‘Do not disturb’: patience, social control and good citizenship in the Canadian family reunification process

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the Canadian spousal reunification process and its specific bureaucratic temporality, in relation to citizenship and mechanisms of social control. Based on ethnographic research in a Facebook support group of Canadian women married to a non-Canadian man, I examine the role of online communities in reinforcing compliance to immigration slow temporalities at the expense of group members’ urgent love temporalities. Spousal reunification applicants were recommended not to intervene as long as their file was still within official processing times. Those who acted too soon showed low compliance with government regulations and were called back to order by other applicants. The promotion of discourses that valorise both patience and proactivity deployed at the ‘right time’ – when delays are expired – constitute mechanisms of social control and contribute to shaping ‘good’, ‘informed’ and thus deserving citizens, in the context of marriage fraud suspicion. This article builds on the literature on waiting in immigration processes and articulates it with concepts of good citizenship. It reflects on how online immigration support groups become spaces in which applicants police and discipline each other along gendered lines.

KEYWORDS:

• Family reunification
• waiting
• citizenship
• social control
• Canada

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This project was approved by the ethics committee of University of Montreal (approbation number CERAS-2014-15-233-D).

2 A « closed » Facebook group is a group that is not public. One must ask the administrator for permission to become a member and be allowed to view posts and participate in conversations.

3 They often called each other « les amoureuses », which means « women in love » (see Geoffrion 2021a).

4 Only one member informed me that she was not comfortable with the research and asked me to exclude her conversations from the data, which I did.

5 Phase II of the project was approved by the ethics committee of Laval University (approbation number: 2020–348 Phase II / 26-04-2021).

6 For several years, the success rate was 85%, with much higher rates of refusals when spouses come from a country of the global South (42% at the Accra bureau). In 2017, the refusal rate in one of the Facebook groups that keeps statistics of its members’ application timeframe was of 33%. In 2021, for the first time, the overall acceptance rate went up to 92% (https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/transparency/committees/cimm-feb-15-17-2022/inventories-processing-times.html).

7 The German sponsors in Laura Block’s study took the same actions, performed in the same order (2021, 61).

8 It is interesting to note that in the wider research project, agents working on immigration claims in deputy offices all over the country have mentioned that people generally come for help too late (Bélanger 2022). This questions the origin of the information circulating widely in several immigration groups and public forums online that the official delays must be respected before MPs are allowed to investigate the status of a file.

9 If most women comply with state-imposed delays and regulations, it does not mean they agree with them. Group discussions on Facebook also display high levels of cynicism and decreasing levels of trust in state-run agencies. As two members concluded: ‘I can easily die before I get a response’ or ‘official delays are just a way to shut us up.’

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.