Humanitarian bargains: private refugee sponsorship and the limits of humanitarian reason

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes Canada's private sponsorship of refugees to explore the conceptual and practical limits of humanitarian reason. In private refugee sponsorship, sponsors channel their humanitarian impulse to resettle refugees in a time-limited partnership with both the state and the refugees they sponsor. To gain insight into how sponsors perform their role in this structurally and temporally bounded trajectory, we conducted a national online survey of 530 sponsors who volunteered to support Syrians resettled to Canada after November 2015. Our analysis draws primarily from written comments shared by survey respondents. We find that over time, sponsors resort to tacit ‘humanitarian bargains’ to mediate between their initial commitment to save refugees’ lives and their ongoing quotidian experiences of intervening in and shaping refugee lives. These bargains become visible when sponsors evaluate sponsorship by reference to a set of expectations and judgements about sponsored refugees, their fellow sponsors and the state. We suggest that the concept of the humanitarian bargain has explanatory force beyond refugee sponsorship.

KEYWORDS:

• Humanitarianism
• refugees
• refugee sponsorship
• resettlement
• citizen-state relationships

Introduction

This paper analyzes Canada's sponsorship of refugees through the lens of humanitarian reason. The Private Sponsorship of Refugees (PSR) programme was legislated into existence in 1978, and engages private citizens in selecting and integrating refugees from abroad. Sponsorship groups undertake to provide income support at prevailing levels of social assistance, and to assist in settlement activities related to housing, employment, education, health care and adjustment to life in Canada. The commitment lasts for 12 months, or until the sponsored refugees become self-sufficient, whichever comes first. The Canadian model has inspired many of the community sponsorship programmes recently initiated in other countries as complementary pathways for refugee admission. In Canada, PSR operates in parallel with an exclusively public resettlement model, the Government Assisted Refugee (GAR) programme, in which the government provides 12 months of income assistance, and settlement agencies furnish the basic services. Canada's initiative to resettle Syrian refugees post-2015 through both resettlement streams bolstered Canada's status as a recognised world leader and promoter of resettlement (Rae 2020, 10).

The upsurge in resettlement after 2015 renewed academic interest in the topic, generating a burgeoning interdisciplinary literature (Garnier, Jubilut, and Sandvik 2018; Labman and Cameron 2020; Molloy and Simeon 2016; Reynolds and Clark-Kazak 2019; Veronis, Hamilton and Walton-Roberts 2020). This work focuses on the experiences of resettled refugees and the legal and international contexts of Canada's refugee resettlement programmes. Our research contribution addresses the under-researched experience of private citizens as sponsors (see also Elcioglu 2023; Kyriakides et al. 2019). In 2017–2018, we conducted a national online survey of 530 sponsors who volunteered to support Syrians resettled to Canada after November 2015. We focus here on how sponsors used the opportunity to share their thoughts and experiences in a comment box at the end of the survey, with 273 respondents generating approximately 19,000 words of text.

Respondents’ comments present an opportunity to assess the operation of humanitarian reason. Fassin (2011) defines humanitarian reason as a rationale for intervention that is produced by the conjunction of an affective response to human suffering and a moral commitment to the equal value of all lives. Fassin treats humanitarian reason as a mode of governance in contemporary politics, operationalised internationally and domestically by civil servants and civil society. Humanitarian reason is not anchored in a conception of rights. Rather, as Fassin observes, humanitarian reason is animated by a sense of moral duty and mobilises compassion rather than justice (Fassin 2011, 8).

While humanitarian reason structures the work of governments and NGOs, the compulsion to do good exerts considerable force on human conduct: Reflecting the humanitarian impulse, or individuals’ moral indignation prompting action, 96% of our respondents selected the agreement option of ‘very’ to the statement ‘It's the ethically right thing to do’ as the reason for their decision to become sponsors.¹ Yet, as others have shown as well, despite the ethical clarity at its inception, the humanitarian impulse engenders clear contradictions over time (Sandri 2018; Ticktin 2011; Trubeta 2015). The sustainability of humanitarian action is contingent on the continual cultivation of affect, which is always vulnerable to distraction or depletion. Furthermore, despite the premise of equality that underwrites the equal valorisation of all lives embedded in humanitarian reason, the relationship of humanitarian actor to recipient is indelibly marked by hierarchy.

Refugee sponsorship harnesses the humanitarian impulse of private citizens to a publicly sanctioned resettlement programme of fixed duration. By investigating this distinctive arrangement, we contribute to the current literature on humanitarian reason in two ways.

First, we ask ‘what can we learn about the limits of humanitarian reason by looking at a state-led programme that mobilises and channels actors’ humanitarian impulse?’ Our analysis of this ‘public-private’ humanitarian partnership adds novel insights to existing critical scholarship about state-driven humanitarian governance as a force that undermines or deflects human rights (Aas and Gundhus 2015; Cuttitta 2018; Ticktin 2011; 2006). One strand of existing literature situates humanitarian intervention by civil society or volunteers as a reaction to states’ failure or refusal to protect refugees (Rabe and Haddeland 2021; Sandri 2018; Trubeta 2015). Another strand examines how volunteers and grassroots organisations contest normative and performative aspects of humanitarianism through alternative practices of solidarity, radical hospitality, or ‘critical humanitarianism’ (Fleischmann 2019; Macklin 2021; Merikoski 2021; Rozakou 2016; Theodossopoulos 2016; Vandevoordt 2019). These contributions explore the productive potential of working against or in the absence of the state. Our work contributes to these literatures by focusing on how private citizens interface with humanitarian reason within a collaborative – though not frictionless – project where the state sets the parameters for volunteer action.

Second, we ask ‘what can we learn about the limits of humanitarian reason by looking at how the humanitarian impulse to ‘do the right thing’ transforms over time?’ Refugee sponsorship foregrounds the relationship between temporality, refugee resettlement and humanitarian reason (Cohen 2018; Stronks 2022). Refugee resettlement aspires to facilitate the ‘integration’ or ‘settlement’ of refugees, which is a process that transpires and evolves over time (Ambrosini and von Wartensee 2022). Yet, humanitarian reason often appears as a static discursive frame that describes the initiation of action, or alternatively a mode of action that remains constant and unchanging. In so doing, it flattens the subjects of humanitarian action and renders them inert (Brun 2016; Hyndman 2018).

Answering our research questions, we contend that over time, sponsors resort to tacit ‘humanitarian bargains’. Initially, sponsors may not harbour conscious expectations about the behaviour or attitude of other actors, be they the refugees, fellow sponsors, or government. But over time, sponsors reflect whether and how what they expended to facilitate resettlement was matched or reciprocated through the performance of other participants. The existence of these bargains becomes visible when sponsors evaluate sponsorship by reference to a set of expectations and judgements about sponsored refugees, their fellow sponsors, and the state. We show that the extent to which the sponsored refugees or other sponsors ‘did their part’ according to the terms of this latent bargain become a metric for the sponsor's level of satisfaction with the sponsorship experience. This notion of ‘humanitarian bargain’ addresses the impact of temporal and relational dynamics on the enactment of humanitarianism in a programmatic context.

In what follows, we first discuss the PSR programme through the lens of humanitarian reason, outline our analytical framework and describe our methodology. We then turn to our findings to show the impact of temporality and state bureaucracy on sponsors’ articulations of how their humanitarian impulse reverberated over time. We identify and analyze the humanitarian bargains that sponsors articulate in their accounts of direct involvement in multiple aspects of the sponsored refugees’ daily life; in their reflections on their interactions with other sponsors as a group; and in their thoughts on their partnership with the state. Our analysis shows that both the state-imposed structure of the programme and its temporality organise sponsors’ experiences: once the urgency and immanent value of relieving suffering or saving a life resolve, humanitarian reason comes under strain because it has little to say about what comes next. We conclude that humanitarian bargains become visible when we study how the impulse to provide relief of suffering and preservation of life in a state-structured programme mark only the commencement, rather than the terminus, of a humanitarian undertaking.

Context: humanitarian reason and the private sponsorship of refugees

The UN Refugee Convention (1951) imposes a legal duty on states to not expel an asylum seeker who meets the refugee definition. Refugee resettlement from abroad, however, is a matter of sovereign discretion.² The Canadian legislation bundles the asylum and resettlement (including sponsorship) streams of admissions together as representative of ‘Canada's humanitarian tradition with respect to the displaced and persecuted’ (IRPA s.12(3)).³ Catherine Dauvergne has argued this mythology of a humanitarian tradition serves to ‘mark the nation as good, prosperous and generous’ (Dauvergne 2005, 7) and humanitarianism thus gains a performative aspect. However compelling the moral imperative to act, refugee sponsorship is a discretionary engagement undertaken by individual Canadians and the Canadian state. Resettlement is not a matter of legal right but rather an institutional manifestation of humanitarian reason.

The refugee sponsorship regime has a temporal arc (one year) and an objective (self-sufficiency). It envisages a 12-month journey from refugee status (with its connotations of passivity and dependency) towards the goal of contemporary neo-liberal citizenship (denoting full employment and non-reliance on the state).

Over the history of Canada's resettlement programmes, over 300,000 refugees have been resettled through private sponsorship with annual numbers fluctuating between 3000 and 21,000. (Labman 2019, 96). The peaks correspond to highly mediatised situations, such as the 1970s Indochinese and 2015 Syrian refugee ‘crises’, with the government setting target admission levels based on perceived need and capacity. This reflects Ticktin's argument that

actions and interventions in the name of the moral imperative— even when grounded by a belief in a universal humanity— take place as exceptions, performed in situations of crisis or with the rhetoric of emergency, when there is no other recourse (Ticktin 2011, 1).

During the valleys, the PSR programme is sustained by repeat sponsors, often affiliated with faith-based or diasporic institutions and tilts towards sponsoring refugees who already have kin in Canada (Hyndman et al. 2021).

In 2015, Canadians mobilised en masse to sponsor the resettlement of Syrians escaping their war-ravaged country (Hamilton, Veronis, and Walton-Roberts 2020; Labman 2020). The groundswell of private initiatives in late summer and early fall 2015 was spurred partly by the image of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi's lifeless body on a Turkish beach and fuelled by the disclosure of Canadian relatives’ unsuccessful attempts to sponsor Kurdi family members to Canada. The new Liberal government acted on an election promise to immediately resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees through the publicly-funded GAR Programme, and also relaxed requirements on private sponsorship. Between November 2015 and October 2020, private sponsors were involved in the resettlement of 21,745 Syrians (IRCC 2020). The government continued to raise private sponsorship levels with pre-pandemic⁴ anticipated yearly arrivals reaching 20,000 in 2020 (IRCC 2022).

Many Canadians who embarked on sponsorship were motivated by compassion in the face of suffering and death, and a will to alleviate it (Hamilton, Veronis, and Walton-Roberts 2020). That Syrian refugees were strangers to virtually all sponsors, literally and politically, evinces the equal value and worth ascribed to all lives, regardless of filial, national, or ethnic proximity. The PSR programme thus creates an opportunity structure that enables Canadian citizens to activate their moral sentiment and enact the humanitarian impulse to save lives under the auspices of a state-led programme, which itself reflects the contemporary workings of humanitarian reason.

Analytical framework: temporality, public-private partnerships, and the limits of humanitarian reason

The equal worth ascribed by humanitarian reason to all lives collides with inevitable choices about whom to save, and the consequential calibration of lives worth saving (Aas and Gundhus 2015; Cuttitta 2018; Fassin 2011; Ticktin 2011). As Fassin argues ‘To “make live” actually supposes implicit or sometimes explicit choices over who shall live and what sort of life and for how long’ (2009, 53). At the highest level, such choices informed the particular surge of support for Syrian refugees by Canadians in 2015 at a time when the projected global refugee resettlement need already sat at 691,000 persons without taking the Syrian outflow into account (UNHCR 2014, 5).

State citizen relationships are a core dimension in our analysis. The sponsorship programme embodies Fassin's concept of ‘humanitarian government’, broadly construed as ‘the set of procedures established and actions conducted in order to manage, regulate, and support the existence of human beings’ (Fassin 2011, 1). Private sponsorship is neither solely humanitarian governance by the state (Fassin 2011), nor ‘vernacular’ or ‘volunteer’ humanitarianism against or in the absence of the state (Cantat and Feischmidt 2019, 381; Sandri 2018, 74). Rather, it is an imbrication of state sovereignty and civic engagement (see also Ambrosini and von Wartensee 2022). Sponsorship thus operates as a kind of ‘public-private partnership’, where the private actor is a group of citizens who engage in refugee resettlement as a form of voluntary civic engagement. Sponsorship groups commit to a common purpose of assisting refugees on a path towards integration and citizenship via a personalised and non-bureaucratic relationship. It harnesses the humanitarian impulse of private actors to a programme whose parameters are set by government. Even as their status as citizens (or permanent residents) and their eligibility as sponsors are constituted by the state, sponsors are not delegates of government, and their interests, perceptions and motivations may not always align with those of the state.

Temporality is another key dimension in our analytical framework. A focus on saving or sustaining life can have a static quality. It maintains its subjects in a holding pattern of survival in the present tense; it is not about creating or restoring a future (Brun 2016). Hyndman (2018, 380) recognises temporality as a fault line that runs through humanitarian reason's mobilisation of affect and values:

[P]roviding the necessities of life in the face of death, as humanitarians espouse, can be vital in the immediate term but effectively suspends ‘living’ a more fulsome life as time passes … . (Hyndman 2018, 380).

Sponsorship affirms Hyndman's observation about the limited scope of humanitarian action. The impulse to rescue may motivate people to sponsor, but the government's objective of future self-sufficiency imbues sponsorship with a prescriptive momentum that converts the sponsors’ project from saving a life into shaping the specific form a life should take. The programme's trajectory from precarity and dependence to (economic) self-sufficiency and independence allows us to analyse how the programme leverages the initial humanitarian impulse to save lives and shapes it into a dynamic process of (re)making refugees into citizens over time (Hyndman and Giles 2017).

Over time and through the relationships forged by sponsorship, we find that the humanitarian impulse transforms into what we call ‘humanitarian bargains’. The notion of a humanitarian bargain may seem incoherent if ‘authentic’ humanitarianism requires an entirely non-consquentialist posture where saving or sustaining of life is its own reward. The insight we offer is that temporality and relationship make this apparent contradiction inevitable. Indeed, the common observation that, as Fassin notes, ‘those at the receiving end of humanitarian attention know quite well that they are expected to show the humility of the beholden rather than express demands for rights’ (Fassin 2011, 3), hints at a logic of reciprocity at work under conditions of asymmetric power. The work by Kyriakides et al. (2019) also points to the rejection of ‘gracious dependency’ by sponsored refugees, which can be read by sponsors as the absence of anticipated or desired gratitude (Kyriakides et al. 2019, 294). We regard these insights as gesturing towards the concept of humanitarian bargain which we develop here.

Importantly, we focus not only on the sponsor-refugee dynamic, but also the sponsor-sponsor and sponsor-state interaction. Malkki (2015) astutly observes Finnish Red Cross workers’ motivations exceeded abstract humanitarian commitment, responding to personal needs, desires and aspirations. We take up Malkki's challenge to ‘revise[] basic assumptions about who the needy are in the humanitarian encounter’ (Malkki 2015, 2). The critical insight that humanitarian actors also have needs that may (or may not) be met by their undertaking further opens up space for introducing the concept of humanitarian bargain.

Methodology

In late 2017 and early 2018, we conducted an online quantitative survey to map the motivations, actions and impacts of sponsorship on sponsors.⁵ The vast majority of the 530 respondents (80%) in our convenience sample were first-time sponsors, in contrast to serial sponsors with multiple sponsorship experiences over many years. About 90% of respondents lived in urban areas, with 37% from Toronto. This matches data from the Longitudinal Immigrant Database, which indicates that 40% of refugee sponsors reside in Toronto. Survey respondents are more likely to be women (74%), over 50 years of age (74%), with 49% over 60 years. Over 1/3rd were retired (36%), almost a third employed full time (32%) and 14% were self-employed, the remainder working part-time. Respondents were highly educated; 84% have at least one university degree, and 53% hold a graduate or professional degree. In short, these sponsors were disproportionality privileged (see also Elcioglu 2023).

Our survey included an open-ended question that asked:

If you would like to tell us more about your private sponsorship expectations or experiences, please use the following text box to discuss any experiences or ideas that you think are relevant and not otherwise captured in this survey.

About half of the respondents (n = 273) wrote in those comment boxes, generating a total of 19,000 words of text. Several offered feedback on the programme, elaborating on their experience in their own words. We interpret these responses as deliberate framings of the positive and negative sides of sponsorship, and respondents clearly indicated a desire to communicate their experiences to government or a wider public. We analysed this data qualitatively, focusing on the meanings associated with sponsorship experience. Using NVivo, we followed a coding strategy aligned with the extended case method (Burawoy 1998). Unlike hypothesis-based research with its focus on refutation, or grounded methodology with its focus on fully inductive coding, the extended case method offers a back and forth between inductive and deductive analysis with the goal of uncovering the working of various forms of power. Using concepts derived from our literature review, we coded for the categories of worth ascribed by sponsors to refugees, the time, labour and personal cost to sponsors, and assessments of the state's and fellow sponsors’ role in the sponsorship endeavour. In addition, we bring our own individually distinct interpretive lenses to the data, and the resulting analysis reflects the encounter between our different disciplinary and social contexts. In the following section, we interpolate the concept of humanitarian bargains into the theorisation of humanitarian reason, and illustrate how such bargains both operationalise and destabilise humanitarian reason.

Analysis: humanitarian bargains in three parts

We contend that sponsors create humanitarian bargains in their relationships to the refugees they sponsor, to each other in sponsorship groups, and to the state. These bargains reflect how, in the context of a state programme governed by humanitarian reason, the humanitarian impulse to save lives transforms over time into varied expectations of reciprocity.

Part 1. Sponsors and refugees: the value of life and lives of value

We locate the evidence for humanitarian bargains in sponsors’ subjective evaluation of the sponsorship experience, which many describe in cost/benefit terms. Liberal political theorists demonstrate the fragility of humanitarianism under neoliberal conditions that prioritise value to the self over moral duty to others (Every 2008). The majority of our respondents, however, believed that sponsorship did confer personal benefit. One stated that it ‘takes a lot more time and energy than I expected but it's well worth it’. Another wrote that it is a ‘surprisingly satisfying, surprisingly emotional’ engagement, with a third declaring ‘I wouldn't have missed this experience’. A few sponsors also shared their stress and frustration but still came out on the positive side of a cost-reward ledger:

… the level of involvement impacted my health negatively – found it somewhat stressful, but I would do it again without fail.

… It has been vastly more time consuming and emotionally wrenching than I ever imagined. I do not regret sponsoring this family at all; in fact, it is one of the better things I have done in my life. However, it has definitely been good and bad for me personally. I am a sadder person now than I was before I undertook private sponsorship.

These responses reveal how sponsors weigh the costs and rewards associated with enacting the humanitarian impulse at a deeply personal level. Importantly, once sponsors engage with specific refugee families, refugee lives are no longer anonymous or generic but attach to specific people with whom sponsors interact often and at close range. This creates the conditions for conjuring a tacit humanitarian bargain through which sponsors mediate their experiences, and adjust expectations over time. It is at this point that the cost/benefit calculus becomes entangled with conceptions of the worthiness of specific refugees, as measured by their conduct, attitude and affect. The bargain weights the value of the work of sponsorship in relation to the worth of the refugees themselves against the personal cost to the sponsors.

We observed that sponsors gauged the worth of sponsored refugees through ascription of initiative, desire to contribute, or anticipated future contributions to Canada. Some respondents identified ‘their’ family as exceptional, with one stating that ‘we won the lottery with our family’, with this recurrent use of possessive ‘our’ echoing invocations of parental pride. Several cited refugees’ willingness to integrate and become independent using descriptors such as ‘resilient’, ‘cooperative’, ‘inspiring’, ‘adaptable’ and ‘resourceful’. One described the family as ‘exceptional’ because because of their determination ‘to integrate and prosper here and [take] active measures to do so’.

This attention to independence incorporates temporality by tying present worthiness to future participation in Canadian society:

Our sponsored family is inspiring and I could not have imagined a more positive experience if I tried (despite the challenges). They are examples of resilience and optimism in the face of unimaginable difficulty, and they have been gracious and embraced Canadian culture wholeheartedly. We love them and Canada is better off for having them here!

A lovely family with exceptional children who are smart, committed and engaged in the life in Canada. A beautiful Mum who will want to be able to work and participate more in the community in the future but is still at school now. Dad who is actively employed, has friends and loves driving his family everywhere.

Although 96% of those surveyed stated that sponsorship is ‘the ethically right thing to do’, sponsors’ written comments did not explicitly identify sponsorship's success as preserving life by resettling refugees. We do not infer an absence of this sentiment – we cannot judge that. Rather, we contend that in the context of the PSR programme, sponsors draw from a widely shared discursive repertoire of ‘worthiness’ in expressing what they believe others would endorse as programme strengths. We hypothesise that checking the box that sponsorship is the ethically right thing to do, in tandem with these more extensive articulations of sponsored refugees’ specific virtues, adds up to the following: Witnessing the suffering of strangers may trigger a humanitarian impulse, but the sustained nature of this engagement with specific people causes ‘shared humanity’ to fade and other logics to emerge. Fassin (2009) explains that the humanitarian conception of life is biological insofar as it attaches to the fact of being alive, but it operates in the register of moral value, unlike (as Fassin also argues), the aggregated life of Foucault’s (1990) biopolitics, or the eviscerated bare life of Agamben (1995). In our case, as relationships between sponsors and refugees develop, this moral value becomes imbricated with judgements of worth and connects with ‘lives in particular’ (Fassin 2009, 57) that emerge or change over time.

This explanation is consistent with Jennifer Hyndman's claim that the ‘[T]he longer [the humanitarian action] lasts, the less likely humanitarian principles such as neutrality, impartiality and independence in the delivery of life-saving aid are in play’ (Hyndman 2018, 380). Indeed, sponsors become avowedly partial. Sponsors sign up to commit to specific refugees. This fosters (and possibly requires) sponsors’ belief that they have a stake in the flourishing of the sponsored refugees. They often form intensely affective bonds with the refugee family. These are not adventitious outcomes of sponsorship; they are design features.

When sponsors balance the emotional, psychological and material costs of sponsorship with the worth they ascribe to refugees, they express the latter in terms of current achievement and future promise as ‘good citizens’, using categories that overlap with the state's agenda and definition of success. Assessments of worth are strongly intertwined with ideas of (future) self-sufficiency and paid employment. This becomes even clearer when some sponsors attribute negative worth to the lives of the refugees they sponsored. They criticise imputed undue reliance on social assistance, and apparent disinterest in paid employment. These sponsors put refugees’ perceived failure to live up to expectations of self-sufficiency and independence in the cost ledger of the humanitarian bargain. As one sponsor writes:

Unwillingness of adults in sponsored family to seek paid employment has been a great frustration and embarrassment to sponsorship committee members, and a disincentive for future sponsorship involvement.

Others tempered their disappointment by describing these matters as ‘challenges’ involved in efforts to transform refugees into independent, tax-paying members of Canadian society:

The biggest challenge is to convince the father of the family to seek employment rather than go on welfare. He wants to continue his ESL classes, and we want him to get a job so that he has to speak English more regularly, and to become independent, work and pay taxes.

The sponsor rejects the validity of the man's choice and emphasises the work the sponsors do to ‘convince’ him to become the right kind of humanitarian subject. This sponsor indicates the friction that can result when refugees are not receptive to the particular way sponsors want to direct their provision of support, which may sometimes be experienced as a lack of gratitude or appreciation.

Finally, a small number of sponsors believed that the family had failed to meet the eligibility criterion for humanitarian action at the outset because they did not present as sufficiently needy because they had been affluent, or had not lived in a refugee camp. These respondents assert both competence and entitlement to assess refugee identity and worthiness, arguing, for example, that ‘It was frustrating, as a sponsorship group, to feel as though we were helping people who didn't really need our help; these were not the needy camp-dwellers we’d fundraised so hard to support’. (In fact, few sponsored Syrians were resettled from refugee camps). These sponsors, in contrasting their sponsored refugees to other refugees coming from ‘vulnerable’ or ‘precarious/dangerous’ situations; identify an absence of what Ticktin describes as the ‘significant factors by which one could prove one's ‘humanity’ worthy of humanitarian exception’ (2011, 3).

The class position of some refugees disrupts the structural asymmetry of power constituted by humanitarian reason and otherwise present in sponsorship, which evidently discomfit some sponsors. The comments suggest a tension between the need for refugee protection that motivates flight with a need for financial assistance once protection has been realised. Notably, the attributes that elicit negative judgements about need by some sponsors are celebrated by others as evidence of resettled Syrians’ worth:

The family that our group sponsored is exceptional. The father/husband is fluent in English, and prior to arriving in Canada, was a [high level manager]. He has been able to successfully establish his own business in Canada.

This collection of comments reveals the extent to which the value of human life shades from intrinsic (being) to performative (doing) along the temporal arc of sponsorship. Refugees must demonstrate and balance both neediness and progress towards independence and self-sufficiency. The specific terms of this bargain differ between sponsors as they individually define, assess, and weigh factors, and modify them over time. Yet, in most cases we observed, the impetus to ‘save strangers’ because of their inherent moral worth and need for protection is superseded by a dynamic measurement of the worth of resettled refugees as sponsors’ channel their humanitarian impulse into the PSR programme, with its formal temporal trajectory and destination of self-sufficiency.

Part 2: sponsor-sponsor: cooperation and withdrawal

Refugee sponsorship is a group endeavour. Sponsorship groups require a minimum of five members (outside of the province of Quebec, where the group can be smaller), and are typically much larger. As a concerted group activity, sponsorship requires advance planning, coordination, division of labour, ongoing commitment and consensus on means and ends. The tacit ‘humanitarian bargain’ among sponsors themselves is that each will ‘do their share’ in furthering a shared conception of self-sufficiency and independence over a 12-month period.

Disappointment in co-sponsors’ performance was a persistent theme amongst many respondents. A number of respondents offered variations of this sponsor's comment: ‘the major challenges were to get people from our group to work together’. Others elaborated on this sentiment:

The sponsorship group was, on many levels, dysfunctional. The sponsorship was phenomenal, but I would not be involved in another sponsorship unless I could convince myself that other members would pull their weight.

One thing I should have been better prepared for: being let down by the members of the sponsorship group (eg people promising to do something, and then not doing it).

A number of people wrote about other sponsors’ waning engagement over time:

The dynamics of our sponsorship group were challenging because it was not apparent to me until the family arrived, that people in the sponsorship group had little inclination to actually help support the family beyond financial contributions … The barriers have been that our financial support has come from busy professionals who do not have time for engagement.

The discrepancy between the shared initial humanitarian impulse to save lives and a commitment to the ongoing labour of supporting the refugee family post-arrival reveals how the work of sponsoring is (perceived as) not distributed equally amongst group members and the fragility of humanitarian commitment as it unfolds over time.

Tensions also flared as some sponsors prioritised the political project of producing self-sufficient citizens while others oriented themselves around the affective project of producing meaningful relationships. One respondent illustrates this:

The sponsorship group disbanded before the end of the first year. We had differences in our expectations that proved irreconcilable. The major difference was one group wanted to sponsor a refugee family to support and encourage them becoming self sufficient. The second group wanted the family to become friends and encouraged dependence and extended family roles (e.g. honorary grandparental roles). It devolved to a “we know them best and we are making their decisions for them” vs “this should be a group decision”. The relationships in the group became toxic so we dissolved it in order to ensure it did not have an impact on the family.

Another respondent wrote:

The group and I differed in our opinions about how to best foster independence instead of always simply providing the families with more money. I was always encouraging the group to try and foster independence, however, the other group members wanted to provide more funds or make purchases for the families. I found this very frustrating and it created an awkward dynamic between the sponsors and the families.

We can read these accounts as bargaining over the proper goals of sponsorship, where disaffection within groups reveals the fault lines of humanitarian reason itself. Sponsors come to realise that they diverge in how they negotiate the transition from, paraphrasing Fassin (2009, 48), saving biological lives of equal and intrinsic value, to attending to the biographical lives of particular people. As they steer refugees towards ways of living deemed worthy, sponsors participate in shaping what Fassin calls ‘life as such’ or ‘ … life as the course of events which occurs from birth to death, which can be shortened by political or structural violence, which can be prolonged by health and social policies, which gives place to cultural interpretations and moral decisions’ (Fassin 2009, 48). Sponsors’ disparate understandings of what ‘life as such’ should look like for refugees become the focus in sponsor-sponsor humanitarian bargaining to sustain involvement in the sponsorship endeavour.

Some groups fracture under the strain, while other groups emerge from sponsorship with a stronger sense of group cohesion. Hyndman et al. (2021) show in their research that sponsorship can be seen as a ‘community practice: both a practice performed by a community and that creates a community, thus helping to sustain sponsorship over time’. Ambrosini and Schnyder von Wartensee (2022) show a similar dynamic in Italian community sponsorships. Like these authors, we find that the sustainability of their initial humanitarian impulse to save a life is contingent on people's capacity to cooperate and to expend the required time, effort and emotional labour. Across a wide swath of comments, it became apparent that a substantial number of respondents found themselves doing most of the work with a handful of other sponsors, while other sponsors withdrew from active engagement. Because sponsors are unpaid volunteers, defection is an available option. The tacit humanitarian bargain in which sponsors work as a team and equitably share the work is unstable and unenforceable, revealing a limit of volunteer-driven, privatised resettlement efforts.

Part 3. Sponsor/state: [Re]setting the terms of the bargain

Unlike the foregoing, the bargain between the state and sponsor is neither tacit nor iterative. Sponsors formally sign a Sponsorship Agreement with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, in which the terms are dictated by the state. As suggested earlier, over the one-year sponsorship term, many sponsors come to realise the incongruence between the formal sponsorship timeline, the expectation of self-sufficiency, and the life course of sponsored refugees. Sponsors negotiate, or bargain, with and within government constraints.

Some sponsors fault refugees for failing to perform as expected, but others attribute the misalignment to the government's unrealistic timeline. As one sponsor remarked,

[A]lthough the sponsorship is only 12 months there is absolutely no way this family could get along in our small town without the continued support of a small group of the original large sponsorship group.

This respondent is joined by others in our survey who come to reject the government timeline as too short to enable ‘their’ family to become self-sufficient. Consistent with findings of other scholars (Lenard 2019, 70) one sponsor writes: ‘Assimilation is extremely hard. One year is a very short time period to learn English, find a job, build a community of friends, make your way in a new city’. Lenard (2019, 70), who conducted interviews with sponsors in Ottawa, reports similar findings regarding sponsors’ rejection of ‘the idea that independence is achievable by month 13’. When caught between the government's generic expectations and their own experience and relationship to particular sponsored refugees, some sponsors resile, signing up for but then later rejecting, the contractual term in the humanitarian bargain between sponsor and government that tasks sponsors with guiding sponsored refugees to independence and self-sufficiency within a year.

While ‘month 13’ signals the formal end of sponsors’ financial obligation, sponsored refugees are entitled to access the same income support from the state post-sponsorship as citizens and other permanent residents. However, some sponsorship groups actually exceed their contractual obligation of financial support beyond the one year. For example,

Our sponsorship group decided to extend total support of our family for two years. The same level of financial support will continue for two years. Four other related family groups have been privately sponsored in our community. All sponsorship groups have made the decision that it is the morally and ethically correct thing to do as one year is not enough.

These sponsors adopt a humanitarian stance that merges their own ethical and moral responsibility with the goal of independence, while refusing the strict temporal terms that inform sponsors’ humanitarian bargain. We suspect that part of the explanation for continued financial support lies in the force of affective bonds that sponsorship can foster.

Many sponsors report that they anticipate their personal relationships with sponsored refugees will endure into the future, even without financial support. Some anticipate ongoing ‘mentorship and friendship’, while others describe how the sponsored refugees had become ‘like family’, rather than friends, with connotations of familial obligation. The personalised structure of sponsorship means that affect persists but also evolves. It does not remain a unidimensional sentiment of compassion towards the suffering of strangers, but becomes a more complex, nuanced, and individualised sentiment whose ethical dimension is shaped by the specificity of personal relationships. Assertions of material and emotional support after month 13, and the endurance of personal relationships between sponsors and sponsored suggest how the humanitarian impulse underlying the sponsorship undertaking can transform into an ethical relationship with the refugees that exceeds the government timeline of the programme.

That the design of refugee sponsorship creates the affective conditions for contestation of its own constraints should not surprise us. Sponsors may partner with government, but they are not agents of government. Affect shapes how sponsors enact their role in resettlement, and in ways that may not always align precisely with the state's own priorities or commitments. Yet, this is not the rejection of state humanitarianism that those who look at hospitality, or volunteer, vernacular, or solidarity humanitarianism analyse (Cantat and Feischmidt 2019; Macklin 2021; Rozakou 2017; Sandri 2018). Rather than acting against or outside of the state, our findings show how sponsors work with and through the state, which enables their relationships with refugees, even as sponsors’ experience may deviate from the temporal and financial boundaries set by the PSR programme. At the same time, the state ultimately benefits from these actions, even where motivated by sponsors’ critique of programme expectations regarding independence and self-sufficiency.

Sponsors also reflect on their distinctive contribution to resettlement which, in their view, a purely public model of resettlement cannot match. Again, the putative superiority of sponsorship resides in the intensely personal relationships fostered by the programme:

This model helped fast track a sense of belonging to Canada and I wish every newcomer and refugee could have access to close, personal friendships with established Canadians. This is much more key to integration than simple financial support.

From talking with other sponsors, I believe that private or shared are the best way to go as the straight government sponsorship does not give them the personal supports that private gives. They have much more opportunity to become part of a community with private and I believe that they learn the language, find work etc … much faster and easier.

Importantly, these statements of support for the programme accompany calls for better preparation, support, networking and guidance from government agencies in addressing the concrete and strenuous challenges that sponsors faced:

I feel strongly that our sponsorship group was not supported. We ran into significant issues with our family - to the point that some of our members had to be protected from the male head of the family (police were involved). We did not know where to turn to get help other than the regular social agencies … I feel that private groups need to have better support from the government when embarking on this.

Sponsors requested assistance in learning how to deal with the paperwork, guidance on creating sponsor networks, and improvements in organisations like the government's Refugee Sponsorship Training programme.⁶ Apart from seeking greater support for their own activities, sponsors also suggested areas for improvement in the delivery of government services which sponsors, as private actors, could not provide: assistance with English as a Second Language classes, credentialing support, the targeted supports for refugees resettled in smaller towns, daycare access and greater availability of multilingual counselling.

Sponsors’ reflections on their relationship to government thus capture a certain ambivalence. While rejecting the role of government delegates, sponsors enrol in a programme that asks them to leverage their humanitarian impulse to save lives into active promotion of a version of ‘self-sufficiency’ with a distinctly economic valence. Some sponsors accept the terms but complain of inadequate government guidance and support for sponsors; many endorse the arrangement believing that sponsors are superior to employees of settlement organisations or government bureaucrats at producing self-sufficient citizens. And several sponsors also came to dispute the norm of (economic) self-sufficiency as unduly narrow and/or infeasible within the stipulated time. In all of these ways, sponsors reflect on their collaboration with the state over time, and how it affects their capacity to manage their other humanitarian bargains. In so doing, sponsors largely reinforce the value of the privatised sponsorship effort.

Sponsors rarely question the premise of sponsorship’s public-private partnership model, but we close with a longer quote from the one respondent whose experience as a sponsor provoked disquiet about the loss of neutrality and impartiality that, as Hyndman (2018) argues, are understood as virtues of humanitarian action:

I undertook this role on invitation from friends, but was cautiously optimistic that I would personally enjoy the experience. There is no doubt the private sponsorship program saves lives and is absolutely valued by resettled refugees. But the rush for Canadians to embrace this charitable model of resettlement versus holding politicians accountable to provide support and financial assistance to all refugees regardless of category does not sit well with me. Outside of my sponsorship group I have seen far too many examples of patronizing behaviour and ‘competition’ (i.e. ‘well I just bought “my” family a car.’ ‘my family were very wealthy back in Syria’) from other private sponsors. Even the general outrage that ‘my family didn't arrive when they were scheduled to’ seems misplaced in the larger world of refugee resettlement.

This respondent identifies the larger structural forces that shape a world in which refugees must depend on privatised, scarce and discretionary resettlement initiatives. Fassin (2011, 246) speaks of the ‘lucidity and reflexivity’ of informants who express doubt, ambivalence and critical insight into the limits of the humanitarian action they undertake. Here, too, we acknowledge the inescapable contradictions created by community sponsorship's entanglement in those structural constraints.

Conclusion

Our analysis contributes to a growing assessment of the operation of humanitarian reason in the sponsorship of refugees, making three contributions. First, we identify temporality as a fault line that runs through humanitarian reason's mobilisation of affect and values in the service of protecting lives inherently of equal value and worth. Once humanitarian action reaches beyond sustaining life towards [re]making a life, it invites differential valorization of how those lives are lived. Once affect takes root in particularistic personal relationships, it cannot always be contained by, or subordinated to, generic governance goals. In short, the structure of sponsorship destabilises the humanitarian reason that motivates it.

This does not mean that humanitarian reason ceases to operate. Our analysis affirms its centrality in motivating individuals to come together and engage in sponsorship. Lives-worth-saving encourages sponsors to assume the future cost to self of sponsorship. Yet, our analysis also reveals that with time and relationship come revisions to moral sentiments that cannot be attributed to humanitarian reason's focus on suffering and the intrinsic value of life as such. Sponsors necessarily attend to the biographical life of the sponsored refugees, or life that unfolds over time in specific socio-political-economic contexts (Fassin 2009, 48). By forming personal relationships, sponsors insert themselves into the biographical life of refugee families (and vice versa). Thus, the humanitarian impulse to save a life transforms into a relationship over time that shapes ways of living.

Second, we focus on the tensions that result from the imbrication of private citizens and the state in the 12-month project of sponsorship. We contribute to work that analyzes the radical potential of working against/in the absence of state or NGO humanitarianism, which develops concepts like vernacular, volunteer, hospitality or solidarity humanitarianism (Cantat and Feischmidt 2019; Sandri 2018; Rozakou 2017). However, our case provides a critical examination of individual, private citizens working with the humanitarian state (Macklin 2021). Both critique humanitarianism's pretenses towards neutrality and equality, but in different ways. We show that once engaged in the PSR programme, sponsors move from the reactive task of saving strangers to the proactive future-oriented task of making citizens. That route passes through expectations articulated by government and takes shape through the formation of personal relationships with particular adults and children. The fragility of sponsorship unfolds in this context: As sponsors relate to refugees, refugee lives are no longer suspended in an inert condition of humanitarian need. Sponsors begin to evaluate the worth of the lives that refugees are actually living, in all their messiness and complexity. A sponsorship group may assemble in reaction to a shared humanitarian impulse, but then waver in practical commitment or splinter over dissensus about means and ends. In short, sponsors partner with the state in a common enterprise, but sponsors operate in a separate affective economy that produces tensions between sponsors and refugees, sponsors themselves, and sponsors and the state. Our analysis shows that sponsors attach value not only to sustaining life itself, but also to certain ways of living, to bonds of affiliation, and to outcomes. Sponsors may embrace the state's exhortation of self-sufficiency within a stipulated time and evaluate sponsored refugees against it, defect from the state's timeline, or contest the definition of successful integration. Unlike actors who resist or critique the state from the outside, our contribution shows how sponsors may embrace, challenge or subvert humanitarian reason with varying degrees of reflexivity about their own role within it.

Third, we develop the concept of the ‘humanitarian bargain’ to describe how sponsors tacitly negotiate the terms of their commitment to sponsored refugees, to co-sponsors and to the state. We suggest that respondents make assessments of worth and cost by forming, questioning and revising over time their expectations of the sponsored refugees, of one another and of the state. These expectations may be inchoate or non-existent when first-time sponsors decide to embark on sponsorship. But as they emerge and evolve over time, these expectations colour sponsors’ reflections on whether the sponsorship is worth doing and worth repeating. In their responses, we see judgements about whether the sponsored family is the right kind of needy and makes the right kind of effort. Sponsors compare co-sponsors’ understanding of their role and performance of it against their own. They re-evaluate whether the state's terms are realistic, attainable and fair. Cumulatively, their responses disclose the individualised humanitarian bargains that allow sponsors to navigate their relationship to sponsored refugees, to other sponsors, and to the state's agenda. Malkki's (2015) interviews with repeat Red Cross volunteers affirms how they (and not only aid recipients) benefit from humanitarian action; our research supplements this by gathering insight both from sponsors who felt they benefited from sponsorship, and those who derived less satisfaction from it.

A limitation of our work is that our research only addresses the sponsor perspective; it is important to recognise the impact of humanitarian reason on the sponsored refugees as well, beyond an expectation of ongoing performance of gratitude (Fassin 2011; Kyriakides et al. 2019). Our findings suggest that sponsors participate with varying degrees of reflexivity in maintaining, intensifying, altering, or contesting the structural dynamics that generate and give content to humanitarian bargains. Indeed, we believe that the concept of ‘humanitarian bargain’ can supplement analyses of humanitarian reason in other dynamic contexts that entail evolution over time in the circumstances, expectations, or relationships among actors.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Luin Goldring, Jennifer Hyndman, the members of the Sociolegal working group at the University of Toronto, and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on various versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, where Audrey Macklin holds fellowships, and by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Immigration and Refugees and Citizenship Canada:[grant number SSHRC-IRCC grant 890-2016-4003].

Notes

1 The remaining 4% selected ‘somewhat’.

2 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees; https://www.unhcr.org/1951-refugee-convention.html

3 Labelling both asylum and resettlement as ‘humanitarian’ blurs the important distinction between the legal entitlement to refugee protection if asylum seekers meet the refugee definition, and the discretionary grant of resettlement (Labman 2019; Kneebone and Macklin 2021).

4 Global resettlement was paused by the UNHCR and IOM due to the COVID-19 pandemic between March and June 2020 and the implications that this pause and the continuing pandemic will have on resettlement and sponsorship remain uncertain. In 2020, Canada only resettled ∼9000 refugees but more than 20,000 were resettled in 2021.

5 We received ethics approval from our university's institutional review board, number 34097.

6 By the same token, the government also exercised minimal accountability over sponsors. As Hyndman (2018, 380) argues, ‘the relationship of those who help to those helped is largely discretionary and accountability is often missing’. The more recent introduction of some assurance mechanisms has generated controversy.