Geraldine Pratt

Drawing on multi-sited qualitative fieldwork, this dissertation examines the recruitment and migration process of temporary migrants through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program for work in lower-skilled jobs in Western Canada. Situated in an understanding of Canada as a recruited nation, I trace shifts in immigration policy that prioritize economic development and which have led to more market-driven and temporary migration flows. With a focus on recruitment practices, the dissertation contributes to theorizations of the “migration industry.” I take third-party recruiters, labour market intermediaries who facilitate and regulate migrant flows, as an entry point for considering how practices of gatekeeping and brokering (re)produce migrant subjects and the borders of the state. My analysis focuses on more “legitimate” recruiters because of an interest in disclosing power relationships in the legal, everyday business of recruitment. It reveals that even as some recruiters provide significant assistance and care, their actions and motivations can also produce and intensify precarity for migrant workers vis-à-vis their employers and the state. At the heart of this dissertation is an argument about configurations of state power—specifically, about forms and spatializations of sovereign power. My analysis examines the position of recruiters within the labour migration cycle and how their interactions with the state enable their legitimation as mobile bordering agents. I posit that recruiters are “petty sovereigns,” who make largely unsupervised and discretionary decisions that impact migrant access to the transnational labour market and the Canadian nation-state. These decisions play out in a transnational sphere, at the front-end of the migration process, and in spaces beyond Canadian jurisdiction. In a market-driven context, the devolution and outsourcing of migrant selection and admission from the state to employers, and employers to contracted third-party recruiters, effectively contributes to the contracting out of accountability. While they are integral to the regulation of labour markets and cross-border flows, recruiters remain largely invisible in many accounts of migration, and one objective of this dissertation is to write these agential actors into larger discourses on neoliberal governance and migration management.

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Foreign-Born Soldiers and the Ambivalent Spaces of Citizenship examines the interlocking politics of immigration and citizenship, labor and militarism, and race and gender. I explore two cases of militarized citizenship: Filipino recruits in the U.S. military and Nepalese Gurkha soldiers in the British Army. The bulk of the thesis engages the lives of Filipino migrants who enlist in the U.S. military as a collective pathway to American citizenship for themselves and their families. Filipino nationals comprise the highest percentage of foreign-born military recruits, a trend enabled by the fact that U.S. citizenship is not required to serve in the armed forces and promoted by the colonial history of the U.S. in the Philippines. Filipinos are the only foreign-born nationals permitted to enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces without having to immigrate to the United States. Filipinos, in other words, are the exception to the permanent residency requirement necessary to join the U.S. military. Citizenship is, however, granted posthumously to any “alien” or “non-citizen national” whose death occurs on active duty, providing a legal “death dividend” for surviving relatives. I observe how the working lives of these migrants illuminate the new mobility of global (militarized) labor, a form of economic discipline facilitated by the state in the era of flexible accumulation. Over a period of twelve months, I conducted a series of in-depth interviews with Filipino military families in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the cases under study, the families of U.S. military personnel killed in action refused – in political protest – the offer of posthumous citizenship. These testimonies illuminate and juxtapose mundane and spectacular instances of state violence against agents of the state and their next of kin in a way that reveals conflicts inherent to incorporation and resistance internal to enlistment.

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This thesis examines the struggles and conditions of Baoris and Chharas, two adivasi(indigenous) communities living in Ahmedabad, India. It engages with the histories through which these communities were transformed into criminalized populations under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. As mapped Criminal Tribes, Baoris and Chharas were brought into a repressive policy apparatus designed to discipline and regulate, control and reform subaltern adivasi populations. This work documents the effects of this history in the post-colonial present. I assess Baoris and Chharas’ differentiated inclusion and exclusion within the long and troubled trajectory of India’s governmental power. Their struggles are situated within the dramatic recalibration of governmental logics and urban restructuring within the liberalizing metropolis. I consider the negotiation of rights and entitlements in a time and place wherein the Indian state is jettisoning its constitutional responsibilities to provide social welfare and democratic justice. This work argues that liberalization produces the informal to push the poor beyond the pale of legality, and suspend the possibility of accessing the technologies and categories of formal governance. I examine how the un-mapping of responsibilities, rights, and visibilities represents a central mechanism driving an emergent urban developmentalism that is reordering the city’s moral, legal and physical landscapes. Just as Baoris and Chharas’ experiences figure the greater erosion of rights and entitlements, their organizing also demonstrates how the developmental and rights-protecting apparatus of the Indian state remains a critical site of oppositional politics. I document their attempts to access and exercise technologies of governing in order to position themselves as legible populations within the classifications and categories of state power.

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