Beyond Justice: The Consequences of Liberalism for Immigration Law

Abstract

In November 1994 the Canadian government released its Immigration Plan for 1995 and an immigration and citizenship strategy mapping policy direction until the year 2000. This strategy, developed after extensive public consultations, was the government’s response to increasingly contentious public discourse about immigration. The 1994 document was the government’s attempt to reorient Canadian immigration law and policy. The 1996 and 1997 Immigration Plans, tabled in November 1995 and October 1996 respectively, are consistent with the five year plan announced in 1994, demonstrating that the change of direction set out in 1994 has met at least some of the government’s objectives.This paper assesses the reorientation of Canadian immigration law contained in the 1995 Immigration Plan and accompanying documents. Much of the public debate about immigration concerns whether current immigration levels and policies are fair, or just. As Canada is a liberal society, it is appropriate to begin the search for standards of fairness—or justice—in liberal theory. But because liberal theory presumes a community and then explores theories of fairness and justice within that community, it does not yield a standard of justice which is useful for assessing changes in immigration law. Nor, I argue, can liberalism’s tenets be extrapolated to address this question. This conclusion leads to insights about the role of immigration law in liberal society and points to particular ways to assess this law. While other theoretical paradigms may contain ways of determining the fairness of immigration law, such paradigms are less useful in the Canadian setting, where liberal discourse is hegemonic and hence is the language in which debates about immigration law must take place to be immediately politically relevant. The first half of this paper examines liberal theory’s failure to address the justice of immigration laws, and evaluates attempts to extend classical liberalism to meet this challenge.