Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 23, Issue 3, March 2004, Pages 323-345
Political Geography

Embodying the nation-state: Canada’s response to human smuggling

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2003.12.017Get rights and content

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.

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 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 and 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 interactions that surround and disrupt these formal instruments of governance to locate political processes in a time and a place (e.g. Gupta, 1995, Heyman and Smart, 1999, Hansen and 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.

Section snippets

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

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.

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

Conclusions

Scholars are unsettling more centralized understandings of the nation-state by insisting that states remain powerful and are themselves restructuring and re-spatializing 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

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Margaret Walton-Roberts, Caroline Desbiens, Jennifer Hyndman, David Ley, Jamie Winders, Graham Webber, Helen Watkins, and Vicky Lawson as well as students in her graduate seminar for thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to employees of Citizenship and Immigration Canada and to members of various NGOs and advocacy organizations for their generous contributions to this research. This work would not have been possible without the financial

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