‘Do not disturb’: patience, social control and good citizenship in the Canadian family reunification process

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the Canadian spousal reunification process and its specific bureaucratic temporality, in relation to citizenship and mechanisms of social control. Based on ethnographic research in a Facebook support group of Canadian women married to a non-Canadian man, I examine the role of online communities in reinforcing compliance to immigration slow temporalities at the expense of group members’ urgent love temporalities. Spousal reunification applicants were recommended not to intervene as long as their file was still within official processing times. Those who acted too soon showed low compliance with government regulations and were called back to order by other applicants. The promotion of discourses that valorise both patience and proactivity deployed at the ‘right time’ – when delays are expired – constitute mechanisms of social control and contribute to shaping ‘good’, ‘informed’ and thus deserving citizens, in the context of marriage fraud suspicion. This article builds on the literature on waiting in immigration processes and articulates it with concepts of good citizenship. It reflects on how online immigration support groups become spaces in which applicants police and discipline each other along gendered lines.