Traditions of Colonial and Eugenic Violence: Immigration Detention in Canada

Abstract

In March 2016, two men died in Canadian immigration detention facilities “in the care of Canada Border Services Agency in less than a week” (Black 2016). Francisco Javier Romero Astorga (a Chilean national, unreported reasons for detention) died in Maplehurst Correctional Centre in the province of Ontario on Sunday, March 13 (Kassam 2016). Also in Ontario, Melkioro Gahungu (a Burundian national who was convicted of killing his wife in 2009) died in the Toronto East Detention Centre on Monday, March 7 (Cain 2016). These events triggered an atypical public reaction to the existence, purpose, and conditions of immigration holding centres and questioned the human rights protections for people being detained. This chapter explores these recent events by situating them in two key historical parallel discourses that underscore the broader colonial project, those pertaining to immigration and eugenics, to consider how we understand and talk about the practice and implications of immigration detention. Contemporary concerns about immigration detention practices in Canada reflect a historical confluence of shifting, colliding, submerging, and (re)emerging ideas about threat, dangerousness, foreignness, and criminality (Chadha 2008; Menzies 1998). These ideas have been forged over time, globally, through projects of nation building, population regulation, surveillance, and control (Dowbiggin 1997; McLaren 1990).