Abstract

In July 2011, Minster of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, announced the beginning of the Citizenship Fraud Crackdown, an initiative to revoke, on mass scale, citizenship and Permanent Resident status obtained through fraudulent means. The initiative strived to purge Canada of past, present, and future citizenship fraud on a scale never seen before. The Crackdown cited 11,000 cases of fraud under investigation. Despite its rhetoric of eliminating fraud, the Crackdown failed to uncover wide scale deception in the citizenship program. I evaluate the Citizenship Fraud Crackdown through public discourse analysis, a review of internal Citizenship and Immigration Canada documents, and through interviews with individuals implicated in the investigations. The case study highlights racial and neoliberal underpinnings present in Canadian citizenship, and interesting tensions within citizenship reforms. The first tension is the push to require greater physical presence in Canada, at a time when globalization promotes neoliberal subjects living transnational lives. A second tension is fracturing of citizenship rights along the lines of dual citizens and single-citizens, even though both types of citizens are offered the same protections under the law. I argue the Citizenship Fraud Crackdown represents a form of nation-building that is fueled by racism and facilitated by the neoliberal crime-and-security agenda. I also argue that neoliberalism does not just operate parallel to racism; it is a racist ideology in and of itself.