Open Access“We must use every legal means to … put them behind bars, or to run them out of town”: Assembling citizenship deservingness in Toronto
Author(s) -
Paloma E. Villegas
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of critical race inquiry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1925-3850
DOI - 10.24908/jcri.v5i1.9135
Subject(s) - citizenship , immigration , argument (complex analysis) , political science , criminology , space (punctuation) , order (exchange) , race (biology) , sociology , law , value (mathematics) , gender studies , politics , economics , machine learning , computer science , biochemistry , chemistry , linguistics , philosophy , finance
This paper examines the assemblage and reassemblage of citizenship deservingness in Canada in the past few decades. By citizenship deservingness, I refer to the ways immigrant and racialized persons are accorded value and opportunity to access and retain formal citizenship status, including the right to remain in Canada. In order to make this argument, I examine the response to a 2012 shooting in Scarborough, an “inner suburb” of Toronto, Canada. I situate the shooting responses alongside policy and discursive changes that have made it easier to deport permanent residents from Canada if they have committed certain criminal acts. As scholars have noted, the targets of such policies are often the same individuals profiled and typecast as committing criminal acts—namely, immigrant and racialized men. In the Scarborough shooting, Jamaican men were specifically criminalized and targeted for exile from the city and country. My analysis demonstrates how, through this process, discourses of race and space came together to produce and legitimate policy changes that continue to erode the rights accorded to permanent residents and citizens.