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- Convenors:
-
Karine Geoffrion
(Université Laval)
Viviane Cretton Mballow (HES-SO Valais Wallis, University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Western Switzerland)
- Stream:
- Relational movements: Migration, Refugees and Borders/Mouvements relationnels: Migration, régugiés et frontières
- Location:
- LMX 243
- Start time:
- 6 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel explores migrants' lived experience of the bureaucratic immigration procedures of their destination country. It also seeks to reflect upon the (re)production of racialized, classed and gendered privilege and inequalities inherent in institutionalized immigration policies and practices.
Long Abstract:
For many migrants, the experience of crossing national borders does not start on the road. It starts before one even leaves the premises of her home and starts engaging with the various and often complicated processes of visa/residence permit application. For them, the lived experience of bureaucratic immigration procedures constitutes the greater part of their route toward their aspired destination. Finding and filling the necessary paperwork in which one has to expose and justify her claim to move, providing proofs of admissibility, dealing with delays in file processing, interacting with, and getting interviewed and screened by immigration clerks, are all part and parcel of the migration route itself. However, the degree of friction encountered along the (bureaucratic) path is often contingent on the classed, gendered and racialized identity of the migrant.
This panel explores the engagement of individuals with the various national bureaucratic procedures that shape their experience of immigration, whether they reach their destination or not. It asks how migrant actors of different backgrounds develop coping or resistance strategies, the resources they mobilize and the emotions that emerge from the immigration process and that contribute to shaping their experience. It also seeks to reflect upon the (re)production of racialized, classed and gendered privilege and inequalities inherent in institutionalized immigration policies and practices. The panel welcomes empirical papers that explore the lived experience of immigration formalities, including administrative discrimination, might it be from the perspective of economic migrants, marriage or family migrants, lifestyle migrants or elite professional migrants.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Jane Helleiner (Brock)
Paper short abstract:
Irish newcomer accounts of the application and approval processes for the Canadian Working Holiday visa are analyzed. The focus is on how these relatively privileged newcomers presented their navigation of the Canadian immigration bureaucracy.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on qualitative interviews with 26 Irish newcomers living in Toronto, this paper focuses on their accounts of accessing a two-year Canadian Working Holiday visa. The paper analyses accounts of the visa application and approval process as well as in some cases, attempts to extend authorized stay and work in Canada beyond the two-year term. The narratives highlight some frustration with an unresponsive Canadian immigration bureaucracy both pre-and post-migration. Critiques of online engagements with this bureaucracy, were however, contrasted with more favourable accounts of face-to-face encounters with Canadian immigration officials during airport border entries. While some interviewees employed private migration industry actors (e.g. brokers, immigration lawyers and paralegals) and/or an Irish settlement organization to assist them in navigating the Canadian immigration bureaucracy, most emphasized their own self-education, often through migrant-created online forums. Such forums offer informal advice to and from Irish newcomers about a wide range of migration-related issues including Working Holiday visa application, approval and authorized extensions. Despite some critique of the Canadian immigration bureaucracy, these relatively privileged (highly educated and white) Irish had been successful in obtaining authorized residence and open work permits in Canada under a Working Holiday program that facilitated their global mobility and for some, the option of permanent residency in Canada.
Shiva Nourpanah (Dalhousie University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on recent fieldwork with foreign nurses who entered Canada on temporary permits. I present an account of the affectual states of the research participants as they negotiate a complicated labour and migration policy regime in search of stable employment, residence and professional recognition.
Paper long abstract:
This study draws on fieldwork done between April 2015-August 2016 in Halifax, Canada, with foreign nurses employed in healthcare, who entered Canada on temporary permits. Through a series of 29 qualitative interviews with foreign nurses, augmented with nine consultations with experts from stakeholder agencies involved in their migration and employment, I present an in-depth account of the affectual states of the research participants as they navigate and negotiate an increasingly complicated labour and migration policy regime in search of stable employment, permanent residence and professional recognition. I use a Weberian theoretical framework on the relations between state and society, and Marxian concepts of the reconfiguration of class relations under capitalist employment regimes, together with contemporary accounts of mobility regimes and neoliberal healthcare workplaces to study the multiple bureaucratic processes which enmesh foreign nurses. My findings uncover a set of interlinked affective states, ranging from ambivalence, anxiety, stress (both positive and negative), to gratitude, loyalty, resentment and fear and a "smoothing over" of unpleasant racialized workplace interactions which are experienced by the participants, and are structurally produced through the conditions which regulates their migration and labour.
Laure Sandoz (NCCR On the Move, University of Neuchâtel)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the practices of various institutions in order to attract and facilitate the settlement of highly qualified professionals in Switzerland. It analyses their strategies to bypass administrative barriers related to national immigration policies.
Paper long abstract:
While most of the research on migration intermediaries has focused on 'illegitimate' practices such as trafficking and irregular migration, little work has been conducted on the 'migration industry' that surrounds more 'privileged' forms of migration. This paper addresses this gap by examining the role of institutions in attracting and facilitating the settlement of highly qualified professionals in Switzerland. Based on an ethnographic field research in two different linguistic regions with a high economic dynamism and immigration rate, the paper analyses the interactions between state and non-state institutions. It highlights the strategies developed by these actors in order to bypass administrative barriers due to national regulations on immigration. It also shows how such strategies contribute to producing a category of 'mobile professionals' who are able to avoid most of the inconveniences associated with immigration policies and bureaucratic practices.
Hélène Quashie (Institut des Mondes Africains (Paris))
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents the administrative facilities granted to European migrants living on the Senegalese coast and the obstacles they encounter which lead to recurring bureaucratic procedures. This contrast reveals social strategies and racialized confrontations with local authorities and residents.
Paper long abstract:
Le littoral sénégalais, en particulier les régions de la Petite Côte et du Saloum, connaît un afflux migratoire spécifique, intensifié au cours des années 2000. Il concerne des ressortissants européens investis dans des logiques de polyrésidentialité, souvent liées à leur retraite, ou d'entrepreneuriat associé au contexte économique de ces zones touristiques. Ces parcours migratoires requièrent une préparation administrative minime : un visa de quelques mois renouvelable généralement accordé sans difficulté ou l'acquisition d'une carte consulaire annuelle. Les autorités sénégalaises ne demandent pas de justification motivée des mobilités résidentielles ou professionnelles, ni des capacités de revenus de ces ressortissants étrangers. Les départs de pays du « Nord » vers des pays du « Sud » sont souvent exempts d'embûches administratives. Cette communication s'intéresse toutefois au contraste observé entre les facilités d'installation et de séjour de ces migrants européens, temporaires ou permanents, et les obstacles qui les ramènent à des procédures bureaucratiques laborieuses et récurrentes, sources de conflits avec les représentants des services des douanes, des transports, des forces de police, des municipalités locales ou des instances ministérielles. Ces antagonismes soulèvent des enjeux liés aux privilèges sociaux et à l'inégale liberté de circulation Nord-Sud incarnée par ces résidents étrangers particuliers. Ils donnent notamment lieu à une racialisation des rapports sociaux, qui fait écho à un phénomène plus général dans les zones touristiques de la Petite Côte et du Saloum. Ce processus se heurte notamment aux désirs migratoires vers le « Nord » que soulève, dans ce contexte, la question des "unions mixtes".
Laura Odasso (Aix-Marseille Université)
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents the experiences of binational couples’ bureaucratic procedures for obtaining a residence permit or the nationality in three European countries during 2000s. If these couples suffer from differential treatments, they also show and develop interesting forms of legal consciousness.
Paper long abstract:
In the wake of restrictive reforms of family migration policies in many European countries since the 1990s, new specific conditions to fulfil and procedural changes have been introduced for binational couples ‒ those formed by a European citizen and a third country national (TCN) ‒ that want to formalise their union and, then, obtain a permanent residence right for the TCN spouse. These policies represent an internal "border-network" that couples have to overcome. Meanwhile, non-governmental organisations have emerged which offer support to binational couples helping them to become aware of their rights.
Based on more than five years' researches (2009-2016) in France, Italy and Belgium on the socio-institutional representations of binational couples and their encounters with the State authorities, the paper aims to provide an insight to the experiences of binational couples' bureaucratic procedures for obtaining a residence permit or the nationality. Some couples feel that immigration authorities treat them differently depending not only on their "legal status", but also on their supposed belonging (to a culture, a social class, a religion, etc.) and on their sex. They perceive differently the stigmatization regarding their romantic and family choices. The encounter with migration law reshapes the feeling of belonging to the national community for the nationals and the sense of "being there" of their foreign partners. Nevertheless, the members of the couples show and develop some forms of legal consciousness that, sometimes, lead them to act collectively in non-governmental organisations that defend their rights reshaping the meaning of their "being (semi)citizens".
Florence Lévy (CECMC EHESS / MAPS Neuchatel University)
Paper short abstract:
Undocumented Northern Chinese migrant women need to marry a French citizen in order to gain a legal stay document. However, they first must convince themselves as well as their fiancé and public officers that this is not a marriage of convenience; otherwise they run the risk of deportation.
Paper long abstract:
Illegality shapes the space of action of undocumented Northern Chinese migrants in France. It constrains their choices of jobs, wage, and housing, their relationship with their families in China, and confines them to a life of permanent precariousness, as they could be deported at any time. Many women decide to marry a French citizen, in order to gain a legal stay document. But they are ambivalent with this choice, viewing it only as an adaptation to French immigration law. They have just divorced in China and have no intention to remarry; their French fiancés are old, poor, not well-educated, and do not seem like a good match. Both of the partners in these marriages have different individual expectations about these relationships, which do not consider romantic love or family life. The relation seems to be based on a "legal-sexual exchange": women look for legal document, men look for sex or care provider.
These binational marriages are considered with suspicious by many actors: the Chinese migrant, her French fiancé and his family, other Chinese migrants, and the French administration. The marriage procedure is risky for these undocumented women who might be arrested and deported if their fail to convince police officers that this is not a marriage of convenience. They have to distinguish themselves from the image of sham marriage. They therefore have to do rational and emotional work in order to convince themselves, their fiancé, their family in China and public officers of the legitimacy of these unions.
Karine Geoffrion (Université Laval)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the lived experience of the Canadian spousal reunification process from the perspective Canadian women married to non-Canadian men. It demonstrates how conjugal authenticity and normalcy are being co-constructed throughout the immigration process.
Paper long abstract:
In the context of cumbersome family reunification immigration procedures in Canada and increasing delays in the processing of "foreign" spouses' files, this paper explores the strategies Canadian women married to non-Canadian men have developed in order to "make it" through the Canadian family reunification process despite the tactics exerted by the state to deter such unions. It draws on the conjugal trajectories of thirty Canadian women who are or have been in an intimate relationship with a non-Canadian man living in a "non-western" country, focusing on their experience of the family reunification process. Eighteen months of participant observation in an online community of Canadian women married to or sponsoring the immigration of a non-Canadian man further enrich the discussion.
I argue that the immigration of their spouse to Canada becomes, for the women, a personal and emotionally loaded project to be achieved by all means. First, I explore how the experience of the bureaucratic process of spousal reunification contributes a co-construction of conjugal authenticity and normalcy. Second, I discuss how the online women support community, while facilitating the immigration process itself by providing concrete immigration tips, guidance, support and an emotional outlet, also fosters its own set of norms and values based on the primacy of binational romantic love and conjugality. This puts pressure on members to conform to the ideal of companionate marriage, which may prove difficult to achieve in transnational relationships, and to follow through on the immigration of their spouse in spite of refusals from Immigration Canada.
Shikainnah Glow Menoza (Hiroshima University)
Paper short abstract:
Identity construction and mobility experiences of Japanese-Filipinos in transnational field has been an ongoing topic of children and youth migration studies. Particularly, this study seeks to shed light on their lived experiences as children of transnational families.
Paper long abstract:
Recent studies of globalization and migration have found remarkable shift and significant roles of female migrant workers known as "feminization of migration". However, this adult-centered perspective has made children and youths invisible and has put them in a vulnerable position in migration studies. Specifically, this study seeks to understand the mobility experiences of children of Filipino and Japanese unions. Majority of these children are known to have Filipina mothers and Japanese fathers owing to the Filipina women migration to Japan as 'marriage migrants in rural villages' in 1980s and 'entertainers' in 1990s.
As a research in progress, the researcher intends to analyze their mobility experiences through case studies. Their shared mobility experiences may have motivated children and youths to either visit or settle in Japan in the future. Further, this paper aims to review Japan government's stand on its Jus sanguinis-based 'nationality' policies, as a bureaucratic route, and how it has changed overtime (Suzuki, 2009). Their right of acquisition of their Japanese nationality has been fought by several groups including non-government organizations, lawyers and represented by their Filipina mothers. Such amendment has enabled Japanese-Filipinos increase their mobilities and thus, fueled their active participation in transnational sphere.