From deserving victims to 'masters of confusion': Redefining refugees in the 1990s

Abstract

Immigration, crime, and social welfare are generally regarded as separate issues, both by government officials and by scholars. We show in this article that much is gained by studying the ways in which these dimensions of governance, at the levels of both government and populist fears, come together, intermixing and constituting new 'hybrid' objects that can be used in govern a number of fields. Fears about 'welfare fraud,' about 'bogus refugees,' and about racialized crime - fears which on their own had considerable power - merged together in the mid-1990s in a way that had particularly dire effects on Toronto's Somali community. We here analyze both the general, national features of the panics and concerns in question, and the ways in which they affected this particular community, seeking thereby to call for increased attention to hybrid governance - the ways in which, for example, immigration policy is increasingly being governed through crime.