This article examines the intersections of the child protection, immigration and criminal systems, and the carceral logics that undergird all three systems. Taking seriously Patricia Hill Collins’ (2017) call to analyze “intensified points of convergence” (p. 1464), we analyze the role of social work in perpetuating carceral systems and the tools that feminist social work provides for disrupting them. Using a case analysis of a foster child in Halifax, Canada, who in 2018 was faced with deportation after social workers failed to secure his citizenship status, we argue that a pipeline exists between child protection and a growing “crimmigration” system. The carceral logics of this pipeline not only draw from anti-Black, Islamophobic, and settler colonial histories of oppression, but they also position certain noncitizen families as unassimilable and requiring of state intervention rather than social supports. With this carceral pipeline in mind, we then draw from feminist anticarceral and intersectional approaches to consider a range of resistance strategies. Ultimately, we argue for a transformative justice approach that goes beyond reforming the pipeline and instead takes seriously the insights of abolitionist movements as an alternative to purely reformist approaches.
Studies of post-nationalism have declined considerably among citizenship scholars in recent decades, and have been largely ignored by social movement scholars in favour of more trans-national approaches. Using a case analysis of a migrant rights movement in Canada as evidence of a 'post-national ethics in practice', in this article I argue for a re-consideration of the usefulness of post-nationalism within current scholarship on precarious immigration status. Taking into account both the limitations and opportunities afforded by a post-national ethical framework, I examine how the movement uses a human rights framing in distinct ways to mobilize constituents, garner mainstream media attention, and effect changes to policy at the national and local level. My findings suggest that the use of human rights frames for these movements offers both risks and rewards; however, the benefits may outweigh the risks in cases in which the quality of exposure within mainstream narratives is enough to disrupt, even if momentarily, the pervasiveness of normative nationalism, opening up new spaces for reconfiguring citizenship at the local level.
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