The border as archive: reframing the crisis mode of governance at the Canada-US border

Abstract

Starting in January 2017 there was a dramatic increase in the number of people crossing irregularly from the US to make a claim for refugee status in Canada. Officials declared a crisis and admonished those who, in the words of one official, were crossing ‘in between the border.’ It is important to pay close attention to these spaces in-between borders: those (un)intended and strategic openings left by the working out of nation-state policies (like the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement) and those paths that are opened through the transgressions of those borders by people on the move. Crisis is the necessary corollary of the ‘politics of anticipatory governance’ that scaffolds contemporary nation-statist border control policies and practices. Approaching the border as an archive means confronting the work that is done by such temporal and spatial manipulations, while placing contested border crossings at the centre of border formation. By examining a series of intersecting moments from the recent history of this border (1987–present), I seek to both ‘inhabit’ the crisis and understand what might remain once the crisis is declared over. I argue that migration management regimes produce the border crises they anticipate while simultaneously masking and revealing contested histories and geographies of migration.