Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border

by Alison Mountz

In July 1999, Canadian authorities intercepted four boats off the coast of British Columbia carrying nearly six hundred Chinese citizens who were being smuggled into Canada. Government officials held the migrants on a Canadian naval base, which it designated a port of entry. As one official later recounted to the author, the Chinese migrants entered a legal limbo, treated as though they were walking through a long tunnel of bureaucracy to reach Canadian soil.

 

The “long tunnel thesis” is the basis of Alison Mountz’s wide-ranging investigation into the power of states to change the relationship between geography and law as they negotiate border crossings. Mountz draws from many sources to argue that refugee-receiving states capitalize on crises generated by high-profile human smuggling events to implement restrictive measures designed to regulate migration. Whether states view themselves as powerful actors who can successfully exclude outsiders or as vulnerable actors in need of stronger policies to repel potential threats, they end up subverting access to human rights, altering laws, and extending power beyond their own borders.

 

Using examples from Canada, Australia, and the United States, Mountz demonstrates the centrality of space and place in efforts to control the fate of unwanted migrants.

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

So here's the thing: literature on migration and immigration from political science is hopelessly located within the state (I'm looking at you, Christian Joppke); in geography, meanwhile, there's flux. Room to write in ethnography. Room to take up contemporary critical theory and critical philosophy. Room for people like Alison Mountz to write staggeringly good books that draw taught strings of illuminated insight from the particularities of office culture and ad hoc policies to the complex historical sediment of state / smuggler-manufactured global refugee flows. The funny thing is, Mountz is still ever-present in the state, theorizing the state, seeing it in its absent presence and I thought I was hallucinating but no, she's a philosopher of the state in many ways. (Drawing her lineage from Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, James C. Scott, and Judith Butler did much to endear her to my heart.)

This is a singular book and, if you're interested in im/migration from a critical theorist's position, you've got your night's reading cut out for you. Or, you know, just find the many essays through your university library where Mountz seeded the important ideas in this book. That's an affordable option. But do get your hands on it.

[Wendelle]

Examines the issue of transmigration, asylum claims, and human smuggling from the perspective of the Canadian immigration government workers whose job requires them to facilitate this issue