“We must use every legal means to … put them behind bars, or to run them out of town”: Assembling citizenship deservingness in Toronto

Abstract

This paper examines the assemblage and reassemblage of citizenship deservingness in Canada in the past few decades. By citizenship deservingness, I refer to the ways immigrant and racialized persons are accorded value and opportunity to access and retain formal citizenship status, including the right to remain in Canada. In order to make this argument, I examine the response to a 2012 shooting in Scarborough, an “inner suburb” of Toronto, Canada. I situate the shooting responses alongside policy and discursive changes that have made it easier to deport permanent residents from Canada if they have committed certain criminal acts. As scholars have noted, the targets of such policies are often the same individuals profiled and typecast as committing criminal acts—namely, immigrant and racialized men. In the Scarborough shooting, Jamaican men were specifically criminalized and targeted for exile from the city and country. My analysis demonstrates how, through this process, discourses of race and space came together to produce and legitimate policy changes that continue to erode the rights accorded to permanent residents and citizens.

Contesting Settler Colonial Accounts: Temporality, Migration and Place-Making in Scarborough, Ontario

“…Scarborough also faced government disinvestment and limited social services as compared to downtown Toronto, leading to depictions of the area as an inner suburb, a coupling of inner city and suburban characterizations (Cowen & Parlette, 2011). Scarborough is often represented in janus-faced terms: as a vibrant multicultural immigrant gateway and a dangerous and impoverished place -a Scarlem -that houses the city's racialized working poor (Basu & Fiedler, 2017;Gillmor, 2007;Videkanic, 2017;Villegas, 2018). This creates a simultaneous hypervisibility of negative representations linking place and race and migration processes (Villegas, 2018), and an invisibility and erasure of the social and economic exclusions faced by area residents.…”

Managing Contradictions of Multiculturalism: Narratives of Belonging and Being Canadian Among Canadian Middle Eastern Women

“…Multiculturalism is a demographic fact of society, and its shallow implementation as policy does not guarantee inclusion or belonging. Despite the fact that citizenship and non-citizenship are seen to exist in binary, the reality is more complicated (Villegas, 2018). This is not to say that racialized citizens do not have citizenship; they do, however, have a different kind of citizenship than white, mostly male Canadians.…”