Fast Refugee Protection: Temporality and Migration Control

Abstract

This article explores the temporality of migration control through an analysis of refugee claim processing in Canada. I draw on organizational reports, commissioned studies, media reports, interviews and archival data to argue that time is a key technology of state-controlled migration regulation. I show that temporal technologies have long been used to both control the access of migrants and the labour of civil servants. Furthermore, I show that procedural temporalities have been consistently manipulated to reflect and facilitate growing restrictionism in Canadian migration regulation. In short, I suggest that migration regulation regimes devise and use temporal technologies to block, deter or delay access to rights to unwanted and unauthorized migrants, and to reduce the cost of doing so where possible.

Silence and Voice in Oral Hearings: Spatial, Temporal, and Relational Conditions for Communication in Asylum and Compulsory Care Hearings

“…How much time a particular court hearing is allocated, and in what kind of spatial design it is located are probably the results of how resources have been allocated within the court system, which ultimately is a political decision. Here, I think future studies could benefit from previous sociolegal work on political steering of migration and asylum procedures through managerialism (Soennecken 2013) and legal quickening (Hambly and Gill 2020; Cwerner 2004) as well as how states use temporal technologies to block and delay migrants’ access to rights (Masoumi 2022). To this end, my findings on temporal rush in compulsory care hearings seems relevant as an example of how politics implicitly steer judicial proceedings through different managerial and temporal technologies.…”

Legal approaches to the regulation of migration processes in the European Union

“…According to this principle, the financial aid allocated by, for example, Finland will be much higher than the aid from Estonia or Bulgaria. When distributing migrants, it is also important to take into account the needs of each individual country: for example, to send labor migrants to those countries where there is a shortage of labor (Masoumi, 2022). Thus, the European Union's policy response to the 2015 refugee crisis has both advantages and disadvantages.…”