“Cancelled Dreams”: Family Reunification and Shifting Canadian Immigration Policy

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a collection of personal interviews with immigrant families, this article documents the impact of recently introduced restrictive family reunification policies on immigrants living in Canada today. Since 2008, Canadian immigration policy has changed dramatically with renewed neoliberal emphasis on economic immigrants and labor-market integration. This article explores the impact of this policy shift on immigrant families and on immigrant women and children in particular. This article argues that there are profound human costs to limiting family reunification; these costs are disproportionately borne by immigrant women and ultimately impact immigrant integration and belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration policy
• Canada
• family reunification
• transnational families

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the participants from Calgary's ethnocultural communities for their generous time. As well, the authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Notes

1. Currently, Citizenship and Immigration Canada includes the following people under the “family class”: spouse, common-law partner, dependent child, spouse or common-law partner's dependent child, and a dependent child of a dependent child. It also includes parents and grandparents who may be sponsored once their children/grandchildren have immigrated to Canada. Not all spouses and dependent children are “counted” under the family-class category—they may be included on an application under the economic class immigration stream and would therefore be counted as economic immigrants and not family class. This article focuses on parents and grandparents who may be sponsored after immigration.

2. To place Canada's new Parent and Grandparent Super Visa program in international perspective, with respect to other nations’ family reunification policies, it is somewhat akin to Australia's nonpermanent “contributory parent” visa category that is limited and relatively expensive. In contrast, the United States continues to allow U.S. citizens over the age of 21 to sponsor their parents to join them for the purposes of permanent residence. The situation with European countries is quite varied with the nuclear family (spouse, partner and children) being the fundamental basis for family reunification (European Migration Network, 2008; Groenendijk, Fernhout, van Dam, van Oers, & Strik, 2007); however, parents are considered in a variety of ways. A few countries (e.g., France, Italy, and Spain) allow parents to be brought in under family reunification provisions without any qualification. Many other countries allow parents if they meet certain criteria such as age (over 65), being solitary, and for humanitarian reasons (e.g., Czech Republic, Germany, Netherlands, UK), and there are a few states, such as Austria and Denmark, that do not allow parents (Strasser, Kraler, Bonjour, & Bilger, 2009, p. 168). Back in 2010, prior to the new Super Visa program, Canada was ranked number two in the Family Reunion Rankings for 31 MIPEX III countries, indicating that the prior policy was very favorable for family reunification relative to other countries (MIPEX, 2014). In this respect Canada's new nonpermanent Super Visa policy can now be situated with other countries that have policies that are restrictive, burdensome, and not so favorable to family reunion.