Systems of Selection: Designing Refugees in Canada and Sweden 1960’s-1990’s

This work explores how states categorise refugees as a way of making migration governable. Through a comparative case study of Sweden and Canada, it looks at two key aspects of refugee categorisation. First, the historical origins and development of processing systems for making refugees administratively legible. Second, how dilemmas of classification are resolved in migration courts when individuals don’t fit the categories. The focus in this presentation will be on the first part, tracing the development of contemporary Swedish and Canadian systems for planning immigration and selecting immigrants to the 1960’s to the 1990’s. The study addresses how, in the context of two countries with very different immigration histories, boundaries have been drawn and negotiated around categories of immigrants, such as Convention refugees and unaccompanied minors. Canada has a long history of resettlement as the main route to refugeehood, exercising selective control, whereas asylum seeking at the border became common earlier in Sweden.

The study is informed by institutional theory and writings on classification. Rather than seeing the categories through which asylum is regulated as static, or the boundaries between “labor migrants” and “refugees” as objective constructs, this study precedes from the notion that categories are deeply political tools for ordering the world. This makes them function as an infrastructure of migration control, expressing notions of deservingness and defining who gets to be a refugee. Similar to many other categorisation system, they are contested: the complexity of migrants’ lives defy administrative simplification, and people react to the categories imposed upon them. This means that the categories are continuously negotiated and re-made. Rather than being transplanted onto migrants, categorisation is seen as constituted in a relationship between the governing and the governed.