Between Legitimate Refugees and Deportable Subjects: (In)admissibility in Canadian Immigration Law

While legal discourse commonly interprets ‘admissibility’ as ‘inadmissibility’ within Canadian immigration law and policy, this research explores ‘admissibility’ as a concept of its own and how it is implemented through Canadian immigration practice. The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act provides concrete terms in which individuals are deemed inadmissible to Canada, however the same cannot be said for an individual being found admissible and nowhere in the Act is admission to the Canadian state guaranteed simply from not meeting such terms. This depicts a disparity between an individual being found not to be inadmissible and actually being admissible to Canada – underscoring the importance to examining how ‘admissibility’ is determined, in addition to ‘inadmissibility’, within the field of immigration. Specifically, this project addresses the following research question: How is admissibility constructed and framed within Canadian immigration law and policy? Two case studies – 1) The security certificate mechanism and 2) Canada’s recent response to the Syrian refugee crisis – of opposing immigration objectives – determining individuals to be inadmissible and admissible, respectively – are analyzed, though it is important to recognize that the construction of admissibility takes place through a variety of sites and processes, most of which are less public than the two cases. To gain an informed understanding of admissibility, this project employed a multi-phase research process that collected data from three sources: 1) Access to Information data from governmental bodies, 2) Open source data from online government websites, and 3) Data from interviews conducted with practitioners in the field of immigration law. Admissibility emerges as a fluid construct that is framed and circumscribed by ‘security’ – and due to its political nature, the terms surrounding the admissibility of a non-Canadian citizen is susceptible to influence, suggesting multiple ways or “points of admissibility” in which an individual’s admissibility can be constructed. Additionally, I provide a detailed review on my experience with the Access to Information process.