Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border by Alison Mountz

Abstract

In July 1999, Canadian authorities intercepted four boats off the coast of British Columbia carrying nearly six hundred Chinese citizens who were being smuggled into Canada. Government officials held the migrants on a Canadian naval base, which it designated a port of entry. As one official later recounted to the author, the Chinese migrants entered a legal limbo, treated as though they were walking through a long tunnel of bureaucracy to reach Canadian soil. The "long tunnel thesis" is the basis of Alison Mountz's wide-ranging investigation into the power of states to change the relationship between geography and law as they negotiate border crossings. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS; ABBREVIATIONS; INTRODUCTION: Struggles to Land in States of Migration; 1. Human Smuggling and Refugee Protection; 2. Seeing Borders Like a State; 3. Ethnography of the State; 4. Crisis and the Making of the Bogus Refugee; 5. Stateless by Geographical Design; 6. In the Shadows of the State; 7. What Kind of State Are We In?; NOTES; BIBLIOGRAPHY; INDEX.