Enforcing Exclusion

Precarious Migrants and the Law in Canada

By Sarah Grayce Marsden
Categories: Law & Legal Studies, Law & Society, Public & Social Policy, Immigration, Emigration & Transnationalism
Series: Law and Society
Publisher: UBC Press
Hardcover : 9780774837736, 248 pages, August 2018
Paperback : 9780774837743, 248 pages, March 2019
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774837750, 248 pages, August 2018
Ebook (EPUB) : 9780774837767, 248 pages, August 2018

Table of contents

Introduction

1 The Creation and Growth of Precarious Migration in Canada: “Illegal” Migration and the Liberal State

2 Status, Deportability, and Illegality in Daily Life

3 Working Conditions and Barriers to Substantive Remedies

4 Exclusion from the Social State: Health, Education, and Income Security

5 Multi-Sited Enforcement: Maintaining Subordinate Membership

6 Rights and Membership: Toward Inclusion?

Postscript

Appendix A: Migrant Participant Profiles

Appendix B: Sample Interview Script

Notes; Index

Description

Migrant workers, though long welcomed in Canada for their labour, are often excluded from both workplace protections and basic social benefits such as health care, income assistance, and education. Through interviews with migrants and their advocates, Marsden shows that people with precarious migration status face barriers in law, policy, and practice, affecting their ability to address adverse working conditions and their access to institutions such as hospitals, schools, and employment standards boards. Enforcing Exclusion recasts what migration status means to both the state and to non-citizens, questioning the adequacy of human-rights-based responses in addressing its exclusionary effects.

Reviews

Enforcing Exclusion should be on every immigration lawyer’s bookshelf.

- Andrea Black

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. 

- Celine Hocquet