Refugees Are (Not) Welcome Here

State-controlled refugee protection in Canada has gone through paradoxical developments in recent decades. While refugee rights have expanded, access to these rights has tightened. Previously unrecognized groups – such as women experiencing gender-based violence and LGBT populations – are now considered legitimate refugees. Yet, the implementation of stringent administrative measures has made it harder for refugees to secure protection. Refugees Are (Not) Welcome Here draws on archival and media sources, interviews, and organizational data to examine how refugee claims are administered within a complex and contradictory regime that maintains significant legal and bureaucratic silos. Azar Masoumi explains why state-controlled refugee protection persists despite its many failures, not only in Canada but globally. This rigorous study deftly argues that the paradoxical interplay between refugee law and claim-processing bureaucracies is symptomatic of a larger illogic: reliance on the exclusivist mechanisms of the nation-state to ensure the universal application of rights. Ultimately, this book illuminates just how this paradox has turned refugee protection into an unfulfilled promise.

Azar Masoumi is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. She has been published in Canadian and international journals including Social and Legal Studies, Studies in Social Justice, Social Identities, Feminist Legal Studies, the Oñati Socio-Legal Series, and Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order.

Focusing on the bureaucracy of refugee status determination, Refugees Are (Not) Welcome Here makes a significant and original contribution to critical refugee and migration studies. The volume will be of great benefit to Canadian audiences and beyond.

Sule Tomkinson, Department of Political Science, Université Laval:

The strength of this book is its use of archival and official material of the Canadian regime of refugee protection to show the inherent tensions in the work of state officials, and the difficulty of securing universal rights within a context of unwanted migration control. There is no other book like it.