Abstract

In the wake of the widespread media focus on the securitization of Canadian immigration policy and its harmonization in a North American "smart border" regime, this thesis examines the role that large-scale news media events around immigration and refugee asylum play in the formation of Canadian immigration policy. Two crucial news events in particular, the 1999 landings of Fujian Chinese migrants off the coast of British Columbia, and the focus on the ostensibly porous Canadian border following the September 2001 attacks in the United States, are analyzed in terms of their impacts on the introduction and intensification of trafficking and security policies, as well as selection, interdiction and enforcement (deportation/detention) practices. This project draws on and reworks theories of biopolitics and governmentality, along with the emerging literature on affect in cultural studies, to consider the effects that spectacular news events around migration have on the governmental formation of immigration policies. Methodologically, it draws on elements of interpretive and discourse analysis, qualitative interviews, along with an approach developed to account for the affective dimensions of news events in everyday life. The thesis argues that these highly affective news media events have been crucial to the formation of an increasingly racialized and sexualized biopolitics of migration focused on the preventative targeting of "risky" migrant bodies and their precarious movements and labour, as crystallized in the recent Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (2002) and the Safe Third Country Agreement (2004)