Points of Entry: How Canada’s Immigration Officers Decide Who Gets in
Vic Satzewich
Every year, over 1.3 million people apply to visit, work, or settle in Canada. It falls to visa officers to determine who gets in – and who stays out. In the face of this enormous responsibility, how do these gatekeepers use their discretionary authority to assess eligibility, credibility, and risk?
Seeking answers to this question, Vic Satzewich conducted interviews with 128 visa officers, locally engaged staff, and immigration program managers at eleven overseas offices. He reveals how the organizational context within which they work shapes their decision making. When something in an application does not “add up” – somber photographs from a supposed wedding celebration, for example – an officer conducts follow-up interviews with the applicant.
In a world where no two visa applications are the same, and in the context of complex and shifting population movements and pressures, this is a fascinating look at how visa officers do their work.
Product Details
About Vic Satzewich
Reviews for Points of Entry: How Canada’s Immigration Officers Decide Who Gets in
D.A. Chekki
CHOICE, February 2016
Satzewich’s first-hand account of the inner workings at the Department of Immigration is not merely timely, it is excellent. Satzewich visited 11 Canadian visa offices abroad, interviewed 128 staff and witnessed 42 interviews with immigrants. It was unprecedented access … Points of Entry is crisp and compelling, written with objectivity and an extraordinary eye for detail. To read it is to understand why Syrian boys died on a beach, and why politicians lament that “doing the right thing is not always easy” — and then feel slightly ashamed.
Holly Doan
Blacklock's Reporter, September 2015
Points of Entry is an ethnographically rich study which brings to life, at times sympathetically, the remote experiences of immigration officers. While offering an entree to the broader implications of how discretionary powers and the organizational culture of visa offices oscillate alongside experiential accounts of racism within Canada’s immigration system, the study also calls for further research into the motivations and intentions of immigration officers.
Sonia D'Angelo, York University
International Journal, Vol. 71 No. 4, December 2016
Points of Entry is a well-written, accessible volume. It makes transparent the formerly hidden exercise of decision making on the part of Canada’s admissions officers and, in so doing, challenges an often critical literature that has presumed entry bias without the test of evidence.
David Ley, University of British Columbia
BC Studies