Chinese Migrants Are Being Smuggled Into Canada Regularly
...and almost nothing is being done about it.
Jan 21 2019
Canada gets more smuggled Chinese
Illegal Chinese migrants continue to flow into Canada almost unabated despite pledges from Beijing to Ottawa that it is working to halt the illicit trade, a senior police officer says.
"I understand that there have been people coming in all the time, regularly," said Detective Constable Ray Miu of the Toronto Police's Combined Forces Asian Investigative Unit. "There are still people involved in this alien smuggling."
A source close to the continuing human-smuggling schemes said that as many as 300 migrants have surreptitiously entered Canada from Fujian province in southeastern China since early September.
Most of the Chinese migrants entered Canada by cargo ships via the West Coast and, in a new twist, by container into Montreal, before heading for the United States, the source said.
"Business continues to be brisk," he said.
The source said four cargo ships dropped off most of the migrants close to the southern B.C. coastline, where they were then ferried onshore and subsequently made their way inland, undetected. At least one other cargo ship carried a small number of migrants by container to Montreal from Europe.
(Criminal kingpins, known as snakeheads, are believed to have organized four boatloads of nearly 600 Chinese migrants in the summer of 1999. Most made refugee claims, but only 24 have been granted refugee status.)
The human trafficking continues even though then-foreign-minister Lloyd Axworthy received assurances from Chinese authorities in September, 1999, that China would work diligently to crack down on the human-smuggling rings. The two governments also committed themselves to co-operate in criminal investigations by sharing information on suspects and witnesses.
And in April, China promised Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan that it would post hundreds of extra security forces on the Fujian coast to prevent an exodus of illegal migrants to Canada.
The source said there was a temporary lull in the highly lucrative trade after U.S. authorities, with the help of a Canadian undercover agent, cracked a major human-smuggling ring in the spring that been shipping migrants from Fujian to the United States via the Windsor-Detroit border.
But the source said the human trafficking picked up steam again in the fall, confirming predictions by Canadian and U.S. authorities that Chinese migrants, desperate for a new life, would continue to pay in excess of $50,000 a head to criminal syndicates to ship them to North America.
Once they arrived, in September and after, the latest group of illegal migrants were split into smaller groups and then travelled to Toronto by chartered bus, posing as a Chinese tour group, as well as by train, plane or concealed in tractor trailers, the source said.
There, the migrants were holed up in safe houses for as long as six weeks.
Det. Constable Miu said that Toronto is dotted with homes that shield illegal migrants until they can make plans to move into the United States.
"This is routine," he said. "There will be somebody here to accommodate them while they arrange an opportunity to go down [to the United States.]
A spokesman for Ms. Caplan said yesterday he was unaware that any Chinese migrants have slipped into Canada undetected and noted that the number of illegal Chinese migrants seized in the United States dropped dramatically last year.
But Staff Sergeant Glen Rockwell of the RCMP's Immigration and Passport Task Force said in an interview from Vancouver yesterday that rough weather in the fall and winter months usually acts as a deterrent to the human-smuggling trade. He acknowledged that cargo ships could ferry migrants close to the B.C. coastline.
"It would be a treacherous journey, but certainly not impossible," he said.
Staff Sgt. Rockwell added, however, that Chinese authorities are assisting in the interdiction effort by seizing vessels bound for Canada from Fujian and Hong Kong.
Jim Redmond, manager of Citizenship and Immigration on Vancouver Island, said that human smugglers appear to have switched courses, turning to Europe as a routing point.
He added that there are still concerns that Chinese migrants are being smuggled into Canada in containers. "I think it is naive to say that's the end of it, and Canada won't have to worry about it in the future."
........................................................................................................................
Embodying the nation-state:Canada’s
response to human smuggling
Alison Mountz
Department of Geography, The Maxwell School, Syracuse University, 144 Eggers Hall,
Syracuse, NY 13244, USA, Abstract
This paper argues that a shift in the scale of analysis of the nation-state, from national and
global scales to the finer scale of the body reveals processes, relations, and experiences otherwise obscured. The response of the Canadian government to the arrival of migrants smuggled
by boat from China to British Columbia in 1999 serves as a case study. I draw on feminist
and post-structural theories that locate exercises of power and productions of difference at the
body in order to address a broader debate about the power of the nation-state to mediate
transnational flows. Following accusations that they were losing control of borders, civil servants of the federal government of Canada sought to contain the issue of human smuggling
by detaining migrants, controlling flows of information, and carefully constructing the public
image of the state. This research, based on ethnographic fieldwork with Citizenship and Immigration Canada, suggests potential in new epistemologies of the nation-state drawn through
corporeal geographies, currently undervalued in mainstream political geography.
# 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Nation-state; Body; Embodiment; Human smuggling; Canada; Transnational migration
Introduction
When boats carrying migrants smuggled from Fujian, China were intercepted by
Canadian authorities off of the west coast of British Columbia (BC) in the summer
of 1999, the Canadian media were saturated with images of a group that came to
be known as ‘‘the boat migrants.’’ Front-page photographs of the boat arrivals
portrayed migrants crowded on boats, having just crossed from international
waters into Canadian waters in an attempt to enter the country surreptitiously.
Discourse in the media foregrounded the migrant body, focusing early coverage on
disease, malnutrition, dehydration, and hypothermia.1 This prominent coverage
played on the symbolic imagery of migrant ships as a threat to the nation-state,
presented the migrants as a threat to public health, and thus contributed to fears
regarding the porosity of international borders, the integrity of Canada’s refugee
program, and the vulnerability of the nation-state more broadly.
Simultaneously, images of officers of the Canadian law boarding the boats
emerged in newspapers. Members of the Emergency Response Team of the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and of the federal Departments of Citizenship
and Immigration Canada (CIC) and National Defence were shown clothed in full
uniform and mask to protect them from the spread of disease. They stepped in to
bring under control a situation narrated by the media as fully out of the control of
the federal government (Hier & Greenberg, 2002). The four boats arrived over the
course of 11 weeks and provoked intense public debate in Canada regarding the
sovereignty of the nation-state, manifest in the perception of its inability to police
borders.2 A parallel discussion regarding the strength of the nation-state has
transpired in recent years in academic literatures on globalization and transnationalism. While some scholars argue that the nation-state has lost political power in a
globalizing world (Ohmae, 1995; Appadurai, 1996), others suggest that it remains
powerful but re-positions itself strategically at different scales (Sassen, 1996;
Marden, 1997; Ong, 1999). This paper posits corporeal geographies as a key scale
at which to understand the nation-state and the re-spatialization of governance
regarding refugee claimants and smuggled migrants.
In Canada, there exist distinctly anxious debates regarding sovereignty as the
nation-state struggles to assert its own position on refugee movements and the
policing of international borders in relation to the ever-encroaching power of its
southern neighbor. The response of the Canadian Government to human smuggling illuminates inconsistencies regarding the global positioning of Canada as
both humanitarian, refugee-receiving nation and enforcer. The Canadian Government facilitates immigration as a population strategy to build a multicultural
society, as an economic strategy to amass investment in Canada, and as a labor
strategy to fill gaps in the labor market.3 The smuggled migrants were positioned
as a threat to national security and fell within the mandate of the Department of
CIC to enforce borders.4 The 1999 arrivals comprised the largest group of refugee
1 These images reflect similar constructions of Chinese migrants as harbingers of disease during migrations to Canada a century earlier (Anderson, 1991). 2 Debates about the permeability of North American international borders were present long before
the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001, but have since intensified.
3 See, for example, Ley (2003) on Canada’s Business Immigration Program and Pratt (1999) on
Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Program.
4 In 1999, when the Fujianese migrants arrived and again in 2000, when most were deported, Canada
failed to meet the target of Elinor Caplan, then Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, to
land upwards of 300,000 immigrants annually, approximately 1% of the Canadian population (Ley and
Hiebert, 2001:120).
324 A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345
claimants detained in recent Canadian history and eventually, in the spring of
2000, the largest mass deportations. Human smuggling movements constitute
‘‘mixed flows’’ of refugees and economic migrants and therefore call upon various
mandates of federal, provincial, and local governments. The response to human
smuggling thus accentuates the reality that ‘‘the state’’ does not contain or enact a
unified series of agendas, objectives, or actors. State practices encompass, rather, a
series of diverse interests and bodies that are often themselves in conflict.
Analysis of the ability of the nation-state to manage transnational migration
serves as one platform from which political geographers can address debates
regarding the vitality and integrity of geographical practices of nation-states.
Human smuggling and trafficking5 involve the movement of bodies as commodities
for consumption in the global sex trade and other service economies. Smuggled
migrants experience most viscerally the displacement caused by neoliberal agendas,
the brutal tactics of enforcers as entrepreneurs of migration (Chin, 1999), and state
practices of detention (Bowden, 2003). Yet images of immigration often narrate the
story of the emasculated state:one that is rendered powerless by flows depicted as
out of control, embodied by migrants who materialize in discourse driven by metaphors of invasion, flood, and waves (Ellis & Wright, 1998; McGuinness, 2001).
Some bodies are made more visible because of the ways that they are raced,
classed, and gendered, which figures prominently in discourse on immigration and
is central to decisions about who ‘‘belongs’’ to the nation-state and which groups
are portrayed as bodies out of place (Cresswell, 1997). These differences are inscribed onto the body and reveal the operation of power through visibility (Pratt,
1998). In response to pressure from national and international publics to
strengthen ‘‘leaky’’ borders, the federal government presented public images of
authorities in control of the situation.
Feminist theories that locate power at the scale of the body uncover attempts of
the nation-state to strategically mediate transnational processes of globalization,
mobility, and displacement. I advocate embodiment as a strategy that draws on
standpoint theory (Harding, 1986; Haraway, 1991) and institutional ethnography
(Smith, 1987) to understand the geography of the nation-state, and more specifically, the operation of power among institutional actors and migrants. Given that
power moves through institutional practices at various scales, a shift in the scale of
analysis of the nation-state, from national and global scales to the finer scale of the
body, reveals processes, relationships, and experiences otherwise obscured.
The migrant body was centered in the Canadian response to human smuggling,
both discursively and materially. Embodying the nation-state means moving
beyond analyses of policy and structure, to the more fluid, daily, personal interac5 Some delineate strictly between the definition of smuggling and trafficking. Whereas human smuggling is ‘‘the illicit movement of people across international boundaries’’ (Koser, 2001:59), human trafficking entails additional elements of coercion and exploitation and tends to be associated with the
movement of women and children, often into the sex trade. I find, however, that the distinction is
ambiguous in practice, given how little is known about the experiences of those who are smuggled and
trafficked over time.
A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345 325
tions that surround and disrupt these formal instruments of governance to locate
political processes in a time and a place (e.g. Gupta, 1995; Heyman & Smart, 1999;
Hansen & Stepputat, 2001). This paper seeks to embody state practices by drawing
on an ethnography conducted with the federal department of Citizenship and
Immigration Canada (CIC). Research focused on the response to human smuggling in 1999. I proceed by outlining a theoretical framework and then reviewing
various embodiments with the objective of uncovering power relations therein.
I then discuss ethnographic findings. I conclude with the argument that state practices of border enforcement are re-spatializing and a discussion of what this means
for potential refugee claimants.
Political geographies of body and state
Michael Taussig asks, ‘‘Could it be that with disembodiment, presence
expands?’’ (1997:3). Because state practices are often concealed in praxis, they
become more powerful for those for whom decision-making processes are
obscured, such as immigrants, refugees, and those who advocate on their behalf
(see Kirby, 1997:5). Academics reify this disembodiment when they marginalize
people from their analyses. As a result, representations of the state as a coherent
body politic circulate without sufficient interrogation; the state continues to be
conceptualized and addressed as one body (see Gatens, 1991); as a result, the
nation-state remains a masculinist, secure concept (see Nast, 1998:195).
In her review of content of Political Geography, Janet Kodras recognized power
as the central theme running through all political geographies, but noted a ‘‘critical
absence’’ of studies on the operation of power as well as a dearth of ‘‘cutting edge
theoretical treatments of the state’’ (1999:75–78). Geographers are now, however,
showing renewed interest in the state (Flint, 2003).6 The method of institutional
ethnography addresses the absences identified by Kodras and, in so doing, offers a
more nuanced rendition of state practices by seeking to understand and locate the
operation of power in the daily work done by civil servants (e.g. Herbert, 1997). In
this paper, data illustrate the negotiations surrounding the implementation of
immigration policy, such as the workplace politics in which policies were enacted.
In order to accomplish such embodiment, I conducted institutional research to
understand the power of the state through the day-to-day operation of the
bureaucracy. I was interested in how individuals within immigration made sense of
human smuggling and of their own role in responding. I conducted semi-structured
interviews and participant-observation in CIC’s regional headquarters for the BC/
Yukon region and reviewed documents pertaining to the 1999 response. I also
interviewed employees of non-governmental organizations, immigration lawyers,
refugee advocates, supra-state institutional actors, and media workers in order to
understand governance practices.
6 Scholars from a variety of interdisciplinary locations have speculated on the academic’s unwillingness to engage more fully with the state (e.g. Abrams, 1988; Kirby, 1997; Mitchell, 1991; Aronowitz &
Bratsis, 2002).
326 A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345
Michel Foucault, 1991, 1995) theorized a shift from more centralized, repressive,
sovereign power aligned with the state to power that operates in more diffuse,
de-centralized, and productive fashion. Following in his lead, post-structural
approaches offer useful tools with which to understand state practices (see
Mitchell, 1991; Painter, 1995; Steinmentz, 1999), and anthropologists in particular
are using these tools to go ‘‘inside’’ the state (Heyman & Smart, 1999; Nelson,
1999; Hansen & Stepputat, 2001). In turn, they are finding state practices to be
ever more dispersed, as Hansen and Stepputat note:
As modern forms of govermentality penetrate and shape human life in unprecedented ways, the practices and sites of governance have also become ever
more dispersed, diversified, and fraught with internal inconsistencies and contradictions. ... The strength of the modern state seems... to be its dispersion and
ubiquity (2001:16).
Governance practices surrounding immigration and refugee flows are shifting
accordingly, as both facilitative and enforcement practices become increasingly
transnational. Political geographers can contribute to the dialogue by locating the
operation of power and the discourse surrounding states and globalization in a
time and a place (Marchand & Runyan, 2000; Nagar, Lawson, McDowell &
Hanson, 2002). This understanding of how state practices are spatialized involves
the social construction of scale.
Geographers argue that scale is a social construction, not ‘‘a preordained hierarchical framework for ordering the world’’ (Marston, 2000:220, see also Smith,
1992; Staeheli, 1994; Delaney & Leitner, 1997). As Swygedouw notes, ‘‘Scale is,
consequently, not socially or politically neutral, but embodies and expresses power
relationships’’ (1997:140). Through new constructions of scale emerge political
potential in new framings of relationships (Swyngedouw, 1997). Geographers have
called upon the social construction of scale to understand state practices (Brenner,
1997; Leitner, 1997), and I am interested in how civil servants themselves draw on
different scales in their daily negotiations. An analysis that links state practices to
the social construction of scale opens potential for new understandings of the
relationship between local state practices and global processes.
Feminist geographers argue that certain scales, such as the household (Marston,
2000) and the individual (Hyndman, 2001), have been overlooked. Likewise, feminist critics of discourse surrounding globalization advocate shifts in scalar narratives
that account for the gendering of transnational phenomena (Marchand & Runyan,
2000; Nagar, Lawson, McDowell & Hanson, 2002). Shifting to the scale of the
body, Nagar et al. note that ‘‘starting from the standpoint of people and economic
spheres that are marginalized under capitalist processes reveals the ways in which
contemporary globalization is intimately tied to gendered and racialized systems of
oppression’’ (2002:259). These calls for new scalar narratives also apply to the
nation-state. Social scientists often write generally of ‘‘states’’ as though they represent coherent and singular projects. Rather than a coherent, hidden strategy
A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345 327
awaiting discovery, states are comprised of persons with distinct objectives and
perspectives, often struggling amongst themselves over state projects.
Geographers are increasingly interested in the body (e.g. Rose, 1995; Longhurst,
1995; Nast & Pile, 1998; Callard, 1998).7 Mobile bodies perpetually rouse the state
into action. As such, the body is a crucial element to understand the operation of
power in relations between states and migrants by locating both civil servants and
migrants in relation to one another. First, I aim to embody the state quite literally,
to understand who enacts policy and in what way. This strategy of embodiment
is a feminist analytical approach that shifts scale to center people within conceptual
understandings of the state. It draws on the work of feminist scholars (e.g.
Harding, 1986; Smith, 1987; Haraway, 1991) to situate knowledge and power in
time and space. Embodiment locates power relations and contextualizes decisionmaking with workplace settings and life histories. The second approach to the
body working through this paper is the Foucauldian, post-structural notion that
power produces identities through discourse; that identities are inscribed onto the
bodies of migrants (see Pratt, 1999) and bureaucrats. These discursive practices of
identification, categorization, and nomination show how civil servants see
migration (cf Scott, 1998). So while the project of embodying the state takes place
empirically in the form of ethnographic research, many of the embodiments outlined in the next section of the paper are enabled with analysis of the construction
of migrant and state identities in the to and fro between CIC and the media. I will
illustrate the relationship between materiality and discourse wherein the narration
of identity explains who and where migrants were situated in the institutional landscape.
The media play a central analytical role in this articulation of geographies of the
nation-state. In the recursive relationships between public opinion, media representation, and the ‘‘key messages’’ communicated by civil servants to the press, the
mainstream media have become the primary method of image-building into which
the federal government pours significant resources. The media framed issues for
various audiences (e.g. the nation, the Province of British Columbia, the cities of
British Columbia, and foreign governments). With this in mind, I now explore the
strategic embodiments of human smuggling.
Embodiment and containment
Power moves through dis/embodiments, and it is therefore important to analyze
who is embodied, how, and why in the relationship between the state and smuggled
migrants. I demonstrate here that there is an important relationship between
discourse and materiality; that these dis/embodiments reveal the spatialized processes through which state practices materialize in relation to migrants and refugee
claimants in quotidian life.
7 I am mindful of Robyn Longhurst’s argument that in theoretical work on the body, geographers too
often overlook the actual messy materiality of bodies (2001).
328 A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345
The dis/embodiment of the state
Immigration departments seem to be disembodied institutions from the perspective of those located outside of government, whether immigrants, refugee claimants, immigration service providers, lawyers, or other members of civil society.
Around the globe, people share common experiences such as long lines and opaque
policies of immigration departments. The disembodiment of these bureaucracies
introduces significant distance between clientele and civil servants, thus expanding
power through absence, as Taussig suggests (1997:3). Decisions regarding clients’
cases are rarely attached to an individual responsible. The less accessible the
decision-makers are to those whose lives they influence, the larger looms the power
of the state to act without demands for accountability.8
With such limited communication and collaboration between immigrants and
refugee claimants, their advocates, and those who decide cases, an advocacy industry arises and operates in adversarial fashion with the federal government. In interviews, I explored how and why CIC was disembodied, given the Department’s
central role in responding to the 1999 boat arrivals. Lawyers, service providers,
and advocates who worked with the smuggled migrants from outside of the parameters of government addressed how difficult it was to establish long-term working
relationships with CIC. They mentioned inaccessibility, secrecy, and a high turnover rate as barriers to communication and relationship-building with the federal
government. Indeed, CIC is known jokingly among immigration consultants as
‘‘the fortress.’’
To some extent, the disembodiment of the state is a function of a large bureaucracy that suppresses and normalizes the individual by emphasizing the whole.
Bureaucracies are designed to protect and manage information as well as public
image (see Heyman, 1995). The federal government often appears to be transparent
on paper and in the media, its outward expressions being written policy, organizational diagrams, and press conferences. Indeed, most immigration policies are a
matter for public record. Policy on paper, however, narrates only a partial story,
the idealized ways in which events should take place, rather than the ways that
things actually happen on the ground.
Disembodiment is also a response to the media. Whereas Canada was once
known as a more progressive, humanitarian state in its granting of refugee status,
it was now portrayed in the media as ‘‘soft’’ and unable to enforce borders, with
the integrity of its refugee program threatened.
The cartoon (Fig. 1) depicts the Canadian government as a marine filling station,
offering welfare assistance, a lax court system, and the acceptance of ‘‘hard luck
stories.’’ The marine arrivals catalyzed a notable shift in Canada in public opinion
8 The call centers of CIC are a classic geographical representation of this reality. Applicants are not
able to call the office where their application is being processed, but rather must contact call centers that
are geographically detached from sites of application or processing, as well as detached from the caller.
CIC call centers are often known for inconsistencies in providing information.
A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345 329
toward immigration, in public discourse surrounding immigration, and in the
political will and capacity of the government to respond. The media produced
these images for consumption by an anxious public, the migrants serving symbolically as an expression of a perceived loss of control of Canadian borders.
In response, the federal government communicated a semblance of control to the
public in order to counter media representations. The boat arrivals drew civil
servants out of their offices and onto the water in ways that made them very visible
to the Canadian public. In this case, federal officials were embodied in particular
ways. Covered in white uniform with hood, black vest, and black boots, they were
homogenized and secure, an embodied expression of the boundaries of the nationstate. The state is therefore strategically embodied in distinct ways and in relation
to different policies and populations.
Fig. 1. ‘‘Immigration Canada’’ as a filling station. Times Colonist, July 22, 1999. (Cartoon by Adrian
Raeside).
330 A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345
CIC worked proactively with the media. In interviews, members of the media
praised the Department’s communications during the response to the arrivals.9
Narratives of the response to human smuggling suggested that communications are
central to the control of information and people in the bureaucracy. In Ottawa, in
the Communications Department at National Headquarters, there were five people
working full-time to monitor the news, and to compile, analyze, and circulate clippings following the boat arrivals. At the same time, there were only three people
working in intelligence in the entire BC/Yukon Region, only one of whom was
assigned to gather intelligence about smuggling movements. While employees in
communications did not work directly with clients, they were among the first
employees flown to the site where migrants would be off-loaded when a boat was
intercepted in order to begin working proactively with reporters.
In the response to human smuggling, a generic disembodiment turned to a
strategic embodiment of the federal response to a delicate situation. The government pursued an enforcement response that foregrounded bodies in certain ways,
including those of bureaucrats, migrants, and representations of human smugglers
themselves.
The dis/embodiment of human smugglers
In contrast with the embodiment of migrants that I detail below, I wish to point
to a second set of people central to smuggling practices, yet mere shadows in the
public realm:human smugglers. At the time of the arrivals, there was sizeable
speculation as to the networks through which they had been organized, immediately labeled ‘‘transnational organized crime.’’ Those who comprised these networks, however, were not identified.10 They remained a ‘‘nefarious’’ force against
whom federal authorities struggled.11 Those responding locally, at the center of the
intelligence capacity insisted that they could not with any certainty characterize
these movements as transnational organized crime and suggested that this was a
sexy term used by enforcement agencies to marshal resources. Higher up in the
bureaucracy, and further away from BC, the narrative was confident and coherent,
part of building an image of power, the perception of control, and the need to
combat a known evil. Lower down, the narrative was less secure. The image painted for me was a colorful one of frontline officers and street-level bureaucrats
scrambling to maintain the fac¸ade communicated to the public.
For federal governments driven by the power of public opinion, the smuggled
migrant body is the most visible expression of an illicit activity that undermines
the integrity of political boundaries. The Canadian federal government has not
9 Interview, Vancouver, August, 2001. 10 The term ‘‘snakehead’’ refers to the more powerful individuals running smuggling operations. Snakeheads do not travel with migrants, but rather employ an extensive network of ‘‘enforcers’’ to transport
migrants. Enforcers are known to use violent tactics to control migrants on board.
11 It is interesting to note alternative perspectives on human smugglers sometimes held by their clients.
Clients often respect human smugglers for facilitating their movement and entrance into jobs and social
structures (see Chin, 1999).
A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345 331
committed resources, infrastructure, or political will to large-scale detention as
practiced in Australia or the United States. Whereas Canada does not routinely
detain those smuggled by plane, the federal government did, however, decide to
detain the migrants who arrived on the second, third, and fourth boats in 1999.
Detention, one among many strategies pursued by nation-states to combat human
smuggling,12 was a controversial decision. Human smugglers receive partial payments for their services over time as clients make their way to the final destination.13 People noted in interviews that detention was an effort to stop human
smuggling to Canada by freezing the migration in place, thus preventing smugglers
from receiving full payment.
Another reason to detain was to sustain the integrity of the federal government in
the mind of the public and other foreign governments. In interviews, respondents
expressed a clear demand from the public to ‘‘do something.’’ Detention is among
the most expensive, reactive, and short-term solutions to human smuggling, but it is
a visible expression of a swift government response, of containment of the problem.
Images in the newspapers of a government out-of-control of its borders soon gave
way to images such as Fig. 2 that portrays minors from the boats in handcuffs and
prison uniforms; bodies contained, a situation brought under control.
Locating the immigrant body at the center of the nationalist imagination in his
analysis of Australian public discourse, Hage refers to detention as ‘‘ethnic caging’’
(1998:105), a material expression of racialized othering. As with the dehumanizing
view of smuggled migrants crowded on boats, the proximity of other bodies
inscripted onto their own, detention also dehumanizes and depersonalizes the
refugee claimant as one in a contained crowd.
In their absence, the state painted a portrait of human smugglers in a narrative
that involved an enforcement response. By detaining migrants to impede smugglers, the nation-state imprisoned one set of people in order to deter another.
While smugglers remained unidentified, their clients were essentially over-identified,
held captive as a visible and costly message to various publics and to smugglers
themselves. Detention communicated to several audiences—including potential
migrants in China, the Chinese and American governments, and the Canadian
public—that human smugglers would not operate successfully in Canada; that
Canada would respond with a show of force and maintain its ability to police
international borders. Migrants were also, therefore, central to this narrative and
embodied in particular ways.
12 Other strategies target smugglers through more direct means such as intercepting smuggled migrants
more aggressively, freezing the assets of suspected smuggling rings, improving intelligence, investing
more resources in prosecution and punitive measures. CIC studies these models in other states. Managers have traveled to Europe to observe prosecutions, to the US to learn about interception practices,
and to Australia to observe detention sites.
13 To the smuggler, the migrant body represented significant revenue, from $30,000 to $60,000 US with
payments from wages for jobs secured in the destination over time. Well-documented practices of abduction and torture are the punishment to the individual or his or her family for not making such payments
(Chin, 1999).
332 A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345
The over-embodiment and containment of migrants
Despite the efforts of CIC to present images of control, the boat arrivals played
in the media as a crisis that provoked anxiety in the public. Media representations
positioned the migrants as a threat to Canadian security. Migrant bodies materiFig. 2. Images of containment. The Globe and Mail, August 20, 1999, A1. (Photo by Peter Blashill).
A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345 333
alized in the media as a site of disease leaking across borders (see Cresswell, 1997).
Images of containment accompanied front-page articles. The Province, a daily
paper in British Columbia, centered the body by headlining the text ‘‘QUARANTINED’’ over a photograph of a group of migrants crowded on the stern of a
boat. As Clarkson (2000) argued, the media did little to contextualize the numbers
as small compared, for example, to the number of people smuggled through
Canada’s airports, estimated in the tens of thousands annually.14 Comparatively
speaking, six hundred is a small number in a larger, continuous movement. But in
this case, 600 people symbolized, simply, ‘‘too many’’ (Clarkson, 2000). Indeed, the
reactions on the part of the media and the Canadian public were disproportionately large and anti-immigration, attacking what the media called
‘‘bogus refugees’’ and what was perceived as an ineffective refugee program. This
accompanied a notable shift in language with terms such as ‘‘boat people,’’ ‘‘queue
jumper,’’ and ‘‘illegal alien.’’ The migrants’ identities were inscribed not as ‘‘genuine’’ political refugees with a right to fully access Canada’s refugee program, but as
‘‘economic’’ migrants who had committed a criminal act.15 The media were therefore complicit in delineating the identities of smuggled migrants as economic
migrants and, therefore, ‘‘bogus refugees.’’
The federal government responded to enormous pressure for an enforcement
response to human smuggling with a strategy that entailed detention, the control of
flows of information, and deportation. As the first boat was intercepted, CIC
quickly set-up a temporary site for processing at Esquimalt, a military base of
the Department of National Defence located in a residential suburb of Victoria.
There, civil servants processed migrants through stations of showering, delousing,
medical exams, and immigration interviews. In an effort to identify people and
to distinguish clients from enforcers, they sought and photographed markings on
the body such as tattoos. They also numbered migrants on their backs in black
magic marker and on their wrists with wristbands. CIC conducted initial immigration interviews, recorded refugee claims, and over time, provided access to legal
counsel.
Nearly 500 of the 599 migrants made refugee claims.16 When CIC released the
adults that had arrived on the first boat, many did not appear at refugee claimant
hearings in subsequent weeks. Having abandoned their claims, they were presumed
to have traveled to the US to work. This abandonment further inflamed public
opinion regarding Canada’s refugee program and its ability to police borders. By
referencing this disappearance, CIC argued successfully that migrants on the
following three boats posed a ‘‘flight risk.’’ This enabled the federal government to
14 Interview, Ottawa, October, 2001. 15 This is an interesting contrast to the characterization of the wealthier business immigrants recruited
from Asia by Canada and lauded as ideal migrants because of the economic dimensions of their lives.
Whereas wealthier immigrants are rewarded for their economic ambitions, poorer migrants are punished
as ‘‘greedy.’’
16 CIC (2000) Marine Arrivals:Status Update. 18 February.
334 A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345
pursue longer-term detention with most of the adults that arrived on the following
three boats.
Following the processing of ensuing arrivals, CIC either released migrants or
transported them to longer-term detention facilities. Ultimately, 492 (83%) of the
599 made refugee claims, and 429 (72%) were held in long-term detention.17 In
some cases, detention lasted over 18 months as claimants exhausted opportunities
for due process in Canada. CIC placed about 100 minors18 in the custody of the
Ministry for Children and Families of the Province of British Columbia, deemed
the legal custodian for unaccompanied minors. CIC granted the claimants due process under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and repatriated those
eventually determined by the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) not to be
refugees according to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and
the 1967 Protocol.
While fulfilling the mandate to protect, CIC proceeded in a context in which this
group of claimants was constructed as distinct from others, in terms of their mode
of travel. This strategy entailed institutional struggles over language that reified the
divide between ‘‘bogus’’ and ‘‘legitimate’’ and connected with struggles over access.
This is where discourse meets materiality, the question being how did the process
of identification affect the quality of claimants’ access to the refugee system?
The political will for detention gave way to what some claimed was an expedited
enactment of the refugee claims process. As one lawyer remarked,
The system was very eager to contain, and the system was eager to process them
on an expedited basis. And I would say with a desired outcome. The frame was
that these were not actual refugees. The frame was that these were economic
migrants. ... The question then becomes, how do you contain six hundred
people. ... Build a frame; work within that. Anything that leaks out, push it
back in.19
Immigration lawyers and advocates argued persuasively in interviews that this
group of migrants experienced a ‘‘skeletal,’’ rather than substantive, form of
justice.20 They argued that the experiences of this group of claimants were distinct
from the experiences of most; that they had expedited and inconsistent access to
the refugee determination system; that they were scripted early on as economicallymotivated, and that policy and procedures were implemented in such a way as to
fit that identity. Refugee advocates and immigration lawyers criticized CIC for the
stress of long-term detention, for the criminalization of refugee applicants, and for
the geography of detention. I will discuss two examples that highlight that local
17 Ibid. 18 These numbers were contested and dynamic:legal status changed over time, some people misrepresented their age, and minors were defined distinctly by the federal and provincial governments.
19 Interview, Vancouver, September, 2001. 20 Interview, Vancouver, September, 2001.
A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345 335
geographical analysis tells us something about the state and the quality of access.
Both relate to detached geographies of detention.
There was a lengthy debate about when the claimants would have access to
legal counsel during processing at Esquimalt. But CIC wanted unfettered access to
the migrants without legal counsel in order to learn as many details about their
journey as quickly as possible. They developed something called the ‘‘long tunnel
thesis.’’ They compared processing at the base to the experience of walking
through the long tunnel of an international airport, during which time one is not
officially landed in national space but being processed. So this site with the optics
of detention—guard dogs, barbed wire, and RCMP—was officially designated a
Port-of-Entry, not a site of detention. This shows a struggle over language, law,
and geographies of access. The shaping of migrant identities connected powerfully
to their access to due process across time and space, the narrative of who they were
explained where they were, and vice versa.
This struggle continued during the course of longer-term detention when
most migrants were held in Prince George, a small city in the interior of British
Columbia, a 12-hour, difficult drive away from advocacy and legal services for
refugees in Vancouver. Once this geography was determined, the process spiraled
from there. Far away from refugee lawyers, interpreters, advocates, settlement
agencies, human rights monitors, and from the regular tribunals of the IRB, special
accommodations had to be made for processing. Not accustomed to servicing this
number of clients simultaneously, Legal Aid created a bidding process wherein
lawyers bid for contracts to represent large numbers of claimants. Although Legal
Aid never explained their decision to sign contracts with the four lawyers selected,
other refugee lawyers suggested that Legal Aid had selected the cheapest bids, noting that the four selected were not the most experienced.21 They questioned both
the number of clients represented per lawyer and the quality of their representation
in Prince George. Whereas hearings normally take place in the chambers of the
IRB in Vancouver, for this group, they were held in provisional tribunals established within the prison in Prince George and adjudicated by officers of the IRB
who were flown in temporarily to accommodate the scale and geography of detention. Lawyers and advocates complained of problems with access, time, and interpreters.
Detached geographies of detention in Esquimalt and Prince George limited
lawyers’ access to clients and the claimants’ access to due process and may have
contributed to an interesting outcome. China, in 1999, was the second largest
source country for positive refugee claims in Canada with a 58% approval rate.
The rate for those who arrived by boat in 1999 was under 5% with 24 claims (United States Committee for Refugees, 2001). The ninety adult females on the boats
comprised only 15% of the group, but received more than 50% of the positive
claims. There are two possible explanations. The first has to do with gender:some
argued successfully that they had faced persecution under China’s one-child policy.
21 Interview, Vancouver, August, 2001.
336 A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345
The second argument has to do with geography. Most of those who received positive claims were women and children housed in prisons and group homes in the
greater Vancouver area. There, they were able to access better refugee lawyers,
interpreters, and advocates who represented only a handful of claimants each.
They attended hearings in the regular tribunals of the IRB in downtown Vancouver, rather than in temporary tribunals in prisons. Overall, according to legal representation for the claimants, the IRB heard these cases in more individualized
fashion. In 2000, 321 of the migrants were repatriated (United States Committee
for Refugees, 2001), with more deported in ensuing months. While the process
appeared to ‘‘work’’ for detainees in Vancouver, it appeared not to work for those
detained in Prince George. The question remains, whether with more even access,
there would have been more than 24 claims.
Detention was implemented with particular geographies, under a framework of
enforcement, security, and diplomacy with China. A more disembodied narrative
tells a simpler story:the arrival of a large group of economic migrants who were
not political refugees, an assertion supported by the outcome of the claimant hearings. But a closer look at the embodied geographical experiences of claimants
shows that the story is more complex; that those moving through the process had
differential access to the system. So the way in which the state sees and categorizes
smuggled migrants has powerful material ramifications.
The embodiment of research
I also learned about the bureaucracy according to how the federal government
reacted to me as a researcher. Examination of the ways in which the government
positioned research and researcher in fieldwork for this project furthers the analysis
of the relationship between body and state. The federal government was widely criticized for the response to this movement in 1999 (Hier & Greenberg, 2002). It was
thus in a sensitive context that I began research with CIC in August of 2000. The
research process itself was fraught with tension, including, for a while, messages
from lawyers in the Department of Justice that altered the conditions of research
on a daily basis and culminated in orders for my removal from CIC. Over time,
with endorsement from National Headquarters, I negotiated re-entry. The challenges to doing institutional ethnography are an instructive element of the strategy
of embodiment. The Department of Justice wished to contain the research in various ways:by determining interviewees, reviewing transcripts, having lawyers
present at interviews, and ultimately housing, owning, and destroying data.
As a researcher, I was positioned simultaneously within and outside of the
bureaucracy, ultimately beyond its control, but also inside its inner workings, able
to discern goings-on beyond the public messages. Many employees supported my
research and were reflective about their work. Yet their openness conflicted with
government’s need to protect information. While those at the center of the
response to human smuggling within the Department were more open to discussing
their work, those whose job it was to create public images were more concerned
about someone moving inside the Department.
A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345 337
In the relationship between smuggling and the nation-state, different bodies
emerge as more and less visible in distinct locales. Both the state and the media
have the power to produce identity for mass audiences, which occurred effectively
in response to the arrivals. These discursive representations connected with
material realities, including claimants’ experiences of the refugee determination
process. In this case, the state positioned the migrant to create a perception of the
state itself as powerful and in control while remaining a selectively opaque institution. As a researcher I am able to disrupt these narratives through the strategy of
embodiment.
The four embodiments outlined relay the diffuse operation of power at multiple
scales and illustrate the importance of analyzing geographies of the nation-state
and the implementation of policy at finer scales where most theories of the state
tend to collapse. Through everyday, local geographical analysis, embodied experiences show struggle on the part of migrants, bureaucrats, and others involved in
the response to smuggling. Much of the success of this government response was
measured in terms of the communication of images. The state is, comparatively
speaking, most powerful because of the resources that it can mobilize to communicate particular representations of events. But embodied, the state is fluid, layered,
textured, more personal, and less powerful. If state practices are only as powerful
as images and their ability to reproduce the perception of power, then this explains
initial resistance to my research and investment in considerable resources to protect
themselves from me.
Geographies of the embodied nation-state
An immigration bureaucrat whom I interviewed compared his daily work for
CIC to the story of ‘‘The Wizard of Oz.’’22 In the story, Dorothy is lost and is told
that the powerful Oz will send her home. Upon finally arriving to see him, however, her dog, Toto, pulls back a curtain to see that Oz is actually a frightened man
hiding in order to amplify his message through a microphone. Similarly, this
bureaucrat described much of his work as ‘‘scrambling’’ to uphold the public fac¸
ade of power, an image larger than the bureaucrats embodied behind the curtain.
Like Toto, permitted inside the workings of government, I was able to observe
some of the inconsistencies behind the public messages. When I began research at
CIC, I was surprised to realize the extent to which the day-to-day operations of the
bureaucracy were oriented to responding to the media. In research interviews, the
most frequently cited source of stress in the response to human smuggling was the
need to somehow manage the external environment, particularly the media. As
events unfolded as a crisis in the media, the media became part of the crisis for
government. In interviews, when asked to describe the role of the media, respondents often included powerful body language in their response. They would sigh,
22 Interview, Vancouver, August 2000.
338 A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345
slouch, shake their head, roll their eyes, or groan. Note the visceral terms with
which one CIC employee described the impact:
We couldn’t get out in front of the cameras fast enough. As soon as another
issue came up, we were arranging to get in front of the media again. They were
all slobbering. They wanted us. They could smell blood.23
Media communications were central to the response and exemplary of the need
to control information and to promote the image of being in control. The boat
arrivals were a crisis, not for the nation, but for people in government. According
to respondents, the media create a climate in which ‘‘People in government are not
allowed to make mistakes.’’ The media were a constant companion both in the
office where employees receive daily news clippings across e-mail that discussed
immigration the day before, and on the water where media arrived—often before
governmental responders—to film each interception. This created an environment
that some referred to as living in a ‘‘fishbowl;’’ the feeling of being constantly
watched.
Everything changes in times of crisis, including bureaucratic operations. Policy
that appears neatly on paper is more convoluted when implemented on the ground,
when decisions are made in haste without much time for discussion. There was no
specific policy driving a marine response on the Pacific coast, and this resulted in
what bureaucrats dubbed ‘‘policy on the fly.’’ In interviews with those who enact
the state on the frontlines, the cleaner narratives of policy recede, and the processes, personalities, and politics surrounding policy come to the fore. There is a
clear disconnect between the theories of the powerful state that course through
political geography and the views articulated by bureaucrats. I interviewed many
civil servants who felt in the dark, powerless, unprepared, unsupported, and
cynical. The embodied state is multiple, conflicted, and in perpetual negotiation.
Embodying the state by studying the day-to-day locations and challenges of
bureaucrats shows a far more diverse, diffuse, and conflicted state. Institutional
ethnography illustrates that state practices are not only powerful, but also often
occasions when civil servants themselves feel powerless and vulnerable.
The strategy of embodiment entails following civil servants through their day-today work in relation to human smuggling. Those who enforce Canadian borders
are working in some surprising places. Airline liaison officers, for example, patrol
foreign airports where they search for and attempt to intercept potential refugee
claimants en route to Canada. Likewise, Immigration Control Officers operate on
the ground in foreign countries where they gather information on smuggling movements. These two examples are part of an increase in ‘‘front-end’’ controls of refugee movements, including increased interception abroad. These creative uses of
geography extended to the location of remote detention sites, and corresponded
with the diversion of boats of smuggled migrants to islands off the coasts of
Australia and the United States. Such actions took place in a global environment
23 Interview, Vancouver, April 2001.
A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345 339
where states watched one another’s enforcement practices and generated the
climate in which the Canadian federal government successfully enacted the ‘‘long
tunnel thesis,’’ thereby restricting access to the system in Esquimalt. These points
where Canadian civil servants come into contact with migrants abroad show the
re-spatialization of governance of the nation-state and the re-constitution of international borders by a constellation of civil servants.
Analysis of the daily work of civil servants illustrates that out of a lack of
direction, powerlessness, and crisis emerged a powerful enforcement response. An
embodied state, however, appears less powerful, more vulnerable, and a bit unprepared to respond to smuggling. Time and again, bureaucrats articulated to me the
absence of a plan in the response to human smuggling. But if there was no plan,
how did these stateless spaces come into being? The answer lies with the state in a
condition of crisis. In a state of crisis, there was not sufficient time for dialogue or
reflection. Decisions were made quickly—such as the decision to detain these
migrants made over a conference call between Vancouver and Ottawa—with a
sense of a situation slipping out of control. In the ‘‘fumbling through’’ environment of crisis where migrants are in motion and civil servants overwhelmed, state
practices of enforcement became transnationally more dispersed through geographies of detention and interception that make refugee determination programs
less accessible to potential claimants. Despite the absence of a plan, this response
fit clearly into a trend toward the design of stateless spaces.
There were surprisingly few people within the Department involved in sustained
fashion in the operational and policy aspects of the response, but the perception of
their power to the outsider was maintained by their dispersion and invisibility. In
the meantime, their own perception of their own power within the Department,
behind the fac¸ade, was remarkably low. Embodiment depicts state practices as
both powerful and vulnerable, and this vulnerability is to the media—where there
was a powerful fixation on inscribing identity onto the migrant deemed political or
economic—more than to human smuggling. This suggests, therefore, an important
political imperative to the strategy of embodying the nation-state.
Conclusions
Scholars are unsettling more centralized understandings of the nation-state by
insisting that states remain powerful and are themselves restructuring and respatializing at different scales (e.g. Leitner, 1997; Marden, 1997; Ong, 1999). Colin
Flint suggests that ‘‘[t]he contribution political geographers are making lies in the
detailed studies of exactly how state sovereignty is changing’’ (2002:393, see Thrift,
2000). This paper explored the spatial exercise of sovereignty in relation to smuggled migrants and potential refugee claimants and illustrated what analysis of the
work of civil servants offers to our understandings of governance and the state.
As the study of the everyday, ethnographic analysis depicts state practices as a
series of relationships and networks through which governance takes place. My
entrance into the everyday was the strategy to shift scale to the body. By locating
340 A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345
civil servants in their day-to-day work on human smuggling, I have also located
their points of contact with potential refugee claimants. These points of contact,
whether within the territorial nation-state, abroad, or in stateless interstitial spaces,
illustrate the reconstitution of international borders. A critical geography of the
state counters disembodiment and detachment with embodied geographies and
draws connections between international practices of border enforcement, detention, and asylum policy.
Arguments structured by the politics of scale enable the reconstitution of discussions at other scales, and thus open possibilities for new political alignments
(Hyndman, 2001; Blomley & Pratt, 2001). In this paper, I read the state through
embodiment. My contribution to a growing dialogue on transnational feminist
critical practice (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Bacchetta et al., 2001) is to ‘‘jump
scale’’ to geographies of the body. The embodied experiences of those enacting the
state and those moving through the refugee determination program uncover differential experiences obscured at other scales and expose holes in the clean narratives
of public policy and public discourse. From the interception of boats on the water
to the detention and deportation of migrants, I have illustrated that examining the
nation-state from the scale of the body shows processes obscured at other scales.
Relationships among states materialize at the body most obviously for the displaced person. But an embodiment of the state reveals other sites of global struggle
suppressed in narratives of transnational migration.
Detached geographies of detention are part of a trend in which asylum-seekers
face increasing front-end control, restricted access to asylum systems, and fewer
advocates in the remote places where they are detained. ‘‘Stateless’’ spaces in quasistate territories and within national territories, in airports and detention centers
such as the long tunnel in Esquimalt, are on the rise. These spaces are a result of
the manipulation of local institutional landscapes.
Discursive representations of bodies are also key to understanding this trend.
The narrative of the federal response to the 1999 boat arrivals perpetually brought
up the containment of flows of information, migrants, and the situation as a whole.
This analysis explained the uneven enactment of policy by showing the inscription
of identity onto the body. The most powerful indication of the importance of
image is the policy of detaining migrants who are smuggled more visibly by boat,
but not those who arrive, in far greater numbers, by plane. During this process,
migrants were scripted into boxes, the narrative of who they were reinforced
by their limited access to the system. The growth in stateless places and remote
detention sites corresponds with the discursive ‘‘rise of the bogus refugee.’’ Each
justifies the other. Discourse and materiality are one. The story of who these people
are—the optics of their criminality—explains where and why they are located in
detention. As such, the media—a key venue for communications from the federal
government to the public—contributed to the stereotyping, regulation, and surveillance of migrant bodies and therefore must also be incorporated into geographies
of the nation-state.
At stake is the ability of displaced people to access refugee programs globally.
I have argued that locating the body tells us something about geopolitical relationA. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345 341
ships. To extend this argument, I want to point out some parallels between discourse surrounding smuggling and terrorism. Both involve networks that transcend
international borders. Both operate in ways that the state cannot clearly engage,
and both threaten refugee programs. Since 2002, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service has required the registration of male immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries currently living in the United States, many of whom
traveled to Canada to make refugee claims as a result of detentions and deportations that ensued (New York Times, 2003). Where the geographies to the campaign
of terror are clouded and not clearly visible to the state, there is still a demand for
visible action, for the sense of containment that comes with surveillance. In
response to a fear that is nameless and faceless, the state inscribes fear onto the
bodies of those who must register. For the state, the body is a geography of terror,
pronounced through nomination, racialization, and identification. Those who must
register with the INS and those who are detained feel most poignantly the scale of
the geopolitical and the power of the nation-state. For this reason, we must not
overlook the scale of the body.
This paper placed the body, unsettled and located the state, and also disrupted
and displaced the border. Never mere lines on a map, borders, like states, are geographically dispersed spatial productions. It is important to think about the
location of borders for those who are smuggled. They pass through the Hong
Kong international airport where Immigration Control Officers stop potential refugees from boarding planes. They lie somewhere on the water beyond territorial
limits where US military ships routinely intercept boats. They are enacted in the
temporary tribunals of prisons in Prince George and in the detached detention centers of Woomera in the remote outback of Australia. The border is indeed a site of
identity construction, but those ‘‘sites’’ are neither unitary nor linear. For the
undocumented, the displaced, and the stateless, for people of color with tenuous
legal status, the border is everywhere. And for people imprisoned because of
their legal status, the border is everything, self-mutilation, hunger strikes, and
suicide attempts, powerful expressions of the pain of containment and the path to
liberation.
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