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
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/15945 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Mountz, Alison |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 29763579 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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