Migrant justice as reproductive justice: birthright citizenship and the politics of immigration detention for pregnant women in Canada

ABSTRACT

This research develops an analytical framework for theorizing the lived experiences of pregnant women in immigration detention, and then applies this framework in considering possibilities for transforming citizenship and the allocation of rights. We focus on the Canadian case, examining the 2.5-year detention of a refugee claimant who was detained while 3 months pregnant. In line with feminist intersectional and critical migration scholars, we argue that immigration detention is a form of structural violence against non-citizens that is gendered, raced, and classed. However, our analytical framework extends existing scholarship by centring reproductive justice as a key axis along which the structural violence of non-citizenship is enacted. Our findings are thus critical of reforms to detention that frame pregnant women as biologically vulnerable: we instead argue for a structural understanding of vulnerability that centres reproductive justice as a fundamental component of migrant justice in envisioning a decarceral future.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration detention
• reproductive justice
• birthright citizenship
• abolition
• intersectional feminism

Acknowledgments

With respectful gratitude to Glory and Alpha Anawa: may your story help others. We also gratefully acknowledge comments from the editors and three anonymous reviewers, as well as participants of the De-Carceral Futures workshop at Queen’s University, who provided generative feedback on this paper. This research was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Equal co-author. Authors are listed alphabetically.

2. At the same time, we agree with critical migration scholars who have been rightly cautious not to sensationalize the detention of women and children in ways that reproduce criminalizing narratives of the predominantly racialized-male population of detainees (Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013). Our focus on structural analysis is thus an attempt to bring scholarly attention to pregnant detainees without reinforcing criminalizing narratives.

3. Now operating under the name SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, the movement for reproductive justice builds on a rich legacy of Black women’s activism in the United States, tracing back to the civil rights movements and key organizations, such as the Combahee River Collective (1974) and the Black Women’s Health Imperative (1984) (Bond Leonard 2017; Ross 2017).

4. Here, we build on a Marshallian notion of social citizenship (1950), while recognizing that reproductive rights were not included in his original formulation. Feminist scholars have offered important critiques of the implicit androcentrism in how early theories of citizenship were formulated (Ong 2006; Stasiulis 1999; Yuval-Davis 1997)

5. Coined by Landolt and Goldring (2015), precarious non-citizenship refers to the ‘dynamic, multi-scalar assemblage’ that shapes access to citizenship for immigrants with precarious immigration status along contingent and indeterminate pathways. The approach challenges dichotomous conceptions of citizen/non-citizen, which they argue are socially constructed.

6. As Molnar and Silverman (2016) explain, ‘Chaudhary provides an alternative to Canada’s provisions for parole or bail for detainees … The decision provides important theoretical and practical steps towards justice: the ancient criminal-justice protection of habeas corpus is being wedged into modern legal thinking’ (2).

7. The Liberal government ear-marked funds for an arms-length monitoring unit for CBSA in its 2019 budget, following decades of activist organizing and at least 16 reported deaths in immigration detention since 2000 (Molnar and Silverman 2018; Tunney 2019). However, at the time of writing, no such body exists in Canada.

8. A recent journalist investigation found five reported allegations of sexual assault within the CBSA between 2016–2018 but no details were available on the outcome or actions taken (Swain et al. 2019).

9. In terms of demographics, earlier accounts from scholars suggest that roughly 70–75% of detainees are male, and that racialized men from the global South are the dominant group in detention in Canada (Pratt 2005).

10. This is true for all incarcerated mothers, but there are particularities for immigrant mothers in a detention system (Ross and Solinger 2017).

11. While right-leaning governments have historically taken the lead politicizing the issue of birth tourism, it is not a wholly partisan issue. The Trudeau Liberal government committed to investigating the issue further in response to a 2018 report suggesting an increase in birth tourism across Canada (Griffith 2018; see also Wright 2018). Problematically, this report includes births by international students, workers, and other temporary residents under the birth tourism label, problematizing all births by foreign mothers as potentially fraudulent (Larios 2019b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Salina Abji

Salina Abji is a Sociologist and Research Consultant based in Toronto. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto. Her SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship at Carleton University focused on migrant activism in response to immigration detention in Canada using a feminist intersectional framework. She has published research on borders, migrant justice, and gender-based violence in Citizenship Studies, Signs, Social Politics, and Studies in Social Justice.

Lindsay Larios

Lindsay Larios is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Concordia University. In January 2021, she will join the Department of Political Science at Guelph University as a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research focuses on the politics of pregnancy and birth, precarious migration as an issue of reproductive justice, and the radical potential of re-imagining citizenship and im/migration policy through the lens of care ethics.