Regulating Spousal Migration through Canada's Multiple Border Strategy: The Gendered and Racialized Effects of Structurally Embedded Borders

This is the pre-print version of an article published by Wiley in Law & Policy in August 2018. Earlier versions of this article were presented at Law and Society Association meetings and at the Third CINETS Crimmigration Conference at the University of Maryland. This research was conducted through the Migrant Mothers Project.As part of emerging scholarship on border governance, this article examines how discourses of “fraud” in Canada merge with public management techniques to produce structurally embed- ded borders. We focus on regulatory changes introduced between 2010 and 2014 that aimed to deter and punish people who participate in “marriage fraud.” We then present the gendered and racialized impact of antifraud regulations through a case analysis of the implementation of Conditional Permanent Resident status (PR) from 2012 to 2017, which required some newly sponsored spouses and partners to remain in a conjugal relationship with their sponsor for two years after immigration. Our analysis of parliamentary proceedings illustrates how public man- agement logics and the use of new digital technologies are mobilized to expand border enforce- ment practices internally and outside the territorial boundaries of the nation. We argue that despite the repeal of conditional PR in 2017, the deterrence of marriage fraud through structur- ally embedded borders continues to regulate racialized immigrants in exclusionary ways that disproportionately impact women.We gratefully acknowledge funding support through an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada