The Geopolitics of Migrant Mobility: Tracing State Relations Through Refugee Claims, Boats, and Discourses

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The Geopolitics of Migrant Mobility:Tracing State Relations Through RefugeeClaims, Boats, and DiscoursesIshan Ashutosh a & Alison Mountz ba Department of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH,USAb Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, Canada

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To cite this article: Ishan Ashutosh & Alison Mountz (2012): The Geopolitics of Migrant Mobility:Tracing State Relations Through Refugee Claims, Boats, and Discourses, Geopolitics, 17:2, 335-354

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Geopolitics, 17:335–354, 2012Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 onlineDOI: 10.1080/14650045.2011.567315

The Geopolitics of Migrant Mobility:Tracing State Relations Through Refugee

Claims, Boats, and Discourses

ISHAN ASHUTOSHDepartment of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

ALISON MOUNTZBalsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, Canada

This paper highlights how states attempt to control migrantmobilities through refugee claims. We examine the representationsand practices of refugees in the refugee claimant process over timeand in very different cases with distinct geopolitical influences andinflections in Canada. Our paper is based on case studies of SriLankan Tamil migrants in Toronto and refugee claimants fromFujian province, China, that landed in British Columbia in 1999.We analyse the ways that geopolitics influence every phase of therefugee claimant process, from the representations of claimants, tothe decisions made about refugee claims, and the tenor of mun-dane encounters with state authorities. Our findings indicate thatthe geopolitics of migrant mobilities are produced through everydaystate practices as well as by migrant strategies to move and resettle.

INTRODUCTION

In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha describes the borderlines thatdefine transnational flows.1 Bhabha begins with an allegorical reference tothe ship in photographer Alan Sekula’s Fish Story to point to the contem-porary conditions of the movement of global capital, labourers, and theapparent myths of the nation-state referenced by this image. To quote fromFish Story:

Address correspondence to Alison Mountz, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

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336 Ishan Ashutosh and Alison Mountz

A scratchy recording of the Norwegian national anthem blares out froma loudspeaker at the Sailor’s Home on the bluff above the channel. Thecontainer ship being greeted flies a Bahamian flag of convenience. It wasbuilt by Koreans working long hours in the giant shipyards of Uslan. Theunderpaid and understaffed crew could be Salvadorean or Filipino. Onlythe Captain hears a familiar melody.2

The Norwegian national anthem continues to play, albeit as an anachronistictune broadcast from that exemplary metaphor of travel, the ship. At once theemblematic symbol of mobility, the ship also shows migrants on board to beadrift in geopoliticised fields of power.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between geopoliticsand mobility in ways that problematise romantic interpretations of thetransnational paths and cultural hybridities of the ship. Viewed in geopoliticalcontext, the ship also suggests immobility and truncated forms of transna-tionalism. Migrants cannot move as readily as the goods they produce,unload, and consume; they are not as fluid as global flows. Instead, theyremain routed through and rooted to places produced through the striatedgeographies of state powers.

We explore “the geopolitics of (im-) mobility,”3 in the refugee claimsprocess that hinges on the unequal relations between states and migrants.4

In particular, we examine the role of the Canadian nation-state in creatingunequal migrant mobilities that structure the experiences and discourses sur-rounding Sri Lankan Tamil migrants in Toronto, and refugee claimants fromFujian province, China, that landed in British Columbia in 1999. In eachof these distinct cases, geopolitical relations between states shape migrantmobilities and are expressed through the intimate and individualised deci-sions of refugees and more collective public discourses surrounding refugeeclaims. Through analysis of these case studies, we reveal the representationsand practices of refugees that shape the geopolitics of mobility. In the firstcase, we explore the experiences of Sri Lankan migrants who fled Sri Lankain the wake of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms. Their experiences suggest thatthe strategies they employed in crossing the border confront the prosaic andeveryday reproductions of the state. In the second case of Fujianese refugees,we examine how arrivals of refugee claimants have been represented in themedia as national outsiders and threats that mark the shift from human-itarianism towards exclusionary practices. By focusing on the geopoliticsof migration that emerge within the mundane encounters and workings ofthis central component of Canada’s immigration bureaucracy, we argue thatrefugee claimant processes act as a key strategy through which nation-statesshape migrant mobilities.

Refugee flows are inherently geopolitical projects, and have been sincetheir inception and codification in the 1951 UN Convention Relating tothe Status of Refugees. The Convention emerged from an international

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The Geopolitics of Migrant Mobility 337

movement to resettle those people displaced from European countries dur-ing World War II. The Convention has since opened in myriad ways toincorporate other geographical locations (through its 1967 Protocol) and amore expansive interpretation of groups who are persecuted on the basis ofmembership in a social group.

Much interpretation of the Convention is left to the signatory states interms of who will fit into the category of the ‘convention refugee.’ Authoritiesmaking these decisions do so on the basis of information on country condi-tions at the time. Geopolitical relations are often reflected in these decisions,both individually and collectively in terms of statistics of whose claims areaccepted and whose are rejected. For example, in the United States, ColdWar geopolitics have shaped refugee flows and the claimant process. Asylumclaimants fleeing communist regimes such as Cuba and Nicaragua had muchhigher rates of acceptance than those fleeing non-communist regimes sup-ported by the US government, such as El Salvador and Guatemala. In Canada,geopolitical influences on the outcome of refugee claims from distinct sourcecountries are no less present, but certainly less polarised than determinationsmade south of the border (which continue to reflect Cold War predilectionspost–Cold War).5

Geographies of refugee movement and resettlement reflect the politi-cised realm of geopolitics. In addition to their countries of origin, thegeographical routes and travel methods of refugee claimants influence thereception and decisions of their claims. In particular, contemporary arrivals ofSri Lankan Tamils and Fujianese by boat in North America have engenderedracialised representations of refugee claimants and intense public scrutinyof their narratives.6 Our analysis reveals the centrality of the nation-state incontrolling migrant mobilities and fixities operating in distinct times, places,and geo-political contexts.

GEOPOLITICS AND MOBILITY

While there exist important and complex links between geopolitical relationsand migrant mobilities, few geographers have analysed these connec-tions. In 1991, Doreen Massey connected population change in urbanplaces to global demographic shifts.7 Indeed, many urban geographers havetaken up these changes in empirical research and analytical renderings of‘transnational’ city neighbourhoods.8 Geopoliticians, however, have beenslower to account for the ways in which global migrations mirror geopoliticalrelations. Indeed, Tesfahuney argued that refugee and international migra-tion flows are relegated to the margins of critical geopolitics, despite thefact that differential mobilities are central to geopolitics.9 The highest num-bers of refugee claimants in refugee resettlement countries, for example,tend to be fleeing the very conflicts in which those states are engaged, as

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the current refugee flows from Iraq and Afghanistan attest. Furthermore,diasporic populations play key roles in lobbying states for humanitarianaid. During the 2004 tsunami, for example, the Sri Lankan Tamil diasporain Canada influenced the Canadian government to increase funding fordevelopment programmes in Sri Lanka.10 Displaced populations, therefore,provide important and varied insights into the multifarious and multi-scalarrelations between nation-states.

Political geographers lay important groundwork in understanding thecomplex relationships between geopolitics and mobility. Hyndman, forexample, advances a “transnational politics of mobility” that “moves beyondthe binary geopolitical divisions of North and South, West and East” andin doing so, highlights the relative fixity of migrant bodies in relation tointernational humanitarian aid.11 Through a “critical geosophy,” Cresswell,too, explores how movements are made meaningful and transformed intomobility through politics and ideology.12 Coleman, meanwhile, traces thegeopolitics of mobility through the process of immigration enforcement inthe United States, looking at how the federal government influences mobil-ity across local and international scales by devolving policing power to localenforcement authorities.13

Building on these insights, we are interested here in how geopoliticalrelations make their way into the refugee claimant process in Canada, influ-encing mobility, representations, and the very chances claimants will haveto stay or the likelihood that they will be returned home. We examine therefugee claims process through non-elite discourses and practices. Our casestudies address two key challenges set forth by critical geopolitics. First, weshow how state practices aimed at limiting movement are challenged throughthe agency of migrants. Second, we examine discourses of nationalism andthe legitimacy of refugee arrivals.

In her critique of Critical Geopolitics, Jo Sharp argues that GerardÓ Tuathail reproduces existing power hierarchies in his focus on the already-powerful; ‘ordinary people’s’ stories are suppressed while elites’ power isreproduced.14 Sharp writes, “Ó Tuathail reduces ordinary people to cultureindustry drones, empty of agency and awaiting their regular injection ofideas. To him, as with the statesmen and geopoliticians he discusses, geopol-itics is something that apparently only the elite do.”15 This oversight preventscritical geopoliticians from considering the influences of popular culturesand public discourses on geopolitical events and actors, falsely separatesstate actors from non-state (and non-elite) actors,16 and leads them to ignorediverse experiences and resistances.17 Importantly, it also “silences a wholerange of people and groups from the operations of international politics.”18

We aim here to address these silences by examining the more mundanereproductions of geopolitical relations, particularly as they influence humanmobility. We move across scales and locations, from the informal locationswhere geopolitics influence bureaucratic decision making throughout the

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claimant process, to the public sphere of media representations of claimants,and into the formal sphere of refugee claimant tribunal hearings.

Decisions and discourses surrounding refugee claims bring to the forethe very state-centred spatial organisation of power that critical geopoliticianswork to uncover. Indeed, in such decisions, state authorities interpret thebasis of claims. The ‘receiving’ state where a refugee claim is made must bea refugee-receiving state or signatory to the 1951 Convention Relating to theStatus of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. If it is, that state then holds muchpower in interpreting the Convention through design of its own standardsand procedures for processing asylum claims. Often, as a result, claimantswho might fit the definition of a convention refugee in one state may not doso in a neighbouring state.

Canada holds the international reputation of having one of the moreprogressive and extensive refugee claimant determination processes, oftensetting the standard for other refugee resettlement countries. The UnitedNations High Commissioner for Refugees awarded Canada the Nansen Medalin 1986 for its contribution to refugee programmes and protection.19 Canada’scurrent status, however, emerged through extensive debates over immigra-tion policies and nation-building in the post-World War II period. Canadadid not sign the Convention until 1969 and only developed a refugeedetermination process in the 1976 Immigration Act.20

The basis of the refugee claim determination process reifies not only thepower of the receiving state to decide, but also maintains a central role forwhat is called the ‘country of origin’ of the claimant. Employees of Canada’sImmigration and Refugee Board (IRB), called Refugee Protection Officers,research the political climate or ‘conditions’ in regions of the country of ori-gin in order to assist the two IRB Board Members assigned to adjudicate eachclaim. The Board was designed to function as an ‘arm’s-length institution’ thatwould independently research and adjudicate refugee claims across Canada.The Members’ decision will determine the outcome of the case: whether theclaimant is allowed to stay in Canada, in the case of a positive outcome;or whether she will be returned home, in the case of a negative claim. Theclaimants’ stories will be carefully weighed in relation to the research donein the region of origin. Does the claimant’s Personal Information Form cor-respond with what current research shows to be happening regionally athome? Does the oral testimony at the IRB hearing confirm ‘a well-foundedfear’ of return home, the legal standard to which claimants are held account-able in each case? These questions guide a slow refugee claims process,leaving many hopeful claimants, in the words of one Sri Lankan refugeewhose claim took ten years to adjudicate, “neither here nor there.”

While the dynamics between states play out on a global stage, they alsofind their way into the more mundane or what Joe Painter calls ‘prosaic’bureaucratic practices of state actors who make these daily decisions aboutrefugee status.21 In so doing, geopolitical relations reproduce the relative

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stature of states as refugee-receiving and refugee-producing entities. Thisstature is embodied in the claim of the claimant, the decision of the adju-dicator, and the countless documents associated with the claimant process.Robert Lidstone has referred to the claimant process in Canada as orien-talizing, or one in which persons making claims on the basis of sexualidentity and orientation must present their home countries as ‘backwards’or repressive, compared to the forward-looking Canadian government thatascribes equal rights to same-sex couples – in the case of Lidstone’s work –under federal law.22 Likewise, scholarship on asylum claims in the UnitedStates has shown how the claimant process reproduces racist and colo-nial scripts between states, with the progressive and enlightened policies ofreceiving countries effectively obscuring their role in contributing to conflictand oppression.23

Geopolitical relations are reproduced not only through the ways inwhich claimants narrate their histories, but also in media reports on theclaims. Claims will be adjudicated in the more informal public arena wellbefore IRB board members render their formal decisions, and some refugeeadvocates have argued that this public discourse about claimants and theirclaims proves more central to decision making than adjudicators like toadmit.24

In the ensuing sections, we examine some of the arguments, discourses,and decisions surrounding distinct refugee claims in order to demonstratethe geopolitical relations at work between Canada and states of origin (inthis case, Sri Lanka and China) that structure human mobility through theoutcome of claims. Our case studies focus on the everyday work of statebureaucracies in the refugee claimant process. We begin with the experi-ences of Sri Lankan refugees who migrated to Toronto in the 1980s and theirencounters with multiple state bureaucracies and then move to discussionof the processing of arrivals from Fujian province in 1999. By examin-ing the refugee claimant process as a geopolitical process, we address alargely under-investigated theme on the geopolitics of mobility. While muchresearch focuses on detention and deportation policies ‘outside’ and excep-tional to state policies, we investigate the practices and representations ofthe refugee in the everyday workings of state bureaucracy. Our focus onthe production of the refugee in the refugee claimant process destabilisesthe state and geopolitics through specific and embodied encounters with theCanadian state.

SRI LANKAN TAMIL (IM-)MOBILITIES FROM 1983 ONWARDS

Geopolitics can be read through migrant narratives where the relations,encounters, and negotiations between states influence every step of therefugee claimant process. In this section, we trace the migration of Sri Lankan

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Tamils to Toronto in the aftermath of the 1983 riots and subsequent hostili-ties during Sri Lanka’s civil war. Today, Canada is home to one of the largestSri Lankan Tamil populations outside of Sri Lanka, and their migrations toCanada continue to provoke debate on refugee policy almost thirty yearsafter their initial arrivals. The settlement of Sri Lankan Tamils in Canadabrings together geographies of violence, experiences of marginalisation, andstate classifications of refugees.

Sri Lankan refugees began migrating to Canada in the immediate after-math of the 1983 riots that targeted the country’s Tamil minority. Followingthe country’s independence in 1948, Tamils were increasingly oppressedthrough a series of governmental policies. In particular, the 1956 “SinhalaOnly” Act made Sinhala the country’s official language, and standardisationpolicies of the 1970s disenfranchised Tamil university students. These poli-cies were accompanied by militant activities such as attacks on Tamils andthe burning of the Jaffna Library in 1981, which housed original Tamil lan-guage, literature, and historical documents. The 1983 pogroms, however,represent a watershed after which, as Oivind Fuglerud notes, “there are no‘facts,’” but rather competing claims and histories that mark the beginningsof Sri Lanka’s civil war.25 These pogroms, or Black July as commemorated bythe Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, represented, in the words of the Toronto-based Canadian Tamil Congress, “an unforgettable part of the collectiveTamil consciousness.”26 The 1983 pogroms produced particular migrationsand appeals for asylum or refugee status, as the Canadian government refersto asylum.

Sri Lankan Tamils who migrated to Canada were placed in the country’schanging immigration and multicultural policies and discourses. In the after-math of the 1983 riots the ‘lucky’ Tamils could enter Canada only because ofnew immigration policies, and in particular, the 1976 Immigration Act. TheAct stipulated three mechanisms for the resettlement of refugees: a desig-nated class of “displaced or persecuted” people, a special measures landingprogramme through which Citizenship and Immigration Canada adjudicatesdecisions on a case-by-case basis, and finally, an inland refugee determina-tion process for potential refugees present in Canada who can successfullymake a claim according to the conditions outlined by the 1951 Convention.27

Since their arrival in Canada, Sri Lankan Tamils have elevated Canada’sinternational reputation for humanitarianism. Canada’s geopolitical promi-nence and relations with other nation-states resulted from their migrations.As Hyndman noted, during peace talks between the Sri Lankan govern-ment and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Oslo in 2002,New Democratic Party leader and former Ontario Premier Bob Rae lec-tured these groups on the benefits of federalism, with Canada ostensiblyacting as a model for both the LTTE and government.28 Before Rae’s dayin Oslo, Canadian philosopher Howard Adelman offered a more measuredperspective on the Sri Lankan war in a special issue of Refuge:

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Civil war can be prevented. Solutions can be found. But they are based onideologies of tolerance, on recognition of multiculturalism, on workingto eliminate socioeconomic inequalities based on race or ethnicity. Theyare based on political structures that adopt a federal model with a greatdeal of local self-determination rather than a highly centralized state.29

Given the continued violence in Sri Lanka, Adelman’s prescriptive for endingcivil war remains unfulfilled. In a later essay Adelman linked these modelsof federalism and multiculturalism to the treatment and rights of refugeesby the state. A state that grants rights to refugees promotes the “individualself interest” of its members and contrasts with other states, like Sri Lanka,which serve the “collective self-interest defined by a small core within theleadership.”30 Refugees in Canada, therefore, are emblematic of not onlywhat was wrong in other, distant parts of the world, but of the necessity of(peacefully) exporting the Canadian model to other parts of the world.

The narratives below are taken from two Sri Lankan Tamil refugeeswhose experiences highlight the strategies used by refugees when encoun-tering state bureaucracies in order to move. Their narratives illustrate theeveryday practices of nation-states and the complex negotiations migrantsentered into with different facets of the state in a transnational arenadominated by violence, oppression, and exclusion. They navigated thesenegotiations from positions of marginalisation and violence, developing prac-tices based on shared strategies and knowledge, trial and error, and ofcourse, deception.

Padma on the Move

Padma moved to North York, north of Toronto’s downtown, in 1984, at atime when there were few other Sri Lankans in the city. “We were living theCanadian way only,” she says, looking down at a restaurant advertisement ina local Tamil weekly, quietly acknowledging how different it would be today,as Toronto is now home to one of the largest Sri Lankan Tamil populationsin the world.31 For the first two years, she lived in an apartment complexwith a few other Sri Lankan families on Toronto’s west side where theylived “almost like relatives,” relying on each other for food, looking after thechildren, and companionship.

The geopolitics of Sri Lankan Tamils’ displacement and resettlementin Canada is produced through colonial networks of labour migration andpost-colonial cultural nationalisms and conflict accompanied by economicliberalisation in Sri Lanka. After the standardisation policies of the early1970s that required Tamil students to score higher in university entranceexams, Padma’s sister and cousin went to study in Chennai, India. OtherTamils had brothers, sisters, and children leave for Canada, Australia, andthe United Kingdom. The prospect of leaving, to put it another way, was

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hardly novel. Padma recognised this option. But the circumstances underwhich she and other Sri Lankan Tamils migrated, in the aftermath of the1983 anti-Tamil pogroms, changed the calculus of mobility from volition,desire, and possibility to one of necessity, urgency, and determination.

In late July, Padma heard over the radio that the LTTE attacked a mili-tary convoy in Jaffna, killing over a dozen Sinhalese military officers. Padmaheard rumours about Tamils entering Colombo from the “countryside” whereviolence had broken out.32 She quietly discussed the incident with her hus-band and feared the worst. Though alarmed, Padma’s husband brushed asideconcerns for their safety, as Colombo, particularly their neighbourhood sur-rounded by government buildings, had remained relatively free from theviolence that had marked the conflict. Colombo, moreover, was Padma’shome, the city where she was born and continued to live after marriage.

The pogroms in Colombo began on the morning of July 25, 1983.At home with her two-year-old daughter that July day, Padma “suddenlysaw everything burning.” Outside she saw a mob that had surrounded aburning car as its occupant, engulfed in flames, struggled to get out of thecar. Throughout Colombo organised groups that roamed the streets, somewith voter lists, stopped vehicles, ‘determined’ the ethnicity of their occu-pants, and if they were Tamil, doused the car in petrol and set it ablaze.The same was done to businesses and residences. The pogroms spread toother cities, before being brought under control by early August.33 The gov-ernment estimates that approximately 350 Tamils died, while other sourcessuggest that three thousand Tamils were killed.34

The anti-Tamil pogroms set in motion patterns of migration that reliedon new refugee-receiving states, and existing networks of Tamil migration,in some cases violently superimposed on the nineteenth-century Kanganisystem that brought Tamil labourers from India to the hill country of SriLanka and Southeast Asia. An analysis of the geopolitics of refugee mobilities,therefore, needs to account for contexts beyond receiving states and insteadexamine the multiple contexts that shape their movements.35

Padma expressed her relative fortune that having family in other nation-states made the process of immigration “smooth,” though her initial attemptsto migrate to Malaysia were met with “very rude” immigration officers atthe Malaysian High Commission. The problem was that her husband, bornin Malaysia, had renounced his citizenship when he moved to Sri Lanka inthe late 1950s. Glancing over their papers through a barrier that preventedPadma from seeing the documents in question, the officer flatly dismissedtheir chances of migration by saying, “At that time your husband thought SriLanka is a paradise, now he wants to come back?” The family then thoughtabout Australia, though they heard that migration to Canada would be faster.“They [Canada] were very welcoming,” remembers Padma. In September1983, Immigration Minister John Roberts allowed Sri Lankans to apply forlanding status from inside Canada and imposed a moratorium on removals

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to Sri Lanka.36 He simultaneously diminished the welcome by also applyingvisa stipulations on Sri Lankan nationals.37 Padma hesitated and wondered,“but Canada?” Neither she nor her husband particularly wished to migrate toCanada, but where they went was secondary; of utmost importance was thatthey leave Sri Lanka. As Lacroix showed in her work on refugees in Montreal,the theme of choice centrally shapes refugee mobilities as they have beenforced to leave.38 For Padma, choosing between Malaysia, Australia, andCanada resulted from their initial forced movement from Sri Lanka.

One year later, in September of 1984, Padma and her family left Sri Lankafor Vancouver, where Padma’s brother worked as a prison guard east ofVancouver. This position worked in their favour, along with special policiesthat allowed eligible Canadian residents to sponsor their relatives.39 Padmaand her husband were interviewed by Canadian immigration officials sta-tioned in New Delhi, who would routinely come to Colombo to processapplicants.

They (the immigration officers) went through all the files, and the thingis we had an article that I just took. His brother was working as a livingunit officer, that’s a government department. When he was working, oneof the prisoners stabbed him. He [Padma’s brother in law] was awardedsomething, so we gave that article to the officer who interviewed us. Theofficer very quickly gave us immigration. Only us! Out of all the peoplethere, everybody was telling us “he is very strict and he doesn’t give[immigration] to anybody,” but, he gave it to us.

After Padma moved to Toronto, her sister’s attempt at asylum failed.“They rejected her [application] time and time again. Because they were inColombo [and] we were very close to the Canadian High Commission, wecould walk to it.” Immigration officials repeatedly informed Padma’s sisterthat “‘there is no problem here, why would you want to go there?’ Theywere telling that all the time! ‘There is no problem, there is no problem.’”This was a reversal of the 1983 special programmes that designated Colomboas the only affected areas.40 Padma sponsored her mother, father, and sister.Padma’s sister finally migrated by stating that she was the last person tojoin the family. As she explained, “I had to consult a lawyer. To get thatword from him [reunification] I had to pay $500. He only said this much –‘last member of the family,’ and that worked!” Padma was not the onlyone; the family reunification programmes of the early 1990s saw a record13,000 Sri Lankan Tamil persons land, many of them family-sponsored. Theynow constitute the second largest class of Tamil migrants after conventionrefugees.41

Padma hopes to return to her family’s home in Jaffna, the largest cityin northern Sri Lanka and a cultural centre for Tamils. Even as Padma artic-ulates this desire, however, she recognises simultaneously its impossibility.Such sentiments signal the power of nostalgia tempered with the realities of

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forced movement. Padma reminded herself that all of her family and friendshave since left the island. Colombo, especially her house in Kollupitiya, is toointimately associated with the features of state power made manifest in herlife. State policies, discourses and violence produced the emigration of indi-viduals and entire families. They reunite briefly with calling cards, e-mail,and the occasional letter routed through the sites of the Tamil diaspora.And yet, in 1983 it was precisely because of Padma’s proximity to the state,to its institutions, its monuments to nothing other than itself, that “saved”her and her family, as her house was left untouched. Like most stories oftransnational migration, Padma’s narrative represents distinct kinds of move-ment, as it would be categorised by the Canadian state. These movementsare most glaringly structured by states, by evaluating the merits of both thedanger Padma and her family faced as well as projections of their belongingin the ‘host’ country. Padma’s movements were predicated on shifting con-ceptions of national belonging violently enforced by the state in Sri Lankaand immigration policies in Canada.

Virali Flees

The geopolitics of migrant mobilities are not merely directed by the state,but rather are contested and negotiated by migrant strategies based on theirencounters with the state. Virali also left her devastated home in Colombo’sWellawatte district immediately following the 1983 riots, where Virali, hertwo sons, and the servant were kept in hiding by their Sinhalese neighbour.Virali and her husband fled to India, where he had professional contacts andsent their two sons to England, where Virali’s mother, brother, and sister hadimmigrated in the late 1970s. Living in Chennai for two years, they frequentlythought of returning to Sri Lanka, but were concerned about the deterioratingpolitical and economic conditions in the country. Such concerns blurred thedistinction between economic and political motivations for migration, just asthis distinction became more prominent in immigration discourse, with theelaboration of the criteria required to become a legitimate refugee. Virali’shusband opted instead to transfer to Kuala Lumpur in 1985. Three years later,after a brief trip to England, Virali’s husband died unexpectedly, placing herlegal status in limbo as her visa depended on her husband’s employment.She now needed to get a new visa to England where her mother and sisterlived.

The negotiations with the Malaysian state grew increasingly complex.Finally, Virali approached the immigration officers with a family friend fluentin Malay to get her dependency visa stamped in her new passport.

In Malay back and forth, she [Virali’s friend] was arguing with that visaofficer. . . . They asked, “Where is your husband?”

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I said, “He has gone abroad.”

“When will he come?”

“I am not sure,” that is also true. So I was like Bill Clinton, he also answerslike that!

So then this [visa officer] said “sign in place of your husband.” I put mysignature and I got the Malaysian visa stamped on my passport – theMalaysian visa!

Following this, Virali went to the British High Commission where shereceived a six-month tourist visa. Upon arriving in London, Virali moved inwith her sister and was reunited with her children. It was, however, a short-lived reunion as the move to England in conjunction with the desire to beindependent and her legal concerns in Malaysia after husband’s death, lefther wanting to move elsewhere.

My cousin said go to Canada. But how to get to Canada? Canada wouldnot give a visa, so I went to the American Embassy. They were smartenough, they gave me the visa, but not my children . . . I had to make upmy mind. In August, my husband died, by September I was in England,and now in November, I had to decide whether to come to America andwithout my kids. They had lost their father, and now I am going to leavethem. . . . That was very difficult. And I remember on the final night, I said[to her son] “if you don’t want me to go, then Amma [mother] won’t go.”I remember his words, “if you have to go, Amma, you have to go.”

The next day Virali landed in Boston, staying with family friends whoarranged for her to be driven to the Canadian border. Because of recentlypassed legislation that fined drivers who brought refugees to the border,Virali was dropped near the Rainbow Bridge border crossing in NiagaraFalls, NY.

We waited until December 25th, Christmas. On the 24th night . . . thatday [the temperature] was the lowest in 72 years. It was snow covered,so they [family friends] brought me a nice big coat, the gloves were likeastronaut’s [gloves], and everywhere [I was covered in] thermals. So [thedriver] drove me to the border, then had a cup of coffee, and he took mea little bit before the bridge, opened his engine [the hood of the car] andsaid “this is as far as I will take you.” It was 10:30-11 in the night. . . .You can see Niagara Falls, and he [the driver] said “you will walk, walk,walk, then you turn and keep walking and you will see these booths.”I’ve never seen such things . . . I was going but I could not even walkbecause there is so much snow! . . . I had two bags in my hand and it

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was so cold, but I don’t think I felt the cold . . . I was void of all feelings.. . . My one goal was to get across. . . . Remember, I lost my husband afew months ago, for me, even if they shoot me I would not have minded.

Despite the cold, Virali’s timing could not have been better. A few dayslater, on New Year’s Day 1989, new immigration legislation was enacted(Bills C-55 and C-84), imposing stricter standards in the refugee determiningprocess.42 These bills would be later expanded in the form of US-Canadabilateralism as the Safe Third Country Agreement, implemented in December2004, where a refugee claim would have to be made in the first country inwhich they arrive. In other words, if Virali had made the same claim in 2005,she would have been turned back to the United States, the first safe countryshe passed through as an asylum claimant.

I was going, I took a turn and suddenly big floodlights were on me. Theyasked me to stop, from a distance. Those people, the border patrol, theguys were so tall! Big fellows, no? . . A very tall fellow came up to meand asked “how did you come? Did you have engine trouble?” So I said“I was brought by an agent and he dropped me off there.”

Almost two decades later, Virali becomes emotional in describing whatamounts to her last border crossing. Of course, the crossing of borders issomething that she does regularly, from speaking to family in other countries,to organising a mission to post-tsunami Sri Lanka. But this crossing repre-sented the transition towards settlement, ongoing since she fled Colombo in1983. As she explained what happened to her at the border, her tears gaveway to an excited jubilation that ended in an outpouring of laughter.

He thought I couldn’t understand English, so he repeated the question,and he looked at me so hard. After a few minutes, he said “give me yourbag, I will carry it for you!”

This seemingly friendly encounter with the state’s gatekeeper engages a num-ber of relevant empirical facts. For much of the 1990s, Sri Lanka rankedamong the top five source countries for refugee claims in Canada. Themajority of these claims proved successful.43 Rather than documenting andestablishing the facts of her movement, however, we aim here to understandVirali’s narrative as a story that reveals the contradictions and complex nego-tiations that produce the state and the refugee. For Virali, her refugee claimrenders visible the Canadian state through a mix of intimidation, anxiety,and with the carrying of her bags, benevolence and the performance of thecompassionate state embodied in the border guard.

Once in the immigration office at the border, Virali once again felt thegaze of the state while waiting for her interview.

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They [the border and immigration officers] definitely saw me earlier. Andon the walkie-talkies they were talking about me . . . looking at me.I [later] wrote to my mother [that] I looked like a specimen, the onlything missing was the glass! . . . Then of course I was taken in and askedso many questions . . . Then I called my brother-in-law [who was livingin Toronto], and he came and brought me [to Toronto], and the next day,it was Christmas.

Shortly after experiencing the state’s magnanimity Virali is made aware of itspower to look, classify, objectify. Refugee displacement blurs assertions ofhuman agency as individuals and families strategise in their decisions aboutborder-crossings, and their narrations of those crossings. Virali’s mobility rep-resents multiple encounters with the state, from state-sanctioned violence inSri Lanka, her dependency status in Malaysia, her tourist visa in the UnitedStates, and her refugee claim at the Canadian border. In each of theseinstances, state policies of entry and exclusion are successfully counteredby Virali’s strategies that enabled her movement as well as resettlement.

The geopolitics of mobility emphasise the practices, institutions, anddiscourses that shape these movements across international borders. ParvatiRaghuram, for instance, has suggested that a multiscalar approach central-ising experiences of migration better illuminates the structures that producethese movements.44 Both Virali’s and Padma’s narratives highlight the mul-tiple scales of state control over refugee flows that range from actionswithin nation-states, across transnational networks and the norms of interna-tional humanitarianism, the borders of the state, and the bodies of migrants.Moreover, Padma and Virali spoke of their encounters with the state withits ability to classify and objectify. And yet, they return the gaze of the stateand deploy strategies in a reconfiguration of Massey’s power geometry thatenables them to escape violence.

In the next section, we continue our analysis of the power geometriesthat shape the geopolitics of mobility. We examine the representations ofrefugees and the practices of immigration officials following the arrivals ofmigrants from Fujian province, China. As discussed in the above case study,the section below highlights the production of the refugee and the cen-trality of the nation-state in the refugee claims process. We turn to publicdiscourses and the everyday practices of immigration officials that focusedon the legitimacy of refugee claims, national exclusions, and the unevenrelations between states.

‘THE BOGUS REFUGEE’ AND THE SHIFT FROM HUMANITARIANASSISTANCE TO EXCLUSION

The Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) was created in January1989, only days after Virali arrived in Canada. Ten years after its creation, theIRB faced one of its heaviest, most trying workloads with the arrival of six

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hundred Fujianese migrants off the coast of British Columbia. By the time thefour boats were intercepted, the IRB had over five hundred refugee claimsto process from the boats alone, with most of the claimants held in detentionin Prince George, in the remote interior of British Columbia.

While refugee claims are received, processed, and adjudicated on anindividual basis, their collective outcomes reveal information about bothnational and geopolitical contexts. Similarly, the discursive representationsof groups of claimants in public discourse also reveal geopolitical influences.The Canadian press, for example, often applies the term ‘bogus refugee’ tothose persons deemed unworthy of asylum based on country of origin, wellbefore their claims have been heard by the Immigration and Refugee Board.The term is often associated with criminality and immoral behaviour such asattempted illicit entry (attempted, as it turns out, by most who make refugeeclaims, as there exists no visa issued to those intending to make a refugeeclaim). The assumption behind the phrase ‘bogus refugee,’ is that those mak-ing the claims were migrants travelling for economic purposes, rather thanfear of persecution.

Discourses on the bogus refugee represent a historical and geographi-cal shift from European to Third World refugees (racialised as lighter skinto darker skin), and in the process, a shift from settlement to repatri-ation (Chimni 1998). In the contemporary context of the geopolitics ofmobility, these decisions are highly racialised. Whereas the Canadian medialargely celebrated the resettlement of Kosovar refugees in 1998, the Chineseclaimants were received in an entirely distinct fashion.45 In 1999, the termwas levelled en masse in reference to a group of nearly six hundredmigrants from the coastal province of Fujian, China, who were interceptedby the Canadian government when smuggled by boat to the coast of BritishColumbia. Although they were believed to be transiting Canada en route towork underground in the US, most made refugee claims in Canada onceintercepted. They were widely vilified in Canadian newspapers, not only as‘bogus’ refugees perceived to be abusing Canada’s refugee determinationprocess, but as ‘queue cutters’ charged with attempting to cheat the line-upof immigrants hoping to enter Canada legally. The term ‘bogus refugee’ isnot exclusive to the Canadian context, but rather has emerged across nationalcontexts where asylum seeking has become highly publicised and politicised(e.g., Australia and the United Kingdom).

In the ensuing months, the government held the large group ofclaimants in detention, an unusual response to refugee claimants in Canada.Many debates ensued among Canadians about the cost of detention, themigrants’ access to the claimant process, and about the severity of the threatposed by human smuggling to national security. Well-rehearsed, racialisedtropes drew on fear of disease and ‘yellow peril.’ The Province, for example,ran a front-page news story with close-up photos of migrants arriving on thedeck of the ship with the bold, capitalised headline, “QUARANTINED.”46

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Meanwhile, the federal and provincial governments poured substantialresources into detention, processing, resettlement, and repatriation. Unlikegroups that had recently been resettled from conflict zones, such as theKosovars brought to Canada only months before the Fujianese landed, thesmuggled migrants remained unpopular in the public and had very lowacceptance rates. Their rates remained below 5%, compared with a 58%acceptance rate among Chinese claimants overall that same year.47

Bureaucrats worked quietly behind the scenes to move them throughthe claimant process and ultimately send most of the Fujianese back onchartered flights, a historically new phenomenon in Canada. Ethnographicresearch conducted by Mountz within Citizenship and Immigration Canada(CIC), the main federal department responsible, illustrated the degree towhich even mid-level bureaucrats not normally engaged in foreign affairswere attuned to the sensitive relations between Canada and China at thetime. China was in the process of joining the World Trade Organization, andCanada had recently sent trade delegations to explore trade relations with thecountry largely recognised as an emerging economic ‘dragon.’ Acceptanceof refugees would prove embarrassing to the PRC, embarrassment whichCanadian officials sought to avoid.

Chinese authorities themselves publicly declared the migrants to bebogus refugees who were economically motivated. Privately, in inter-govermental negotiations, they insisted that they would only issue traveldocuments to repatriate an entire shipload at a time. This precise return enmasse would send a clear message to potential migrants that such behaviourwould not be tolerated and to the rest of the world that China was nota refugee-producing country that abuses human rights. Compliance withthis request would undermine Canada’s commitment to hear each caseindividually, however. This exchange signals struggles over sovereignty.By processing an entire boatload at a time, China would curtail Canada’scommitment to hear each individual claim as an independent case. TheCanadian refugee claimant process was, at the time, well-known for itsopportunities for claimants to appeal negative decisions. As a result of indi-vidualised hearings and opportunities for appeal, individual claimants tookhighly varied amounts of time to be processed. Therefore, it would take along time for the Canadian authorities to attempt to re-assemble an entireboatload of arrivals for return. In an effort to balance its legal commit-ment to human rights with its political commitment to diplomatic relations,CIC attempted to hide the numbers to arrive on each ship, but failed.48

Instead, they repatriated groups on flights that matched the numbers thathad arrived on individual boats, if not the exact groups of individuals whoarrived together on each boat.

In the end, only twenty-four of more than five hundred claimantshad claims accepted, most of them children and women making gender-based claims of persecution under China’s one-child policy. Canada, also

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wanting to send a strong message of deterrence to potential undocumentedmigrants and to the rest of the world, aggressively worked not only to negatemost decisions, but to appeal and overturn the small group that had beenaccepted. As such, the geopolitical migrated into the refugee determinationprocess, influencing the chances for mobility and likelihood of return forFujianese migrants, a process that moved between formal spheres of bureau-cratic management and informal spheres of public adjudication. Ultimately,some 330 Fujianese were repatriated to China.

By selecting its refugees, the state polices its own borders, and in sodoing reproduces and asserts a Canadian sovereignty relationally more pow-erful than that of the country of origin. At the same time, however, thecountry of origin (here, China) asserts its own narrative, and in this case,Canada complies. Even through the seeming minutae of debates internalto bureaucracies about how much information to release about boat inter-ceptions (i.e., the number of people that arrived on each boat) and theadjudication of cases, geopolitics come into play. Frontline workers and mid-level bureaucrats alike understood well the negotiations between Canadianand Chinese authorities.

Such a narrative of the state re-emerged in 2009 in high-level nego-tiations between heads of state when American President Barack Obama,Mexican President Felipe Calderón, and Canadian Prime Minister StephenHarper met for trilateral talks in México in early August. After the ballooningof Mexican refugee claimants during the previous few years, CIC decided toimpose visa restrictions on all travellers. This met with an outcry of protestfrom Mexican citizens, all of whom were affected by the decision that wouldslow travel to Canada from Mexico, as well as – it was hoped – the numberof claims from Mexico. Harper would not retract this decision when facedwith pressure from Calderón, and instead explained the source of the prob-lem: a ‘broken’ refugee system that enabled too many claims from ‘bogusrefugees.’49

In October 2009, both the symbolism and hysteria of the boat and thegeopolitical machinations swirling around those on board re-emerged withthe arrival of the first boat to be intercepted since 1999 off the coast ofBritish Columbia. This ship carried seventy-seven Sri Lankan Tamil men.In response, a round of securitisation took hold. Amid speculation of themen’s involvement with the LTTE and discussion in the media about tracesof explosives on the boat, the men were held in detention in Surreybeyond the administrative time allowed for detention without review. RCMPCommissioner William Elliot said, “the fact of their arrival, and the potentialfor others to follow, does raise security concerns.”50 In August 2010, anothership carrying 490 Tamil asylum seekers from Sri Lanka was intercepted as itapproached British Columbia.51 Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based ‘expert’on terrorist organisations suggested that the Canadian military should haltships in international waters before they enter Canadian waters.52 These

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events return us to the real and symbolic nature of the ship and its rep-resentations of mobility. Ships evoke transnational flows, but as we havestressed in this paper, also represents the power of nation-states in guidingmigrant mobilities.

CONCLUSION

In this essay, we have explored the multifaceted relations between geopol-itics and migrant mobility with examination of the decisions and discoursessurrounding the Canadian refugee determination process. Refugee journeysare geopolitical journeys; people on the move are both authors of thesenarratives, as they navigate geopolitical terrain, and expressions of broadergeopolitical relations at work that structure their mobility. Distinct claimsmade during distinct geopolitical moments will meet greater or lesser suc-cess, depending not only on the individual merit and content of cases, but onthe broader politicised and historicised relations between national govern-ments of the country of origin and the receiving country. We have offeredtwo contexts of refugee flows in Canada to illustrate how discourses andpractices of refugees prosaically shape the geopolitics of migration withinthe regularised channels and policies of the nation-state.

Examination of refugee claimants’ experiences holds potential to addressnot only the reproduction of geopolitical relations, but simultaneously theresistance to those geopolitical relations that Matthew Sparke53 and otherfeminist scholars have repeatedly found to be absent in the field of criticalgeopolitics. In the case studies above, migrants encountered the state in mul-tiple locales: along its land and sea borders, checkpoints, and bureaucracies.These encounters cannot be encapsulated merely as appeals to the state, butalso as the myriad strategies and decisions that influenced their movementsthrough, and at times in spite of, the continued centrality of the state in shap-ing migrant mobilities. The differences between the narratives of Sri LankanTamil migrants and the Fujianese claimants also point to the strategies of thestate in accepting and rejecting migrants, at curtailing movement and produc-ing state-centred movements that deny access to territory. The transnationaljourneys we discussed are shot through with spatial impositions of power onmobility and the human agency of individuals and communities navigatinggeopolitical hierarchies.

NOTES

1. H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge 1994).2. Ibid., p. 8.3. D. Massey, ‘Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’, in J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam,

and L. Tickner. (eds.), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change (London and New York:Routledge 1993).

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4. See J. Hyndman, ‘Border Crossings’, Antipode 29/2 (1997) pp. 149–176. For a discussionof citizenship regimes and migrant mobilities see A. Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics ofTransnationality (Durham: Duke University Press 1999).

5. For this reason, persons fleeing non-communist regimes during the Cold War often tried to getto Canada where they would find statistically higher chances of getting refugee status.

6. See A. Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2010).

7. Massey (note 4).8. M. P. Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell

2001); M. Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City (London: Verso 2001).9. M. Tesfahuney, ‘Mobility, Racism and Geopolitics’, Political Geography 17/5 (1998)

pp. 499–515.10. J. Hyndman, ‘Acts of Aid: Neoliberalism in a War Zone’, Antipode 41/5 (2009) pp. 867–889.11. Hyndman, ‘Border Crossings’ (note 4) p. 150.12. T. Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York and London:

Routledge 2006).13. M. Coleman, ‘Immigration Geopolitics beyond the Mexico-U.S. Border’, Antipode 38

(2007) pp. 54–76.14. J. Sharp, ‘Remasculinizing Geo(-)Politics? Comments on Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical

Geopolitics’, Political Geography 19/4 (2000) pp. 361–364.15. Ibid., p. 362.16. Sharp (note 14).17. F. Smith, ‘Refiguring the Geopolitical Landscape: Nation, ‘Transition’ and Gendered Subjects in

Post-Cold War Germany’, Space and Polity 5/3 (2001) pp. 213–235.18. Sharp (note 14) p. 363.19. S. Smith, ‘Immigration and Nation-building in Canada and the United Kingdom’, in P. Jackson

and J. Penrose (eds.), Constructions of Race, Place, and Nation (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress 1993).

20. G. Dirks, Controversy and Complexity: Canadian Immigration Policy during the 1980s(Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press 1995).

21. J. Painter, ‘Prosaic Geographies of Stateness’, Political Geography 25/7 (2006) pp. 752–774.22. R. Lidstone, Refugee Queerings: Sexuality, Identity and Place in Canadian Refugee

Determination, Master’s thesis, Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, 2006.23. L. Cantú, E. Luibhéid, and A. M. Stern, ‘Sexual Identity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands’,

in E. Luibhéid and L. Cantú (eds.), Queer Migrations: Sexuality, Citizenship, and Border Crossings(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2005).

24. Mountz (note 6).25. O. Fuglerud, Life on the Outside: The Tamil Diaspora and Long-Distance Nationalism (London:

Pluto Press 1999) p. 34.26. Canadian Tamil Congress, ‘Commemoration of the 25th Anniversary of Black July’, May 8, 2008,

available at <http://www.canadiantamilcongress.ca/CTC_BlackJuly_English.pdf>, accessed 4 Aug. 2009.27. N. Kelley and M. Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration

Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998).28. J. Hyndman, ‘Aid, Conflict and Migration: The Canada-Sri Lanka Connection’, The Canadian

Geographer 47/3 (2003) pp. 251–268.29. H. Adelman, ‘Tamil Refugees and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka’, Refuge 13/3 (1993) pp. 1–2.30. H. Adelman, ‘Refugee or Asylum: A Philosophical Perspective’, Journal of Refugee Studies 1/1

(1988) p. 13.31. There are significant discrepancies regarding the size of the Tamil population in Toronto.

See Hyndman, ‘Aid, Conflict and Migration’ (note 28). Also see A. Aruliah, ‘Accepted on CompassionateGrounds: An Admission Profile of Tamil Immigrants in Canada’, Refuge 14/4 (1994) pp. 10–14, who statedthat a decade following the 1983 riots in Sri Lanka, there were 73,000 Tamil Sri Lankans in Canada, thelargest influx having arrived in the early 1990s. Interviews with members of the Sri Lankan communityreported that the population in Toronto is approximately 200,000. This same estimate was noted in L.Sandercock, L. Dickout, and R. Winkler, ‘The Quest for an Inclusive City: An Exploration of Sri LankanTamil Experience of Integration in Toronto and Vancouver’, Research on Immigration and Integration inthe Metropolis 04-12 (May 2004).

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32. Padma’s narrative conflicts with other accounts that state that the violence began in Colombobefore moving to other cities in Sri Lanka. Given that the Colombo riot in 1983 is seen as retaliation forthe LTTE attack in Jaffna, and the history of riots in Sri Lanka since 1948 that began in other cities andrural areas, Padma’s narrative must be placed in the larger context of strife and conflict in Sri Lanka.

33. Ibid.34. M. Kleinfeld, ‘Strategic Troping in Sri Lanka: September 11th and the Consolidation of Political

Position’, Geopolitics 8/3 (2003) pp. 105–126.35. J. Hyndman and M. Walton-Roberts, ‘Interrogating Borders: A Transnational Approach to

Refugee Research in Vancouver’, Canadian Geographer 44/3 (2000) pp. 244–258.36. Aruliah (note 31).37. Kelley and Trebilcock (note 27).38. M. Lacroix, ‘Canadian Refugee Policy and The Social Construction of the Refugee Claimant

Subjectivity: Understanding Refugeeness’, Journal of Refugee Studies 17/2 (2004) pp. 147–166.39. Aruliah (note 31).40. Adelman, ‘Tamil Refugees’ (note 29).41. Sandercock, Dickout, and Winkler (note 31).42. Kelley and Trebilcock (note 27).43. Hyndman, ‘Aid, Conflict and Migration’ (note 28).44. P. Raghuram, ‘Crossing Borders: Gender and Migration’, in L. Staeheli, E. Kofman, and L. J.

Peake (eds.), Mapping Women Making Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography (New Yorkand Oxon: Routledge 2004).

45. M. Mahtani and A. Mountz, ‘Immigration to British Columbia: Media Representation and PublicOpinion’, Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, Working Paper No. 02-15 (2003),available at <http://www.riim.metropolis.net/>, accessed 1 May 2003.

46. ‘Quarantined’, The Province, 21 July 1999.47. United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, U.S. Committee for Refugees

World Refugee Survey 2000 - Canada, 1 June 2000, available at <http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country„USCRI„CAN,4562d94e2,3ae6a8e00,0.html>, accessed 9 Aug. 2009.

48. Mountz (note 6).49. ‘Harper Blames Canada’s Refugee System for Mexican Visa Uproar’, Edmonton Journal,

10 Aug. 2009, p. 1.50. S. Bell, ‘Tamils’ Ship Alleged to Have Traces of Explosives’, National Post, 3 Nov. 2009, A1.51. H. Johnson, ‘Intercepting Boat Arrivals: What the Australian Policy Model Means for Canadian

Asylum Policy’, Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, 9 Dec. 2010, available at <http://www.asiapacific.ca/sites/default/files/filefield/australiamigrationpolicy.pdf>, accessed 2 Jan. 2011.

52. M. Youssef, ‘More Tamil Vessels May Be Headed for Canada’, The Globe and Mail, 5 Aug. 2010,available at <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/more-tamil-vessels-may-be-headed-for-canada/article1662085/>, accessed 6 Aug. 2010.

53. M. Sparke, ‘Graphing the Geo in Geopolitical: Critical Geopolitics and the Re-Visioning ofResponsibility’, Political Geography 19/4 (2000) pp. 373–380.

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The Geopolitics of Migrant Mobility: Tracing State Relations Through Refugee Claims, Boats, and Discourses

Documents