Data Laundering Border Violence: Performance Measures and Immigration Enforcement

Abstract

On July 8, 2020, the Office of the Auditor General of Canada (OAG) tabled its report on immigration removals, finding that the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) fails to enforce deportations in a timely manner and has abysmal record-keeping practices. The report concludes that these failings undermine the integrity of Canada’s immigration system and endangers the public. Critical Accounting scholarship problematizes auditing for legitimizing harmful processes through the guise of scrutiny. The OAG audit of the CBSA overlooks the well-documented systemic abuses of the CBSA in administering migrant detention. The article argues “performance audits” are a governmental technology called data laundering that rationalizes the violence inherent in immigration enforcement. Data laundering obscures the fact that policing migration depends on broad discretionary powers, leading to opaque and inconsistent data practices. “Laundering” signals auditing’s inability to be sufficiently adversarial with a sector of law enforcement whose poor data-keeping practices maintains an illusion of recordkeeping as a form of power. Audit dependence on quantitative forms of data increases violence against immigrants; when violent deportation and detention measures are quantified, this presumes an acceptable ledger of force that accounts for, and in so doing legitimizes, state enactment of violence upon vulnerable people.