Getting Carded: Border Control and the Politics of Canada's Permanent Resident Card

Abstract

This article is concerned with the ways in which border control has been reconstituted through Canada's Permanent Resident Card (PRC). Some questions examined with this paper include: how did the PRC come to exist as a technology of border control? Does it function as a symbol of the Canadian nation-state's imperative to manage transnational movement and access to the geopolitical space of the nation and, if so, how? Through what means does the PRC and the events surrounding its introduction and use facilitate processes of serialization and racialization? Does the PRC, as a technique of reason of state, do the work of producing the category “responsible immigrants”? The notions of “economies of bodies” and “bordering” are important here. “Bordering” opens up the concept of the border from a fixed place to a verb, or a process. Given this, bordering does not only occur at the territorial boundaries of the nation-state, it can also be internal to it. By examining how the category of “permanent resident” is organized, gains meaning and is maintained, this article demonstrates how the technology of the PRC and similar technologies of the regulation of mobility operate as practices of bordering and nation-making and constitute Canadian citizenship.

Notes

 ¹ The manufacturers of the PRC are the Canadian Bank Note Company, Limited (CBN) subcontracted with California based LaserCard Corporation, in partnership with Anteon Corporation. Also subcontracted is Information Spectrum Incorporated. The five-year subcontract with LaserCard Corporation was awarded with Canadian Bank Note in 2002. CBN prints and distributes the card from its facility in Ottawa, Canada.

 ² Immigration and Refugee Protection Act c.16 (2) (a). According to a document released under the Access to Information Act request, Biometrics: CIC Business Requirements, the CIC intends to have two biometric identifiers in the card, with facial data as the primary one and fingerprint templates as the secondary identifier. In this way, the PRC would be similar in function to the US Department of State's Laser Visa Border Crossing Card, a multiple entry visa used by Mexican citizens to enter the US. This card, also produced by LaserCard Corporation, is used to biometrically verify the cardholder's identity through a one-to-one identification process between the cardholder and the encoded fingerprint data.

 ³ “Immigration and Refugee Protection Act”, Citizenship and Immigration Canada website, available at: www.cic.gc.ca/english/irpa (accessed 5 December 2003).

 ⁴ United Nations Security Council Resolution 1373, September 2001.

 ⁵ In practice, this was not always the case. In July 2004 the Prime Minister announced that religious headscarves were acceptable after complaints that women were being forced to remove their religious headscarves to be photographed for their PRC upon arrival at Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport in Dorval, Quebec (Hustak, 2004; Stanstna, 2004). Hair and ears are not considered “facial features”.

 ⁶ Although the PRC was introduced as a mobility document, Social Development Canada now requires a PRC in order for permanent residents whose Records of Landing were issued before 28 June 1973 and after 27 June 2002 to obtain a Social Insurance Number (SIN) or to replace a damaged or lost SIN Card. Given this, the PRC can be understood as a measure of the Canadian state's imperative to not only manage access to geopolitical space of the nation, but increasingly to the nation's financial space as well. This is especially the case for homeless and underhoused persons, as SIN cards are needed to apply for numerous government benefits. The difficulties faced by homeless and underhoused peoples in accessing the PRC are many. These include accessing the application form by Internet or by mail to a fixed address; payment of the application fee; accounting for employment and residence histories; securing a guarantor; and care of the application and photograph, which could be rejected if torn, bent or otherwise flawed.

 ⁷ See Foucault's discussion of Nicolas Delamare's Traité de la police (1705) (Foucault, 1988, pp. 153–157) where the police are said to “see to everything regulating society” and “everything pertaining to men's happiness” (p. 157) where through the technique of the police the “integration of individuals in the state's utility is achieved” (p. 153). In a development on Delamare's work of systematizing French administrative practices, Foucault suggests that this is a project that through its classification of needs attempts to determine “the correlation between the utility scale for individuals and the utility scale for the state” (p. 157). For Foucault, reviewing Delamare's manual is instructive because in it Delamare positions human happiness as a political object (p. 158). Or as Foucault put it: “Now happiness is not only a simple effect. Happiness of individuals is a requirement for the survival and development of the state. It is a condition, it is an instrument, and not simply a consequence. People's happiness becomes an element of state strength” (p. 158).

 ⁸ A complete list of exempt countries and those whose nationals require visas can be found at: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/visit/visas.html

 ⁹ In a survey conducted with permanent residents, some respondents said that they would not apply for the PRC within the first two years of its introduction (Environics Research Group, 2003).

¹⁰ A class action lawsuit involving 46 permanent residents was filed on 18 December 2003 claiming that the CIC engaged in systematic discrimination of permanent residents based on their nationalities (The Province, 2004). The application was dismissed in April 2004.