Syrian refugee resettlement and the role of local immigration partnerships in Ontario,Canada

We examine Canada's recent Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative (SRRI) paying close attention to the resettlement role played by mid‐sized urban communities. We elaborate on a key policy dimension at work at this scale of action: local immigration partnerships (LIPs). We start with a very brief review of Canada's history of mass refugee resettlement. Second, we assess the policy of LIPs, particularly how they have been presented as a form of “place‐based policy,” and third, we offer an overview of the role the LIPs played in three case study communities (Hamilton, Ottawa, and Waterloo) during the SRRI. Finally, we present three overarching themes that emerged from our research in each of these communities: the importance of each community's history of immigration and refugee resettlement; the embeddedness of the LIP and its leadership in the local community; and how the positioning of each LIP relative to the three levels of government and its official Resettlement Assistance Program agreement holders impacted its ability to act. The history, location, and place characteristics of each community influenced the nature of intersectoral and intergovernmental relations in distinctive ways, and differentially shaped the effectiveness of each LIP's ability to contribute to the SRRI.     

Building intersectoral partnerships as place‐based strategy for immigrant and refugee (re)settlement: The Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership

This paper examines the role of the Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership in the Syrian refugee resettlement in Canada's national capital following the federal government's 2015–2016 resettlement plan. Based on the findings of qualitative data collection—including semi‐structured interviews with representatives from community organizations, settlement agencies, and the City of Ottawa—two main arguments are advanced. First, while the current literature tends to portray the Canadian settlement sector as a passive victim in the face of neoliberal restructuring and austerity measures, this paper offers a more nuanced perspective by reflecting on the sector's ability to exert agency by developing initiatives and devising strategies that are rooted in the local context. Second, the case of the Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership sheds light on the significance of intersectoral networks and partnerships that extend beyond the settlement sector to build a sound approach for welcoming refugees and newcomers more generally. These findings serve to demonstrate the potential of partnerships as a place‐based settlement model that is responsive to context‐specific needs and enhances local community strengths, thus providing important lessons that can inform future immigrant and refugee (re)settlement and integration in other Canadian cities and regions.     

Syrian refugee resettlement: A case study of local response in Hamilton,Ontario

This paper examines the response by local government and stakeholders to the arrival and resettlement of Syrian newcomers in Hamilton, Ontario in 2015 and 2016—the first major wave of refugee arrivals since two significant changes in Hamilton's settlement organizational landscape. The creation of a local immigration partnership called the Hamilton Immigration Partnership Council (HIPC) is an example of place‐based policymaking within local immigration and settlement in Canada. Place‐based approaches emerged to bypass top‐down policy ineffectiveness, and the shift to empower civic participation in the local decision‐making process is seen as one solution to public policy innovations. Examination of HIPC's role in this context is thus critical to understand the challenges and learnings encountered in one place‐based setting. Our findings suggest that the lack of power (in terms of information, communication, resources, and funding) led to a missed opportunity for HIPC to lead a significant resettlement initiative. HIPC's inability to bring together key partners across the sector prior to and during the event is symptomatic of systemic barriers the Council had faced, including competing interpretations of HIPC and its role by its members. This study suggests the effectiveness of place‐based policy is not without its nuances, and iterative challenges and learnings.     

Une histoire de résidus : à propos des facteurs généraux et locaux de croissance régionale au Canada,de 1971 à 2001

Starting from an econometric model of local employment growth, applied to Canada (1971–2001), residuals—relative to model predictions—are analyzed over time and over space, in turn allowing us to draw a distinction between general explanatory variables and factors of a more local, cyclical or accidental nature. The model's explanatory power grows over time, founded on variables such as urban size, market access and industrial structure, allowing us to conclude that local employment growth in Canada follows an increasingly geographically predictable pattern. However, an examination of the residuals reveals more localized processes. Growth volatility is most manifest in Alberta and British Columbia, home to the most erratic local economies. Emerging patterns are visible in the last period, most notably the underperformance of Northern Ontario and of non‐metropolitan communities between Windsor and Québec City, lying along the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence. The over‐performance—compared to model predictions — of small and mid‐sized towns in south‐eastern Québec can, on the other hand, be interpreted as a sign of truly local social processes, generally associated with a particularly dynamic local entrepreneurial class.     

To Be or Not to Be a Refugee: The International Politics of the Hong Kong Refugee Crisis, 1949–55

While a great deal is known about the international politics of refugee policy in Europe since the appointment of the first international commissioner for refugees by the League of Nations in 1921, relatively little attention has so far been paid to similar questions involving the plight of refugees in Asia. This article examines one of the first attempts by the newly established UNHCR to extend its mandate beyond the European context for which it was originally conceived. During the early 1950s the British colony of Hong Kong briefly became the focus of intense UN and international attention over the issue of how to treat the hundreds of thousands of Chinese refugees who fled China's communist revolution for the colony. The influx of refugees, many of whom were destitute, threatened to overwhelm Hong Kong's infrastructure and prompted urgent calls for their resettlement abroad. The ensuing UNHCR investigation into the legal status of the Hong Kong ‘refugees’ offers an instructive example of the politicisation of the UNHCR in the context of the unfolding Cold War in Asia and reveals the deep divisions that emerged within the Anglo-American alliance over how to deal with Hong Kong's refugee population. The paper argues that the UNHCR Survey Mission in Hong Kong was doomed to fail given the mutual suspicions and incompatible agendas of the various players involved.     

The invasion complex: the abject other and spaces of violence

This article examines how the image of the refugee has been defined through the fear of the other, and how the mechanisms of detention have transformed the conditions of belonging. I examine the contemporary geopolitical forces propelling the rise of a new authoritarianism, growing border anxieties and hostility towards refugees, and argue that these emerging shifts provoke an urgent need for a new conceptual framework to understand the dynamics of contemporary global flows and concepts of belonging. I introduce what I call the ‘invasion complex’, a new conceptual hybrid that draws upon elements of psychoanalytic theory and complex systems theory, and Giorgio Agamben's analysis of sovereignty and ‘the camp’, to explain heightened border anxieties and the legitimization of violence towards the Other. I consider the value, applications and limitations of Agamben's analysis, and contend that both the state‐centric moral debate on the refugee crisis, and Agamben's method of privileging political agency in terms of sovereign power, tend to discount the role of complexity. Drawing on the Australian political and public discourse on refugees, and the 2001 Tampa crisis, I argue that the hostile reactions can be traced to a complex interplay between old phobias and new fantasies. I conclude by urging the need to move beyond nation state centric critiques of racism, and propose the development of a new paradigm — a potential politics that recognizes the complex dynamics of global flows, and which opens the way for a discourse of hope based on the rights of the human being, rather than the citizen.     

Governing Global Displacement in Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Berlin's Refugee Housing Crisis

A surge of forcibly displaced migrants into Europe in 2015 culminated in what has been referred to as the ‘refugee crisis’. As the continent's top destination country, Germany has been widely praised for its welcoming culture while heavily criticized for failures of integration. This is particularly true of Berlin — a city that has absorbed the highest number of war refugees in Europe, many of whom remain without stable accommodation. Despite its significance, the scholarship has largely neglected the housing question within the European refugee crisis. The aim of this article is to cast a critical light on the complexities and contradictions glossed over by the refugee crisis trope. Drawing on the Berlin case, the author argues that resettlement initiatives need to be understood against the backdrop of austerity urbanism, particularly its insistence that markets can meet housing demand. By focusing on three types of shelter provisioning for refugees, the article reveals the multifaceted and nuanced ways in which the Berlin government, refugees and grassroots organizations contest, produce and navigate the moving frames of austerity urbanism in search of stable housing.     

Subcontracting Academia: Alienation,Exploitation and Disillusionment in the UK Overseas Syrian Refugee Research Industry

As the political economy of social science research has shifted, subcontracted research assistants have taken over an ever growing part of the research process. In this article, we report on a case study of the experiences of local research assistants employed on UK‐directed research projects on Syrian refugees in Lebanon. While refugee research is framed in the UK as a noble project of helping the world's most vulnerable, these assistants speak critically of their sense of alienation, exploitation and disillusionment with the research they work on. Such problems arise, we argue, not just from subcontracted labour relations in the workplace itself, but also the broader political economy of how overseas social science research is currently produced. Addressing these problems requires giving better recognition to the work, interests and concerns of research assistants, but also rethinking and restructuring the global production of social science research more generally.     

Welcome to Australia? A reappraisal of the Fraser government's approach to refugees, 1975–83

The Fraser government's response to the Indo-Chinese refugee crisis and the presentation, for the first time, of asylum-seekers arriving in Australia by boat is almost universally acclaimed as having been proactive, generous and humanitarian in spirit—the antithesis of both the preceding Whitlam Labor government and subsequent governments, particularly since 2001. Adopting a policy of ‘forward selection’ of refugees from camps in South-East Asia, the Fraser government was able to stem the flow of boats and oversaw the relatively uncontroversial resettlement of nearly 70,000 Indo-Chinese. However, the author argues that this was not the brave and principled course of action for which Fraser and his immigration ministers are regularly fêted, but rather a delayed response that was motivated by fear and desperation rather than pure humanitarian intent. The celebrated outcomes of Fraser's policies belie the self-interested way in which they were constructed and neglect the fact that the government did not act until it was forced. Fraser's policies were neither a departure from the past nor the antithesis of current polices; to the contrary, they were the seeds of the contemporary Australian model of asylum.     

Sanctuary Revisited: Central American Refugee Assistance in the History of Church-based Immigrant Advocacy

Abstract

Extant literature on the U.S. Sanctuary movement of the 1980s mainly facilitates an understanding of the movement as part of liberal religious resistance to the Reagan-Bush Administrations' policy in Central America. However, I argue that Sanctuary should also be understood as pivotal to church involvement in a longer lineage of social activism that can be called immigrant advocacy. Church-based immigrant advocates (CBIAs) were in short supply until the end of World War II, when Christian clergy and laity used biblical calls for hospitality to argue for the admission of thousands of displaced persons from Europe. Over the next quarter-century, many CBIAs provided services to political refugees admitted under State Department criteria. But as CBIAs grew frustrated with double standards in refugee admissions, they began to develop discourses legitimating hospitality work outside of a nation-state framework. In tracing the history of church-based immigrant advocacy, Sanctuary indexes the juncture at which many Christian organizations widened their operations beyond the standard of sovereignty to accommodate undocumented refugees as well as immigrants motivated by economic need.     

Interrogating borders: a transnational approach to refugee research in Vancouver

Immigration is predicated on the centrality of the nation‐state. The authors argue that analyzing settlement patterns and successful integration within a strictly national context is insufficient to understand the political, social, and economic relations which shape the lives of refugee immigrants in Canada. To support this claim, a less state‐centric theoretical framework of transnational migration is outlined. The paper examines methods emerging from transnational migration, focussing in particular on research with Burmese refugees who have settled in the Greater Vancouver Area. Based on 50 personal interviews conducted with refugee newcomers from Burma who are now settled in the Lower Mainland, the authors use the case study as a basis to raise methodological and theoretical questions about immigration research. We argue that the very politics of doing research with this group of refugees and other immigrant groups are shaped by the relations of power experienced before arriving in Canada. Les auteures soutiennent que l'analyse des schémas d'établissement et d'intégration réussie dans un contexte strictement national s'avère insuffisante pour comprendre les relations politiques, sociales et économiques qui définissent l'existence des réfugiés immigrants au moment de l'arrivée. Dans le but d'appuyer cette proposition, nous définissons un schéma théorique moins axé sur l'état, c'est‐à‐dire le transnationalisme. La recherche examine ces facteurs en relation avec les expériences des ‘immigrants non‐traditionnels’ au Canada, en particulier les réfugiés Burmans installés dans la région de Vancouver. Basés sur 50 entrevues personnelles menées avec des réfugiés nouvellement arrivés du Burma et qui sont maintenant installés dans le ‘Lower Mainland’, les auteures utilisent l'étude de cas comme une base permettant de soulever des questions de méthodologie pour la recherche en immigration. Nous avançons que les implications politiques de la recherche avec ce groupe de réfugiés et d'autres groupes d'immigrants dépendent des relations de pouvoir vécues avant l'arrivée au Canada.     

The image of the city in modern literature

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship.

All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century – repatriation, resettlement and local integration – are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation–state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership – and through this of access to citizenship rights – that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights?

This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled.

Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation – or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation – became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’.     

Trans migrations: Seeking refuge in “safe haven” Toronto

Trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people who make refugee claims in Canada negotiate a complex nexus of identity, belonging, and citizenship. Drawing on insights from TGNC refugees, immigration lawyers, and frontline workers, in this paper we examine the ways the state controls the trans body through the refugee claims process and in the process of integration into life in Canada, while also highlighting trans refugee methods of survival and resistance. What emerges is an understanding of the ways that refugees navigate the tension between gender, sexuality, and homecoming as both intimately felt and geopolitically managed. We convey TGNC refugee narratives to demonstrate how they both confirm and expand upon the existing literature on Canadian LGBTQ+ refugees. TGNC refugees' experiences at the Immigration and Refugee Board confirm insights from existing LGBTQ+ refugee studies. However, TGNC refugees' day-to-day lives differ significantly from LGB refugee lives as recounted in the literature. In TGNC refugees' attempts to access gender-affirming documentation, healthcare, housing, and income, they confront distinct systems of transgender exceptionalism, border imperialism, and racial and heteropatriarchal capitalism that limit their access to basic necessities and impact how they build home both conceptually and materially.     

Building local nodes in a global sector: Clustering within the aeronautics industry in Montreal

This article analyzes the mechanisms through which metropolitan governance is established in Montreal's aeronautics sector, one of the most important and innovative industries in the region. The article also examines the role of lead firms, socio‐economic actors, and public agencies from a territorial point of view. It is established that on the one hand the existence of a small number of prime producers at the local level facilitates productive linkages among businesses through subcontracting, and on the other hand, the intensive participation of intermediate socio‐economic agencies and organizations ensures a metropolitan anchoring of the sector and creates a strong territorial identity among the players.     

Pax Ottomanica No More! The “Peace” Discourse in Turkish Foreign Policy in the Post‐Davutoğlu Era and the Prolonged Syrian Crisis

Turkey's eight years between 2008 and 2016 has been dominated by Ahmet Davuto?lu's vision of foreign policy, which was derived from his multi‐edition book Strategic Depth (2000). In order to be able to present itself in its larger periphery as a pro‐active, trustworthy actor, Davuto?lu argued, Turkey needed to change the foreign‐policy paradigms with which it was stranded. As the Strategic Depth vision unfolded, it drew explicit parallels between modern Turkey and the Ottoman neighborhood policy. Turkey‐Syria relations since 2008 had been providing the seekers of neo‐Ottomanist tendencies in the contemporary Turkish foreign policy with abundant examples, because Syria, once an Ottoman territory and always a challenge to modern Turkey, came to be the first poster country in the shift towards Turkey's imperial awakening. In the post‐Davuto?lu era, however, the rhetoric and practices of the past eight years seemed suddenly to disappear from the use of the Turkish agents of foreign policy; the new code of terms and actions to replace the Strategic Depth version is yet to be decided. This study seeks to pin down the neo‐imperialist character of Turkey's foreign‐policy discourse of the aforementioned eight years and contribute to discussions of the Turkish aspiration of neo‐Ottomanism with focus on the Syrian crisis through the Justice and Development Party's re‐invented peace discourse. In doing so, it aims to find out and elaborate on the current tendencies of Turkish foreign policy, which are no longer as explicit and articulated as they were during Davuto?lu's ministry and prime ministry. As Turkey's cross‐border operation to Syria — the Euphrates Shield — ends and another one in Idlib begins, a discursive analysis stretching from Davutoglu's diplomatic “zero problems” with Damascus to the military use of ground troops and air force is timely. Such an endeavor would be essential in understanding the spectacular swing from one edge to the other in Turkey's inclination over a phantasmagorical empire.     

Essai de typologie des centres de santé et de services sociaux au Québec

Given the importance of contextual factors—physical, social and institutional environments—for understanding health landscapes, this article examines the situation in the province of Québec and suggests a spatial typology at the scale of the health and social services centres (CSSS). These CSSS provide services for 95 areas which are the finest territorial delineation in terms of health policies since a reform instituted in 2003. While delivery of primary health and social services is defined at this local scale, overall health policy is decided at the provincial scale. The challenge for stakeholders is to supplement their local knowledge with that of the broader context. In this article, we use principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis to identify eight profiles of CSSS. The final results of the cluster analysis demonstrate that two‐thirds of the health and social services centres correspond with two marginally differentiated profiles and the remaining third shows specificities that are highly spatially anchored.     

The militarization of islands and migration: Tracing human mobility through US bases in the Caribbean and the Pacific

In this paper, we argue that the confinement of people on island military bases, whether narrated as humanitarian rescue, migration management, refugee resettlement, or militarized border enforcement, is an imperial process of ruination that impairs human possibility and erodes access to rights. Furthermore, the government's categorization of mobile people – as refugees, displaced, detainees, or migrants – informs the naming of these spaces, the bureaucratic and legal processes that they are subjected to, and their treatment (by local communities, federal authorities, the media, and the law). Empirical material is drawn from qualitative research conducted on US migration control in the Caribbean and Pacific. We identify spatial patterns of militarization operating across these sites, wherein migration is intertwined with enforcement, confinement, and militarization.     

Telling it Like it is? Constructing accounts of settlement with immigrant and refugee women in Canada

This article reflects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee women's settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It specifically takes up the ways in which the women's accounts were co‐constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in‐depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mother's accounts showing how their story‐telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the women's talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of ‘womanhood’ in Canada, routes to a desired ‘integration’ and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as ‘desirable’ immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological reflection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken‐for‐granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of ‘the other’. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the specific space of the interview, were intricately involved in ‘telling it like it is’ for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.     

Performing refugeeness in the Czech Republic: gendered depoliticisation through NGO assistance

The article examines the gender micropolitics of non-governmental assistance to refugees in the Czech Republic – a post-socialist society which is becoming a country of immigration. It critically examines relations of power between refugees and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These NGOs act as mediators between refugees and the state, media, wider public and academic production of knowledge. It is argued that despite the important roles they play in securing refugees' access to rights, their assistance is often perceived as problematic by refugees. The article analyses these relations in a wider context of the institutions of the refugee system where the state has increasing power in defining the conditions under which NGO assistance to refugees is provided. The study is based on qualitative research among recognised refugees from the former Soviet Union living in the Czech Republic and local NGOs assisting them with integration into society. I demonstrate how particular forms of assistance and public representation depoliticise refugees in a sense of fostering rather than challenging unequal power relations that lock refugees in a position of clients lacking political means of influencing their place in a receiving society. This is done by conceptualising ‘a refugee’ as a performative identity that is being produced and enacted in feminised NGO spaces. The analysis highlights refugees' critical reflections on their position in the relations of assistance.