Temporalising barriers: Postsecondary schooling access among precarious status students in Toronto

Abstract

AbstractThis paper examines the landscape of access to postsecondary education (PSE) for precarious status migrants in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on interview data, the paper focuses on the barriers migrant students experience when attempting to enrol in PSE due to their immigration status and how that process changed after participating in a bridging course designed to facilitate their entry to a local PSE institution. The data reveals that participants experience temporal displacements (limbo, delay, and deficit) and engage in temporal negotiations given immigration and educational policy, institutional timelines, life course expectations, and day‐to‐day schedules. Although the bridging course is an important intervention towards the social inclusion of migrant students, these gains are curtailed by persisting financial and institutional barriers that perpetuate temporal displacements. The paper contributes to debates about the inclusion of precarious status migrants to membership rights and social goods by complicating understandings of access to PSE for precarious status migrants. It also widens our understanding of access to PSE for precarious status migrants beyond the U.S. context.