Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345 www.politicalgeography.

com

Embodying the nation-state: Canadas response to human smuggling

Alison Mountz
Department of Geography, The Maxwell School, Syracuse University, 144 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA

Abstract This paper argues that a shift in the scale of analysis of the nation-state, from national and global scales to the ner scale of the body reveals processes, relations, and experiences otherwise obscured. The response of the Canadian government to the arrival of migrants smuggled by boat from China to British Columbia in 1999 serves as a case study. I draw on feminist and post-structural theories that locate exercises of power and productions of dierence at the body in order to address a broader debate about the power of the nation-state to mediate transnational ows. Following accusations that they were losing control of borders, civil servants of the federal government of Canada sought to contain the issue of human smuggling by detaining migrants, controlling ows of information, and carefully constructing the public image of the state. This research, based on ethnographic eldwork with Citizenship and Immigration Canada, suggests potential in new epistemologies of the nation-state drawn through corporeal geographies, currently undervalued in mainstream political geography. # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Nation-state; Body; Embodiment; Human smuggling; Canada; Transnational migration

Introduction When boats carrying migrants smuggled from Fujian, China were intercepted by Canadian authorities o of the west coast of British Columbia (BC) in the summer of 1999, the Canadian media were saturated with images of a group that came to be known as the boat migrants. Front-page photographs of the boat arrivals portrayed migrants crowded on boats, having just crossed from international waters into Canadian waters in an attempt to enter the country surreptitiously.

Tel.: 315-443-5637; fax: 315-443-4227. E-mail address: amountz@maxwell.syr.edu (A. Mountz).

0962-6298/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2003.12.017

324

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

Discourse in the media foregrounded the migrant body, focusing early coverage on disease, malnutrition, dehydration, and hypothermia.1 This prominent coverage played on the symbolic imagery of migrant ships as a threat to the nation-state, presented the migrants as a threat to public health, and thus contributed to fears regarding the porosity of international borders, the integrity of Canadas refugee program, and the vulnerability of the nation-state more broadly. Simultaneously, images of ocers of the Canadian law boarding the boats emerged in newspapers. Members of the Emergency Response Team of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and of the federal Departments of Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) and National Defence were shown clothed in full uniform and mask to protect them from the spread of disease. They stepped in to bring under control a situation narrated by the media as fully out of the control of the federal government (Hier & Greenberg, 2002). The four boats arrived over the course of 11 weeks and provoked intense public debate in Canada regarding the sovereignty of the nation-state, manifest in the perception of its inability to police borders.2 A parallel discussion regarding the strength of the nation-state has transpired in recent years in academic literatures on globalization and transnationalism. While some scholars argue that the nation-state has lost political power in a globalizing world (Ohmae, 1995; Appadurai, 1996), others suggest that it remains powerful but re-positions itself strategically at dierent scales (Sassen, 1996; Marden, 1997; Ong, 1999). This paper posits corporeal geographies as a key scale at which to understand the nation-state and the re-spatialization of governance regarding refugee claimants and smuggled migrants. In Canada, there exist distinctly anxious debates regarding sovereignty as the nation-state struggles to assert its own position on refugee movements and the policing of international borders in relation to the ever-encroaching power of its southern neighbor. The response of the Canadian Government to human smuggling illuminates inconsistencies regarding the global positioning of Canada as both humanitarian, refugee-receiving nation and enforcer. The Canadian Government facilitates immigration as a population strategy to build a multicultural society, as an economic strategy to amass investment in Canada, and as a labor strategy to ll gaps in the labor market.3 The smuggled migrants were positioned as a threat to national security and fell within the mandate of the Department of CIC to enforce borders.4 The 1999 arrivals comprised the largest group of refugee
These images reect similar constructions of Chinese migrants as harbingers of disease during migrations to Canada a century earlier (Anderson, 1991). 2 Debates about the permeability of North American international borders were present long before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001, but have since intensied. 3 See, for example, Ley (2003) on Canadas Business Immigration Program and Pratt (1999) on Canadas Live-In Caregiver Program. 4 In 1999, when the Fujianese migrants arrived and again in 2000, when most were deported, Canada failed to meet the target of Elinor Caplan, then Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, to land upwards of 300,000 immigrants annually, approximately 1% of the Canadian population (Ley and Hiebert, 2001: 120).
1

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

325

claimants detained in recent Canadian history and eventually, in the spring of 2000, the largest mass deportations. Human smuggling movements constitute mixed ows of refugees and economic migrants and therefore call upon various mandates of federal, provincial, and local governments. The response to human smuggling thus accentuates the reality that the state does not contain or enact a unied series of agendas, objectives, or actors. State practices encompass, rather, a series of diverse interests and bodies that are often themselves in conict. Analysis of the ability of the nation-state to manage transnational migration serves as one platform from which political geographers can address debates regarding the vitality and integrity of geographical practices of nation-states. Human smuggling and tracking5 involve the movement of bodies as commodities for consumption in the global sex trade and other service economies. Smuggled migrants experience most viscerally the displacement caused by neoliberal agendas, the brutal tactics of enforcers as entrepreneurs of migration (Chin, 1999), and state practices of detention (Bowden, 2003). Yet images of immigration often narrate the story of the emasculated state: one that is rendered powerless by ows depicted as out of control, embodied by migrants who materialize in discourse driven by metaphors of invasion, ood, and waves (Ellis & Wright, 1998; McGuinness, 2001). Some bodies are made more visible because of the ways that they are raced, classed, and gendered, which gures prominently in discourse on immigration and is central to decisions about who belongs to the nation-state and which groups are portrayed as bodies out of place (Cresswell, 1997). These dierences are inscribed onto the body and reveal the operation of power through visibility (Pratt, 1998). In response to pressure from national and international publics to strengthen leaky borders, the federal government presented public images of authorities in control of the situation. Feminist theories that locate power at the scale of the body uncover attempts of the nation-state to strategically mediate transnational processes of globalization, mobility, and displacement. I advocate embodiment as a strategy that draws on standpoint theory (Harding, 1986; Haraway, 1991) and institutional ethnography (Smith, 1987) to understand the geography of the nation-state, and more specically, the operation of power among institutional actors and migrants. Given that power moves through institutional practices at various scales, a shift in the scale of analysis of the nation-state, from national and global scales to the ner scale of the body, reveals processes, relationships, and experiences otherwise obscured. The migrant body was centered in the Canadian response to human smuggling, both discursively and materially. Embodying the nation-state means moving beyond analyses of policy and structure, to the more uid, daily, personal interacSome delineate strictly between the denition of smuggling and tracking. Whereas human smuggling is the illicit movement of people across international boundaries (Koser, 2001: 59), human trafcking entails additional elements of coercion and exploitation and tends to be associated with the movement of women and children, often into the sex trade. I nd, however, that the distinction is ambiguous in practice, given how little is known about the experiences of those who are smuggled and tracked over time.
5

326

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

tions that surround and disrupt these formal instruments of governance to locate political processes in a time and a place (e.g. Gupta, 1995; Heyman & Smart, 1999; Hansen & Stepputat, 2001). This paper seeks to embody state practices by drawing on an ethnography conducted with the federal department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC). Research focused on the response to human smuggling in 1999. I proceed by outlining a theoretical framework and then reviewing various embodiments with the objective of uncovering power relations therein. I then discuss ethnographic ndings. I conclude with the argument that state practices of border enforcement are re-spatializing and a discussion of what this means for potential refugee claimants. Political geographies of body and state Michael Taussig asks, Could it be that with disembodiment, presence expands? (1997: 3). Because state practices are often concealed in praxis, they become more powerful for those for whom decision-making processes are obscured, such as immigrants, refugees, and those who advocate on their behalf (see Kirby, 1997: 5). Academics reify this disembodiment when they marginalize people from their analyses. As a result, representations of the state as a coherent body politic circulate without sucient interrogation; the state continues to be conceptualized and addressed as one body (see Gatens, 1991); as a result, the nation-state remains a masculinist, secure concept (see Nast, 1998: 195). In her review of content of Political Geography, Janet Kodras recognized power as the central theme running through all political geographies, but noted a critical absence of studies on the operation of power as well as a dearth of cutting edge theoretical treatments of the state (1999: 7578). Geographers are now, however, showing renewed interest in the state (Flint, 2003).6 The method of institutional ethnography addresses the absences identied by Kodras and, in so doing, oers a more nuanced rendition of state practices by seeking to understand and locate the operation of power in the daily work done by civil servants (e.g. Herbert, 1997). In this paper, data illustrate the negotiations surrounding the implementation of immigration policy, such as the workplace politics in which policies were enacted. In order to accomplish such embodiment, I conducted institutional research to understand the power of the state through the day-to-day operation of the bureaucracy. I was interested in how individuals within immigration made sense of human smuggling and of their own role in responding. I conducted semi-structured interviews and participant-observation in CICs regional headquarters for the BC/ Yukon region and reviewed documents pertaining to the 1999 response. I also interviewed employees of non-governmental organizations, immigration lawyers, refugee advocates, supra-state institutional actors, and media workers in order to understand governance practices.
6 Scholars from a variety of interdisciplinary locations have speculated on the academics unwillingness to engage more fully with the state (e.g. Abrams, 1988; Kirby, 1997; Mitchell, 1991; Aronowitz & Bratsis, 2002).

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

327

Michel Foucault, 1991, 1995) theorized a shift from more centralized, repressive, sovereign power aligned with the state to power that operates in more diuse, de-centralized, and productive fashion. Following in his lead, post-structural approaches oer useful tools with which to understand state practices (see Mitchell, 1991; Painter, 1995; Steinmentz, 1999), and anthropologists in particular are using these tools to go inside the state (Heyman & Smart, 1999; Nelson, 1999; Hansen & Stepputat, 2001). In turn, they are nding state practices to be ever more dispersed, as Hansen and Stepputat note: As modern forms of govermentality penetrate and shape human life in unprecedented ways, the practices and sites of governance have also become ever more dispersed, diversied, and fraught with internal inconsistencies and contradictions. . . . The strength of the modern state seems. . . to be its dispersion and ubiquity (2001: 16). Governance practices surrounding immigration and refugee ows are shifting accordingly, as both facilitative and enforcement practices become increasingly transnational. Political geographers can contribute to the dialogue by locating the operation of power and the discourse surrounding states and globalization in a time and a place (Marchand & Runyan, 2000; Nagar, Lawson, McDowell & Hanson, 2002). This understanding of how state practices are spatialized involves the social construction of scale. Geographers argue that scale is a social construction, not a preordained hierarchical framework for ordering the world (Marston, 2000: 220, see also Smith, 1992; Staeheli, 1994; Delaney & Leitner, 1997). As Swygedouw notes, Scale is, consequently, not socially or politically neutral, but embodies and expresses power relationships (1997: 140). Through new constructions of scale emerge political potential in new framings of relationships (Swyngedouw, 1997). Geographers have called upon the social construction of scale to understand state practices (Brenner, 1997; Leitner, 1997), and I am interested in how civil servants themselves draw on dierent scales in their daily negotiations. An analysis that links state practices to the social construction of scale opens potential for new understandings of the relationship between local state practices and global processes. Feminist geographers argue that certain scales, such as the household (Marston, 2000) and the individual (Hyndman, 2001), have been overlooked. Likewise, feminist critics of discourse surrounding globalization advocate shifts in scalar narratives that account for the gendering of transnational phenomena (Marchand & Runyan, 2000; Nagar, Lawson, McDowell & Hanson, 2002). Shifting to the scale of the body, Nagar et al. note that starting from the standpoint of people and economic spheres that are marginalized under capitalist processes reveals the ways in which contemporary globalization is intimately tied to gendered and racialized systems of oppression (2002: 259). These calls for new scalar narratives also apply to the nation-state. Social scientists often write generally of states as though they represent coherent and singular projects. Rather than a coherent, hidden strategy

328

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

awaiting discovery, states are comprised of persons with distinct objectives and perspectives, often struggling amongst themselves over state projects. Geographers are increasingly interested in the body (e.g. Rose, 1995; Longhurst, 1995; Nast & Pile, 1998; Callard, 1998).7 Mobile bodies perpetually rouse the state into action. As such, the body is a crucial element to understand the operation of power in relations between states and migrants by locating both civil servants and migrants in relation to one another. First, I aim to embody the state quite literally, to understand who enacts policy and in what way. This strategy of embodiment is a feminist analytical approach that shifts scale to center people within conceptual understandings of the state. It draws on the work of feminist scholars (e.g. Harding, 1986; Smith, 1987; Haraway, 1991) to situate knowledge and power in time and space. Embodiment locates power relations and contextualizes decisionmaking with workplace settings and life histories. The second approach to the body working through this paper is the Foucauldian, post-structural notion that power produces identities through discourse; that identities are inscribed onto the bodies of migrants (see Pratt, 1999) and bureaucrats. These discursive practices of identication, categorization, and nomination show how civil servants see migration (cf Scott, 1998). So while the project of embodying the state takes place empirically in the form of ethnographic research, many of the embodiments outlined in the next section of the paper are enabled with analysis of the construction of migrant and state identities in the to and fro between CIC and the media. I will illustrate the relationship between materiality and discourse wherein the narration of identity explains who and where migrants were situated in the institutional landscape. The media play a central analytical role in this articulation of geographies of the nation-state. In the recursive relationships between public opinion, media representation, and the key messages communicated by civil servants to the press, the mainstream media have become the primary method of image-building into which the federal government pours signicant resources. The media framed issues for various audiences (e.g. the nation, the Province of British Columbia, the cities of British Columbia, and foreign governments). With this in mind, I now explore the strategic embodiments of human smuggling. Embodiment and containment Power moves through dis/embodiments, and it is therefore important to analyze who is embodied, how, and why in the relationship between the state and smuggled migrants. I demonstrate here that there is an important relationship between discourse and materiality; that these dis/embodiments reveal the spatialized processes through which state practices materialize in relation to migrants and refugee claimants in quotidian life.
I am mindful of Robyn Longhursts argument that in theoretical work on the body, geographers too often overlook the actual messy materiality of bodies (2001).
7

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

329

The dis/embodiment of the state Immigration departments seem to be disembodied institutions from the perspective of those located outside of government, whether immigrants, refugee claimants, immigration service providers, lawyers, or other members of civil society. Around the globe, people share common experiences such as long lines and opaque policies of immigration departments. The disembodiment of these bureaucracies introduces signicant distance between clientele and civil servants, thus expanding power through absence, as Taussig suggests (1997: 3). Decisions regarding clients cases are rarely attached to an individual responsible. The less accessible the decision-makers are to those whose lives they inuence, the larger looms the power of the state to act without demands for accountability.8 With such limited communication and collaboration between immigrants and refugee claimants, their advocates, and those who decide cases, an advocacy industry arises and operates in adversarial fashion with the federal government. In interviews, I explored how and why CIC was disembodied, given the Departments central role in responding to the 1999 boat arrivals. Lawyers, service providers, and advocates who worked with the smuggled migrants from outside of the parameters of government addressed how dicult it was to establish long-term working relationships with CIC. They mentioned inaccessibility, secrecy, and a high turnover rate as barriers to communication and relationship-building with the federal government. Indeed, CIC is known jokingly among immigration consultants as the fortress. To some extent, the disembodiment of the state is a function of a large bureaucracy that suppresses and normalizes the individual by emphasizing the whole. Bureaucracies are designed to protect and manage information as well as public image (see Heyman, 1995). The federal government often appears to be transparent on paper and in the media, its outward expressions being written policy, organizational diagrams, and press conferences. Indeed, most immigration policies are a matter for public record. Policy on paper, however, narrates only a partial story, the idealized ways in which events should take place, rather than the ways that things actually happen on the ground. Disembodiment is also a response to the media. Whereas Canada was once known as a more progressive, humanitarian state in its granting of refugee status, it was now portrayed in the media as soft and unable to enforce borders, with the integrity of its refugee program threatened. The cartoon (Fig. 1) depicts the Canadian government as a marine lling station, oering welfare assistance, a lax court system, and the acceptance of hard luck stories. The marine arrivals catalyzed a notable shift in Canada in public opinion

The call centers of CIC are a classic geographical representation of this reality. Applicants are not able to call the oce where their application is being processed, but rather must contact call centers that are geographically detached from sites of application or processing, as well as detached from the caller. CIC call centers are often known for inconsistencies in providing information.

330

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

Fig. 1. Immigration Canada as a lling station. Times Colonist, July 22, 1999. (Cartoon by Adrian Raeside).

toward immigration, in public discourse surrounding immigration, and in the political will and capacity of the government to respond. The media produced these images for consumption by an anxious public, the migrants serving symbolically as an expression of a perceived loss of control of Canadian borders. In response, the federal government communicated a semblance of control to the public in order to counter media representations. The boat arrivals drew civil servants out of their oces and onto the water in ways that made them very visible to the Canadian public. In this case, federal ocials were embodied in particular ways. Covered in white uniform with hood, black vest, and black boots, they were homogenized and secure, an embodied expression of the boundaries of the nationstate. The state is therefore strategically embodied in distinct ways and in relation to dierent policies and populations.

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

331

CIC worked proactively with the media. In interviews, members of the media praised the Departments communications during the response to the arrivals.9 Narratives of the response to human smuggling suggested that communications are central to the control of information and people in the bureaucracy. In Ottawa, in the Communications Department at National Headquarters, there were ve people working full-time to monitor the news, and to compile, analyze, and circulate clippings following the boat arrivals. At the same time, there were only three people working in intelligence in the entire BC/Yukon Region, only one of whom was assigned to gather intelligence about smuggling movements. While employees in communications did not work directly with clients, they were among the rst employees own to the site where migrants would be o-loaded when a boat was intercepted in order to begin working proactively with reporters. In the response to human smuggling, a generic disembodiment turned to a strategic embodiment of the federal response to a delicate situation. The government pursued an enforcement response that foregrounded bodies in certain ways, including those of bureaucrats, migrants, and representations of human smugglers themselves. The dis/embodiment of human smugglers In contrast with the embodiment of migrants that I detail below, I wish to point to a second set of people central to smuggling practices, yet mere shadows in the public realm: human smugglers. At the time of the arrivals, there was sizeable speculation as to the networks through which they had been organized, immediately labeled transnational organized crime. Those who comprised these networks, however, were not identied.10 They remained a nefarious force against whom federal authorities struggled.11 Those responding locally, at the center of the intelligence capacity insisted that they could not with any certainty characterize these movements as transnational organized crime and suggested that this was a sexy term used by enforcement agencies to marshal resources. Higher up in the bureaucracy, and further away from BC, the narrative was condent and coherent, part of building an image of power, the perception of control, and the need to combat a known evil. Lower down, the narrative was less secure. The image painted for me was a colorful one of frontline ocers and street-level bureaucrats scrambling to maintain the facade communicated to the public. For federal governments driven by the power of public opinion, the smuggled migrant body is the most visible expression of an illicit activity that undermines the integrity of political boundaries. The Canadian federal government has not
Interview, Vancouver, August, 2001. The term snakehead refers to the more powerful individuals running smuggling operations. Snakeheads do not travel with migrants, but rather employ an extensive network of enforcers to transport migrants. Enforcers are known to use violent tactics to control migrants on board. 11 It is interesting to note alternative perspectives on human smugglers sometimes held by their clients. Clients often respect human smugglers for facilitating their movement and entrance into jobs and social structures (see Chin, 1999).
10 9

332

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

committed resources, infrastructure, or political will to large-scale detention as practiced in Australia or the United States. Whereas Canada does not routinely detain those smuggled by plane, the federal government did, however, decide to detain the migrants who arrived on the second, third, and fourth boats in 1999. Detention, one among many strategies pursued by nation-states to combat human smuggling,12 was a controversial decision. Human smugglers receive partial payments for their services over time as clients make their way to the nal destination.13 People noted in interviews that detention was an eort to stop human smuggling to Canada by freezing the migration in place, thus preventing smugglers from receiving full payment. Another reason to detain was to sustain the integrity of the federal government in the mind of the public and other foreign governments. In interviews, respondents expressed a clear demand from the public to do something. Detention is among the most expensive, reactive, and short-term solutions to human smuggling, but it is a visible expression of a swift government response, of containment of the problem. Images in the newspapers of a government out-of-control of its borders soon gave way to images such as Fig. 2 that portrays minors from the boats in handcus and prison uniforms; bodies contained, a situation brought under control. Locating the immigrant body at the center of the nationalist imagination in his analysis of Australian public discourse, Hage refers to detention as ethnic caging (1998: 105), a material expression of racialized othering. As with the dehumanizing view of smuggled migrants crowded on boats, the proximity of other bodies inscripted onto their own, detention also dehumanizes and depersonalizes the refugee claimant as one in a contained crowd. In their absence, the state painted a portrait of human smugglers in a narrative that involved an enforcement response. By detaining migrants to impede smugglers, the nation-state imprisoned one set of people in order to deter another. While smugglers remained unidentied, their clients were essentially over-identied, held captive as a visible and costly message to various publics and to smugglers themselves. Detention communicated to several audiencesincluding potential migrants in China, the Chinese and American governments, and the Canadian publicthat human smugglers would not operate successfully in Canada; that Canada would respond with a show of force and maintain its ability to police international borders. Migrants were also, therefore, central to this narrative and embodied in particular ways.
12 Other strategies target smugglers through more direct means such as intercepting smuggled migrants more aggressively, freezing the assets of suspected smuggling rings, improving intelligence, investing more resources in prosecution and punitive measures. CIC studies these models in other states. Managers have traveled to Europe to observe prosecutions, to the US to learn about interception practices, and to Australia to observe detention sites. 13 To the smuggler, the migrant body represented signicant revenue, from $30,000 to $60,000 US with payments from wages for jobs secured in the destination over time. Well-documented practices of abduction and torture are the punishment to the individual or his or her family for not making such payments (Chin, 1999).

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

333

Fig. 2. Images of containment. The Globe and Mail, August 20, 1999, A1. (Photo by Peter Blashill).

The over-embodiment and containment of migrants Despite the eorts of CIC to present images of control, the boat arrivals played in the media as a crisis that provoked anxiety in the public. Media representations positioned the migrants as a threat to Canadian security. Migrant bodies materi-

334

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

alized in the media as a site of disease leaking across borders (see Cresswell, 1997). Images of containment accompanied front-page articles. The Province, a daily paper in British Columbia, centered the body by headlining the text QUARANTINED over a photograph of a group of migrants crowded on the stern of a boat. As Clarkson (2000) argued, the media did little to contextualize the numbers as small compared, for example, to the number of people smuggled through Canadas airports, estimated in the tens of thousands annually.14 Comparatively speaking, six hundred is a small number in a larger, continuous movement. But in this case, 600 people symbolized, simply, too many (Clarkson, 2000). Indeed, the reactions on the part of the media and the Canadian public were disproportionately large and anti-immigration, attacking what the media called bogus refugees and what was perceived as an ineective refugee program. This accompanied a notable shift in language with terms such as boat people, queue jumper, and illegal alien. The migrants identities were inscribed not as genuine political refugees with a right to fully access Canadas refugee program, but as economic migrants who had committed a criminal act.15 The media were therefore complicit in delineating the identities of smuggled migrants as economic migrants and, therefore, bogus refugees. The federal government responded to enormous pressure for an enforcement response to human smuggling with a strategy that entailed detention, the control of ows of information, and deportation. As the rst boat was intercepted, CIC quickly set-up a temporary site for processing at Esquimalt, a military base of the Department of National Defence located in a residential suburb of Victoria. There, civil servants processed migrants through stations of showering, delousing, medical exams, and immigration interviews. In an eort to identify people and to distinguish clients from enforcers, they sought and photographed markings on the body such as tattoos. They also numbered migrants on their backs in black magic marker and on their wrists with wristbands. CIC conducted initial immigration interviews, recorded refugee claims, and over time, provided access to legal counsel. Nearly 500 of the 599 migrants made refugee claims.16 When CIC released the adults that had arrived on the rst boat, many did not appear at refugee claimant hearings in subsequent weeks. Having abandoned their claims, they were presumed to have traveled to the US to work. This abandonment further inamed public opinion regarding Canadas refugee program and its ability to police borders. By referencing this disappearance, CIC argued successfully that migrants on the following three boats posed a ight risk. This enabled the federal government to
Interview, Ottawa, October, 2001. This is an interesting contrast to the characterization of the wealthier business immigrants recruited from Asia by Canada and lauded as ideal migrants because of the economic dimensions of their lives. Whereas wealthier immigrants are rewarded for their economic ambitions, poorer migrants are punished as greedy. 16 CIC (2000) Marine Arrivals: Status Update. 18 February.
15 14

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

335

pursue longer-term detention with most of the adults that arrived on the following three boats. Following the processing of ensuing arrivals, CIC either released migrants or transported them to longer-term detention facilities. Ultimately, 492 (83%) of the 599 made refugee claims, and 429 (72%) were held in long-term detention.17 In some cases, detention lasted over 18 months as claimants exhausted opportunities for due process in Canada. CIC placed about 100 minors18 in the custody of the Ministry for Children and Families of the Province of British Columbia, deemed the legal custodian for unaccompanied minors. CIC granted the claimants due process under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and repatriated those eventually determined by the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) not to be refugees according to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol. While fullling the mandate to protect, CIC proceeded in a context in which this group of claimants was constructed as distinct from others, in terms of their mode of travel. This strategy entailed institutional struggles over language that reied the divide between bogus and legitimate and connected with struggles over access. This is where discourse meets materiality, the question being how did the process of identication aect the quality of claimants access to the refugee system? The political will for detention gave way to what some claimed was an expedited enactment of the refugee claims process. As one lawyer remarked, The system was very eager to contain, and the system was eager to process them on an expedited basis. And I would say with a desired outcome. The frame was that these were not actual refugees. The frame was that these were economic migrants. . . . The question then becomes, how do you contain six hundred people. . . . Build a frame; work within that. Anything that leaks out, push it back in.19 Immigration lawyers and advocates argued persuasively in interviews that this group of migrants experienced a skeletal, rather than substantive, form of justice.20 They argued that the experiences of this group of claimants were distinct from the experiences of most; that they had expedited and inconsistent access to the refugee determination system; that they were scripted early on as economicallymotivated, and that policy and procedures were implemented in such a way as to t that identity. Refugee advocates and immigration lawyers criticized CIC for the stress of long-term detention, for the criminalization of refugee applicants, and for the geography of detention. I will discuss two examples that highlight that local
Ibid. These numbers were contested and dynamic: legal status changed over time, some people misrepresented their age, and minors were dened distinctly by the federal and provincial governments. 19 Interview, Vancouver, September, 2001. 20 Interview, Vancouver, September, 2001.
18 17

336

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

geographical analysis tells us something about the state and the quality of access. Both relate to detached geographies of detention. There was a lengthy debate about when the claimants would have access to legal counsel during processing at Esquimalt. But CIC wanted unfettered access to the migrants without legal counsel in order to learn as many details about their journey as quickly as possible. They developed something called the long tunnel thesis. They compared processing at the base to the experience of walking through the long tunnel of an international airport, during which time one is not ocially landed in national space but being processed. So this site with the optics of detentionguard dogs, barbed wire, and RCMPwas ocially designated a Port-of-Entry, not a site of detention. This shows a struggle over language, law, and geographies of access. The shaping of migrant identities connected powerfully to their access to due process across time and space, the narrative of who they were explained where they were, and vice versa. This struggle continued during the course of longer-term detention when most migrants were held in Prince George, a small city in the interior of British Columbia, a 12-hour, dicult drive away from advocacy and legal services for refugees in Vancouver. Once this geography was determined, the process spiraled from there. Far away from refugee lawyers, interpreters, advocates, settlement agencies, human rights monitors, and from the regular tribunals of the IRB, special accommodations had to be made for processing. Not accustomed to servicing this number of clients simultaneously, Legal Aid created a bidding process wherein lawyers bid for contracts to represent large numbers of claimants. Although Legal Aid never explained their decision to sign contracts with the four lawyers selected, other refugee lawyers suggested that Legal Aid had selected the cheapest bids, noting that the four selected were not the most experienced.21 They questioned both the number of clients represented per lawyer and the quality of their representation in Prince George. Whereas hearings normally take place in the chambers of the IRB in Vancouver, for this group, they were held in provisional tribunals established within the prison in Prince George and adjudicated by ocers of the IRB who were own in temporarily to accommodate the scale and geography of detention. Lawyers and advocates complained of problems with access, time, and interpreters. Detached geographies of detention in Esquimalt and Prince George limited lawyers access to clients and the claimants access to due process and may have contributed to an interesting outcome. China, in 1999, was the second largest source country for positive refugee claims in Canada with a 58% approval rate. The rate for those who arrived by boat in 1999 was under 5% with 24 claims (United States Committee for Refugees, 2001). The ninety adult females on the boats comprised only 15% of the group, but received more than 50% of the positive claims. There are two possible explanations. The rst has to do with gender: some argued successfully that they had faced persecution under Chinas one-child policy.
21

Interview, Vancouver, August, 2001.

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

337

The second argument has to do with geography. Most of those who received positive claims were women and children housed in prisons and group homes in the greater Vancouver area. There, they were able to access better refugee lawyers, interpreters, and advocates who represented only a handful of claimants each. They attended hearings in the regular tribunals of the IRB in downtown Vancouver, rather than in temporary tribunals in prisons. Overall, according to legal representation for the claimants, the IRB heard these cases in more individualized fashion. In 2000, 321 of the migrants were repatriated (United States Committee for Refugees, 2001), with more deported in ensuing months. While the process appeared to work for detainees in Vancouver, it appeared not to work for those detained in Prince George. The question remains, whether with more even access, there would have been more than 24 claims. Detention was implemented with particular geographies, under a framework of enforcement, security, and diplomacy with China. A more disembodied narrative tells a simpler story: the arrival of a large group of economic migrants who were not political refugees, an assertion supported by the outcome of the claimant hearings. But a closer look at the embodied geographical experiences of claimants shows that the story is more complex; that those moving through the process had dierential access to the system. So the way in which the state sees and categorizes smuggled migrants has powerful material ramications. The embodiment of research I also learned about the bureaucracy according to how the federal government reacted to me as a researcher. Examination of the ways in which the government positioned research and researcher in eldwork for this project furthers the analysis of the relationship between body and state. The federal government was widely criticized for the response to this movement in 1999 (Hier & Greenberg, 2002). It was thus in a sensitive context that I began research with CIC in August of 2000. The research process itself was fraught with tension, including, for a while, messages from lawyers in the Department of Justice that altered the conditions of research on a daily basis and culminated in orders for my removal from CIC. Over time, with endorsement from National Headquarters, I negotiated re-entry. The challenges to doing institutional ethnography are an instructive element of the strategy of embodiment. The Department of Justice wished to contain the research in various ways: by determining interviewees, reviewing transcripts, having lawyers present at interviews, and ultimately housing, owning, and destroying data. As a researcher, I was positioned simultaneously within and outside of the bureaucracy, ultimately beyond its control, but also inside its inner workings, able to discern goings-on beyond the public messages. Many employees supported my research and were reective about their work. Yet their openness conicted with governments need to protect information. While those at the center of the response to human smuggling within the Department were more open to discussing their work, those whose job it was to create public images were more concerned about someone moving inside the Department.

338

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

In the relationship between smuggling and the nation-state, dierent bodies emerge as more and less visible in distinct locales. Both the state and the media have the power to produce identity for mass audiences, which occurred eectively in response to the arrivals. These discursive representations connected with material realities, including claimants experiences of the refugee determination process. In this case, the state positioned the migrant to create a perception of the state itself as powerful and in control while remaining a selectively opaque institution. As a researcher I am able to disrupt these narratives through the strategy of embodiment. The four embodiments outlined relay the diuse operation of power at multiple scales and illustrate the importance of analyzing geographies of the nation-state and the implementation of policy at ner scales where most theories of the state tend to collapse. Through everyday, local geographical analysis, embodied experiences show struggle on the part of migrants, bureaucrats, and others involved in the response to smuggling. Much of the success of this government response was measured in terms of the communication of images. The state is, comparatively speaking, most powerful because of the resources that it can mobilize to communicate particular representations of events. But embodied, the state is uid, layered, textured, more personal, and less powerful. If state practices are only as powerful as images and their ability to reproduce the perception of power, then this explains initial resistance to my research and investment in considerable resources to protect themselves from me.

Geographies of the embodied nation-state An immigration bureaucrat whom I interviewed compared his daily work for CIC to the story of The Wizard of Oz.22 In the story, Dorothy is lost and is told that the powerful Oz will send her home. Upon nally arriving to see him, however, her dog, Toto, pulls back a curtain to see that Oz is actually a frightened man hiding in order to amplify his message through a microphone. Similarly, this bureaucrat described much of his work as scrambling to uphold the public fac ade of power, an image larger than the bureaucrats embodied behind the curtain. Like Toto, permitted inside the workings of government, I was able to observe some of the inconsistencies behind the public messages. When I began research at CIC, I was surprised to realize the extent to which the day-to-day operations of the bureaucracy were oriented to responding to the media. In research interviews, the most frequently cited source of stress in the response to human smuggling was the need to somehow manage the external environment, particularly the media. As events unfolded as a crisis in the media, the media became part of the crisis for government. In interviews, when asked to describe the role of the media, respondents often included powerful body language in their response. They would sigh,
22

Interview, Vancouver, August 2000.

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

339

slouch, shake their head, roll their eyes, or groan. Note the visceral terms with which one CIC employee described the impact: We couldnt get out in front of the cameras fast enough. As soon as another issue came up, we were arranging to get in front of the media again. They were all slobbering. They wanted us. They could smell blood.23 Media communications were central to the response and exemplary of the need to control information and to promote the image of being in control. The boat arrivals were a crisis, not for the nation, but for people in government. According to respondents, the media create a climate in which People in government are not allowed to make mistakes. The media were a constant companion both in the oce where employees receive daily news clippings across e-mail that discussed immigration the day before, and on the water where media arrivedoften before governmental respondersto lm each interception. This created an environment that some referred to as living in a shbowl; the feeling of being constantly watched. Everything changes in times of crisis, including bureaucratic operations. Policy that appears neatly on paper is more convoluted when implemented on the ground, when decisions are made in haste without much time for discussion. There was no specic policy driving a marine response on the Pacic coast, and this resulted in what bureaucrats dubbed policy on the y. In interviews with those who enact the state on the frontlines, the cleaner narratives of policy recede, and the processes, personalities, and politics surrounding policy come to the fore. There is a clear disconnect between the theories of the powerful state that course through political geography and the views articulated by bureaucrats. I interviewed many civil servants who felt in the dark, powerless, unprepared, unsupported, and cynical. The embodied state is multiple, conicted, and in perpetual negotiation. Embodying the state by studying the day-to-day locations and challenges of bureaucrats shows a far more diverse, diuse, and conicted state. Institutional ethnography illustrates that state practices are not only powerful, but also often occasions when civil servants themselves feel powerless and vulnerable. The strategy of embodiment entails following civil servants through their day-today work in relation to human smuggling. Those who enforce Canadian borders are working in some surprising places. Airline liaison ocers, for example, patrol foreign airports where they search for and attempt to intercept potential refugee claimants en route to Canada. Likewise, Immigration Control Ocers operate on the ground in foreign countries where they gather information on smuggling movements. These two examples are part of an increase in front-end controls of refugee movements, including increased interception abroad. These creative uses of geography extended to the location of remote detention sites, and corresponded with the diversion of boats of smuggled migrants to islands o the coasts of Australia and the United States. Such actions took place in a global environment
23

Interview, Vancouver, April 2001.

340

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

where states watched one anothers enforcement practices and generated the climate in which the Canadian federal government successfully enacted the long tunnel thesis, thereby restricting access to the system in Esquimalt. These points where Canadian civil servants come into contact with migrants abroad show the re-spatialization of governance of the nation-state and the re-constitution of international borders by a constellation of civil servants. Analysis of the daily work of civil servants illustrates that out of a lack of direction, powerlessness, and crisis emerged a powerful enforcement response. An embodied state, however, appears less powerful, more vulnerable, and a bit unprepared to respond to smuggling. Time and again, bureaucrats articulated to me the absence of a plan in the response to human smuggling. But if there was no plan, how did these stateless spaces come into being? The answer lies with the state in a condition of crisis. In a state of crisis, there was not sucient time for dialogue or reection. Decisions were made quicklysuch as the decision to detain these migrants made over a conference call between Vancouver and Ottawawith a sense of a situation slipping out of control. In the fumbling through environment of crisis where migrants are in motion and civil servants overwhelmed, state practices of enforcement became transnationally more dispersed through geographies of detention and interception that make refugee determination programs less accessible to potential claimants. Despite the absence of a plan, this response t clearly into a trend toward the design of stateless spaces. There were surprisingly few people within the Department involved in sustained fashion in the operational and policy aspects of the response, but the perception of their power to the outsider was maintained by their dispersion and invisibility. In the meantime, their own perception of their own power within the Department, behind the facade, was remarkably low. Embodiment depicts state practices as both powerful and vulnerable, and this vulnerability is to the mediawhere there was a powerful xation on inscribing identity onto the migrant deemed political or economicmore than to human smuggling. This suggests, therefore, an important political imperative to the strategy of embodying the nation-state.

Conclusions Scholars are unsettling more centralized understandings of the nation-state by insisting that states remain powerful and are themselves restructuring and respatializing at dierent scales (e.g. Leitner, 1997; Marden, 1997; Ong, 1999). Colin Flint suggests that [t]he contribution political geographers are making lies in the detailed studies of exactly how state sovereignty is changing (2002: 393, see Thrift, 2000). This paper explored the spatial exercise of sovereignty in relation to smuggled migrants and potential refugee claimants and illustrated what analysis of the work of civil servants oers to our understandings of governance and the state. As the study of the everyday, ethnographic analysis depicts state practices as a series of relationships and networks through which governance takes place. My entrance into the everyday was the strategy to shift scale to the body. By locating

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

341

civil servants in their day-to-day work on human smuggling, I have also located their points of contact with potential refugee claimants. These points of contact, whether within the territorial nation-state, abroad, or in stateless interstitial spaces, illustrate the reconstitution of international borders. A critical geography of the state counters disembodiment and detachment with embodied geographies and draws connections between international practices of border enforcement, detention, and asylum policy. Arguments structured by the politics of scale enable the reconstitution of discussions at other scales, and thus open possibilities for new political alignments (Hyndman, 2001; Blomley & Pratt, 2001). In this paper, I read the state through embodiment. My contribution to a growing dialogue on transnational feminist critical practice (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Bacchetta et al., 2001) is to jump scale to geographies of the body. The embodied experiences of those enacting the state and those moving through the refugee determination program uncover dierential experiences obscured at other scales and expose holes in the clean narratives of public policy and public discourse. From the interception of boats on the water to the detention and deportation of migrants, I have illustrated that examining the nation-state from the scale of the body shows processes obscured at other scales. Relationships among states materialize at the body most obviously for the displaced person. But an embodiment of the state reveals other sites of global struggle suppressed in narratives of transnational migration. Detached geographies of detention are part of a trend in which asylum-seekers face increasing front-end control, restricted access to asylum systems, and fewer advocates in the remote places where they are detained. Stateless spaces in quasistate territories and within national territories, in airports and detention centers such as the long tunnel in Esquimalt, are on the rise. These spaces are a result of the manipulation of local institutional landscapes. Discursive representations of bodies are also key to understanding this trend. The narrative of the federal response to the 1999 boat arrivals perpetually brought up the containment of ows of information, migrants, and the situation as a whole. This analysis explained the uneven enactment of policy by showing the inscription of identity onto the body. The most powerful indication of the importance of image is the policy of detaining migrants who are smuggled more visibly by boat, but not those who arrive, in far greater numbers, by plane. During this process, migrants were scripted into boxes, the narrative of who they were reinforced by their limited access to the system. The growth in stateless places and remote detention sites corresponds with the discursive rise of the bogus refugee. Each justies the other. Discourse and materiality are one. The story of who these people arethe optics of their criminalityexplains where and why they are located in detention. As such, the mediaa key venue for communications from the federal government to the publiccontributed to the stereotyping, regulation, and surveillance of migrant bodies and therefore must also be incorporated into geographies of the nation-state. At stake is the ability of displaced people to access refugee programs globally. I have argued that locating the body tells us something about geopolitical relation-

342

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

ships. To extend this argument, I want to point out some parallels between discourse surrounding smuggling and terrorism. Both involve networks that transcend international borders. Both operate in ways that the state cannot clearly engage, and both threaten refugee programs. Since 2002, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service has required the registration of male immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries currently living in the United States, many of whom traveled to Canada to make refugee claims as a result of detentions and deportations that ensued (New York Times, 2003). Where the geographies to the campaign of terror are clouded and not clearly visible to the state, there is still a demand for visible action, for the sense of containment that comes with surveillance. In response to a fear that is nameless and faceless, the state inscribes fear onto the bodies of those who must register. For the state, the body is a geography of terror, pronounced through nomination, racialization, and identication. Those who must register with the INS and those who are detained feel most poignantly the scale of the geopolitical and the power of the nation-state. For this reason, we must not overlook the scale of the body. This paper placed the body, unsettled and located the state, and also disrupted and displaced the border. Never mere lines on a map, borders, like states, are geographically dispersed spatial productions. It is important to think about the location of borders for those who are smuggled. They pass through the Hong Kong international airport where Immigration Control Ocers stop potential refugees from boarding planes. They lie somewhere on the water beyond territorial limits where US military ships routinely intercept boats. They are enacted in the temporary tribunals of prisons in Prince George and in the detached detention centers of Woomera in the remote outback of Australia. The border is indeed a site of identity construction, but those sites are neither unitary nor linear. For the undocumented, the displaced, and the stateless, for people of color with tenuous legal status, the border is everywhere. And for people imprisoned because of their legal status, the border is everything, self-mutilation, hunger strikes, and suicide attempts, powerful expressions of the pain of containment and the path to liberation.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Margaret Walton-Roberts, Caroline Desbiens, Jennifer Hyndman, David Ley, Jamie Winders, Graham Webber, Helen Watkins, and Vicky Lawson as well as students in her graduate seminar for thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to employees of Citizenship and Immigration Canada and to members of various NGOs and advocacy organizations for their generous contributions to this research. This work would not have been possible without the nancial support of the Metropolis Project and the Killam Predoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia. All mistakes are my own.

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

343

References
Abrams, P. (1988). Notes on the diculty of studying the state (1977). Journal of Historical Sociology, 1(1), 5889. Anderson, K. (1991). Vancouvers Chinatown: racial discourse in Canada, 18751980. Montreal, Kingston, London, Bualo: McGill-Queens University Press. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Aronowitz, S., & Bratsis, P. (Eds.) (2002), Paradigm lost: state theory reconsidered. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Bacchetta, P., Campt, T., Grewal, I., Kaplan, C., Moallem, M., & Terry, J. (2001). Transnational feminist practices against war. http://www.geocities.com/carenkaplan03/transnationalstatement.html 12 March 2003. Blomley, N., & Pratt, G. (2001). Canada and the political geographies of rights. The Canadian Geographer, 45(1), 151166. Bowden, C. (2003). Outback nightmares and refugee dreams. Mother Jones, 2003(April) (4653, 9293). Brenner, N. (1997). State territorial restructuring and the production of spatial scale. Political Geography, 16(4), 273306. Callard, F. (1998). The body in theory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 16, 387400. Chin, K. L. (1999). Smuggled Chinese: clandestine immigration to the United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Clarkson, S. (2000). 600 is too many. Ryerson Review of Journalism, Spring. Cresswell, T. (1997). Weeds, plagues and bodily secretions: a geographical interpretation of metaphors of displacement. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87(2), 330345. Delaney, D., & Leitner, H. (1997). The political construction of scale. Political Geography, 16(2), 9397. Ellis, M., & Wright, R. (1998). The Balkanization metaphor in the analysis of US immigration. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88(4), 686698. Flint, C. (2002). Political geography: globalization, metapolitical geographies and everyday life. Progress in Human Geography, 26(3), 391400. Flint, C. (2003). Political geography II: terrorism, modernity, governance and governmentality. Progress in Human Geography, 27(1), 97106. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault eect: studies in governmentality (pp. 87104). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books. Gatens, M. (1991). Corporeal representation in/and the body politic. In R. Diprose, & R. Ferrell (Eds.), Cartographies: poststructuralism and the mapping of bodies and spaces (pp. 7987). North Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Grewal, I., & Kaplan, C. (1994). Introduction: transnational feminist practices and questions of postmodernity. In I. Grewal, & C. Kaplan (Eds.), Scattered hegemonies: postmodernity and transnational feminist practices (pp. 133). Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Gupta, A. (1995). Blurred boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of politics, and the imagined state. American Ethnologist, 22(2), 375402. Hage, G. (1998). White nation: fantasies of White supremacy in a multicultural society. Annandale: Pluto Press. Hansen, T. B., & Stepputat, F. (2001). Introduction: States of imagination. In T. B. Hansen, & F. Stepputat (Eds.), States of imagination: ethnographic explorations of the postcolonial state (pp. 138). Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (1991). Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial knowledge. Simians, cyborgs, and women. London and New York: Routledge. Harding, S. (1986). The science question in feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Herbert, S. (1997). Policing space: territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

344

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

Heyman, J. M. (1995). Putting power in the anthropology of bureaucracy: the immigration and naturalization service at the MexicoUnited States border. Current Anthropology, 36(2), 261287. Heyman, J. M., & Smart, A. (Eds.) (1999), States and illegal practices. Oxford and New York: Berg. Hier, S. P., & Greenberg, J. L. (2002). Constructing a discursive crisis: risk, problematization and illegal Chinese in Canada. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25(3), 490513. Hyndman, J. (2001). Towards a feminist geopolitics. The Canadian Geographer, 45(2), 210222. Kirby, A. (1997). Is the state our enemy? Political Geography, 16(1), 112. Kodras, J. (1999). Geographies of power. Political Geography, 18(1), 7579. Koser, K. (2001). The smuggling of asylum seekers into western Europe: contradictions, conundrums, and dilemmas. In D. Kyle, & R. Koslowski (Eds.), Global human smuggling (pp. 5873). Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leitner, H. (1997). Reconguring the spatiality of power: the construction of a supranational migration framework for the European Union. Political Geography, 16(2), 123143. Ley, D. (2003). Seeking Homo economicus: the Canadian state and the strange story of the business immigration program. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(2), 426441. Ley, D., & Hiebert, D. (2001). Immigration policy as population policy. The Canadian Geographer, 45(1), 120125. Longhurst, R. (1995). The body and geography. Gender, Place and Culture, 2(1), 97105. Longhurst, R. (2001). Bodies: Exploring uid boundaries. London and New York: Routledge. Marchand, M., & Runyan, A. S. (Eds.) (2000), Gender and global restructuring: sightings, sites and resistances. London and New York: Routledge. Marden, P. (1997). Geographies of dissent: globalization, identity and the nation. Political Geography, 16(1), 3764. Marston, S. A. (2000). The social construction of scale. Progress in Human Geography, 24(2), 219242. McGuinness, S. (2001). Canadian print media coverage of the 1999 Fujian Migrants. Centre of Chinese Research, Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia. Mitchell, T. (1991). The limits of the state: beyond statist approaches and their critics. American Political Science Review, 85(1), 7796. Nagar, R., Lawson, V., McDowell, L., & Hanson, S. (2002). Locating globalization: feminist (re)readings of the subjects and spaces of globalization. Economic Geography, 78(3), 257284. Nast, H. (1998). Unsexy geographies. Gender, Place and Culture, 5(2), 191206. Nast, H., & Pile, S. (Eds.) (1998), Places through the body. London: Routledge. Nelson, D. (1999). A nger in the wound: body politics in quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. New York Times. (2003). US crackdown sets o unusual rush to Canada. February 25. Ohmae, K. (1995). The end of the nation state: the rise of regional economies. New York: Free Press. Ong, A. (1999). Flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Painter, J. (1995). Politics, geography and political geography. London and New York: Arnold. Pratt, G., & Philippine Womens Centre. (1999). Inscribing domestic work on Filipina bodies. In H. Nast, & S. Pile (Eds.), Places through the body (pp. 283304). London: Routledge. Pratt, G. (1999). From registered nurse to registered nanny: discursive geographies of Filipina domestic workers in Vancouver, BC. Economic Geography, 75(3), 215236. Rose, G. (1995). Geography and gender, cartographies and corporealities. Progress in Human Geography, 19(4), 544548. Sassen, S. (1996). Losing control: sovereignty in an age of globalization. New York: Columbia University Press. Scott, J. (1998). Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Smith, D. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: a feminist sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Smith, N. (1992). Geography, dierence and the politics of scale. In J. Doherty, E. Graham, & M. Malek (Eds.), Postmodernism and the social sciences (pp. 5779). London: Macmillan.

A. Mountz / Political Geography 23 (2004) 323345

345

Staeheli, L. (1994). Empowering political struggle: spaces and scales of resistance. Political Geography, 13(5), 387391. Steinmetz, G. (Ed.) (1999), State/culture: state-formation after the cultural turn. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Swyngedouw, E. (1997). Neither global nor local: glocalisation and the politics of scale. In K. Cox (Ed.), Spaces of globalization (pp. 137166). New York: Guilford Press. Taussig, M. (1997). The magic of the state. New York and London: Routledge. Thrift, N. (2000). Its the little things. In K. Dodds, & D. Atkinson (Eds.), Geopolitical traditions: a century of geopolitical thought (pp. 380387). Routledge (London and New York). United States Committee for Refugees. (2001). Country Report: Canada. http://www.refugees.org/ world/countryrpt/amer_carib/2001/canada.htm. 23 January 2003.