Citation

Abji S. Stud. Soc. Justice 2020; 14(1): 67-89.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier B.V., Publisher Brock University, Social Justice Research Institute)

DOI

10.26522/ssj.v2020i14.2158

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Scholars have identified crimmigration - or the criminalization of "irregular" migration in law - as a key issue affecting migrant access to justice in contemporary immigrant-receiving societies. Yet the gendered and racialized implications of crimmigration for diverse migrant populations remains underdeveloped in this literature. This study advances a feminist intersectional approach to crimmigration and migrant justice in Canada. I add to recent research showing how punitive immigration controls disproportionately affect racialized men from the global south, constituting what Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo have called a "gendered racial removal program" (2013). In my study, I shift analytical attention to consider the effects of the contemporary crimmigration system on migrant women survivors of gender-based violence. While such cases constitute a small sub-group within a larger population of migrants in detention, nevertheless scholarly attention to this group can expose the multiple axes along which state power is enacted - an analytical strategy that foundational scholars like Crenshaw (1991) used to theorize "structural intersectionality" in the US. In focusing on crimmigration in the Canadian context, I draw attention to the growing nexus between migration, security, and gender-based violence that has emerged alongside other processes of crimmigration. I then provide a case analysis of the 2013 death while in custody of Lucía Dominga Vega Jiménez, an "undocumented" migrant woman from Mexico. My analysis illustrates how migrant women's strategies to survive gender-based violence are re-cast as grounds for their detention and removal, constituting what I argue is a criminalization of survivorship.The research overall demonstrates the centrality of gendered and racialized structural violence in crimmigration processes by challenging more universalist approaches to migrant justice.

Language: en

Keywords

Canada; crimmigration; gender; gender-based violence; illegality; immigration detention; intersectionality; migrant justice; race