Regulating Spousal Migration through Canada's Multiple Border Strategy: The Gendered and Racialized Effects of Structurally Embedded Borders

Abstract

As part of emerging scholarship on border governance, this article examines how discourses of “fraud” in Canada merge with public management techniques to produce structurally embedded borders. We focus on regulatory changes introduced between 2010 and 2014 that aimed to deter and punish people who participate in “marriage fraud.” We then present the gendered and racialized impact of antifraud regulations through a case analysis of the implementation of Conditional Permanent Resident status (PR) from 2012 to 2017, which required some newly sponsored spouses and partners to remain in a conjugal relationship with their sponsor for two years after immigration. Our analysis of parliamentary proceedings illustrates how public management logics and the use of new digital technologies are mobilized to expand border enforcement practices internally and outside the territorial boundaries of the nation. We argue that despite the repeal of conditional PR in 2017, the deterrence of marriage fraud through structurally embedded borders continues to regulate racialized immigrants in exclusionary ways that disproportionately impact women.

“Fake” or “Real” Marriage? Gender, Age, “Race” and Class in the Construction of Un/desirability of Marriage Migrants in South Korea

“…By constructing migrants as potential criminals and security threats, punitive measures are easily implemented. It was not a coincidence that fraudulent marriage came to be the object of the securitization of migration in many destination countries (Bhuyan, Korteweg, & Baqi, 2018;D'Aoust, 2014;Gaucher, 2014): fraudulent marriage is stipulated as a venue for "unqualified" immigrants to enter destination countries. Certain gendered and racialized marriage migrants are grouped and portrayed as potential criminals, rather than individual marriage fraudsters.…”

Marriage Migration and National Boundary-Making: A Comparative Study of Marriage Migration in South Korea and Canada

“…Backlogs and longer waiting times have been a feature of family class immigration (Chen and Thorpe, 2015). Criticizing the absence of specific regulations that govern the lengthy processing times for marriage migration, Bhuyan et al (2018) argue that "even if somewhat reduced, waiting continues to be a hallmark of marriage migration, particularly for people from countries in the Global South" (363). Most recently, the Spouse or Common-law Partner in Canada Class (hereafter referred to as inland spousal and partner immigrants) 31 has also faced significant backlogs and longer wait times.…”