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Non-Status Citizenship and the Promises of the Inclusive City

Proud of its diversity and progressive politics, the City of Toronto adopted a ‘sanctuary policy’ in 2013. However, municipal governments and urban planners have yet to fully address the ‘local turn’ of migration politics at a time when they are increasingly confronted with anti-austerity, anti-racism, and anti-colonial movements. Urban planners have been complicit in neglecting particular populations through the production of uneven urban environments.

In this research project, Luisa Sotomayor and I examine how non-status citizenship is negotiated in municipal governance and planning politics in Toronto. Given their precarious presence in the city, non-status citizens are subjected to everyday socio-legal violence invested in historical and current state/planning practices of dispossession and racial capitalism. Our inquiry aims to recenter the limits and possibilities of creating an urban fabric where different sectors and service providers within and beyond the state may resist “irregularity” to “circumvent non-juridical status” and where illegalized migrants are increasingly included and afforded housing, labor, and mobility justice (beyond limited sanctuary policy). Using content analysis of official documents and undocumented testimonies, our research seeks to put forward a collective project of planning for migrant solidarity that activate new openings to disrupt exclusionary discontinuities in access to substantive citizenship, services and infrastructure.

Politics of migration and immigration control

This research examines the expanded criminalization and policing logic to undocumented immigration as a complement to deterrence technology at the increasingly militarized border infrastructure (where apprehensions have been at their lowest points in decades). I focus particularly on how incapacitation (and the performativity of arrest) becomes a discursive, political and economic justification for detention (as a booming economy) and removal/deportation for immigrants living already in the United States.  Because incapacitation blames the individual rather than the (infra)structural, solidarity across anti-immigrant, anti-racist, anti-precarity and post-colonial social movements is even more urgent. 

Post-disaster redevelopment of Lac-Mégantic

This research examines the particular conditions of disaster capitalism in the post-disaster recovery process of this small town in Quebec destroyed by a tragic train derailment in 2013. It specifically studies the social, political and economic processes enacting post-disaster redevelopment through the analysis of local contingencies, aspirations and capacities. In examining the political economy of post-disaster recovery, my research focuses particularly on the genealogy of ‘exceptional’ decisions and actions taken by various actors (state, market, civil society) during various phases of the recovery process.