Contemporary Nation-Building: Migration, Marriage Fraud and the Gendering of Racialized Exclusions

• In Event: 215 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. The State and Racial Exclusion

Abstract

By analyzing the introduction of conditional permanent residence for spousal migrants in Canada in 2012, we examine four dimensions of the production and subsequent regulation of “marriage fraud” as a site of gendered racialized exclusion in nation-building. First, we examine how the government frames immigration and marriage fraud as a threat to the “integrity of the immigration system” and positions racialized women as a threat to the nation. Second, we focus on the ways in which immigrant communities participate in the constitution of nationhood. We analyze how the government has responded to conservative immigrant leaders’ calls for the government to take up the issue of “marriage fraud” in order to protect family and cultural integrity. Third, we turn to the literature on practices of immigration control and the notion of multiple borders to analyze the ways in which regulations governing sponsored spouses extends the use of migration controls in nation-building processes across space and time. Fourth, we focus on the use of immigration enforcement (i.e. surveillance, detention and deportation) to show how of control of marriage fraud hooks into patriarchal control of women and intimate partners and show how the government acknowledges that conditional status for sponsored spouses increases the risk of violence within families, yet prioritizes policing nation-state borders. Throughout our analysis, we highlight that the gendered racialized exclusions effected through the sponsored spouses regulation neo-liberalizes state control by recruiting intimates to act as agents of the state in these nation-building efforts.

Authors

• Anna C. Korteweg, University of Toronto

• Rupaleem Bhuyan, University of Toronto