Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border

Abstract

[...] the central notion that the arrival of the vessels did not need to be a crisis is somewhat obscured by Mountz's empirical attention to the challenges faced by CIC staff as they worked to respond to maritime human smuggling. [...] the latter chapters of the book seem too far removed from the core case study as they deal with the exclusionary practices of Australia, Italy and the United States (chapter 5) and the experiences of Mexican women working illegally in the US (chapter 6).

Mountz, Alison (2010); Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. 209pp. $21.23 (Can) paperback. ISBN 978-0-8166-6538-9

Legally ambiguous American security measures are well documented and countries like Australia and the United Kingdom are gaining a reputation for exceptional border enforcement efforts. What many people do not know is that Canada engages in similar practices. Alison Mountz sets out to complicate our collective self-image. She offers a case study of Canada's response to four vessels caught smuggling migrants from China to British Columbia in 1999. Seeking Asylum provides a critical, well written account of a particular Canadian effort to manage irregular migration. It is rich in theoretical nuance, textual evidence and empirical detail. As a graduate student I take the book as a model for the kind of research report my dissertation ought to approximate. I would recommend it to anyone whose work relates to human migration, Canadian immigration law, organization studies, rights activism or border enforcement.

The majority of the text (the introduction and chapters 1 through 4) is based on ethnographic research Mountz conducted at Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) in 2000. Throughout, her interest is in the way CIC employees explained their institutional response to the four previously mentioned vessels. She finds that such explanations centred on the notion that the arrival of these ships constituted a crisis; that is, a workload nightmare for CIC and a challenge to Canadian sovereignty. In dealing with this perceived crisis CIC chose to detain the vessels' passengers en masse in a facility which was itself given a special legal status. Although it was just a fenced off group of buildings at Esquimault naval base, this detention centre was designated a "port of entry" (legally comparable to the long tunnels of an international airport) where the migrants were considered to be not yet landed in Canada. This allowed CIC to deny the migrants access to legal representation and Canada's refugee claimant system as they worked to balance the provision of basic necessities with administrative work, public relations and a criminal investigation.

The critical wallop to CIC's narrative of crisis and necessary response comes with Mountz's question of why an organization which is set up to deal with immigration (and routinely handles far larger numbers of irregular migrants arriving in Canada by land and air each year) should be thrown into crisis by spontaneous marine arrivals. In tackling this question she engages with Giorgio Agamben's well-known theory that states rely on discourses of emergency to justify legally exceptional forms of exclusion. Following Agamben, she notes that CIC employees often used the notion of crisis as a reason for admitted imperfections in their handling of events. However, she also notes that they were not disingenuous in doing so: they really did experience the marine arrivals as occasioning a disaster.

This caveat sets Mountz's work apart from many Agamben-inspired essays as she locates "state collusion in the production of crisis" more in the everyday practices of state employees than in the decisions of nefarious policymakers. In fact, she offers a refreshing criticism of Agamben for failing to study the way exceptional practices of exclusion arise empirically. Mining this vein, Mountz asserts that substituting theories of "The State's" interests for analysis of the mundane conditions which allow routine events, like irregular migration, to become catastrophes is to risk attributing to the state more unity, clarity of purpose and capacity than is actually possessed by those who embody it.

In examining how CIC came to experience the marine arrivals as a crisis and incarcerate the migrants, she elaborates two sets of quotidian factors alongside CIC's penchant for crisis as alibi. 1) CIC had neglected to develop federal policy or allocate resources to handling marine arrivals despite having faced maritime human smuggling a number of times throughout the 20th century. Mountz lists budget cuts, internal division over CICs role in marine interception, poor record keeping and high employee turnover rates as reasons for CICs failure to remember and prepare for irregular maritime migration. 2) CIC was unduly influenced by the media. Mountz examines news articles and editorial cartoons to argue that the media portrayed the Chinese migrants as a threat to Canadian identity and economic prosperity while representing CIC as soft or incompetent. Through interviews, she found that this coverage was such a source of anxiety at CIC that the organization began vetting major decisions through communications staff. What's more, Mountz cites staff members speculating that the decision to incarcerate the migrants was as much a result of media pressure to "do something" as security concerns. In other words, although CIC staff perpetuated a discourse of crisis, they also succumbed to this discourse as represented in the media.

By presenting these factors Mountz substantiates her argument that in order to hold states accountable for their role in producing and handling "crises" one must attend to the everyday practices of state employees. She goes on to invite us to join her in questioning how these practices could be otherwise. In doing so, her work holds out hope that irregular migration may come to be treated as the predictable event it is and that migrants may be spared continuous rights violations under the guise of "emergency measures."

It is hard to overstate the success of Seeking Asylum as it brings critical insights together with comprehensible ways of improving border services. Nonetheless, I conclude with two criticisms. First, the central notion that the arrival of the vessels did not need to be a crisis is somewhat obscured by Mountz's empirical attention to the challenges faced by CIC staff as they worked to respond to maritime human smuggling. Second, the latter chapters of the book seem too far removed from the core case study as they deal with the exclusionary practices of Australia, Italy and the United States (chapter 5) and the experiences of Mexican women working illegally in the US (chapter 6).

Sidebar

McLane, Patrick. 2011. Review of Alison Mountz's Seeking Asylum. Surveillance & Society 8(3): 389-390.

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© The author, 2011| Licensed to the Surveillance Studies Network under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license.