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Resisting the Dehumanization of Refugees: 3. Migrant and Refugee Precarity as a Double Movement: A Case Study of Dehumanization and Humanization in the Canada-US Borderlands

Resisting the Dehumanization of Refugees
3. Migrant and Refugee Precarity as a Double Movement: A Case Study of Dehumanization and Humanization in the Canada-US Borderlands
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“3. Migrant and Refugee Precarity as a Double Movement: A Case Study of Dehumanization and Humanization in the Canada-US Borderlands” in “Resisting the Dehumanization of Refugees”

Chapter 3 Migrant and Refugee Precarity as a Double Movement A Case Study of Dehumanization and Humanization in the Canada-US Borderlands

Jeffrey M. Ayres

On a Saturday afternoon in mid-October 2019, far-right and pro-immigration groups gathered along the Québec–New York border, engaging in competing protests near the Lacolle-Champlain border crossing. The location of the protests was not by chance: minutes away from this official border crossing is Roxham Road, an unofficial crossing that tens of thousands of asylum seekers for several years had been using to enter Canada from the United States. The far-right groups—who had instigated the demonstration—included members of Yellow Vests Canada, Storm Alliance, the People’s Party of Canada, Groupe de Sécurité Patriotique, and the well-known white supremacist group Soldiers of Odin. Separated by a heavy presence of members of Sûreté du Québec, pro-immigration groups, including Bridges Not Borders (Créons des Ponts), Caring for Social Justice, Valleyfield, West Island refugee volunteers, and Unitarian Universalists from the Eastern Townships, held a press conference and displayed signs with pro-refugee messages to counter the far-right anti-immigration demonstrators (Campbell and Kovac 2019; Curtis 2019).

These duelling border protests—and the wider public debate and public policies they reflect—illustrate long-unfolding structural forces shaping the precarity of undocumented migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, yet the protests also highlight the reformist potential of civil society, social movements, and contentious politics at a moment of overlapping global political, economic, and environmental crises. Moreover, this duality of migrant and refugee precarity—with multiple overlapping forms of vulnerability, anxiety, uncertainty, and deportability contrasted with civil society interventions and social movement mobilizations for human rights, economic well-being, and the right to claim asylum—provides insights into the conditions of globalization and contestation in the twenty-first century. Unpacking the processes that contribute to such precarity helps clarify the interdependence of policies, rhetoric, and actions that dehumanize refugee claimants with interventions, protests, and responses that seek to humanize refugees and migrants at a time of near-unparalleled crisis for displaced peoples globally. With the 2020 advent of the COVID-19 global pandemic and the resulting economic crisis of mass unemployment for hundreds of millions globally, these conditions of precarization have only deepened while nonetheless having been met by one of the largest US-centered transnational moments of contentious politics and social movement mobilization in decades (Kipfer 2020).

This chapter explores the appearance and consequences of the duality of migrant and refugee precarity along the Canada-US borderlands through the analytical lens of Polanyi’s “double movement” (2001). Over the past several decades in the post–Cold War era, Polanyi’s conceptual approach—originally applied to understand the transformative socio-political responses to the crisis of nineteenth-century civilization that resulted in the First World War—has been applied to explain a variety of countermovement reactions and responses to crises of twentieth-century civilization. Polanyi focused during his time on the so-called Great Transformation of the post–World War I era: the duelling fascist and socio-democratic responses to what he called the failed “utopian project” of founding a society on a self-regulating market (Desai 2020, 4). Yet Polanyian analysis is arguably just as potent today as it was a century ago, as the concept of the double movement has increasingly been drawn on by scholars and activists to place the spread of an extraordinary array of reactionary and progressive social movements today in a similar context: as diverse and socially protective responses and reactions to a similarly failed attempt to recreate another utopian project of a market society through neoliberal economic policies. From the alter-globalization movements of the 1990s culminating in the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) protests, to the post-Seattle contentious political cycle that produced variously the World Social Forum, Occupy Wall Street, and global anti-austerity protests, to most recently the spread of populist, xenophobic reactionary movements countered by a revitalization of the Black Lives Matter movement, cycles of unrest and contentious political behaviour are linked to the neoliberal processes that have exacerbated global inequality and insecurity (Ayres and Macdonald 2019).

In short, I argue that we are currently witnessing the playing out of another Great Transformation, with the acceleration of the duality of migrant and refugee precarity an important part of this destabilized era. In this chapter, I first review the development of precarity as a hegemonic norm under neoliberalism, discussing briefly how neoliberal precarization has accelerated conditions that dehumanize life and labour for refugees and migrants. I then turn to a discussion of Trump administration executive orders, travel restrictions, and immigration bans that have exacerbated precarity, with a focus on the dehumanizing impact of these policies in the Canada-US borderlands region. In particular, I focus on the double movement of refugee and migrant dehumanization and humanization at Roxham Road, where tens of thousands of people have fled from the United States as irregular migrants seeking asylum and refugee status in Canada.

While expanded securitization by US Customs and Border Protection and anti-immigration protests notably on the Québec side of the border aggravated further the unpredictability of daily life for those seeking to cross into Canada, counterprotests, border solidarity actions, and humanitarian relief provided by civil society groups on both sides of the border suggest the possibility for an alternative, humanizing politics of refugee settlement and migration in a post-neoliberal era.

Precarity as a Hegemonic Norm in the Neoliberal Era

The past few years have marked a new era of mass migration, with hundreds of millions of people on the move globally due to an accumulation of crises and political conflicts. This trend of vast movements of people is linked to any number of challenges: state failure, civil war, human rights abuses, violence, transnational criminal activity, shifts in the global balance of power, environmental degradation, and accelerating climate change. The numbers are sobering; according to the International Organization for Migration (2020), 272 million people could be classified as migrants in 2019—3.5 percent of the world’s population, with the global refugee population in 2018 at 25.9 million, internally displaced peoples at 41.3 million, and stateless peoples at 3.9 million. Less acute crises and more long-term economic, social, political, and technological transformations linked to post–Cold War globalization also have pushed and pulled people across the globe. Yet it is the neoliberal character of these globalization-induced transformations that is of particular relevance to understanding the precarization of migrant and refugee life and the accompanying countermovements that have reacted to it.

Neoliberalism has been described variously as an economic theory, political ideology, policy paradigm, and social imaginary (Evans and Sewell 2013). Whichever meaning is considered, the overriding theme is the dramatically increased role played by markets in shaping many of the most profound political, economic, and cultural changes of the post–Cold War era (Hall and Lamont 2013). Picking up steam dramatically in the early 1980s with the full support of key political leaders such as US president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and to a lesser extent Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, neoliberal prescriptions such as deregulation, privatization, tax cuts, and the liberalization of trade and investment became embedded in national and international policies and regimes to legitimize a radical scaling back of the social welfare role played by governments and encouraged a dramatic change in prevailing views on the appropriate relationship between the public and private sectors (Hall and Lamont 2013). The impact of neoliberal ideas became especially identifiable in the emergence of free trade agreements such as the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement or the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in the creation of the WTO, in the functioning logic of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for dispensing loans across the developing world, and in the adoption of increasingly regressive income tax policies by states.

In addition to the obvious political and economic policy impacts, neoliberal ideas also have shaped what Hall and Lamont call the “collective imaginary” (2013, 4) of a society, and this rise in market fundamentalist ideologies has directly contributed to the growing precarious character of everyday life for so many in the twenty-first century. As Hall and Lamont argue, neoliberal ideas have contributed to the collective reimagining of those “overarching narratives that tell people what their society is about” so that national imaginaries have become neoliberalized: “Governments and international agencies were called upon to rethink their missions, and individuals faced profound redefinitions in the criteria for social worth, as economic performance and market status became more central markers for social and cultural membership” (4). Arguably, neoliberalism has brought not merely dramatic redistributive shifts—steadily rising levels of inequality within both developed and developing countries, contributing to a more precarious way of life (Evans and Sewell 2013)—but also profound shifts in those dominant scripts that previously might have been drawn on to legitimize government responses to counter widening material insecurity. And as the neoliberal script increasingly removed any role for the state, discouraging socially protective government interventions to counter growing income inequality and material insecurity within states, precarity has become a hegemonic norm embodying such market imperatives as efficiency, flexibility, unpredictability, and insecurity (Schierup, Alund, and Likic-Brboric 2014; Wise 2018).

The daily life experiences of migrants and refugees reflect a crossroads of precarity and intersecting and destabilizing crises—the migrant experience being the “quintessential incarnation” of precarity (Tsianos 2007, 192). As Paret and Gleeson argue, migrant experiences provide a critical and much broader lens for appreciating the origins and institutionalization of precarity over the past several decades (2016). While the condition and processes of precarity have become increasingly popular subjects of study in political economy and critical labour studies, focusing especially on the conditions of life and labour precarity, migrants experience precarity in multiple reinforcing ways with the added challenge of legal status/citizenship or precarity of place. Life precarity references a “situation in which persons do not have stable life conditions,” implying existing in a “state of flux,” while labour precarity “refers to a situation in which subjects are faced with flexible working conditions” (Biglia and Marti 2014, 1489). As Roy and Verdun point out, labour precarity focuses primarily on issues related to the insecurity of employment, whereas life precarity is linked to a much broader “feeling of vulnerability that could arise not just due to labour market conditions, but from various life experiences and prospects” (2019, 3). Added to these two precarious conditions is precarity of place or legal precarity, which Roy and Verdun argue is connected most closely to the migrant or refugee claimant experience: “precariousness around not having the correct legal documentation and status to reside lawfully in the country and/or to travel freely back to the mother country and to have the right to reenter after a short time away” (4). In other words, on top of the relentless uncertainty of having access to gainful employment or being able to coherently plan for a future, the migrant or would-be refugee experiences precarity of place in the day-to-day risk of being deported through a change in immigration or labour laws or through the general lack of state protection due to the status as a non-citizen of a given country.

Migrant and refugee precarity—in its life, labour, and legal dimensions—is further reinforced by state bordering practices that encourage reactionary movements no less shaped by neoliberal scripts that have redrawn the boundaries between public and private and accentuated clear lines between the included and excluded of a national community. Precarity as a hegemonic norm is therefore reinforced through processes of bordering, through which “territories and peoples are respectively included or excluded within a hierarchical network of groups, affiliations and identities” (Newman 2003, 13). As Black, Chattopadhyay, and Chisholm have noted, “The blatant hardening of borders through regulatory measures designed specifically to keep migratory labour cheap, disposable, and controllable, is not new. [. . .] In recent decades, the exploitation of global migrant populations has been fortified with increasingly technological sophistication, the spread of globalization, and the hegemony of neoliberalism” (2020, 6). In the nearly twenty years since the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, bordering processes are even less concentrated in central places along those territorial lines separating states and are, rather, more widely dispersed to serve surveillance, filtering, and sorting functions for the state. Law enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), policing, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other agencies that exist to control and disaggregate have “delocalized” or gone “remote,” operationalizing the neoliberal national imaginaries wherever authorities have deemed it necessary to protect community members from perceived dangers, such as asylum seekers, migrants, drug and sex traffickers, cheap labour, and undocumented workers. In short, remote and delocalizing bordering processes have exacerbated the precarious life, labour, and legal conditions facing migrants and refugees, with a political rationale that supports and sustains neoliberal norms: border regions are “decongested” to further liberalize and speed up cross-border trade, production, and tourism, while migrants and asylum seekers are intercepted, imprisoned, and deported prior to activating human rights, refugee, or citizenship claims (Walters 2006, 195), reinforcing a community that clearly demarcates between “us and them.”

As much as several decades of neoliberal precarization processes today have exacerbated some of the more dehumanizing characteristics of this age—spiralling inequality, growing material insecurity, anxiety, vulnerability, and broadly shared feelings of despair—precarity also has been recognized for its dual significance: as a condition shaping social movement identity, contentious politics, and resistance (Schierup, Alund, and Likic-Brboric 2014, 51). This is where a Polanyian analysis is most instructive: the expectation that the movement toward neoliberal orthodoxy that has unfolded over the past several decades—commodifying work and life experiences, dis-embedding the market from government regulation, and accelerating the twenty-first-century norm of precarity—suggests the relevance of considering if neoliberalism would be met by countermovements of resistance seeking social protection from precarization. Critically, moreover, an accurate reading of Polanyi recognizes that these countermovements may take a variety of ideological and political forms; as fascist, socialist, and communist movements arose after the First World War competing for national and international dominance in the Great Transformation of Polanyi’s time, today’s countermovements against neoliberal precarity have demonstrated both reactionary and progressive characteristics. On the progressive, social justice, and emancipatory left, the past several decades have seen a number of challenges to neoliberal precarity: from the alter-globalization movement’s campaigns opposing NAFTA and the WTO, to the global anti-capitalist World Social Forum, to Occupy Wall Street and anti-austerity protests and the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet, on the reactionary, xenophobic, and populist right, we have seen far different manifestations of socially protective impulses: the rise of a global white supremacy movement, the Tea Party, the 2016 “Make America Great Again” US presidential campaign, Brexit, and the spread of populist and authoritarian governments worldwide, couching socially and community-protective responses with anti-immigrant and racist delocalized bordering practices. The next section of this chapter looks to the Québec–New York–Vermont border region to illustrate this duality of precarity in its both dehumanizing and humanizing forms and highlights the potentials of migrant and refugee agency and civil society counter-hegemonic discourse and collective action to the precarization of life and work.

Exacerbating Migrant Precarity in the Borderlands

Clearly, the precarization of the average American played a crucial role in the election of Donald Trump, as the declining economic fortunes of Americans played a key role in the construction of negative and fearful frames of meaning about what life in the United States means today to Trump and his supporters. As many observers of the rise of Trump to the presidency have observed, Trump tapped into and exploited successfully a widespread shared sense of “cultural resentment” on the part of mostly white, working-class Americans, especially across Rust Belt states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (Cramer 2016; Campbell 2018), a population segment especially receptive to fearful rhetoric about a dangerous and unfair North America of violent immigrants and relentless job loss. A “profound and enduring connection” developed between Trump and his core voters, a connection based on grievance, where Trump met “his voters in a common perception (real or not) of being shunned, ignored and disrespected by ‘elites’” (LeTourneau 2017). Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign rallies provided a window into the depth of resentment, rage, and fear collectively shared by a large segment of the American population, with Trump’s campaign and rhetoric exhibiting a collection of what were widely perceived as common-sense proposals to strengthen America’s borders and protect its economy and its workers. Through his interactions with supporters at campaign rallies and through his rhetoric, fear and anxiety were fused in trade and security across the North American region, where the preoccupation with illegal immigration, fortifying the border, and building a wall were combined with the national security threat posed by both NAFTA partners, Canada and Mexico.

Executive Orders, Travel Bans, and Decreased Refugee Resettlement

The Trump administration wasted little time constructing a response to the precarious livelihoods of many Americans by developing policies and announcing proposals that contained racist and xenophobic overtones and served to exacerbate further the precarity of migrants, refugees, and undocumented workers in the United States. At times, President Trump was quite direct, attacking DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals); complaining in 2018 that the United States had been accepting too many people from “shithole countries” from Africa, Haiti, and El Salvador (Sacchetti, Hauslohner, and Paquette 2020); or “scapegoating” almost a quarter of Africa’s population with travel and immigration bans put in place ostensibly due to security risks in the vetting procedures in place in these countries (Tharoor 2020). Many of these policies created invisible walls and barriers to migration and clearly were designed to restrict immigration, reduce refugee resettlement, and deport people who did not fit the white nationalist imaginary that buttressed the Trump administration. In the days following his inauguration in January 2017, President Trump issued several executive orders, the results of which would have severely curtailed travel or migration from majority-Muslim or majority-non-white countries, including (1) Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, (2) Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements, and (3) Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.

All three executive orders built upon the exclusionary campaign rhetoric to shape policies at the core of the Trump administration’s nativist political project. The first two orders have had significant implications for securitized bordering and re-bordering along the US-Mexico and US-Canadian borders: the first ordered law enforcement agencies in the United States to aggressively act to remove all undocumented migrants, even those not previously convicted of a crime, which was a notable change from the emphasis on removal during the Obama administration, and the second focused on fulfilling Trump’s central campaign promise of building a wall between the United States and Mexico, limiting the due process rights of asylum seekers, and broadening and expediting the detention of immigrants and removal with limited rights of appeal.

While the third executive order has gone through several changes and was ultimately upheld in revised form by the US Supreme Court in 2018, all three orders have significantly enhanced the deportation powers of key agencies within the DHS, including ICE and its key agency empowered with making arrests—Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO)—and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Under Trump, over one hundred thousand people a year were arrested by the ERO—more arrests annually than are carried out combined by the FBI, the Marshals Service, and the Secret Service, with arrests skyrocketing by over 40 percent since the issuing of these executive orders (ICE 2018). The expanded arrests and deportations are linked to a more explicitly nativist political project and are also part of a much larger expansion of a US border control-security-industrial complex over the past several decades.

In addition to travel restrictions, immigration bans, and the elimination of visa lotteries, the Trump administration oversaw a dramatic curtailment in refugee resettlement in the United States. The 2017 Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States executive order suspended the settlement of Syrian refugees indefinitely and served as a harbinger of the administration’s approach to refugee resettlement that was soon to follow: that same year, the administration capped resettlement at forty-five thousand—less than half the amount of refugee resettlement that occurred in the last year of the Obama administration and the first time in history that the ceiling was below sixty-seven thousand (Goudeau 2020). By 2018, Canada, with one-tenth the population, had surpassed the United States in total numbers of refugees resettled, and for the first time in the history of the United Nations Refugee Agency, the United States did not resettle the most refugees. Through 2019, with understaffing at the FBI, bureaucratic delays within the DHS, and relief agencies such as Catholic Charities and the International Rescue Committee closing offices, refugee resettlement continued to slow (Alvarez 2018), and the admission ceiling in 2020 was slashed again to a mere eighteen thousand.

Roxham Road and the Safe Third Country Agreement

The particular vulnerability and insecurity of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers—life, labour, and legal precarity—have been exacerbated by the functioning of the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA). The hostility, xenophobia, harsh rhetoric, and restrictive policies of the Trump administration toward migrants and potential asylum seekers have had a direct impact on the flow of people seeking to leave the United States for Canada. Since the beginning of the Trump administration in January 2017, over fifty-five thousand asylum seekers have entered Canada through land crossings, with long-time undocumented migrants in the United States pushed to the border due to increased fears of arrest, detention, and deportation. Many of these people overstayed visas or received a negative asylum decision, and while 60 percent purportedly always saw the United States as a “transit state” with the eventual goal of moving to Canada, 40 percent nonetheless felt threatened enough by the Trump administration’s stance to uproot their lives and seek refuge in Canada (Keung 2019; Smith 2019).

Rural upstate New York, where Roxham Road dead-ends into the US-Canada border, is where over 90 percent of all crossings into Canada from the United States by undocumented migrants have taken place since 2016 (Banerjee 2018). What has encouraged undocumented migrants and refugee claimants to seek out Roxham Road is primarily the STCA—in addition to the anti-immigration and xenophobic stance of the Trump administration. Coming into effect in 2004, the STCA was designed to reduce so-called asylum shopping, forcing would-be refugee claimants to apply for status in whichever country they first landed in their official point of entry. The premise of the agreement is that both Canada and the United States are safe countries for people to make asylum claims, and the agreement mandates that anyone crossing at an official Canada-US land point of entry to seek asylum must be turned back to claim refugee status in their first country of entry. However, the unanticipated exception to the STCA is that people may try to cross at unofficial points of entry—such as Roxham Road—and while temporarily they may be detained, they may then pursue refugee status outside the parameters of the STCA. Granted, the STCA was initially negotiated at a time when few people were trying to cross dangerous and unofficial entry points between the United States and Canada. Yet by encouraging irregular crossing at an unofficial point in the border, the STCA exacerbates the already precarious livelihoods of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers: travel to and across the US-Canada border can be dangerous and risky, unscrupulous taxi drivers who drop people off at the end of Roxham Road have been known to charge exorbitant prices, and the experience of taking one’s family to the border knowingly crossing at an unofficial site is extraordinarily anxiety producing, with uncertainty and fear over police treatment and an unknown time frame for asylum consideration awaiting (Wu, Reynolds, and Young 2020; Brown 2019). Moreover, negative and factually incorrect media portrayals of Canada “losing control” over its borders and being “invaded” by “bogus” refugee claimants oftentimes frame those crossing at Roxham Road as criminals or dangers to Canadian society rather than as individuals and families fearful of remaining in a hostile United States and desperate for refuge in Canada.

Re-bordering and Remote Control Beyond the International Border

Agents of the DHS currently are legally empowered to stop vehicles within one hundred miles of the border and search private land within twenty-five miles of the US-Canada border. Such practices illustrate the operationalization of “remote control”—where the expanded securitization functions of the border are increasingly delocalized and focused on policing, detaining, and relocating “mobilities” not in immediate proximity to the international legal border (Walters 2006). CBP officers have been known to board Greyhound busses without a warrant in Vermont and have stood outside bus doorways inquiring about citizenship status in Burlington, Vermont (a distance of less than fifty miles), prior to allowing passengers to board. The American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont (ACLU-VT) submitted a series of Freedom of Information requests in 2012 to federal agencies, discovering that the DHS had drawn up plans for creating an eight-acre stretch of permanent border control checkpoints, many as much as one hundred miles from the Canadian border, along the North-South interstates in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine (ACLU-VT 2013a). The following year, the ACLU-VT released a new study titled Surveillance on the Northern Border, which detailed the extensive way the newest surveillance technologies are being implemented to track the movements of citizens of Vermont (ACLU-VT 2013b). The ACLU-VT report noted that because over 90 percent of Vermonters live within the one-hundred-mile possible interior checkpoint zone, Vermont has become a “perverse Ground Zero in the accelerating surveillance society” (Picard 2013).

Relatedly, over the past several years, there has been a significant increase in the targeting, arrest, and detention of undocumented immigrants in the New York–Vermont border region by ICE and CBP agents, as reported by the Swanton Border Control Sector, an area from the eastern border of New York, across all Vermont, to the New Hampshire–Maine border. Importantly, the total number of people caught illegally crossing from Canada into the United States in the Swanton sector reached its highest level in the fiscal year 2018 since 2011: the CBP apprehended 736 people in the fiscal year 2018, up from 449 in the fiscal year 2017, including 142 families attempting to cross into the United States from Canada in the fiscal year 2018 (Norton and Rodrigues 2019). Yet in addition to this increase in the capturing and detention of immigrants attempting illegal border crossings from Canada into the United States, there has also been an increase in CBP and ICE arrests of undocumented immigrants in Vermont, with an increase in the Swanton sector from 291 to 449 for an increase of 54 percent in the fiscal year 2017 (Dilawar 2018). This increase in arrests of undocumented immigrants seems consistent with the Trump administration’s 2017 executive order Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, which eliminated the Obama-era focus on arresting undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions. Connected circumstantially to Vermont’s status as a “sanctuary state” but more directly to recent political campaigns in Vermont designed to promote the human rights of undocumented immigrants, ICE and the CBP have appeared to target especially the state’s population of immigrant dairy farm labourers. Workers and activists from the Vermont-based immigrant human rights group Migrant Justice have been detained, intimidated, harassed, and arrested conspicuously coinciding with three recent campaigns to improve the well-being of undocumented labourers in Vermont (True 2017; Dilawar 2020).

Anti-immigration Borderlands Protests

The most obvious signs of a reactionary countermovement that has exacerbated migrant and refugee precarity—especially due to the STCA and the resulting conditions and events transpiring at Roxham Road—are illustrated in the anti-immigration and right-wing protests that have been organized on the Québec side of the border over the past several years. Storm Alliance—an anti-immigration and anti-Muslim group formed in December 2016—has been a central player in organizing protests along the border and in Montréal and Québec City. Supporters of Storm Alliance broke from the white supremacist group Soldiers of Odin, which had emerged in Canada in 2015 and gained notoriety for the use of street patrols seen as an attempt to intimidate refugees and immigrants (Lamoureux 2017). Storm Alliance focuses explicitly on conditions in Québec and protests against the federal Liberal government’s handling of the situation at Roxham Road. Members of Storm Alliance oppose what they perceive as illegal immigration flowing across the border and call for the federal government to reimburse Québec for the costs associated with handling the large influx of refugee claimants into the province, claiming that the needs of average Quebeckers are not being met (Olivier 2018). In addition to the “United to Protect Our Borders” rally in May 2018, Storm Alliance has also participated in so-called patrols of the Canada-US border—sometimes joined by the anti-Muslim group La Meute and members of other far-right and paramilitary organizations—to observe the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the processing of asylum seekers crossing into Canada at Roxham Road. While not as overtly expressed through public policy and legislation, such concerns have echoed across the conservative political spectrum in Canada, as anxiety, fear, and anger over irregular border crossings have become features of political debate and rhetoric. In 2018, Michelle Rempel, a Conservative member of Parliament from Alberta, proposed turning the entire length of the Canada-US border into a formal point of entry, which would effectively block irregular border crossing to seek asylum; Jean-François Lisée, the Québec provincial Parti Québécois leader, called for a fence to be built at Roxham Road; and roughly timed with October 2019 border protests, former Federal Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer sought to politicize the situation at Roxham Road to boost his party’s fortunes in the October 21, 2019, federal election. This alarmist rhetoric coming from Canada’s Conservative Party as well as the much more openly anti-immigrant People’s Party has connected with the same theme of the “invasion of illegals” at the border espoused by right-wing protests, with concerns growing that Canada’s Liberal Party and its immigration policy in turn are being influenced by these reactionary protests and concerns (Carbert 2019).

Challenging Migrant Precarity in the Borderlands

The precarious conditions experienced by undocumented migrants and asylum seekers in the Canada-US border region have a clear dual significance visible not merely in reactionary trends and actions but in solidaristic countermovements in support of migrants and refugees. Harsh US government policy and anti-immigrant rhetoric and executive orders have been met with and countered by pro-migrant borderlands protests. New civic organizations have emerged to provide humanitarian relief along the border in an attempt to reduce the levels of anxiety, life insecurity, and vulnerability experienced by individuals and families crossing into Canada at Roxham Road. Migrant groups have pushed back through protests and legal actions against the erosion of their collective agency and have demonstrated resiliency and solidarity in the midst of precarious life, labour, and legal conditions. All these initiatives suggest that neoliberal precarity and its particularly harsh effects on migrants and asylum seekers have been challenged by counter-hegemonic engagement and participation, highlighting that borderlands precarity is not just an inevitable and bleak condition but has become a rallying point for resistance. In short, while the Canada-US borderlands reveal the dangers and pressures associated with migrant precarity, this region has also become a space for a more progressive, human rights–oriented countermovement; a microcosm of broader challenges to neoliberal precarity; and a reference point and example for “social justice movements generating strategies and discourses of contestation in the name of human rights and universal citizenship” (Schierup, Alund, and Likic-Brboric 2014, 51). These elements are central to a more humanizing approach to migrants and refugees.

Border Solidarity and Humanitarian Relief

Concerned individuals on both sides of the Canada-US border have formed humanitarian-based organizations that focus on trying to improve the well-being and enhance the personal dignity of asylum seekers attempting to cross into Canada at Roxham Road. Both Plattsburgh Cares and Bridges Not Borders formed in 2017 in response to the increase in people streaming to the New York–Québec border in reaction to the tightening of US immigration and asylum policies. Plattsburgh Cares, based on the New York side of the border, and Bridges Not Borders, based on the Québec side, have both played important roles in distributing supplies, providing information, and dispelling misconceptions about asylum seekers and undocumented migrants crossing the border. Plattsburgh Cares has produced flyers explaining the STCA, helped people find local temporary housing, provided translators for immigration attorneys, given local presentations on the plight of migrants and refugees, rallied in support of DACA, and engaged particularly in everyday forms of humanitarianism at Roxham Road, providing water, food, clothing, crayons, and stuffed animals to asylum seekers and their families. The group also has built alliances and shared resources with other local organizations—such as Refugees Welcome International, Adirondack Friends of Refugees and Immigrants, and John Brown Lives—and enlisted local taxi drivers to more humanely and cost-effectively transport would-be refuge claimants from Plattsburgh to Roxham Road (Crête 2018; Plattsburgh Cares 2021).

There has been a similar trend toward networking and alliance building in support of refugee rights and to provide humanitarian relief on the Québec side of the border. Bridges Not Borders in Québec has engaged in similar small-scale relief actions to raise awareness of the challenges facing refugee claimants once they cross the border, including serving as a “peaceful and informed” presence at the border, providing meals and explaining the STCA to migrants, lobbying the federal and provincial governments to better protect and respect refugee rights, and meeting with members of Parliament and the Quebec National Assembly to raise awareness about the conditions at Roxham Road and the trends forcing people to the border. Other organizations that have collaborated with Bridges Not Borders or are similarly engaged in collective actions and information raising on the precarious conditions facing the thousands of asylum seekers who have entered Canada include Foyer du Monde, Comité d’accueil des migrants du Haut-Saint-Laurent, Comité d’accueil des demandeurs d’asile au Québec, the Montréal-based office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and Solidarity Across Borders, a migrant justice network based in Montréal and active since 2003, which is composed of both migrants and allies working to end deportations and detentions of asylum seekers (Bridges Not Borders 2020b). The different volunteer and citizens-based relief groups that have engaged in cross-border collaboration and increased their humanitarian efforts on behalf of migrants and refugees illustrate a type of “alternative politics of migration” (Alonso 2020, 73), mobilizing resources and raising awareness to change existing laws and policies that exacerbate migrant precarity and highlighting the violence, inequality, and poverty that have pushed and pulled people to travel tens of thousands of miles to seek refuge in Canada or even originally the United States. Promoting a different approach to migration policy and relief “from below”—as opposed to through top-down government proclamations or international agreements such as the STCA—these organizations serve as important countervailing forces against government policies at the federal, provincial, or state level that have proved not merely insufficient but harmful (ibid.).

Pro-immigration Borderlands Protests

Protests, campaigns, and other types of information-raising collective actions have emerged throughout the Canada-US borderlands region, complementing the relief efforts of the civil society organizations assisting people crossing the border into Canada. Again, Roxham Road has become a flashpoint for protest, with anti-immigration and pro-migrant protesters rallying peacefully but arrayed against each other, oftentimes separated by police in Québec. Bridges Not Borders joined Solidarity Across Borders in several counterprotests from 2017 to 2019 in Québec to counter the rallies organized by the Storm Alliance and other anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups. While these efforts have in part served to provide a counter-presence to the larger numbers of individuals participating in the anti-immigration rallies, Bridges Not Borders also has engaged in more everyday acts of micro-protest and humanitarianism, holding a press conference, hosting a picnic, and even hosting a tea party for news organizations to counter the “Secure Our Borders” demonstration in the Lacolle, Québec, border crossing in June 2018.

Other protests and demonstrations have occurred in the Montréal area at the proposed construction site in Laval for a new detention center for undocumented migrants while they await hearings on whether they will be allowed to remain in Canada. Anarchists and groups committed to the abolition of prisons have for several years organized protests on New Year’s Eve at the Laval site, setting off fireworks and making noise through chants and music in solidarity with people already held in detention at the minimum-security federal training center (Milton 2019). Ni Frontières, Ni Prisons—an organization specifically devoted to halting the construction of the proposed new detention center—has targeted construction companies involved in the bidding process, while anti-capitalist groups framed the annual May 1 International Labour Day celebrations in 2019 around opposition to migrant detention and deportation (Earles 2019). Additionally, Solidarity Across Borders has organized marches in Montréal against the proposed detention center and kept the spotlight on the challenging conditions facing those individuals—detained or not—awaiting hearings to determine their refugee status.

Migrant Agency and Successful Organizing and Mobilization

There are many instances in the Canada-US borderlands region where people are mobilizing with some success against the precarious life, labour, and legal conditions they face as undocumented migrants, challenging trends, policies, and institutions that might otherwise erode their collective agency. Paret and Gleeson have referred to the “precarity-migrant-agency” nexus as situations where “migrants are building solidarity to push back against their precarity”—protesting against exploitation at work, exclusion from public services, and the ever-present threat of criminalization, deportation, and family separation (2016, 286). One of the more visible organizations that has engaged in a number of successful collective actions and mobilizations on behalf of undocumented workers and against the intersecting conditions of precarity facing migrants is Migrant Justice, based in the city of Burlington in northern Vermont. Similar in composition to Solidarity Across Borders in that its members are undocumented workers as well as local supporters, Migrant Justice has undertaken several campaigns that have targeted federal and state laws and corporate behaviour that exploits or destabilizes the daily lives of migrant workers in Vermont and across greater New England, including a mobilization to demand fair and impartial policing across Vermont as well as a campaign to demand that ICE stop targeting and arresting undocumented dairy workers in front of their homes.

A protest campaign in 2013 successfully pressured the Vermont General Assembly to approve legislation allowing migrants to gain access to a Vermont driver’s license regardless of immigration status. In November 2018, Migrant Justice started a campaign against the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and ICE, marching through downtown Burlington to the federal courthouse to announce a federal anti-discrimination lawsuit alleging that the DMV and ICE were collaborating to harasses and detain migrant workers. Specifically, Migrant Justice contended that the DMV was providing ICE with the personal information of undocumented workers who had applied for driver’s licenses and had been involved in Migrant Justice human rights campaigns. The Vermont DMV and Migrant Justice reached a settlement in January 2020 that created new regulations that restricted communication and information sharing between federal immigration authorities such as ICE and the DMV (Blaisdell 2020). Migrant Justice’s ongoing Milk with Dignity campaign highlights the benefits of targeting the market power and resources of companies to improve the labour and housing conditions of migrant workers. This campaign encourages dairy companies to commit to prioritizing the sourcing of milk from farms that enroll in the Milk with Dignity program so that the labour and housing conditions of migrant workers are improved in part through the commitment of farms employing undocumented workers but also by companies paying a premium to help raise wages and working conditions on the farms. The well-known socially conscious ice cream company Ben and Jerry’s was the first to sign on to the Milk with Dignity campaign, reaching an agreement with Migrant Justice in October 2017. The agreement stipulated that 100 percent of Ben and Jerry’s northeastern US dairy purchases and over 250 workers would be covered and protected by the agreement’s code of conduct. Most recently, Migrant Justice has been targeting Hannaford, one of the largest supermarket chains in the northeastern United States, pressuring the chain to join the Milk with Dignity campaign through marches and protests outside individual stores (Migrant Justice 2020).

Challenging the Safe Third Country Agreement in the Era of COVID-19

In the absence of—or to some extent, because of—government action on immigration and refugees, civil society organizations in Canada decided to challenge the STCA in the Federal Court. The challenges posed by the STCA—increased fear, uncertainty, and vulnerability as tens of thousands of people crossed into Canada from the United States at Roxham Road—became impossible to ignore for social groups on the frontline of providing humanitarian relief to asylum seekers. As a result, in July 2017, six months after the inauguration of President Trump, the Canadian Council for Refugees, Amnesty International, and the Canadian Council of Churches joined an individual litigant and her children in a legal challenge, arguing that sending refugee claimants back to the United States violates their rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canadian Council for Refugees 2018). Eventually joined by individuals from El Salvador, Syria, and Ethiopia, the challenge cited the Trump administration’s hostility; growing restrictions on asylum seekers, visas, and immigration; removals of asylum seekers to unsafe countries; unlawful detention; barring of asylum claims based on gender and gang violence; criminalizing asylum at the border; and inconsistent access for asylum seekers to courts (Smith and Hofmann 2019). A federal court in Toronto eventually heard the challenge to the designation of the United States as a safe third country for refugees the first week of November 2019, with a supportive rally for refugee rights outside the courthouse in Toronto providing further grassroots support (Carbert 2019).

In the months following the November 2019 court hearing and the eventual decision against the STCA released in July 2020 by Justice Anne Marie McDonald, the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the world, dramatically exacerbating the precarious conditions facing migrants and would-be refugee claimants. Amid the surging global pandemic through the first six months of 2020, the Canadian and US governments put in place restrictive immigration and asylum policies that were not merely counterproductive in the fight against what had become a global health crisis but multipliers of the already existing life, legal, and workplace challenges facing migrants (Hsu 2020). Undocumented workers and asylum seekers were part of Québec’s struggle with COVID-19: with hundreds working in long-term care homes in greater Montréal and fearing possible detention or deportation, many did not seek out treatment for COVID symptoms (Lowrie 2020). Compounding the challenges facing asylum seekers was the decision in March to close the border between Canada and the United States to all non-essential travellers, and any persons seeking asylum irregularly—at Roxham Road or any other unofficial border crossing—would be turned back to the United States. Closing the border effectively shut down what might be called the new underground railroad of largely racialized people fleeing the United States to Canada at Roxham Road, exposing asylum seekers now turned back to the hostile, xenophobic environment and threat of detention and deportation from the United States, with several dozen would-be refugee claimants turned away from the border at Roxham Road in April and May alone (Levitz 2020). In but just one desperate example, a thirty-two-year-old Vermont farmworker and Migrant Justice activist died of COVID-19 in Mexico in July 2020 after being deported by ICE in March despite having taken steps to apply for political asylum on the basis of “horrific and systemic violence that they experienced as a trans person in Mexico” (Brouwer 2020).

Nonetheless, the Federal Court ruling in July 2020 striking down the STCA, giving the federal government in Ottawa six months to respond to the decision, was particularly momentous for supporters of a new and more humanitarian approach to refugee resettlement in Canada. The ruling that the STCA is unconstitutional is seen as a major victory for refugee rights at a critical moment in the global COVID-19 pandemic. In the decision, Justice McDonald writes, “Security of the person encompasses freedom from the threat of physical and psychological punishment or suffering,” noting in reference to those held in the United States, “The accounts of the detainees demonstrate both physical and psychological suffering because of detention, and a real risk that they will not be able to assert asylum claims” (Keung 2020). As the editorial board of the Washington Post notes in response to the ruling, “The question facing the administration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is whether its neighbor to the south still adheres to what Western democracies regard as the basic standards of dignity and decency on which the original treaty was based. [. . .] The evidence suggests it does not” (Editorial Board 2020). Regardless of the government’s response, the challenge to the STCA demonstrates how important it is for countervailing forces to be brought to bear against government policies and institutions that have exacerbated migrant precarity for many years.

Toward a Progressive Agenda for Humanizing the Migrant and Refugee Experience?

This chapter has reviewed ways in which precarity—and especially migrant precarity—has developed into a flashpoint for social and political organization and collective action. Polanyi’s concept of the double movement helps make sense of the decades-long unfolding of a neoliberal market orthodoxy that has exacerbated conditions of precarity for people around the world, who have experienced growing job insecurity, income inequality, accelerating day-to-day unpredictability, and feelings of vulnerability. For migrants and asylum seekers, neoliberal precarization has been accompanied by the added insecurity of precarity of place. In the Canada-US borderlands region of Québec–New York–Vermont, examples are widespread of countermovements of reaction and restriction slashing and sometimes overlapping with countermovements of agency and solidarity. Of course, what is playing out on this northern border of North America is taking place in different forms across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Gramsci’s concept of the “interregnum,” which refers to moments between the breakdown of one political-ideological order and the emergence of a new one (Stahl 2019), is another tool for understanding what is happening. It seems clear that neoliberalism has been undermined—but not eliminated—by succeeding crises, from the 2008 financial crisis to the new global depression due to COVID-19. The world, in short, is ripe for a new successor to neoliberalism, but it is manifestly unclear whether that change and new order will be reactionary and dehumanizing or progressive and rehumanizing.

In reflecting on the precarity-migrant-agency nexus, Paret and Gleeson write, “We should celebrate acts of resistance, even when they are limited or largely symbolic [. . .] but we must also acknowledge the persistence of precarity and the structures that maintain it, whether institutional or ideological” (2016, 289). The challenges facing workers and people in their everyday lives, but especially the struggles of migrants and asylum seekers, are likely to carry on for the foreseeable future, with climate change, failing states, and deepening inequality characteristics of any post-COVID global order. Moments of agency and collective action help clarify the processes of social and political change, and any hopes for a trending toward a politics of migration that embraces a progressive push for the distribution of collective goods, inclusive national imaginaries, and greater equity will likely require a multi-scale countervailing front against precarity and its neoliberal scripts: everyday acts of humanitarianism, protests and collective action campaigns, and legal and institutional efforts brought by civil society interweave into larger progressive countermovement potentials. Polanyi’s understanding effectively of the dual potential of the double movement is essential: today’s reactionary and progressive bordering practices are historically and politically contingent, with political, cultural, economic, and discursive practices continually colliding and contesting to redraw extraterritorial borders to legitimize different social imaginaries and uncertain political outcomes. It is, however, the progressive practices that need to be capitalized on to push a humanizing agenda for asylum seekers and refugees at the 49th parallel.

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