Securing Borders: Detention and Deportation in Canada
Anna Pratt
Detention and deportation are the two most extreme sanctions of an “immigration penality” that polices noncitizens, identifies those deemed dangerous, diseased, deceitful, or destitute, and refuses them entry or casts them out. They play a key role in regulating national borders, citizens, and populations. But what determines whether a noncitizen is “deserving” or “undeserving”? And how have anxieties about risky outsiders and the quest for security shaped Canada’s response to immigrants and refugees?
Anna Pratt takes a close look at the discursive formations, transformations, and technologies of power that have surrounded the laws, policies, and practices of detention and deportation in Canada since the Second World War. She demonstrates that although the desire to fortify the border against risky outsiders has long been prominent in Canadian immigration penality, the degree to which concerns about security, crime, and fraud have come to govern the process is unprecedented.
Securing Borders traces the connections between seemingly disparate concerns – detention, deportation, liberalism, law, discretion, welfare, criminal justice, refugees, security, and risk – to consider them in relation to the changing modes of Canadian governance.
This work is a rich interdisciplinary study which promises to be of interest to scholars in a range of disciplines including criminology, socio-legal studies, law, history, sociology, political science, international relations, and public administration. It will also be of interest to non-governmental advocates as well as to government representatives who work in the areas of immigration, refugee determination, and related fields.
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About Anna Pratt
Reviews for Securing Borders: Detention and Deportation in Canada
Georgios A. Antonopoulos, University of Durham
British Journal of Criminology Advance Access
Pratt’s book provides a complete and lucid analysis of the darker side of immigration policies in Canada. It maintains balance between a theoretical framework, historical backgrounders and practical illustrations, as well as between law and social science insights which will make reading accessible to a larger audience…It is, arguably the most complete and up-to-date Canadian book on detention and deportation.
Sophie Dorais, McGill University
Canadian Journal of Law and Society, vol. 21, no. 1, 2006
This book goes a long way to render visible the material conditions and tangible practices of the detention and deportation of undeserving and undesirable non-citizens, who are essentially being criminalized for the mere act of migration.
Harsha Walia
The Rain Review of Books, Issue 4:1, Winter 2006
Anna Pratt, a sociologist who teaches criminology, examines an important aspect of Canada’s refugee policy – detention and deportation – from the perspective of human rights and social justice. She sees larger a pattern in connections between the federal government’s immigration and refugee policies, public concerns about crime and welfare fraud, media reporting on immigrant communities such as Toronto’s Somalis, and the trend towards neo-liberalism.
Greg Marquis, University of New Brunswick
Law and Politics Review, Vol. 16, No.3