, this study examines the Icelandic colonists’ relationship to the Aboriginal people they displaced, to other settler groups, and to the Canadian state. It draws out the tensions between the designs and perceptions of government officials in Ottawa and Winnipeg, the administrative machinery of the state, and the lives and strategies of people attempting to navigate shifting positions within colonial hierarchies of race and culture.

The thesis focuses on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada's Guidelines on Women Refugee Claimants Fearing Gender-Related Persecution, released in 1993. The guidelines were designed to address a perceived shortcoming in international refugee law and its domestic applications, namely, the omission of gender-based persecution from the protection of the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The omission of gender from the UN Convention had resulted in gender inequalities in the evaluation of asylum claims, inequalities the Canadian guidelines were designed to correct. However, since the inception of the guidelines, critics have dismissed the directives as numerically ineffective, pointing to the low numbers of women requesting asylum on the basis of gender-related persecution. While such a numerical analysis may be useful, the thesis argues it is incomplete. The thesis centres instead on the vital consciousness-raising role played by the guidelines, both domestically and abroad, and on the concrete results engendered by this function in the international realm of women's human rights.

This thesis studies the discursive behaviour of Canadian federal political parties with regards to immigration and integration issues. It seeks to test the empirical acuity offered by brokerage and issue ownership theories to explain the parties' electoral strategies in these domains. It examines the evolution of partisan discourse in relation to these themes over time, with special attention paid to the merger of right parties. It also studies the impact of certain real-world events, such as the referendum on Quebec secession in 1995 and the terrorist attacks of September 2001, on party positions. It thus proposes a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of five major parties' discourse, focusing on the various positions held by each of them on the issues of immigration and integration in their respective 1993, 1997, 2000, and 2004 election platforms.

Contemporary liberal democratic societies currently enact immigration policies that are morally indefensible from a liberal autonomy and social justice perspective. In a world characterized by stark inequalities in individual opportunities to lead autonomous lives, and in which many individuals lack the basic conditions for autonomous functioning, I argue that contemporary immigration regimes that distinguish between desirable immigrants---who are typically from similarly wealthy countries---and undesirable one ---who are typically members of the global poor---conflict with liberal commitments to individual autonomy and equality of opportunity. I advocate that such commitments should lead wealthy countries to change their criteria for immigration, so that they admit proportionally many more of the global poor than they currently do. Such redistributive immigration policies are a way for rich countries to fulfill their global distributive justice duties. The thesis examines two major objections to formulating immigration policies on grounds of global distributive justice. First, some theorists posit a moral distinction between compatriots and non-compatriots, and argue that duties of redistribution should be restricted to compatriots. Second, some theorists fear that redistributive immigration schemes will have negative consequences on the conditions of social justice in host communities. This fear derives from the assumptions that social solidarity and social trust will be eroded by the greater ethno-cultural heterogeneity that is likely to result from the implementation of redistributive immigration policies. In response I show, first, that social solidarity is not circumscribed by national boundaries; the empirical evidence does not support claims that solidaristic acts rely on a predefined idea of community. Second, drawing on the Canadian case study, I find that institutional trust rather than interpersonal trust is key to motivating compliance with social welfare policies, and that this kind of trust can be sustained under conditions of ethno-cultural heterogeneity.

The social organization of Canada's inland refugee determination system is explored in this institutional ethnographic study. First listening to refugee claimants' experience from their vantagepoint on the margins of society, the research then explicates the complementary social relations of the refugee determination system in order to examine the contributing social organization and underlying ideology of the politico-administrative system. Three adult, English-speaking single Nigerian men, seeking Convention refugee status or permanent resident status, were interviewed. Phenomenological methods were utilized to analyze the data. An initial explication of the social relations of the system was conducted through the observation of refugee determination hearings and interviews with knowledgeable informants. Through these interviews and textual analysis, ideology at the politico-administrative level was explored. The findings reveal a contradiction between refugees' expectations based on Canada's international reputation in refugee protection and support of democratic rights, and their reception in Canada. Refugee claimants spoke of their dual experience as characterized by exclusion and marginalization from Canadian society at the very time that they needed to reconstruct their sense of self and adapt; of being held suspect as 'criminals' and 'illegals' by the refugee determination system until proven 'genuine'. Inclusion depended on success in the socially, culturally, and politically constructed Canadian refugee determination system; a process that was foreign to them. Comprehension and successful participation in this process depended in part on the support, resources, and information they accessed during their initial settlement period. The organization of the refugee determination system with a focus on the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) revealed complex independent decision-making in a highly decentralized, but hierarchical and non-transparent administrative system. Inconsistencies in decision making and in the degree to which refugees had the opportunity to relate their experience in refugee determination hearings were articulated and observed. Aspects of the system such as selection of members, institutional culture, independence of the IRB, and discourse on refugees in the Canadian media and society were indicators of how the social relations of the system were organized by an underlying ideology. Implications for the profession of social work and for social change were examined. / Arts, Faculty of / Social Work, School of / Graduate

This thesis provides a geographical analysis of the response of the Canadian nation-state to human smuggling. I contend that nation-states must be examined in relation to transnational migration and theorized as diverse sets of embodied relationships. As a case study, I conducted an ethnography of the institutional response to the arrival of four boats carrying migrants smuggled from Fujian, China to British Columbia in 1999. I studied the daily work of border enforcement done by civil servants in the federal bureaucracy of Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), as well as the roles played by other institutions in the response to the boats. This "ethnography of the state" led me to theorize the nation-state geographically as a network of employees that interact with a variety of institutions in order to enact immigration policy. I also interviewed employees of other institutions involved in the response to human smuggling, including provincial employees, immigration lawyers, service providers, suprastate organizations, refugee advocates, and media workers. The thesis explores crossinstitutional collaboration among them and the resulting decision-making environment in which civil servants design and implement policy. Civil servants practice enforcement according to how and where they "see" human smuggling. My conceptual understanding of state practices relates to these efforts to order transnational migration. Diverse institutional actors negotiate smuggling at a variety of scales. Power relations are visible through discussions of smuggling at some scales, but obscured at others. I "jump scale" through embodiment in order to understand the micro-geographies of the response. This shift in the scale of analysis of the nation-state uncovers different relationships, interests, and negotiations in which state practices are embedded. This approach to geographies of the nation-state considers the time-space relations across which state practices take place, the everyday enactment of policy, the categorization of migrants, and the constitution of borders through governance. I argue that such an approach is key to understanding the relationship between nation-states and smuggled migrants. The findings suggest a re-spatialization of enforcement through which nation-states increasingly practice interception abroad and design stateless: spaces, and in so doing, reconstitute international borders. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate