Mountz_2004

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Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345

www.politicalgeography.com

Embodying the nation-state: Canada’sresponse to human smuggling

Alison Mountz �

Department of Geography, The Maxwell School, Syracuse University, 144 Eggers Hall,

Syracuse, NY 13244, USA

Abstract

This paper argues that a shift in the scale of analysis of the nation-state, from national andglobal scales to the finer scale of the body reveals processes, relations, and experiences other-wise obscured. The response of the Canadian government to the arrival of migrants smuggledby boat from China to British Columbia in 1999 serves as a case study. I draw on feministand post-structural theories that locate exercises of power and productions of difference at thebody in order to address a broader debate about the power of the nation-state to mediatetransnational flows. Following accusations that they were losing control of borders, civil ser-vants of the federal government of Canada sought to contain the issue of human smugglingby detaining migrants, controlling flows of information, and carefully constructing the publicimage of the state. This research, based on ethnographic fieldwork with Citizenship and Immi-gration Canada, suggests potential in new epistemologies of the nation-state drawn throughcorporeal geographies, currently undervalued in mainstream political geography.# 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Nation-state; Body; Embodiment; Human smuggling; Canada; Transnational migration

Introduction

When boats carrying migrants smuggled from Fujian, China were intercepted byCanadian authorities off of the west coast of British Columbia (BC) in the summerof 1999, the Canadian media were saturated with images of a group that came tobe known as ‘‘the boat migrants.’’ Front-page photographs of the boat arrivalsportrayed migrants crowded on boats, having just crossed from internationalwaters into Canadian waters in an attempt to enter the country surreptitiously.

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345324

Discourse in the media foregrounded the migrant body, focusing early coverage ondisease, malnutrition, dehydration, and hypothermia.1 This prominent coverageplayed on the symbolic imagery of migrant ships as a threat to the nation-state,presented the migrants as a threat to public health, and thus contributed to fearsregarding the porosity of international borders, the integrity of Canada’s refugeeprogram, and the vulnerability of the nation-state more broadly.

Simultaneously, images of officers of the Canadian law boarding the boatsemerged in newspapers. Members of the Emergency Response Team of the RoyalCanadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and of the federal Departments of Citizenshipand Immigration Canada (CIC) and National Defence were shown clothed in fulluniform and mask to protect them from the spread of disease. They stepped in tobring under control a situation narrated by the media as fully out of the control ofthe federal government (Hier & Greenberg, 2002). The four boats arrived over thecourse of 11 weeks and provoked intense public debate in Canada regarding thesovereignty of the nation-state, manifest in the perception of its inability to policeborders.2 A parallel discussion regarding the strength of the nation-state hastranspired in recent years in academic literatures on globalization and transnation-alism. While some scholars argue that the nation-state has lost political power in aglobalizing world (Ohmae, 1995; Appadurai, 1996), others suggest that it remainspowerful but re-positions itself strategically at different scales (Sassen, 1996;Marden, 1997; Ong, 1999). This paper posits corporeal geographies as a key scaleat which to understand the nation-state and the re-spatialization of governanceregarding refugee claimants and smuggled migrants.

In Canada, there exist distinctly anxious debates regarding sovereignty as thenation-state struggles to assert its own position on refugee movements and thepolicing of international borders in relation to the ever-encroaching power of itssouthern neighbor. The response of the Canadian Government to human smug-gling illuminates inconsistencies regarding the global positioning of Canada asboth humanitarian, refugee-receiving nation and enforcer. The Canadian Govern-ment facilitates immigration as a population strategy to build a multiculturalsociety, as an economic strategy to amass investment in Canada, and as a laborstrategy to fill gaps in the labor market.3 The smuggled migrants were positionedas a threat to national security and fell within the mandate of the Department ofCIC to enforce borders.4 The 1999 arrivals comprised the largest group of refugee

1 These images reflect similar constructions of Chinese migrants as harbingers of disease during migra-

tions to Canada a century earlier (Anderson, 1991).2 Debates about the permeability of North American international borders were present long before

the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001, but have since intensified.3 See, for example, Ley (2003) on Canada’s Business Immigration Program and Pratt (1999) on

Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Program.4 In 1999, when the Fujianese migrants arrived and again in 2000, when most were deported, Canada

failed to meet the target of Elinor Caplan, then Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, to

land upwards of 300,000 immigrants annually, approximately 1% of the Canadian population (Ley and

Hiebert, 2001: 120).

325A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323–345

claimants detained in recent Canadian history and eventually, in the spring of2000, the largest mass deportations. Human smuggling movements constitute‘‘mixed flows’’ of refugees and economic migrants and therefore call upon variousmandates of federal, provincial, and local governments. The response to humansmuggling thus accentuates the reality that ‘‘the state’’ does not contain or enact aunified series of agendas, objectives, or actors. State practices encompass, rather, aseries of diverse interests and bodies that are often themselves in conflict.

Analysis of the ability of the nation-state to manage transnational migrationserves as one platform from which political geographers can address debatesregarding the vitality and integrity of geographical practices of nation-states.Human smuggling and trafficking5 involve the movement of bodies as commoditiesfor consumption in the global sex trade and other service economies. Smuggledmigrants experience most viscerally the displacement caused by neoliberal agendas,the brutal tactics of enforcers as entrepreneurs of migration (Chin, 1999), and statepractices of detention (Bowden, 2003). Yet images of immigration often narrate thestory of the emasculated state: one that is rendered powerless by flows depicted asout of control, embodied by migrants who materialize in discourse driven by meta-phors of invasion, flood, and waves (Ellis & Wright, 1998; McGuinness, 2001).Some bodies are made more visible because of the ways that they are raced,classed, and gendered, which figures prominently in discourse on immigration andis central to decisions about who ‘‘belongs’’ to the nation-state and which groupsare portrayed as bodies out of place (Cresswell, 1997). These differences are inscri-bed onto the body and reveal the operation of power through visibility (Pratt,1998). In response to pressure from national and international publics tostrengthen ‘‘leaky’’ borders, the federal government presented public images ofauthorities in control of the situation.

Feminist theories that locate power at the scale of the body uncover attempts ofthe nation-state to strategically mediate transnational processes of globalization,mobility, and displacement. I advocate embodiment as a strategy that draws onstandpoint theory (Harding, 1986; Haraway, 1991) and institutional ethnography(Smith, 1987) to understand the geography of the nation-state, and more specifi-cally, the operation of power among institutional actors and migrants. Given thatpower moves through institutional practices at various scales, a shift in the scale ofanalysis of the nation-state, from national and global scales to the finer scale of thebody, reveals processes, relationships, and experiences otherwise obscured.

The migrant body was centered in the Canadian response to human smuggling,both discursively and materially. Embodying the nation-state means movingbeyond analyses of policy and structure, to the more fluid, daily, personal interac-

5 Some delineate strictly between the definition of smuggling and trafficking. Whereas human smug-

gling is ‘‘the illicit movement of people across international boundaries’’ (Koser, 2001: 59), human traf-

ficking entails additional elements of coercion and exploitation and tends to be associated with the

movement of women and children, often into the sex trade. I find, however, that the distinction is

ambiguous in practice, given how little is known about the experiences of those who are smuggled and

trafficked over time.


tions that surround and disrupt these formal instruments of governance to locatepolitical processes in a time and a place (e.g. Gupta, 1995; Heyman & Smart, 1999;Hansen & Stepputat, 2001). This paper seeks to embody state practices by drawingon an ethnography conducted with the federal department of Citizenship andImmigration Canada (CIC). Research focused on the response to human smug-gling in 1999. I proceed by outlining a theoretical framework and then reviewingvarious embodiments with the objective of uncovering power relations therein.I then discuss ethnographic findings. I conclude with the argument that state prac-tices of border enforcement are re-spatializing and a discussion of what this meansfor potential refugee claimants.

Political geographies of body and state

Michael Taussig asks, ‘‘Could it be that with disembodiment, presenceexpands?’’ (1997: 3). Because state practices are often concealed in praxis, theybecome more powerful for those for whom decision-making processes areobscured, such as immigrants, refugees, and those who advocate on their behalf(see Kirby, 1997: 5). Academics reify this disembodiment when they marginalizepeople from their analyses. As a result, representations of the state as a coherentbody politic circulate without sufficient interrogation; the state continues to beconceptualized and addressed as one body (see Gatens, 1991); as a result, thenation-state remains a masculinist, secure concept (see Nast, 1998: 195).

In her review of content of Political Geography, Janet Kodras recognized poweras the central theme running through all political geographies, but noted a ‘‘criticalabsence’’ of studies on the operation of power as well as a dearth of ‘‘cutting edgetheoretical treatments of the state’’ (1999: 75–78). Geographers are now, however,showing renewed interest in the state (Flint, 2003).6 The method of institutionalethnography addresses the absences identified by Kodras and, in so doing, offers amore nuanced rendition of state practices by seeking to understand and locate theoperation of power in the daily work done by civil servants (e.g. Herbert, 1997). Inthis paper, data illustrate the negotiations surrounding the implementation ofimmigration policy, such as the workplace politics in which policies were enacted.In order to accomplish such embodiment, I conducted institutional research tounderstand the power of the state through the day-to-day operation of thebureaucracy. I was interested in how individuals within immigration made sense ofhuman smuggling and of their own role in responding. I conducted semi-structuredinterviews and participant-observation in CIC’s regional headquarters for the BC/Yukon region and reviewed documents pertaining to the 1999 response. I alsointerviewed employees of non-governmental organizations, immigration lawyers,refugee advocates, supra-state institutional actors, and media workers in order tounderstand governance practices.

6 Scholars from a variety of interdisciplinary locations have speculated on the academic’s unwilling-

ness to engage more fully with the state (e.g. Abrams, 1988; Kirby, 1997; Mitchell, 1991; Aronowitz &

Bratsis, 2002).


Michel Foucault, 1991, 1995) theorized a shift from more centralized, repressive,

sovereign power aligned with the state to power that operates in more diffuse,

de-centralized, and productive fashion. Following in his lead, post-structural

approaches offer useful tools with which to understand state practices (see

Mitchell, 1991; Painter, 1995; Steinmentz, 1999), and anthropologists in particular

are using these tools to go ‘‘inside’’ the state (Heyman & Smart, 1999; Nelson,

1999; Hansen & Stepputat, 2001). In turn, they are finding state practices to be

ever more dispersed, as Hansen and Stepputat note:

As modern forms of govermentality penetrate and shape human life in unpre-

cedented ways, the practices and sites of governance have also become ever

more dispersed, diversified, and fraught with internal inconsistencies and contra-

dictions. . . . The strength of the modern state seems. . . to be its dispersion and

ubiquity (2001: 16).

Governance practices surrounding immigration and refugee flows are shifting

accordingly, as both facilitative and enforcement practices become increasingly

transnational. Political geographers can contribute to the dialogue by locating the

operation of power and the discourse surrounding states and globalization in a

time and a place (Marchand & Runyan, 2000; Nagar, Lawson, McDowell &

Hanson, 2002). This understanding of how state practices are spatialized involves

the social construction of scale.Geographers argue that scale is a social construction, not ‘‘a preordained hier-

archical framework for ordering the world’’ (Marston, 2000: 220, see also Smith,

1992; Staeheli, 1994; Delaney & Leitner, 1997). As Swygedouw notes, ‘‘Scale is,

consequently, not socially or politically neutral, but embodies and expresses power

relationships’’ (1997: 140). Through new constructions of scale emerge political

potential in new framings of relationships (Swyngedouw, 1997). Geographers have

called upon the social construction of scale to understand state practices (Brenner,

1997; Leitner, 1997), and I am interested in how civil servants themselves draw on

different scales in their daily negotiations. An analysis that links state practices to

the social construction of scale opens potential for new understandings of the

relationship between local state practices and global processes.Feminist geographers argue that certain scales, such as the household (Marston,

2000) and the individual (Hyndman, 2001), have been overlooked. Likewise, femin-

ist critics of discourse surrounding globalization advocate shifts in scalar narratives

that account for the gendering of transnational phenomena (Marchand & Runyan,

2000; Nagar, Lawson, McDowell & Hanson, 2002). Shifting to the scale of the

body, Nagar et al. note that ‘‘starting from the standpoint of people and economic

spheres that are marginalized under capitalist processes reveals the ways in which

contemporary globalization is intimately tied to gendered and racialized systems of

oppression’’ (2002: 259). These calls for new scalar narratives also apply to the

nation-state. Social scientists often write generally of ‘‘states’’ as though they rep-

resent coherent and singular projects. Rather than a coherent, hidden strategy


awaiting discovery, states are comprised of persons with distinct objectives andperspectives, often struggling amongst themselves over state projects.

Geographers are increasingly interested in the body (e.g. Rose, 1995; Longhurst,1995; Nast & Pile, 1998; Callard, 1998).7 Mobile bodies perpetually rouse the stateinto action. As such, the body is a crucial element to understand the operation ofpower in relations between states and migrants by locating both civil servants andmigrants in relation to one another. First, I aim to embody the state quite literally,to understand who enacts policy and in what way. This strategy of embodimentis a feminist analytical approach that shifts scale to center people within conceptualunderstandings of the state. It draws on the work of feminist scholars (e.g.Harding, 1986; Smith, 1987; Haraway, 1991) to situate knowledge and power intime and space. Embodiment locates power relations and contextualizes decision-making with workplace settings and life histories. The second approach to thebody working through this paper is the Foucauldian, post-structural notion thatpower produces identities through discourse; that identities are inscribed onto thebodies of migrants (see Pratt, 1999) and bureaucrats. These discursive practices ofidentification, categorization, and nomination show how civil servants seemigration (cf Scott, 1998). So while the project of embodying the state takes placeempirically in the form of ethnographic research, many of the embodiments out-lined in the next section of the paper are enabled with analysis of the constructionof migrant and state identities in the to and fro between CIC and the media. I willillustrate the relationship between materiality and discourse wherein the narrationof identity explains who and where migrants were situated in the institutional land-scape.

The media play a central analytical role in this articulation of geographies of thenation-state. In the recursive relationships between public opinion, media represen-tation, and the ‘‘key messages’’ communicated by civil servants to the press, themainstream media have become the primary method of image-building into whichthe federal government pours significant resources. The media framed issues forvarious audiences (e.g. the nation, the Province of British Columbia, the cities ofBritish Columbia, and foreign governments). With this in mind, I now explore thestrategic embodiments of human smuggling.

Embodiment and containment

Power moves through dis/embodiments, and it is therefore important to analyzewho is embodied, how, and why in the relationship between the state and smuggledmigrants. I demonstrate here that there is an important relationship betweendiscourse and materiality; that these dis/embodiments reveal the spatialized pro-cesses through which state practices materialize in relation to migrants and refugeeclaimants in quotidian life.

7 I am mindful of Robyn Longhurst’s argument that in theoretical work on the body, geographers too

often overlook the actual messy materiality of bodies (2001).


The dis/embodiment of the state

Immigration departments seem to be disembodied institutions from the perspec-tive of those located outside of government, whether immigrants, refugee clai-mants, immigration service providers, lawyers, or other members of civil society.Around the globe, people share common experiences such as long lines and opaquepolicies of immigration departments. The disembodiment of these bureaucraciesintroduces significant distance between clientele and civil servants, thus expandingpower through absence, as Taussig suggests (1997: 3). Decisions regarding clients’cases are rarely attached to an individual responsible. The less accessible thedecision-makers are to those whose lives they influence, the larger looms the powerof the state to act without demands for accountability.8

With such limited communication and collaboration between immigrants andrefugee claimants, their advocates, and those who decide cases, an advocacy indus-try arises and operates in adversarial fashion with the federal government. In inter-views, I explored how and why CIC was disembodied, given the Department’scentral role in responding to the 1999 boat arrivals. Lawyers, service providers,and advocates who worked with the smuggled migrants from outside of the para-meters of government addressed how difficult it was to establish long-term workingrelationships with CIC. They mentioned inaccessibility, secrecy, and a high turn-over rate as barriers to communication and relationship-building with the federalgovernment. Indeed, CIC is known jokingly among immigration consultants as‘‘the fortress.’’

To some extent, the disembodiment of the state is a function of a large bureauc-racy that suppresses and normalizes the individual by emphasizing the whole.Bureaucracies are designed to protect and manage information as well as publicimage (see Heyman, 1995). The federal government often appears to be transparenton paper and in the media, its outward expressions being written policy, organiza-tional diagrams, and press conferences. Indeed, most immigration policies are amatter for public record. Policy on paper, however, narrates only a partial story,the idealized ways in which events should take place, rather than the ways thatthings actually happen on the ground.

Disembodiment is also a response to the media. Whereas Canada was onceknown as a more progressive, humanitarian state in its granting of refugee status,it was now portrayed in the media as ‘‘soft’’ and unable to enforce borders, withthe integrity of its refugee program threatened.

The cartoon (Fig. 1) depicts the Canadian government as a marine filling station,offering welfare assistance, a lax court system, and the acceptance of ‘‘hard luckstories.’’ The marine arrivals catalyzed a notable shift in Canada in public opinion

8 The call centers of CIC are a classic geographical representation of this reality. Applicants are not

able to call the office where their application is being processed, but rather must contact call centers that

are geographically detached from sites of application or processing, as well as detached from the caller.

CIC call centers are often known for inconsistencies in providing information.


toward immigration, in public discourse surrounding immigration, and in the

political will and capacity of the government to respond. The media producedthese images for consumption by an anxious public, the migrants serving symboli-cally as an expression of a perceived loss of control of Canadian borders.

In response, the federal government communicated a semblance of control to thepublic in order to counter media representations. The boat arrivals drew civil

servants out of their offices and onto the water in ways that made them very visibleto the Canadian public. In this case, federal officials were embodied in particularways. Covered in white uniform with hood, black vest, and black boots, they werehomogenized and secure, an embodied expression of the boundaries of the nation-

state. The state is therefore strategically embodied in distinct ways and in relationto different policies and populations.

Fig. 1. ‘‘Immigration Canada’’ as a filling station. Times Colonist, July 22, 1999. (Cartoon by Adrian

Raeside).


CIC worked proactively with the media. In interviews, members of the mediapraised the Department’s communications during the response to the arrivals.9

Narratives of the response to human smuggling suggested that communications arecentral to the control of information and people in the bureaucracy. In Ottawa, inthe Communications Department at National Headquarters, there were five peopleworking full-time to monitor the news, and to compile, analyze, and circulate clip-pings following the boat arrivals. At the same time, there were only three peopleworking in intelligence in the entire BC/Yukon Region, only one of whom wasassigned to gather intelligence about smuggling movements. While employees incommunications did not work directly with clients, they were among the firstemployees flown to the site where migrants would be off-loaded when a boat wasintercepted in order to begin working proactively with reporters.

In the response to human smuggling, a generic disembodiment turned to astrategic embodiment of the federal response to a delicate situation. The govern-ment pursued an enforcement response that foregrounded bodies in certain ways,including those of bureaucrats, migrants, and representations of human smugglersthemselves.

The dis/embodiment of human smugglers

In contrast with the embodiment of migrants that I detail below, I wish to pointto a second set of people central to smuggling practices, yet mere shadows in thepublic realm: human smugglers. At the time of the arrivals, there was sizeablespeculation as to the networks through which they had been organized, immedi-ately labeled ‘‘transnational organized crime.’’ Those who comprised these net-works, however, were not identified.10 They remained a ‘‘nefarious’’ force againstwhom federal authorities struggled.11 Those responding locally, at the center of theintelligence capacity insisted that they could not with any certainty characterizethese movements as transnational organized crime and suggested that this was asexy term used by enforcement agencies to marshal resources. Higher up in thebureaucracy, and further away from BC, the narrative was confident and coherent,part of building an image of power, the perception of control, and the need tocombat a known evil. Lower down, the narrative was less secure. The image pain-ted for me was a colorful one of frontline officers and street-level bureaucratsscrambling to maintain the facade communicated to the public.

For federal governments driven by the power of public opinion, the smuggledmigrant body is the most visible expression of an illicit activity that underminesthe integrity of political boundaries. The Canadian federal government has not

9 Interview, Vancouver, August, 2001.10 The term ‘‘snakehead’’ refers to the more powerful individuals running smuggling operations. Snake-

heads do not travel with migrants, but rather employ an extensive network of ‘‘enforcers’’ to transport

migrants. Enforcers are known to use violent tactics to control migrants on board.11 It is interesting to note alternative perspectives on human smugglers sometimes held by their clients.

Clients often respect human smugglers for facilitating their movement and entrance into jobs and social

structures (see Chin, 1999).


committed resources, infrastructure, or political will to large-scale detention aspracticed in Australia or the United States. Whereas Canada does not routinelydetain those smuggled by plane, the federal government did, however, decide todetain the migrants who arrived on the second, third, and fourth boats in 1999.Detention, one among many strategies pursued by nation-states to combat humansmuggling,12 was a controversial decision. Human smugglers receive partial pay-ments for their services over time as clients make their way to the final desti-nation.13 People noted in interviews that detention was an effort to stop humansmuggling to Canada by freezing the migration in place, thus preventing smugglersfrom receiving full payment.

Another reason to detain was to sustain the integrity of the federal government inthe mind of the public and other foreign governments. In interviews, respondentsexpressed a clear demand from the public to ‘‘do something.’’ Detention is amongthe most expensive, reactive, and short-term solutions to human smuggling, but it isa visible expression of a swift government response, of containment of the problem.Images in the newspapers of a government out-of-control of its borders soon gaveway to images such as Fig. 2 that portrays minors from the boats in handcuffs andprison uniforms; bodies contained, a situation brought under control.

Locating the immigrant body at the center of the nationalist imagination in hisanalysis of Australian public discourse, Hage refers to detention as ‘‘ethnic caging’’(1998: 105), a material expression of racialized othering. As with the dehumanizingview of smuggled migrants crowded on boats, the proximity of other bodiesinscripted onto their own, detention also dehumanizes and depersonalizes therefugee claimant as one in a contained crowd.

In their absence, the state painted a portrait of human smugglers in a narrativethat involved an enforcement response. By detaining migrants to impede smug-glers, the nation-state imprisoned one set of people in order to deter another.While smugglers remained unidentified, their clients were essentially over-identified,held captive as a visible and costly message to various publics and to smugglersthemselves. Detention communicated to several audiences—including potentialmigrants in China, the Chinese and American governments, and the Canadianpublic—that human smugglers would not operate successfully in Canada; thatCanada would respond with a show of force and maintain its ability to policeinternational borders. Migrants were also, therefore, central to this narrative andembodied in particular ways.

12 Other strategies target smugglers through more direct means such as intercepting smuggled migrants

more aggressively, freezing the assets of suspected smuggling rings, improving intelligence, investing

more resources in prosecution and punitive measures. CIC studies these models in other states. Man-

agers have traveled to Europe to observe prosecutions, to the US to learn about interception practices,

and to Australia to observe detention sites.13 To the smuggler, the migrant body represented significant revenue, from $30,000 to $60,000 US with

payments from wages for jobs secured in the destination over time. Well-documented practices of abduc-

tion and torture are the punishment to the individual or his or her family for not making such payments

(Chin, 1999).


The over-embodiment and containment of migrants

Despite the efforts of CIC to present images of control, the boat arrivals played

in the media as a crisis that provoked anxiety in the public. Media representations

positioned the migrants as a threat to Canadian security. Migrant bodies materi-

Fig. 2. Images of containment. The Globe and Mail, August 20, 1999, A1. (Photo by Peter Blashill).


alized in the media as a site of disease leaking across borders (see Cresswell, 1997).

Images of containment accompanied front-page articles. The Province, a daily

paper in British Columbia, centered the body by headlining the text ‘‘QUAR-

ANTINED’’ over a photograph of a group of migrants crowded on the stern of a

boat. As Clarkson (2000) argued, the media did little to contextualize the numbers

as small compared, for example, to the number of people smuggled through

Canada’s airports, estimated in the tens of thousands annually.14 Comparatively

speaking, six hundred is a small number in a larger, continuous movement. But in

this case, 600 people symbolized, simply, ‘‘too many’’ (Clarkson, 2000). Indeed, the

reactions on the part of the media and the Canadian public were dis-

proportionately large and anti-immigration, attacking what the media called

‘‘bogus refugees’’ and what was perceived as an ineffective refugee program. This

accompanied a notable shift in language with terms such as ‘‘boat people,’’ ‘‘queue

jumper,’’ and ‘‘illegal alien.’’ The migrants’ identities were inscribed not as ‘‘genu-

ine’’ political refugees with a right to fully access Canada’s refugee program, but as

‘‘economic’’ migrants who had committed a criminal act.15 The media were there-

fore complicit in delineating the identities of smuggled migrants as economic

migrants and, therefore, ‘‘bogus refugees.’’The federal government responded to enormous pressure for an enforcement

response to human smuggling with a strategy that entailed detention, the control of

flows of information, and deportation. As the first boat was intercepted, CIC

quickly set-up a temporary site for processing at Esquimalt, a military base of

the Department of National Defence located in a residential suburb of Victoria.

There, civil servants processed migrants through stations of showering, delousing,

medical exams, and immigration interviews. In an effort to identify people and

to distinguish clients from enforcers, they sought and photographed markings on

the body such as tattoos. They also numbered migrants on their backs in black

magic marker and on their wrists with wristbands. CIC conducted initial immi-

gration interviews, recorded refugee claims, and over time, provided access to legal

counsel.Nearly 500 of the 599 migrants made refugee claims.16 When CIC released the

adults that had arrived on the first boat, many did not appear at refugee claimant

hearings in subsequent weeks. Having abandoned their claims, they were presumed

to have traveled to the US to work. This abandonment further inflamed public

opinion regarding Canada’s refugee program and its ability to police borders. By

referencing this disappearance, CIC argued successfully that migrants on the

following three boats posed a ‘‘flight risk.’’ This enabled the federal government to

14 Interview, Ottawa, October, 2001.15 This is an interesting contrast to the characterization of the wealthier business immigrants recruited

from Asia by Canada and lauded as ideal migrants because of the economic dimensions of their lives.

Whereas wealthier immigrants are rewarded for their economic ambitions, poorer migrants are punished

as ‘‘greedy.’’16 CIC (2000) Marine Arrivals: Status Update. 18 February.


pursue longer-term detention with most of the adults that arrived on the following

three boats.Following the processing of ensuing arrivals, CIC either released migrants or

transported them to longer-term detention facilities. Ultimately, 492 (83%) of the

599 made refugee claims, and 429 (72%) were held in long-term detention.17 In

some cases, detention lasted over 18 months as claimants exhausted opportunities

for due process in Canada. CIC placed about 100 minors18 in the custody of the

Ministry for Children and Families of the Province of British Columbia, deemed

the legal custodian for unaccompanied minors. CIC granted the claimants due pro-

cess under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and repatriated those

eventually determined by the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) not to be

refugees according to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and

the 1967 Protocol.While fulfilling the mandate to protect, CIC proceeded in a context in which this

group of claimants was constructed as distinct from others, in terms of their mode

of travel. This strategy entailed institutional struggles over language that reified the

divide between ‘‘bogus’’ and ‘‘legitimate’’ and connected with struggles over access.

This is where discourse meets materiality, the question being how did the process

of identification affect the quality of claimants’ access to the refugee system?The political will for detention gave way to what some claimed was an expedited

enactment of the refugee claims process. As one lawyer remarked,

The system was very eager to contain, and the system was eager to process them

on an expedited basis. And I would say with a desired outcome. The frame was

that these were not actual refugees. The frame was that these were economic

migrants. . . . The question then becomes, how do you contain six hundred

people. . . . Build a frame; work within that. Anything that leaks out, push it

back in.19

Immigration lawyers and advocates argued persuasively in interviews that this

group of migrants experienced a ‘‘skeletal,’’ rather than substantive, form of

justice.20 They argued that the experiences of this group of claimants were distinct

from the experiences of most; that they had expedited and inconsistent access to

the refugee determination system; that they were scripted early on as economically-

motivated, and that policy and procedures were implemented in such a way as to

fit that identity. Refugee advocates and immigration lawyers criticized CIC for the

stress of long-term detention, for the criminalization of refugee applicants, and for

the geography of detention. I will discuss two examples that highlight that local

17 Ibid.18 These numbers were contested and dynamic: legal status changed over time, some people mis-

represented their age, and minors were defined distinctly by the federal and provincial governments.19 Interview, Vancouver, September, 2001.20 Interview, Vancouver, September, 2001.


geographical analysis tells us something about the state and the quality of access.Both relate to detached geographies of detention.

There was a lengthy debate about when the claimants would have access tolegal counsel during processing at Esquimalt. But CIC wanted unfettered access tothe migrants without legal counsel in order to learn as many details about theirjourney as quickly as possible. They developed something called the ‘‘long tunnelthesis.’’ They compared processing at the base to the experience of walkingthrough the long tunnel of an international airport, during which time one is notofficially landed in national space but being processed. So this site with the opticsof detention—guard dogs, barbed wire, and RCMP—was officially designated aPort-of-Entry, not a site of detention. This shows a struggle over language, law,and geographies of access. The shaping of migrant identities connected powerfullyto their access to due process across time and space, the narrative of who they wereexplained where they were, and vice versa.

This struggle continued during the course of longer-term detention whenmost migrants were held in Prince George, a small city in the interior of BritishColumbia, a 12-hour, difficult drive away from advocacy and legal services forrefugees in Vancouver. Once this geography was determined, the process spiraledfrom there. Far away from refugee lawyers, interpreters, advocates, settlementagencies, human rights monitors, and from the regular tribunals of the IRB, specialaccommodations had to be made for processing. Not accustomed to servicing thisnumber of clients simultaneously, Legal Aid created a bidding process whereinlawyers bid for contracts to represent large numbers of claimants. Although LegalAid never explained their decision to sign contracts with the four lawyers selected,other refugee lawyers suggested that Legal Aid had selected the cheapest bids, not-ing that the four selected were not the most experienced.21 They questioned boththe number of clients represented per lawyer and the quality of their representationin Prince George. Whereas hearings normally take place in the chambers of theIRB in Vancouver, for this group, they were held in provisional tribunals estab-lished within the prison in Prince George and adjudicated by officers of the IRBwho were flown in temporarily to accommodate the scale and geography of deten-tion. Lawyers and advocates complained of problems with access, time, and inter-preters.

Detached geographies of detention in Esquimalt and Prince George limitedlawyers’ access to clients and the claimants’ access to due process and may havecontributed to an interesting outcome. China, in 1999, was the second largestsource country for positive refugee claims in Canada with a 58% approval rate.The rate for those who arrived by boat in 1999 was under 5% with 24 claims (Uni-ted States Committee for Refugees, 2001). The ninety adult females on the boatscomprised only 15% of the group, but received more than 50% of the positiveclaims. There are two possible explanations. The first has to do with gender: someargued successfully that they had faced persecution under China’s one-child policy.

21 Interview, Vancouver, August, 2001.


The second argument has to do with geography. Most of those who received posi-tive claims were women and children housed in prisons and group homes in thegreater Vancouver area. There, they were able to access better refugee lawyers,interpreters, and advocates who represented only a handful of claimants each.They attended hearings in the regular tribunals of the IRB in downtown Vancou-ver, rather than in temporary tribunals in prisons. Overall, according to legal rep-resentation for the claimants, the IRB heard these cases in more individualizedfashion. In 2000, 321 of the migrants were repatriated (United States Committeefor Refugees, 2001), with more deported in ensuing months. While the processappeared to ‘‘work’’ for detainees in Vancouver, it appeared not to work for thosedetained in Prince George. The question remains, whether with more even access,there would have been more than 24 claims.

Detention was implemented with particular geographies, under a framework ofenforcement, security, and diplomacy with China. A more disembodied narrativetells a simpler story: the arrival of a large group of economic migrants who werenot political refugees, an assertion supported by the outcome of the claimant hear-ings. But a closer look at the embodied geographical experiences of claimantsshows that the story is more complex; that those moving through the process haddifferential access to the system. So the way in which the state sees and categorizessmuggled migrants has powerful material ramifications.

The embodiment of research

I also learned about the bureaucracy according to how the federal governmentreacted to me as a researcher. Examination of the ways in which the governmentpositioned research and researcher in fieldwork for this project furthers the analysisof the relationship between body and state. The federal government was widely cri-ticized for the response to this movement in 1999 (Hier & Greenberg, 2002). It wasthus in a sensitive context that I began research with CIC in August of 2000. Theresearch process itself was fraught with tension, including, for a while, messagesfrom lawyers in the Department of Justice that altered the conditions of researchon a daily basis and culminated in orders for my removal from CIC. Over time,with endorsement from National Headquarters, I negotiated re-entry. The chal-lenges to doing institutional ethnography are an instructive element of the strategyof embodiment. The Department of Justice wished to contain the research in vari-ous ways: by determining interviewees, reviewing transcripts, having lawyerspresent at interviews, and ultimately housing, owning, and destroying data.

As a researcher, I was positioned simultaneously within and outside of thebureaucracy, ultimately beyond its control, but also inside its inner workings, ableto discern goings-on beyond the public messages. Many employees supported myresearch and were reflective about their work. Yet their openness conflicted withgovernment’s need to protect information. While those at the center of theresponse to human smuggling within the Department were more open to discussingtheir work, those whose job it was to create public images were more concernedabout someone moving inside the Department.


In the relationship between smuggling and the nation-state, different bodiesemerge as more and less visible in distinct locales. Both the state and the mediahave the power to produce identity for mass audiences, which occurred effectivelyin response to the arrivals. These discursive representations connected withmaterial realities, including claimants’ experiences of the refugee determinationprocess. In this case, the state positioned the migrant to create a perception of thestate itself as powerful and in control while remaining a selectively opaque insti-tution. As a researcher I am able to disrupt these narratives through the strategy ofembodiment.

The four embodiments outlined relay the diffuse operation of power at multiplescales and illustrate the importance of analyzing geographies of the nation-stateand the implementation of policy at finer scales where most theories of the statetend to collapse. Through everyday, local geographical analysis, embodied experi-ences show struggle on the part of migrants, bureaucrats, and others involved inthe response to smuggling. Much of the success of this government response wasmeasured in terms of the communication of images. The state is, comparativelyspeaking, most powerful because of the resources that it can mobilize to communi-cate particular representations of events. But embodied, the state is fluid, layered,textured, more personal, and less powerful. If state practices are only as powerfulas images and their ability to reproduce the perception of power, then this explainsinitial resistance to my research and investment in considerable resources to protectthemselves from me.

Geographies of the embodied nation-state

An immigration bureaucrat whom I interviewed compared his daily work forCIC to the story of ‘‘The Wizard of Oz.’’22 In the story, Dorothy is lost and is toldthat the powerful Oz will send her home. Upon finally arriving to see him, how-ever, her dog, Toto, pulls back a curtain to see that Oz is actually a frightened manhiding in order to amplify his message through a microphone. Similarly, thisbureaucrat described much of his work as ‘‘scrambling’’ to uphold the public facade of power, an image larger than the bureaucrats embodied behind the curtain.

Like Toto, permitted inside the workings of government, I was able to observesome of the inconsistencies behind the public messages. When I began research atCIC, I was surprised to realize the extent to which the day-to-day operations of thebureaucracy were oriented to responding to the media. In research interviews, themost frequently cited source of stress in the response to human smuggling was theneed to somehow manage the external environment, particularly the media. Asevents unfolded as a crisis in the media, the media became part of the crisis forgovernment. In interviews, when asked to describe the role of the media, respon-dents often included powerful body language in their response. They would sigh,

22 Interview, Vancouver, August 2000.


slouch, shake their head, roll their eyes, or groan. Note the visceral terms withwhich one CIC employee described the impact:

We couldn’t get out in front of the cameras fast enough. As soon as anotherissue came up, we were arranging to get in front of the media again. They wereall slobbering. They wanted us. They could smell blood.23

Media communications were central to the response and exemplary of the needto control information and to promote the image of being in control. The boatarrivals were a crisis, not for the nation, but for people in government. Accordingto respondents, the media create a climate in which ‘‘People in government are notallowed to make mistakes.’’ The media were a constant companion both in theoffice where employees receive daily news clippings across e-mail that discussedimmigration the day before, and on the water where media arrived—often beforegovernmental responders—to film each interception. This created an environmentthat some referred to as living in a ‘‘fishbowl;’’ the feeling of being constantlywatched.

Everything changes in times of crisis, including bureaucratic operations. Policythat appears neatly on paper is more convoluted when implemented on the ground,when decisions are made in haste without much time for discussion. There was nospecific policy driving a marine response on the Pacific coast, and this resulted inwhat bureaucrats dubbed ‘‘policy on the fly.’’ In interviews with those who enactthe state on the frontlines, the cleaner narratives of policy recede, and the pro-cesses, personalities, and politics surrounding policy come to the fore. There is aclear disconnect between the theories of the powerful state that course throughpolitical geography and the views articulated by bureaucrats. I interviewed manycivil servants who felt in the dark, powerless, unprepared, unsupported, andcynical. The embodied state is multiple, conflicted, and in perpetual negotiation.Embodying the state by studying the day-to-day locations and challenges ofbureaucrats shows a far more diverse, diffuse, and conflicted state. Institutionalethnography illustrates that state practices are not only powerful, but also oftenoccasions when civil servants themselves feel powerless and vulnerable.

The strategy of embodiment entails following civil servants through their day-to-day work in relation to human smuggling. Those who enforce Canadian bordersare working in some surprising places. Airline liaison officers, for example, patrolforeign airports where they search for and attempt to intercept potential refugeeclaimants en route to Canada. Likewise, Immigration Control Officers operate onthe ground in foreign countries where they gather information on smuggling move-ments. These two examples are part of an increase in ‘‘front-end’’ controls of refu-gee movements, including increased interception abroad. These creative uses ofgeography extended to the location of remote detention sites, and correspondedwith the diversion of boats of smuggled migrants to islands off the coasts ofAustralia and the United States. Such actions took place in a global environment

23 Interview, Vancouver, April 2001.


where states watched one another’s enforcement practices and generated theclimate in which the Canadian federal government successfully enacted the ‘‘longtunnel thesis,’’ thereby restricting access to the system in Esquimalt. These pointswhere Canadian civil servants come into contact with migrants abroad show there-spatialization of governance of the nation-state and the re-constitution of inter-national borders by a constellation of civil servants.

Analysis of the daily work of civil servants illustrates that out of a lack ofdirection, powerlessness, and crisis emerged a powerful enforcement response. Anembodied state, however, appears less powerful, more vulnerable, and a bit unpre-pared to respond to smuggling. Time and again, bureaucrats articulated to me theabsence of a plan in the response to human smuggling. But if there was no plan,how did these stateless spaces come into being? The answer lies with the state in acondition of crisis. In a state of crisis, there was not sufficient time for dialogue orreflection. Decisions were made quickly—such as the decision to detain thesemigrants made over a conference call between Vancouver and Ottawa—with asense of a situation slipping out of control. In the ‘‘fumbling through’’ environ-ment of crisis where migrants are in motion and civil servants overwhelmed, statepractices of enforcement became transnationally more dispersed through geo-graphies of detention and interception that make refugee determination programsless accessible to potential claimants. Despite the absence of a plan, this responsefit clearly into a trend toward the design of stateless spaces.

There were surprisingly few people within the Department involved in sustainedfashion in the operational and policy aspects of the response, but the perception oftheir power to the outsider was maintained by their dispersion and invisibility. Inthe meantime, their own perception of their own power within the Department,behind the facade, was remarkably low. Embodiment depicts state practices asboth powerful and vulnerable, and this vulnerability is to the media—where therewas a powerful fixation on inscribing identity onto the migrant deemed political oreconomic—more than to human smuggling. This suggests, therefore, an importantpolitical imperative to the strategy of embodying the nation-state.

Conclusions

Scholars are unsettling more centralized understandings of the nation-state byinsisting that states remain powerful and are themselves restructuring and re-spatializing at different scales (e.g. Leitner, 1997; Marden, 1997; Ong, 1999). ColinFlint suggests that ‘‘[t]he contribution political geographers are making lies in thedetailed studies of exactly how state sovereignty is changing’’ (2002: 393, see Thrift,2000). This paper explored the spatial exercise of sovereignty in relation to smug-gled migrants and potential refugee claimants and illustrated what analysis of thework of civil servants offers to our understandings of governance and the state.

As the study of the everyday, ethnographic analysis depicts state practices as aseries of relationships and networks through which governance takes place. Myentrance into the everyday was the strategy to shift scale to the body. By locating


civil servants in their day-to-day work on human smuggling, I have also locatedtheir points of contact with potential refugee claimants. These points of contact,whether within the territorial nation-state, abroad, or in stateless interstitial spaces,illustrate the reconstitution of international borders. A critical geography of thestate counters disembodiment and detachment with embodied geographies anddraws connections between international practices of border enforcement, deten-tion, and asylum policy.

Arguments structured by the politics of scale enable the reconstitution of discus-sions at other scales, and thus open possibilities for new political alignments(Hyndman, 2001; Blomley & Pratt, 2001). In this paper, I read the state throughembodiment. My contribution to a growing dialogue on transnational feministcritical practice (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Bacchetta et al., 2001) is to ‘‘jumpscale’’ to geographies of the body. The embodied experiences of those enacting thestate and those moving through the refugee determination program uncover differ-ential experiences obscured at other scales and expose holes in the clean narrativesof public policy and public discourse. From the interception of boats on the waterto the detention and deportation of migrants, I have illustrated that examining thenation-state from the scale of the body shows processes obscured at other scales.Relationships among states materialize at the body most obviously for the dis-placed person. But an embodiment of the state reveals other sites of global strugglesuppressed in narratives of transnational migration.

Detached geographies of detention are part of a trend in which asylum-seekersface increasing front-end control, restricted access to asylum systems, and feweradvocates in the remote places where they are detained. ‘‘Stateless’’ spaces in quasi-state territories and within national territories, in airports and detention centerssuch as the long tunnel in Esquimalt, are on the rise. These spaces are a result ofthe manipulation of local institutional landscapes.

Discursive representations of bodies are also key to understanding this trend.The narrative of the federal response to the 1999 boat arrivals perpetually broughtup the containment of flows of information, migrants, and the situation as a whole.This analysis explained the uneven enactment of policy by showing the inscriptionof identity onto the body. The most powerful indication of the importance ofimage is the policy of detaining migrants who are smuggled more visibly by boat,but not those who arrive, in far greater numbers, by plane. During this process,migrants were scripted into boxes, the narrative of who they were reinforcedby their limited access to the system. The growth in stateless places and remotedetention sites corresponds with the discursive ‘‘rise of the bogus refugee.’’ Eachjustifies the other. Discourse and materiality are one. The story of who these peopleare—the optics of their criminality—explains where and why they are located indetention. As such, the media—a key venue for communications from the federalgovernment to the public—contributed to the stereotyping, regulation, and surveil-lance of migrant bodies and therefore must also be incorporated into geographiesof the nation-state.

At stake is the ability of displaced people to access refugee programs globally.I have argued that locating the body tells us something about geopolitical relation-


ships. To extend this argument, I want to point out some parallels between dis-course surrounding smuggling and terrorism. Both involve networks that transcendinternational borders. Both operate in ways that the state cannot clearly engage,and both threaten refugee programs. Since 2002, the US Immigration and Natur-alization Service has required the registration of male immigrants from pre-dominantly Muslim countries currently living in the United States, many of whomtraveled to Canada to make refugee claims as a result of detentions and deporta-tions that ensued (New York Times, 2003). Where the geographies to the campaignof terror are clouded and not clearly visible to the state, there is still a demand forvisible action, for the sense of containment that comes with surveillance. Inresponse to a fear that is nameless and faceless, the state inscribes fear onto thebodies of those who must register. For the state, the body is a geography of terror,pronounced through nomination, racialization, and identification. Those who mustregister with the INS and those who are detained feel most poignantly the scale ofthe geopolitical and the power of the nation-state. For this reason, we must notoverlook the scale of the body.

This paper placed the body, unsettled and located the state, and also disruptedand displaced the border. Never mere lines on a map, borders, like states, are geo-graphically dispersed spatial productions. It is important to think about thelocation of borders for those who are smuggled. They pass through the HongKong international airport where Immigration Control Officers stop potential refu-gees from boarding planes. They lie somewhere on the water beyond territoriallimits where US military ships routinely intercept boats. They are enacted in thetemporary tribunals of prisons in Prince George and in the detached detention cen-ters of Woomera in the remote outback of Australia. The border is indeed a site ofidentity construction, but those ‘‘sites’’ are neither unitary nor linear. For theundocumented, the displaced, and the stateless, for people of color with tenuouslegal status, the border is everywhere. And for people imprisoned because oftheir legal status, the border is everything, self-mutilation, hunger strikes, andsuicide attempts, powerful expressions of the pain of containment and the path toliberation.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Margaret Walton-Roberts, Caroline Desbiens, JenniferHyndman, David Ley, Jamie Winders, Graham Webber, Helen Watkins, andVicky Lawson as well as students in her graduate seminar for thoughtful feedbackon earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to employees of Citizenship andImmigration Canada and to members of various NGOs and advocacy organiza-tions for their generous contributions to this research. This work would not havebeen possible without the financial support of the Metropolis Project and theKillam Predoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia. All mistakesare my own.


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